When you dream that you're falling, do you have a moment when you realize you're falling, but aren't yet screaming in terror at the concrete and trees rising up to smash you? Do you ever notice if you are the only thing thats falling, or is there debris and other people? Or rain?

A couple years ago I wrote a Greasemonkey script to patch up the display of iFriends SuperSearch and fanclub pages. I'd been ripped off by this outfit and was briefly motivated by pique, pettiness, vengeance and a love of boobies. And then, a short while later, I got over it and stopped caring. And mostly the world didn't care either. I posted the script on my blog, nothing happened. Then a few people downloaded it, then a whole bunch more nothing. Then, all of a sudden, some chathosts got pissed at me, and then calmed right down again. And then one day I was the third result on Google for the term 'iFriends'. Holy crap! Wasn't that an exciting story? Here's the graphic novel:

Does this man look like the legendary gunman Vash the Stampede? That droopy-eyed, weak-looking, bristle-headed, promiscuous-looking donut freak of a man?


[download this video] [view large]

And we're back... welcome to the new strix.org.uk, things will be a little unsettled during the course of the update, expect this Fully Operational Battle Station to coming around Endor's horizon by the weekend. Expect dead links to some of the cameras until then.

North Korea has a website, and it's pretty, er.... nifty. You can buy Kim Il Sung's classic eBook "10-POINT PROGRAMME OF THE GREAT UNITY OF THE WHOLE NATION FOR THE REUNIFICATION OF THE COUNTRY". You can learn about the glorious North Korean Government:

The Chondoist Chongu Party
The Chondoist Chongu Party is a democratic party formed by Chondoist peasants on February 8, Juche 35(1946).
It was formed with the objectives to oppose imperialist aggression and subjugation, join in the work to secure national independence and build a rich and strong democratic country with the partiotic idea of “defending the country and providing welfare for the people” and the independent spirit of “driving out westerners and the Japanese”. [link][Patriotic Japanese Translation Link!]

One of the coolest things about making tools is getting to see what other people use them for. My Google Video search thingy is now thoroughly redundant, but it was cool when I made it (Way back before GooTube, back when Google Video didn't yet have a feature for searching for video) it's still used, mostly for finding porn. I keep a log of searches, for my own statistical fiddling, some of the queries people (you! the public) make are pure gold. Some recent nuggets:

[download this video] [view large]

Indeed they are.

David Plotz is reading the Bible and blogging it on Slate. His coverage is excellent and deals with many questions I've long had about the Old Testament but never got round to looking into. For instance, the business with Jonah and the Fish (a) does anyone actually believe this story, that some dude lived for three days inside a sea animal - Pinnochio style - and (b) why is this framed as Jonah and the Whale? Jonah 1:17 clearly says 'fish'. Because modern versions have edited it in :-) Unlike unicorns and dragons, whales are not mentioned in the bible at all. Nor are cats (ie: Felis Cattus Domesticus). Anyhoo, Exodus:

Chapter 35 through Chapter 39
When you need to build a tabernacle, whom do you call? Bezalel*, of course. Again and again, Moses talks up this guy, whom God endowed 'with a divine spirit of skill, ability, and knowledge in every kind of craft.' Bezalel and his sidekick Oholiab get more mentions in Exodus than anyone but Moses and Aaron. They're only subcontractors, but God loves them.

...

Chapter 40
God names feckless Aaron as his high priest and declares that Aaron's descendants would be an 'everlasting priesthood throughout the ages.' Couldn't the Israelites do better than that? First of all, Aaron (Mr. Golden Calf himself!) is probably the most incompetent and faithless man among them. If He'd picked anyone at random — You, Uriah in the tribe of Asher, come over here and put on this sacral vestment — God would be more likely to find a suitable priest. And even if Aaron were the holiest man in the Sinai desert, the inherited priesthood would still be an iffy idea.

Google AdSense has a testimonials page, these are usually very lame - often fictional quotes dreamed up by PR people, PR people posing as customers whacked on MDMA:

I'd like to thank Shady Company for a fantastic product, it's increased our revenue by 12,000% since an hour ago, and its such a pretty color. Whee! Look at the colors! The after-sales people are fantastic, I love you guys, I love you so much, I just want to touch your shirt... wow, thats so... amazing... your shirt... it feels so furry... wow.
Dr Martin Horseworthy, Nebraska

'General: You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s)'

This is just too good. The assorted fruit and mixed nuts of the American religious right are unhappy with Wikipedia for its bias towards a reasonable middle ground and tendency to favor evidence supported consensus over truthiness. And so was created Conservapedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to advancing lunatic opinion in an environment unencumbered by scientific knowledge or inconvenient reality.

As John Swift points out 'Conservapedia is based on good conservative Christian values while Wikipedia, as you can tell from its name, is based on Wiccan.' Would love to see Jimbo Wales face when he reads that one.

As far as I know this is the first time there has been an online creationist encyclopeadia which you can edit. From the entry on Kangroos:

'Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobaramin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land - as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart - or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.'

I'm having tremendous fun. I edited the article on Atheism to point out that it leads to pedophilia and bestiality. I checked back an hour later expecting my edit to be gone, but no: they didn't remove it, they added citations.

“Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.’” (Gospel of Thomas 114) “Jesus is not suggesting a sex-change operation, but is using 'male' and 'female' metaphorically to refer to the higher and lower aspects of human nature. Mary is thus to undergo a spiritual transformation from her earthly, material, passionate nature (which the evangelist equates with the female) to a heavenly, spiritual, intellectual nature (which the evangelist equates with the male).” [link]

From the Wikipedia, on the mood-altering effect of crowd membership:

Collective effervescence (CE) is the energy formed by a gathering of people as might be experienced at a sporting event, a carnival, or a riot. This energy can cause people to act differently than in their everyday life.

Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This book is largely based on studies of the aboriginal tribes.

Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together becomes sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which then become sacred.

For Durkheim, religion is a fundamentally social phenomenon. The beliefs and practices of the sacred are a method of social organization. According to Durkheim:

'god and society are one of the same… the god of the clan… can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of a plant or animal that serves as a totem.'

In 1942 Disney made a Donald Penis Duck episode showing him as a factory worker in Nazi Germany.


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Some nifty cultural dissonance there, Donald Duck giving the Nazi salute to a framed picture of Hitler on his bedroom wall. Lyrics to the film's title song (which won a freaking Oscar!):

Incan geoglyphs in Chile. When I was (more credulous) child I read most of Erich Von Danniken's books on the subject of Nazca lines, Incans and aliens, aaah memories. Pretty cool archaeological specimens too :-)

More at Google Sightseeing

Architectures of Control is a fascinating blog about how items are designed to affect the behavior of people using them, from planned obsolescence where the desired behavior is a person to buying replacement object to the use of sideshow 'slimming mirrors' in clothing stores.

There are a lot of views one could take of these practices and techniques. (With the weasel words in brackets) mostly they are manipulative (subtle), dishonest (ingenious) and effective ways of separating people from money (helping customers decide what's best for them), or effecting (encouraging) changes in public behavior.

Such techniques raise deeper questions about society and capitalism as well, such as who gets to decide what is for the publics good (is the general public fit to decide?) and what should be expected of businesses. A common view seems to be that the responsibilities of businesses lie mostly with the supporting the interests of the shareholders, if a company can make more money through deceptive or unethical means - or even illegal means if repercussions will be negligible - then that is what it will do. The shareholders get to vote on company management, and if the organization is not generating as much money as it can management may be replaced or a competitor with fewer scruples may out compete an honest responsible organization. Thus businesses will be winnowed down in a fairly Darwinian way, tending towards large monopolies where possible.

Words like fair and honest are rather subjective, that may not matter when discussing the general case. Society benefits a great deal from big businesses (with some notable exceptions), despite their drawbacks which is why they are allowed to exist, and society's servant Government is supposed to mediate where interests of profit and public good come to loggerheads. (continues after the jump)

By now you've almost certainly heard about Ms Novack's recent road-trip adventure. Every news source I use has been rehashing it. A song and dance:


[download this video] [view large]

But... two women having a catfight over some guy isn't news, if it wasn't for the sordidly memorable bit about the diapers it would have had far less coverage. There's a marketing lesson in that. Following a similar theme of sex, conflict and a little social transgression:

Orange County Weekly: ‘They’re My friends and I’m a Swinger!’

It's about the cops busting a local nookie joint. Notice towards the bottom there are three websites mentioned, but only one has a full domain name. You can bet that a local interest story about illicit sex in a sexually repressed part of the US is going to stir up a fair bit of traffic to those sites, and comefiesta.com is the one they'll hit first since it has an easy to use domain.

Interestingly, there isn't a website called comefiesta.com, it's a (deliberate) misspelling of cumfiesta.com, a Bukkake getup from Miami, right the way across the continent. Someone going by 'creep276' has an affiliate agreement whereby he gets paid for sending traffic to cumfiesta-with-a-u, and visiting comefiesta-with-an-o redirects visitors to the with-a-u.

So when the plump, sweaty, newspaper reading public of Orange County put their hairy palms to the keyboard after breakfast, someone makes a sudden surge of money. I'm not sure if the 'o' was a deliberate misspelling or not, could be the OC Weekly doesn't like to say cum, but it's suspicious, and a clever way to make a quick bag of pesos for the sly journalist, source or media hacker. The affiliate ID's a bit of a giveaway though, a single large frame or a cloned front page on the decoy domain would be more opaque.

Link: JealousAstronaut.com

From the Personal Finance Blog, a list of the ten best places to find money while walking:

Finally! Someone got to writing technical documentation that does not need to be broken up with porn and pictures of beetles to make it fun to read. I'm learning Ruby - on Rails - and compared to the usual slew of boring white books, this is just plain awesome: Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby (with cartoon foxes). An excerpt:

Animal Perfect is now the future of animal enhancement. They build new animals and salvage old-style animals for parts. Of course, they’ve come a long ways. When Animal Perfect started, you’d see a full-grown bear walk into Animal Perfect and you’d see a full-grown bear with sunglasses walk out. Completely cheesy.

Stick around and you’ll see a crab with his own jet pack. That’s a new 2004 model jetcrab.

But now, the whole operation is up and running. And the cleanliness of the place is astonishing. All the equipment is so shiny. Everything is in chrome. Oh, and all the staff have concealed weapons. They’re trained to kill anyone who enters unannounced. Or, if they run out of bullets, they’re trained to pistol whip anyone who enters unannounced.

'Elf, make me a starmonkey.'

First, the star is caught.


Some imaginary Ruby for you:

pipe.catch_a_star

Variable pipe. Method catch_a_star. A lot of Rubyists like to think of methods as a message. Whatever comes before the dot is handed the message. The above code tells the pipe to catch_a_star.

This is the second half of Ruby. Putting things in motion. These things you define and create in the first half start to act in the second half.

1. Defining things.
2. Putting those things into action.

So what if the star catching code works? Where does the star go?

captive_star = pipe.catch_a_star

See, it’s up to you to collect the miserable, little star. If you don’t, it’ll simply vanish. Whenever you use a method, you’ll always be given something back. You can ignore it or use it.

If you can learn to use the answers that methods give you back, then you will dominate.



Quickly then.

starmonkey = ratchet.attach( captive_monkey, captive_star )

The ratchet gets an attach message. What needs to be attached? The method arguments: the captive_monkey and the captive_star. We are given back a starmonkey, which we have decided to hang on to.



This is turning out to be such a short, little proggie that I’m just going to put it all together as one statement.

starmonkey = ratchet.attach( captive_monkey, pipe.catch_a_star ) + deco_hand_frog

See how pipe.catch_a_star is right in the arguments for the method? The caught star will get passed right to the ratchet. No need to find a place to put it. Just let it go.

But it turns out there's a faster way...

... moving along ...

Tomorrow is Boomtime, the 35th day of the Aftermath in the Discordian calendar, that is: St Pliny Dance-for-Ham Day. To celebrate, let's play a game.

SINK, A GAME by Ala Hera, E.L., N.S.; RAYVILLE APPLE PANTHERS

SINK is played by Discordians and people of much ilk. PURPOSE: To sink object or an object or a thing... in water or mud or anything you; can sink something in.

RULES: Sinking is allowed in any manner. To date, ten pound chunks of mud were used to sink a tobacco can. It is preferable to have a pit of water or a hole to drop things in. But rivers - bays - gulfs - I dare say even oceans can be used.

TURNS are taken thusly: who soever gets the junk up and in the air first.

DUTY: It shall be the duty of all persons playing 'SINK' to help find more objects to sink, once one object is sunk.

UPON SINKING: The sinked shall yell 'I sank it!' or something equally as thoughtful.

NAMING OF OBJECTS is sometimes desirable. The object is named by the finder of such object and whoever sinks it can say for instance, 'I sunk Columbus, Ohio!'

Here's a good way to boggle your mind. Think about prime numbers. Just think about them, for like 48 hours. It starts off being very strange and difficult. They're just ordinary numbers, right? Numbers that don't happen to be divisible by other natural numbers, save zero and one. The lone pines that stand at odd intervals after the firs have been toppled and chopped up with division lines. Pillars of obstinance in the mess if fickle, irresolute, factorisable integers.

But they're not random. There's a pattern, a clear and bafflingly complex one. A few hours in, you start to notice small things. Only two primes ever touch, two and three. They like to end in 9. They like to end in 3. If you black out the prime multiples one by one you see how it builds up, and where the next prime will be. I thought it was like a wave at first, because I didn't know any better, with each prime adding new curves to the waveform, new harmonics and a multiplied wavelength.

It's not like that. What it is: a developing pattern of gaps, each hole in the pattern of blacked out numbers is a new prime, which blacks out more of the holes ahead of it, making a bigger but perfectly repeating pattern up the number line. It's like a printing wheel that snowballs bigger and bigger as it rolls away from 0. When you see this, you realize why one is not treated as a prime number, I never understood that until now.

Ancient mathematicians knew this and gave it a name, it's called the Sieve of Eratosthenes. This is the same Eratosthenes fellow who devised the latitude and longitude system we use today to navigate the globe, and invented the orrery [flickr] hundreds of years before the Church declared the world flat.

But back to the primes. Once you've watched the wheel turn a few times in your head - and this takes a loooong time - you see how the primes are thinning out as the wheel gets bigger, more primes add more black so the white gaps become sparser. When real mathematicians talk about this they call it the Prime Number Theorem.

Then you realize that the blacked out bits don't much matter, the numbers they cover up are all discarded so the only information is the length of the black bits, the distance between primes. The wheel now shrinks down from a stripey black and white printing press to a small tight wheel of numbers. And still the pattern builds, but you can see it clearly

and... *BANG!* your brain shorts out. You sit in your chair, completely dazed, unable to think about anything. All the understanding, the beauty and form you saw clearly a moment ago is replaced by static.

Bodily functions resume, you suddenly realize you're hungry, thirsty and need to pee. Hours have passed, wince at the time spent when you remember all that you need to get done.

But it's not entirely wasted. If a computer program can be written to efficiently draw the wheel as it grows, up to a list of gap lengths a few gigabytes long then a list of the first x many primes can be made in short order. I fancy it can be done. Once we have the primes we can maybe make a program to create rough rules that prove a large number is not divisible by that prime, or pattern of primes, allowing the rapid elimination of huge swaths of prime factors by a logical tree. It doesn't have to prove if it is divisible, just cut down most of the numbers we might have to test.

Simple example, say 5. Compare to your number to factorize, does that number end in 5 or 0? no? Then it's not divisible by 5. Or 15, 25, 3214320985, etc. One logical rule that nixes a great many numbers we'd have to consider as factors. Thus the program imputes a decision tree for arriving at a small number of candidate primes, which are easily checked against the number we wish to factorize, and factorize but Foxtrot Oscar quickly. We allow perhaps a terabyte, or as much space as we can get, for this tree, and it can process all numbers below a limit of the largest prime squared, producing either the
factors or quickly telling us if the large number is yet another prime. We're sacrificing computational simplicity in exchange for computation time on a grand scale, and automating that.

Sooo... what? The factoring problem is one of the great, some say intractable, problems of mathematics. Being able to factorize large numbers would be a kind of comp-sci superpower, all manner of hard tasks become trivial. All the locks on public-key encrypted messages would open for you. The SSL on your bank website, the cypher on your cellphone or the new DVDs, a million hidden messages all made transparent. All kinds of people would step up to give you awards (and money, lots of money) in addition to all the prize money waiting for those who decrypt ciphers, such as offered by RSA and the EFF. Well worth thinking about a little, no matter how unlikely you are to crack it.

Seriously, this girl draws to most fluid, expressive, believeable characters ever. Case in point. So much motion. How?!

Link: Dance of the Flight Attendant
based on [Via]

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