U Thant Island - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I've always wondered about that.
| Islands |
.con -- for phishing sites
.ort -- for very small sites
.ent -- for Tolkien-related sites
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Peanuts Meets Marvel Mashup. Via Longboard.
Come to think of it, I've been reading a lot of comics lately. I'm still on Greg's Planet Hulk series, plus he has a new Phoenix out and a Battlestar Galactica comic that reads like a really great ep. Also still on Whedon's Astonishing X-Men, and Gaiman's new series The Eternals. No one does myth like Gaiman does myth.
Am I missing anything? Oh yeah, Civil War. I'm just picking up the main issues, not the whole freakin' story arc. I mean, I do have bills to pay.
| Peanuts | Mashups | Marvel | Greg Pak | Neil Gaiman | Joss Whedon |
Got this as the subject line of a weight-loss spam email this morning:
academics will present papers discussing four main themes including medicine and biology, astrology and space sciences, geology and marine sciences and social ."
Very clever of them, finding out my wife's academic interests and tailoring their spam to suit!
| Academics |
BibliOdyssey is my favorite blogsource of book illustrations and other ephemera. I stopped short on seeing this illustration from Charles Hinton's 1904 work The Fourth Dimension:
A tesseract, as every reader of Ishbadiddle knows from reading A Wrinkle In Time knows, is a
"Nnow," Mrs. Which said. "Arre wee rreaddy?"
"Where are we going?" Calvin asked.
Again Meg felt an actual physical tingling of fear as Mrs. Which spoke.
"Wwee musstt ago bbehindd thee sshaddow."
"But we will not do it all at once," Mrs. Whatsit comforted them. "We will do it in short stages." She looked at Meg. "Now wewill tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?"
"No," Meg said flatly.
Mrs. Whatsit sighed. "Explanations are not easy when they are about things for which your civilization still has no words. Calvin talked about traveling at the speed of light. You understand that, little Meg?"
"Yes," Meg nodded.
"That, of course, is the impractical, long way around. We have learned to take short cuts wherever possible."
"Sort of like in math?" Meg asked.
"Like in math." Mrs. Whatsit looked over at Mrs. Who.
"Take your skirt and show them."
"La experiencia es la madre de la ciencia. Spanish, my dears. Cervantes. Experience is the mother of knowledge." Mrs. Who took a portion of her white robe in her hands and held it tight.
"You see," Mrs. Whatsit said, "if a very small insect were to move from the section of skirt in Mrs. Who's right hand to that in her left, it would be quite a long walk for him if he had to walk straight across."
Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together.
"Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said, "he would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel."
(text and images grabbed from here)
Hinton, who invented the word "tesseract," sounds like a good candidate for an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Those colored cubes (not to be confused with Timecube!) are a way to (somehow) visualize four-dimensional space. You can read more in The Fourth Dimension which is now scanned and on-line. In addition to his work as a mathematician and sci-fi author, Hinton was a bigamist and an inventor:
In 1897, he designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team's batting practice. According to one source it caused several injuries, and may have been in part responsible for Hinton's dismissal from Princeton that year. However, the machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher. He successfully introduced the machine to the University of Minnesota where Hinton worked as an assistant professor until 1900.
As a coincidental side note, Hinton was the son-in-law of George Boole, whose family's history will figure into the VSNP. Also by coincidence, tomorrow is L'Engle's birthday.
| Tesseract | History | VSNP | 19th Century | Baseball | Inventors |
You know, in the wake of Robert Altman's death I read several eulogies that praised his "perfect" film (according to Ebert), McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I still don't like the movie but regardless of your opinion of that film you should read Grant McCracken's reminiscence of working as a driver for Julie Christie during the making of it. (Who knew?) For a director in whose films there are no bit parts, it's not surprising that even the chauffeur could offer an opinion.
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So first Colin sent over this Flash cartoon ad up for kosher.com:
I happened to be listening to some music when I watched it, and the results were amusing. So I reposted it with a new soundtrack-- "Metal," by Afrika Bambaataa and Gary Numan.
Enjoy!
| Kosher | Mashups |
I spotted this chart on Longboard and immediately had to send it over to Junk Charts. Why, why, why?!?!
"OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?"
| Design | Charts |
Fox News Preps News Satire Show.
Well, I guess they're going to need to fill up some air time now that they've cancelled the O.J. confessional...
| Satire | Daily Show |
And the Case of the Captured Koala.
| Parody | Encyclopedia Brown |
Colin sent over this NYT article about the kid-rock scene in New York: Mama Was a Riot Grrrl? Then Pick Up a Guitar and Play
OK, so Zach and I actually went to see Tiny Masters of Today at the CMJ show at Union Hall they talk about in this article. Debbie said, "Oh, there's a kids' music show
there," and we went, to find out that it was not rock music for kids, but rock music by kids. It was a pretty hilarious scene -- some tots running around, a scrum of tweens sitting on the floor up front, the adults drinking beer in the back -- half parents, half CMJers. Zach told me that it was loud. And that he wanted to be in a rock band too. He said he wants to play the drums.
Of course, about halfway through the set, he fell asleep. That boy can sleep through anything.
| Brooklyn | Park Slope | New York City |
The Coming Collapse in Housing
| Bubble | Tulip Economies |
| Cats | Liz Hiraldo |
You know, if they had this back in the 90s. Yale Daily News - Mr. Yale pageant draws crowd
| Beauty | Contests |
In case you missed it this morning, here's the piece on Marketplace featuring DonorsChoose: Marketplace: Click, click, donate
| DonorsChoose | Shameless Self-Promotion |
The Communist Manifesto, remixed with cartoons:
Debbie, are you going to show this to your class?
Via Boing Boing.
See also:
| Animation | Cartoons | Communism | Karl Marx |
That is all.
| Cabaret |
This is one of those good things about Windows that you might not know about, since it's buried in a sub-sub-sub-menu. ClearType makes the text on your screen appear sharper. The Wikipedia article linked above explains that "ClearType uses anti-aliasing at the subpixel level to greatly reduce visible artifacts on such displays when text is rendered, making the text appear 'smoother' and more legible." I turned it on and man, it makes a big difference. Go to your Control Panel and click on the "Display" icon. The go to the Appearance Tab, click on "Effects," check "Use the following method to smooth screen fonts", and select "ClearType."
They don't make that especially easy, do they?
| Windows | How To | Fonts |
Grant has some interesting thoughts on the meaning of Douglas Coupland's endorsement of the Blackberry Pearl:
This Blog Sits at the: Douglas Coupland and the Blackberry Pearl
When Coupland endorses a consumer good, he contradicts his cultural significance. In the process, he extinguishes the part of the credibility that made him a suitable celebrity endorser. This damage to Coupland's celebrity inflicts harm on the Blackberry brand. The "meaning mechanics" of this marketing campaign are ill advised.
Maybe he's endorsing it... ironically.
It can't be much worse than using Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" in an ad for a Mercedes Benz.... Of course, she wasn't around to complain.
| Celebrity |
Three years ago I blogged about a chidren's book I had read as a youth and was trying to identify.
I read this book sometime between 1977 - 1984, got from a local library in upstate New York where we were for the summer. Here's the details I remember:* Setting is medieval.
* A young man is lame. He has a vision. (A bridle is somehow involved). He must seek out his namesake to be healed.
* There's a quest to find his namesake. (A warrior, perhaps?)
* At one point, he is with a woman / witch at some standing stones (Stonehenge?). She "opens" them and they're really computers, although he doesn't understand what he's seeing.
Thanks to the folks at Loganberry Books I was able to identify it as The Namesake by C. Walter Hodges. (I was indeed confusing two books -- there's a Stonehenge scene in Namesake but no witches or protocomputers.) It's long out of print, but I finally decided to pick up a used copy.
It's great.
The young man, Alfred, is indeed lame (one-legged, in fact, which in the 9th C was unusual enough that he is regarded with superstition) and he does in fact have that vision -- to give "what is under his hand" to his namesake, in order to become master of his affliction rather than its servant. What's under his hand when he has the vision is an old bridle. His namesake is Alfred, brother of the King of Wessex, Ethelred, who eventually succeeds the throne and becomes Alfred the Great. Most of the book is not, as I remembered, the boy Alfred's quest to find his namesake, but rather what happens after -- how the King takes him in and teaches him to write, and how he helps in the wars against the invading Danes. Most of which is pretty bloody, so I wouldn't give this book to any child under the age of 12. (The pagan Danes don't come off too well, so I probably wouldn't give this to any pagans -- sorry Thudfactor.)
Hodges (about whom there is not much on the web, except his obit) was primarily an illustrator, and he brings an illustrator's eye to his fiction, like Mervyn Peake. There are also some wonderful illustrations in the book.
The thing that I liked best about this was how it made the history of 1,100 years ago seem alive -- I know that sounds like a 7th grade book report statement but it's true. King Alfred comes across as wise and noble but also real. After reading this I found myself wishing that Mrs. Sherman was still alive, so I could send her a copy. She would have loved it.
There's a sequel, The Marsh King, which I'm hoping to get a copy of soon.
| The Curious Bookshelf | History | United Kingdom | Medieval | Children's Books |
I got arrested this week at a checkpoint!
I for one feel safer now that the deadly rubber band threat has been checked.
Via Boing Boing
| Airplanes | TSA |
| Bank of America |
If you haven’t already done so, please make sure to write your (possibly new) senators and representative, and soon, telling them what you expect out of them and the 110th congress. Me? I had the pleasure of being snarky with Joe Lieberman about the fact that he's the only member of the Connecticut for Lieberman party. But I also told him, Dodd, and DeLauro what I want them to do for me now that they’ve got The Power. At the risk of being insufficiently cynical, I claim that your chance to be heard is not limited to election day.
RUMSFELD RESIGNS, GETS ENGAGED TO BRITNEY SPEARS
| Britney Spears | Your Blank of the Day |
I have been diligently avoiding the news, but apparently there is an election tomorrow. In 2004 we linked to an election night cheat sheet -- not actually a guide to cheating on elections, but rather a guide to the returns. Dan has done it again this year with an hour by hour guide to tomorrow's election night returns.
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The Jews The New York Times. And remember, the GOP has MADE US SAFER! A VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATS IS A VOTE FOR THE TERRORISTS! Pay no attention to the nuclear bomb plans we just released on teh internets, please.
| Iraq | New York Times | Nuclear Weapons |
Kerim writes about just how far down the rabbit hole we've gone on torture:
Majid Khan is being denied access to a lawyer because he was tortured. That’s right, his having been tortured means that he is now in possession of highly sensitive information which would threaten US security were it to be leaked. That sensitive information? The “alternative interrogation methods” which were used on him!
| Catch-22 |
Cardhouse, which I haven't read in some time, has a new gallery of vintage condom package designs. Tourist tubes?
| Sex | Condoms | 1950s | 1940s | 1930s |
Occasionally, vendors confuse "billing" and "shipping" addresses, and materials get shipped to our main office at DonorsChoose instead of to schools.
When those materials consist of live fish for a classroom? Hilarity ensues!
Thankfully, they are not tilapia.
Update: Sadly, the snails and all but one fish did not survive the night in the spare vase. However the two newts are reportedly doing fine.
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I read The Eudaemonic Pie, an account of some hackers trying to beat roulette, back in '86 or '87. (Actually, it wasn't part of my nerdy computer books library, but rather part of my stepfather's gambling library.) I remember the book as being OK but sort of disappointing, like a heist movie where the heist never takes place.
Via Cynical C comes this long excerpt from book by Kevin Mitnick, in which he chronicles some (other) hackers who beat video poker. It's a fun read. Movie rights, anyone?
| Gambling | Hackers |
