category: stuff

I've been watching an anime recently called the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s a strange and interesting story about God in the form of a Japanese schoolgirl. She doesn't know she's God, her desires and beliefs simply manifest themselves. About three years before the story is set she destroyed the timeline at that point, preventing time travel from the future. Haruhi spends her time with a school club she started which is mostly composed of espers, time travellers and herself.

The story is told from the point of view of Kyon, the only ordinary human she hangs with. Haruhi seems constrained only by her view of the world, believing she's an ordinary schoolgirl the world organizes itself to conform to that. Until she gets depressed and wishes the whole world would disappear except for her and Kyon. Space time ends for awhile...

[watch on GUBA]
wikipedia entry
fansub torrent link

useful: GUBA has direct download links for some episodes.

Unreal Wars is a text based RPG following the war in Iraq. Looks pretty cool. I don't speak Dutch so I haven't played it, but if you do spreek de taal, get a load of this:

I'm a big fan of Google Earth, yet somehow managed not to know there are also maps of the moon and Mars. Shown here is the summit of Olympus Mons, a volcano the size of the state of Arizona. Biiiiiigass mountain. As far as we know, it's the largest in the solar system. Mars doesn't have tectonic plates, so areas of volcanic activity don't move around with time, and the mountains can get *real* huge. Ginormously huge. Wow.

Google Mars
Olympus Mons on Wikipedia

Came across this on Google Earth and I think it's magnificent :-) Grid location 51 22' 20'' north, 1 50' 53'' west. Next time I'm in England, I'm going to organise some friends to have a picnic here.



It's name is the Alton Barnes White Horse. It was designed in 1812 by one 'Jack the Painter' who had been commissioned by the landowner of Alton Barnes Manor Farm. At Winter Solstice the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group light it with candles.



The circular dimply thing is a burial mound, ancient Celts built them on hilltops all over the south of England to honor chieftans and legendary badminton players. Or it might be something else, but that'd be less romantic.

More about the horse
Google Maps Link

Update: more horses

New Devizes Horse
Broad Hinton/Hackpen/Winterbourne Bassett
Oldbury
The Broad Town White Horse
Folkestone white horse, Kent

According to CNN (article link), Microsoft and Yahoo are planning on building data storage centres outside of Quincy, Washington. By all accounts a charming little town with a potato based economy.

Quincy has cheap land, cheap hydroelectric power and nice industrial parks to build data centres in. There's easy access by highway 90 to nearby Ginko Petrified Forest State park, and - oh yes - the Yakima NSA facility.

Observe: une carte (google maps)



Aah, nothing says 'we value or customers privacy' quite like building gaint private data storage centres near to a giant govt data mining centre. What will Yahoo and M$ store in these centres? They're not saying:

'My understanding is their objective is to increase their capacity for the Internet, search engines,' Snead said. 'All I know is there's a lot of computers.'

Still unknown is whether those computers will hold consumer information, miles of code or backups for data stored on servers elsewhere. Gellos declined to provide further details, saying company officials were still finishing plans for the site.

According to the NOAA this morning, a huge great chunk of ice has broken off the Fimbul Ice Sheet in Queen Maud Land. I know it sounds like I'm making these names up, but no: there is a place called Queen Maud Land. The souls of evil chidren spend dark, sunless winters there molesting the penguins.

It's a disturbing reminder of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, when sea levels suddenly rise because an ice sheet breaks off Antarctica due (perhaps) to global warming, drifts into warmer water and melts.

(picture coutesy of the DMSC, click to enlarge)

Kickass little video clip and narration of a tropical bird doing a mating dance that involves moonwalking. Michael Jackson soundtrack. Enjoy. Link.

Shout to Jazzz for sending this in.

I'm posting this (beautiful) picture for two reasons. [1] I like boobies and [2] this should get my site blocked by Smartfilter. ''Secure Computing'' is a US-based censorware company that makes products used by totalitarian governments and certain private organizations in an attempt to control people's exposure to ideas.

It's a bit of a misnomer, the software is certainly not smart, and the wholesale blacklisting it does shouldn't really be called filtering. Evilcensor would be a better name, maybe their PR guys wouldn't go for it.

So... if you live somewhere like Tunisia, the UAE or a conservative christian university, you probably can't access this site anymore. Acces to photographs of Michaelangelo's David (nudity), the works of Shakepseapre (God knows) or the Koran (unorthodoxy) is probably also blocked.

This painting - Liberty by Eugene Delacroix - represents an idea. Liberty is beautiful, and sometimes you must fight for her. For yourself and your peers. You owe nothing to those who would keep you from her.

If your government wishes to restrict your ability to think and learn, they're still your government, their power is that which people have given to them. If your school or workplace has a bad internet policy, it is your place to tell them.

Which is why I'm blacklisting my site, I want to encourage people to learn to get around the filters, or to do their bit to change policy where possible. There are many ways to frustrate censorship online, a good introduction is BoingBoing's Guide to Defating Censorware. With only a little knowedge even the best censorship machines become useless.

My most devout wish is that more people will learn and risk to free themselves this way. Whether you're a citizen of a musilm country who can't access the Bible or a kid with christian parents who can't get hold of good, unbiased sex-ed online, you have a right to expose yourself to whichever ideas and material you choose. I hope you won't let anyone stop you.

I am always willing to help people who email me about this. I've overcome all filtering systems I've encountered so far.

Just in case my site's not blocked yet, lets add one more count of obscenity:

FUCK CENSORSHIP.

and have a wonderful day.

Duke University Library has an awesome collection of newspaper ads from the early 20th century. Not only are they an old-timey reminder of the culture that defeated the Nazis and gave us Daffy Duck, you can learn about tampons as well. Yay!

link

Seems like the wikipedia's having a problem. Just when I was gearing up to do some scraping... bummer.



In lighter news, the classic search engine Altavista was recently hacked. I visited night before last and their portal page had been blanked and replaced with a single heading 'do you yahoo?'.

For completeness I thought I'd find and add some images of Sugar Grove's twin facility outside Yakima, Washinton. Notice how many of the dishes are pointing inwards towards the United States, as well as West, to intercept traffic coming in off the Pacific. Images produced using Google Earth, click to enlarge.



The gorge in these photos runs due west.

Google Maps Link

This is a snip from a recent New York Times article about the NSA center to monitor communications coming into the US off the eastern seaboard:

Man! I love being alive! I just read an article in the Times about 'Natura', a Christian themed nudist camp and Garden of Eden theme park opening in Florida. Christian nude volleyball. SweeEEEeeet!

link: Christians strip to build a new Eden
via BoingBoing

UPDATE: This is an old article that is attracting some attention recently. Edited May 2007 in answer to the comments, quotes courtesy of the Wikipedia article on Christian nudism. It should be noted that the modern naturism movement is in part an ideological descendant of Christian nudist communities going back to the Adamites of the 1st through 4th centuries. Nudism is not contrary to Christian belief, but some of the foamier-mouthed, cultish evangelical sects like to say it is.

Pope John Paul II

"Sexual modesty cannot then in any simple way be identified with the use of clothing, nor shamelessness with the absence of clothing and total or partial nakedness... Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person."

"Nakedness itself is not immodest... Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person, when its aim is to arouse concupiscence, as a result of which the person is put in the position of an object for enjoyment."

A gratuitous picture

Dr. R. C. Sproul

"Jesus provides the covering for our nakedness... so that once we are covered by the righteousness of Christ, we can be naked in the presence of God and not be shamed. We can stop running. We can stop hiding. Because we have been adorned with a gown of perfect righteousness, if we trust in Him."

A. W. Tozer

"The monkish hatred of the body which figures so prominently in the works of certain early devotional writers is wholly without support in the word of God. Common modesty is found in the sacred Scriptures, it is true, but never prudery or a false sense of shame. The New Testament accepts as a matter of course that in His incarnation our Lord took upon Him a real human body, and no effort is made to steer around the downright implications of such a fact. He lived in that body here among men and never once performed a non-sacred act. His presence in human flesh sweeps away forever the evil notion that there is about the human body something innately offensive to the Deity. God created our bodies and we do not offend Him by placing the responsibility where it belongs. He is not ashamed of the work of His own hands."

Was at the Bell Ringers dinner this evening, great company, excellent food, our own private vicar at the table (usually the whole town has to share a vicar). And on top of that this place has some *hot* staff. I dont think any of them are single, so I hadn't made too much time thus far, might hang out there more in the future. Nice high toned place, so I'm not going to have a punchup with a chav over some girl I'm sarging, or have to AMOG a tattooed gorilla called Knuckles. Probably be the only male customer under 40 :-) Need to bear places like this in mind in future. Hmmm...



I like the word 'tartlets' being next to my name on that card. Anyhoo, I just got home to an email from one Joseph Matthews that contains a really interesting idea:

First came across this place on flickr, somewhere I must definitely visit before I'm 50. I am so going windsurfing here.




A google image search brings up a bunch more pictures.

found at

9137 messages and not one of them spam. Looks like I have some reading to do...



9136...9135..bottles of beer on the wall...9134..bottles of beer...

The empty cardboard box has been added to New York's National Toy Hall of Fame. I think this is excellent, not only is an empty cardboard box (next to lego, and a length of rope) the ultimate toy, its cool to see it up alongside the manufactured marketed things like Barbie Dolls. Something else I like about this collection is that most of these toys work on the imagination, they're not an entertainment system like a TV or GameBoy, they're something you must be creative to use, which can only be good for kids. Much better than doping them up on junk food and sugar and then sitting them in fornt of an XBox IMO. Well, for kids under 11 anyhoo.

National Toy Hall of Fame

via UNEASYsilence