I've been playing a lot with Context Free recently, and was inspired to write a program to do the same thing in three dimensions. It's still in early beta and there's quite a lot I'd like to add, both to the program and the grammar language. So, if you know what a context free design grammar is and have a copy of POV-Ray handy, check out:
Feedback, bug fixes and mirrors always welcome, and I'd love to see what you make with this :-) If there's interest I'll add an image/rules gallery as at ChrisCoyne.com.
Many thanks to Chris Coyne, Mark Lentczner, John Horigan and others for Context Free. It rocks.
Brinkster.net has this neato federal seal generator, going to make me up some job titles and busniess cards for Alderney week. Just add American accent...
Context Free is a kickass free renderer for making fractals and abstract art using context free grammars. With this program the grammars are written in the form of rules for drawing shapes on a canvas and recursively calling other rules according to probability. Nice intersection of mathmatics and art.
My script converts images into rules for use with Context Free. Shown here is a licence plate I photographed with an unsecured Panasonic webcam in New Jersey. Seemed to be a car park security camera. Someone was obviously concerned about me zooming it in on the licence plates (technique for estimating camera's location) and switched the camera off.
If you drive a black BMW with NJ plate SMV-21N, rest assured that your carpark security guy is diligently watching his camera, especially when random folks from the other side of the world are using it to look around.
The spiral's a simple, elegant shape to start off with:
startshape plateSpiral
/* define a rule */
rule plateSpiral {
/* draw the licence plate */
bmpImg {}
/* rotate 10 degrees, y -10, */
/* size 98%, repeat */
plateSpiral {s 0.98, y 10, r 10}
}
rule bmpImg {
...
}
So have a play, I'm sure you can do better than mine, and I'd love to see what you make :-)
If you are viewing this page from the United States and are using the craptastic Internet Explorer web browser, you have just broken the law.
You now have this number in your browser cache, and have come afoul of the DMCA. This number when converted from base 10 to binary and executed strips the copy protection from DVDs. The NSA has observed your download, and your ISP has probably logged it.
Illegal numbers. What is the world coming to. What's that Timmy? You guessed there were 51103 pennies in the jar... *gasp* No! officer, wait! he's just a child, he didn't know...
From: humanresources@company.net
To: all@company.net
Subject: Recent Changes
As you are no doubt aware, Sony Corporation(tm) has recently acquired international copyright on the number 43. The copyright comes into effect Tuesday. For this reason the 43rd floor will now be known as the 'Carribean Suite' and will have the braille abbreviation CS on elevator buttons and door plates.
Office parties celebrating birthdays between 42 and 44 will be referred to as Disillusionment Year parties. In all other correspondence and business in which the number may appear Sony Number(tm) will be used in place of 43 once our licence has come through.
The IT department is issuing a software update to all company computers that will allow Sony Number(tm) to evaluate correctly in spreadsheets and our proprietary software. For efficiency, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+S will be implemented to type 'Sony Number(tm)'.
From Tuesday, any employee using the number 43 without express written permission from Sony Corp and consultation with the legal department will be deemed to be comitting copyright infringement and subject to the usual disciplinary procedures. Remember what happened to the intern who downloaded that illegal Justin Timberlake .mp3? She's still in jail, dont let it happen to you - police *will* be informed.
If there are any remaining queries about these changes, please contact your supervisor or the HR department.
Wishing you a productive day,
Joan Davis
humanresources@company.net
ps: Happy Dissillusionment Year to to Jim in accounting!
In actual news, copyrights and patents have been granted on some numbers, and you're not allowed to use them. Details:
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:
Welkom bij Unrealwars - Life is a game
Unrealwars is een gratis text rpg game die gebasseerd is op de oorlog in Irak.
Maar inplaats van lekker achter de tv te kijken, speel je nu zelf mee in de geweldadige strijd. Jij krijgt de touwtjes in handen en moet een groot leger leiden. Kan jij dat aan meld je dan nu aan op Unrealwars.
So why am I pimpin' this? The man behind it is my friend Kornelis the Dutch, and he's promised that if strix.org.uk will help promote the venture, he'll sing for us all :-) So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, Kornelis:
I just finished listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything podcast about the Poetica Vaginal project, where a bunch of intellectuals from several universities got together to beam recordings of human vaginal contractions into space as a sort of SETI art project.
One of the problems with [previous attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials] is that there were episodes of sexual censorship: in the first messages we sent a line drawing of a male human being complete with external genitalia but a line drawing of a female human being without any external genitalia. We sent a picture of man and Barbie Doll into deep space to communicate with aliens as if they weren't entitled to know what we look like. It was really a picture of our own intolerance and it got worse with the Voyager probes ... where NASA prohibited entirely images of nude human beings. Aristotle knew that you had to reveal yourself to yourself before you can reveal yourself to anyone else. He writes about this in his book on poetics. He calls it the reognition and reversal principle. So.. really, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is an excercise in comminucation with ourselves.
The project was ultimately stopped by the US Air Force. Isn't that amazing? The US has the balls and foresight to spend millions of wingwangs sending data about ourselves into deep space, but cant send an uncensored picture of what we look like, it's as if we're embarassed about having human bodies. The subtext of our grand message to other sentince seems to be ''we're a species with massive issues about our own sexuality'', probably the most honest thing we could say on the subject. Not sure why we need to bring it up in our first communications with other species.
Dearly beloved (et Al) we are gathered here today to celebrate the most weird and dreadful crap ever inflicted by the entertainment industry on the great public consciousness of mankind, so, without further ado here they are:
Stricky's Guide to The Worst Music Videos of All Time... in no particuar order.
7. Judge Dread - Big Six
Ah Judge Dread, the original Pervy Welsh Uncle. Until I saw this I'd belived that in the '70s the Germans had a monopoly on sex fiends this creepy, but this man is clearly Welsh, though he is on German TV. I don't know what became of Judge Dread, I'd hazard a guess he's in jail, probably something involving his topless backup dancers. NSFW - says 'pussy' a lot.
3.Uchoten - Pinokiwo
If you've ever wanted to see a Japanese guy in lots of makeup sing the same lines over and over agin, then roll around on the floor and screaming, now's your chance :-)
6. Fannypack - Cameltoe
Moving on up to the year 2003, when a kids group from Brooklyn would start to change the world by singing about how to wear clothes on your vagina. A mutlicultural troup, members are Black, Irish, West Indian, Thai and Puerto-Rican, and there's a white guy called Fancy. I give you... Cameltoe!
9. The Shadows - Apache
Go get your parents, drag them in front of the computer, this topped the UK singles charts for five weeks. Somewhere out there hippies were getting high, making love and giving birth to the sound of this disco monster. Get a load of the moustaches :-) and dig the girls in their 'indian' outfits.
1. Ohjaaja - I Wanna Love You Tender
And the winner is: Swedish people Finnish National Treasures (thank you Fairuza) doing aerobics! And their Battlestar Galactia lookin' video. This is so bad it's good. Enjoy :-)
This Wikipedia article describes how the Romans used magic, psychic chickens to tell fortune. I wonder if they'd laugh as hard at modern religion/superstitions. Probably.
The Romans used chickens for oracles, both when flying ('ex avibus') and when feeding ('auspicium ex tripudiis'). The hen ('gallina') gave a favourable omen ('auspicium ratum'), when appearing from the left (Cic.,de Div. ii.26), like the crow and the owl.
For the oracle 'ex tripudiis' according to Cicero (Cic. de Div. ii.34), any bird could be used, but normally only chickens ('pulli') were consulted. The chickens were cared for by the pullarius, who [...] fed them a special kind of soft cake. If the chickens stayed in their cage, made noises, beat their wings or flew away, the omen was bad; if they ate greedily, the omen was good.
In 249 BC, the Roman general Publius Claudius Pulcher had his chickens thrown overboard when they refused to feed before the battle of Drepana, saying 'If they won't eat, perhaps they will drink.' He promptly lost the battle against the Carthaginians and 93 Roman ships were sunk. Back in Rome, he was tried for impiety and heavily fined.
So now you know. Next time you lose a sea battle, it's probably because you didn't have enough chickens along with you, or they weren't hungry enough.[read on...]
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.
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.
LOS ANGELES, California -- A woman is in stable condition with bubonic plague, the first confirmed human case in Los Angeles County since 1984, health officials said Tuesday.
Los Angeles had the Black Death in 1984? I had no idea that diease still existed, I assumed it had gone the way of smallpox. Huh. In a related note, Alderney is reportedly the only place in Europe where one can still find plague rats - they were outcompeted by Rattus norvegicus and almost all populations in temperate latitudes have died out.
So.. we have a new item for 'Things to do in LA:', contract plague. Life is funny. [read on...]
This is terrible, one of lifes wonderful joys is being taken away from us. Australia has joined the list of countries which have banned sexy, midriff-baring cheerleader uniforms. From Si.com:
Australian cheerleaders have been banned from baring midriffs by officials of the sport who fear displays of skin may encourage eating disorders.
Gymnastics Australia has ordered cheerleading troupes to find new uniforms by the end of the year.
I think this is a complete load. Yes, eating disorders in teengers are something we should take seriously, they're sad and tragic things, the causes aren't easy to explain. Factors involved may include the advertising industry and low self-esteem from the likes of religious guilt or emotionally distant parents during childhood.
But not cheerleader uniforms! Watching beautiful, lithe schoolgirls shaking it in tiny uniforms is the very best part of American or Aussie rules football, in fact the only part I care about. Myself and millions, nay, billions of other men (and some women) take enromous pleasure from the cheerleader fantasy.
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.
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.
Probably this is all just coincidence. We all know that big corporations don't help the NSA monitor internet traffic and VOIP calls like AT&T did, and the government's not even all that interested in online search engines. It's not like the Feds would sue Google for search data.
There's likely nothing to it. There's plenty of other stuff between Yakima and Quincy (rocks, bigger rocks, a road) so both the NSA and the search engines have good, independent reasons to build there. Unless... maybe, just maybe, something more sinister is afoot.
What if the NSA, using the combined research muscle of both Yahoo and Microsoft were developing a supercomputer. ... (dramatic pause) ... A supercomputer that ... (another dramatic pause) ... runs on potatoes! If that's the case then God help us. God help us all.
Goofy press has a brilliant, exhaustive dictionary of sexual terms. I'd have thought that being a barman and regular citizen of the net I'd have heard every sexual euphamism there was. I'd be wrong.
CHICKEN OF THE SEA
a young gay sailor.
COTTONTAIL
term that nude sunbathers sometimes use for a person who wears a bathing suit; see 'textile.'
DICK-HEAVY COMPANIES
businesses where the bosses are men and the secretaries (oops! administrative assistants) are women.
FARMER TED
term for an undesirable male who is trying to make a move on you; from a character in the movie sixteen candles, 'Oh crap, it's farmer ted'.
FIFTY-FOOTER
someone who looks hot from across the room, but starts looking less attractive with each approaching step.
FRAZIER
manliest lion to ever live in captivity; once had intercourse more than 160 times in less than three days. died shortly thereafter.
FRENCH EMBASSY
place where there's lots of gay sex going on.
FROG KISSER
person who believes that she can turn a loser into a winner.
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