The website www.wordle.net allows you to create “word clouds” from text that you provide. Text can be submitted by pasting in a text or by pointing to a blog. The word cloud generated gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The cloud shown below was created based on the Quickfox website.
A self-replicating machine is an “artificial construct that is theoretically capable of autonomously manufacturing a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment”. This is an interestic topic and it is surprising that there are several “open source” initiatives allowing you to build your own self replicating machine. An example is the RepRap 3D printer, for which you can order the components and build the machine, that then afterwards can create a lot of it’s own components. You can build it for about EUR 370.
We tend to forget how complicated our technology has become and how even relative simple things require a whole infrastructure to be available. In this Ted.com video Thomas Thwaites took it upon himself to try to build a toaster from scratch, starting with collecting the raw materials.
It shows not only how difficult it is to start from the raw materials, but also that in order to learn what to do you have to go back to ancient books.