Alderney's main currency is the Guernsey Pound, which unlike british sterling has a one pound note, known sometimes as a green drinking voucher, which explains these coupons for the Alderney Week beer tent:
President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a blog, where he writes about not liking Jews and Americans, and it's gone offline. Glad I'm not his techie right now, might learn him a thing or two about using the infidel software of Microsoft.
Finally, someone has made a periodic table that's easy to visualise and remember. Every science classroom should have one of these, instead of the standard dull color coded ones found in high schools everywhere, the ones full of tiny numbers and symbols with no explanation of either that make the subject seem boring and hard. Creating a clear visual-memory hook for this information is such an obvious good idea that I'm surprised I haven't come across it before now.
Shiny as this is, I think it can be even better. Some images are easier to associate than others, say silicon, which is a vague grey lump in this one, maybe better replaced by a picture of a silicon chip or better yet a pair of breasts (easiest thing in the world for a schoolkid to remember - as well as associating something pleasant and fun with the tasks at hand). What group is silicon in? silicon -> breasts, between a diamond (carbon) and a little metal bust of a german guy (germanium) -> group 14. Easy.
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...
In '77 and '69 revolution was in the air. Computers were still scary and radio was king. The only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail. The record shops were still on top and vinyl was all that they stocked and the super info highway was still drifting out in space (whatever that means) kids were wearing hand-me-downs and playing games meant kick-arounds... I'm so glad I'm not a punk rocker with flowers in my hair :-)
Thank you Sandi, for reminding me how kickass life is.
I make a lot of websites, most of them I think look OK, they could all be better. I've no training in web design, didn't do art past junior school (and *sucked* at it), but you learn a few things from trial and error, and the usual experiences of life. One of the things I've learned is that it's best to avoid using complimentary colors, say blue and yellow, except for very loud logos and advertisements. I've also learnt not to use serifs on very small text, and that the Google logo is a masterful bit of advertising because by having so many colors it fights with almost any conceivable page you might put it on, thus drawing attention to itself. So I pay attention, but I still dont know very much about graphic design. High time I did some reading on the subject. Google up one set of results for 'graphic design principles':
First result: Huh. Links turn yellow. Yellow on blue. Less than wonderful looking font. Oddly disconnected centered title. Reminds me of geocities in the 1990s. Ugly pixelly graphics. At best, this is likely to be a bunch of reading that teaches me to make sites that look like this. Moving along....
Second result: And it's about.com, a library of articles around all manner of subjects. Looks OK too. Bookmarked for later.
Third result: Blue on orange this time, but it's only one link. Looks better than the first result, but no real information here. Oh well.
Fourth result: It's a company, selling web design services. The eye is drawn to a pull quote in the middle of the page... 'Rob Frankel, the number one guru for branding says, ''Doing it yourself works for suicide.'' '. Yeah. Tasteful. Worse, I think its meant to be a joke. These people sure know how to design a page that embodies the expert, professional nature of their service. And they use Microsoft FrontPage, so they must be pros. Next.
Fifth result: Wow that's bad! Red on blue this time. And I quote: '1. Skim over the basic elements of the 'CRAP Principles' in Williams and then reread my ''Summarizing the CRAP Principles'' below.' If I made that up, people wouldn't believe me. This is the fifth result on Google? Though I didn't read further, its clear they've used all their crap principles on this one. Red bevelled buttons, text all bold and underlined, more red buttons that don't match the others. Enough of this now.
If these are the experts, I don't need to know. I'm beginning to suspect the upper echelons of the design community are like the upper echelons of the art community, a bunch of windy overblown monkeys spouting on about paradigms and such in a way that means nothing to anyone except themselves. Thinking... if you were an expert that was going to teach the world graphic design from a website, wouldn't you make it a good looking website, so people might belive that you understood how its done? At the very least? There are millions of beautifully made sites on the web, template shops (like this and this) are a good place to find a lot of them together and compare. I'm going to go study those instead.
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...
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.
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 :-)
Subscribe
