Google is having a science fair! No, really - if your teenager has a plan to convert live bees into toothpaste they can present their wondrous idea in front of the internet and our Googly overlords.
Chidingly, they don't want to know about my research into trolling with Justin Bieber - but not because it's not a good idea, and not just because I'm too old. It's because I'm Bad People. The competition is open the all the world's schoolchildren - except for the brown schoolchildren of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar/Burma, Syria and Zimbabwe. Presumably other untrustworthy races such as the Daleks are also excluded, the rules aren't clear. To my fellow Zimbabwean readers and friends, and others in the axis of not-liked-by-Google, let's keep the secret of moon babies to ourselves. The Americans can't have any.
Image courtesy of 4chan
Their loss. Perhaps they know that Zimbabweans don't much do science fairs - instead we have exciting engineering competitions where children get all sticky building bridges out of ice cream sticks and glue. The secret to winning is lots of glue. And re-enforcing triangles. And using compressive, rather than tensional structures. But mostly: lots of glue. But what am I talking about, they're Google, they definitely know that.
The competition opens April 5th, so start your hamsters on their regimen of sodium pentathol now and the rules prohibit feeding sodium pentathol to hamsters. They also prohibit the use of meat obtained from pet stores and human teeth (unless autoclaved at 121 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes). Quite specific, that rule about teeth. Entrants must be schoolkids between 13 and 18 in teams of up to three people. They'll need a Google Account and can sign up here.
Final judging will be on July 11th. Winners stand to receive a US$50,000 scholarship and their choice of experience from CERN, Google, LEGO or Scientific American, a trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic Expeditions and a chance to work for LEGO MINDSTORMS R&D.; Which is all pretty awesome. Beats the crap out of the certificate I got for my bridge. Fifteen finalists will get token items and a trip to the Googleplex.
You're still wondering why they felt it necessary to have detailed rules about autoclaving teeth, aren't you? Me too. Keep that in mind as you watch this interview with competition judge Dr Marion Nestle.
Notice: This post is sponsored by the promoters of Google Science Fair
By way of promoting the new Golf GTI, Volkswagen have produced a flash game at the GTI Project website - racing a miniature red Golf around a scale-elecric track. It's actually quite good - it uses live action video for the track and cut-scenes, is well produced and fun to play. Morish, even. It was novel to play a driving game with only one dimension of control.
You can play for time or join/start a group to play competitively. The premise of the rankings is that you can win a Golf GTI to drive for three months. Consecutively, one would guess.
For pure geekery I'd be interested in studying the game's physics model. I tend to wipe out quite a bit, if one were to disassemble the game it should be possible to work out the maximum speed at every point on the track and then using the game's values for acceleration and drag find the fastest possible time. It's probably different for each lap (you don't start from 0 except on the first lap, which will change the optimal pattern of acceleration for the next lap, which will feed forward into the next and so on). I'd like to know the fastest lap time possible in this game universe, I'm certainly not achieving it.
Oh Happy Day! With Bush out the White House, funding for abstinence only sex-ed in American public schools has finally been cut, due to being demonstrably counterproductive. After two presidential terms of this teen pregnancies in the US are at a 15-year high [source]. I never imagined academic studies, reason or sense could affect a political issue that involves people's two greatest emotional buttons: children and sex. Obviously teens aren't children, but the law doesn't see it that way.
As digger bsmang writes:
Very awesome. Abstinence-only education is simply ineffective. Maybe children will finally receive useful and appropriate information about the consequences of being sexually active and how to keep themselves safe and non-pregnant in the event that they should happen to entertain their natural urges...
And it's wonderful to see the side of intelligence be triumphant over that of stupidity. Needs to happen more often.
For their part, the religious lunatic fringe behind all this are repairing to their convention in Puerto Rico, no doubt to ponder which socially conservative congressmen might try to sneak funding for them in exchange for some shiny new dentures and a cake.
And now to 4chan for dispatches from the front:
I've no idea who to attribute. Whoever made this, you rock.[read on...]
Several blogs are reporting sightings of a weird marine animal in the Channel. A big weird marine animal, which is strange because I've met a few old-timers in the Channel Islands who'll swear blind there's something like this living out there. Tall tales of a Channel Monster tended to come up after a little drinking on quiet winter nights, when there was no-one else in the bar, just a few of my elderly regulars and me serving the drinks. I never took too much of what they said to heart (fishermen have stories for every occasion). They did have a fairly consistent description though and after some prodding and skeptical remarks, an old salt called Ormer drew me this sketch:
Turns out more and more people are coming forward with sightings, so there may be something to it. The Association of Maritime Research are looking for witnesses and reported sightings:
Calling for Witnesses
The AMR’s success in identifying this marine phenomenon is dependent upon the participation of the general public. As the first report came from Dover they have put in place a multimedia campaign calling for witnesses to come forward. This will include the distribution of flyers, radio, press and online communications.
We are calling for all witnesses of sightings of any strange phenomena in the English Channel to contact the AMR immediately via our website www.thechannelcreature.com. A reward is being offered for evidence leading directly to proof of this creature’s existence.
El perro, el perro, es mi corazón.
El gato, el gato, el gato no es bueno.
Cilantro es cantante,
Cilantro es muy famoso
Cilantro es el hombre con el queso del diablo.
El perro, el perro, es nunca sin raison
El gato, el gato, el gato es obseno
Cilantro es caliente,
Cilantro es carinoso
...
mejor de su esposo
Feeding the beast. This is - I think - a viral marketing campaign, I received an email out of the blue, offering me money to post this here. Apparently to do with Apple computer and GPS, and a suggestion of geocaching.
I'm intrigued. Not so much by whatever they're selling - more of a Linux person - but in deconstructing the ad and its blog. Much as I'd love to think that OpenStreetMap have an advertising budget for this sort of thing I'm presuming this must be to do with a phone or PDA release.
The blog the ad points to does not offer any information on anything, it spins a disjointed narrative implying some sort of interesting context but that's all it's for - to create unanswered questions so people wonder what's going on.
A puzzle. I like puzzles. This puzzle is made of people :-) The blog hosts some pictures, a pretty original Google Maps mashup and a link to something on Vimeo. All of these plus the DNS will be linked to accounts around the internet. A place to start. In the morning.
Fafblog is a good blog. It is the best blog. It is a blog about God, the Universe and those Horrible Screaming Monkeys.
1. Is there an emergency?
a. Yes!
- Quick! Break glass in case of emergency.
- Oh no, now I'm all cut and bleeding on this broken glass!
- Sounds like an emergency! Quick, break more glass.
- Okay, I broke the glass! Now what?
- Oh no, what'd you do that for! You needed that glass for the emergency!
Following are instructions for using the stencil generator, it's quick and easy. First, you'll need a source image to make your stencil from. You can upload a picture from your computer, or download one from the net. Try to find one where the background is distinct from the foreground (subject) of the image. I recommend the creative commons image search, since you can search for images which are copylefted to allow derivative works.
One you've found an image you'd like to use, copy its URL - not the URL of the page it's on, the URL of the image - or download it to your computer. Back at the stencil generator, paste the URL into the text field and click 'go'.
If all goes well you'll now have a set of thumbnails in front of you with differing levels of light and dark. Click one, and you'll notice the image in the middle of the page changes to a version of your picture at that white level. In this example I've used the 'Photo Negative' button at the bottom of the page to change the thumbnails from white-on-black to black-on-white. Click around until you find the whiteness level you like best.
I think that works, now to add a caption, using the text field at the bottom of the page:
All done, click 'Add to Gallery' (bottom of the page) et voila, your stencil. To save it to your computer, Right Click, 'Save As..'
Optional: Adding it to the gallery. Not forgetting to credit the original photographer Antiquité Tardive - this is basic courtesy and a condition of the Creative Commons license. It's now saved in the stencil gallery and published in the gallery's RSS feed.
Now print it on card or a transparency for screen printing, graffiti, interior decorating, cake icing, etc. The following instructables may be handy for the physical part:
Well, OK, there's many different kinds of stupid, but this is one of my favorites. rickrolldb.com in amassing a database of Rickrolls, web pages which trick the user into viewing 80's pop icon Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. Ostensibly this is so that web users pissed at being taken for a dance can add the database to their browser's ad blocker. Since YouTube Rickrolled it's entire user base on April 1st 2008 it has gone irrepairably mainstream and is officially an old meme - unfunny outside its legitimate use in harassing Scientology.
But this database intrgues me. It's a realtime dataset showing the growth and manifestation of a meme, empirical data against which theories of meme behavior can be falsified or corroborated. There are other such datasets which can be created, one can track the reproduction of files on p2p networks (actually, I did study this, a story for another day) or the spread of threatening chain messages in YouTube comments. This is different though, the YouTube data is messed up by anti-spam systems that arbitrarily check and confine the meme's spread, and file sharing is a little simplistic. rickrolldb on the other hand is a real-time map showing the spread and use of a learned behavior in a human population. A limited demonstration that stupidity is contagious :-)
In 2005 or so I made an image macro that arranged letters cut from newspapers and magazines into text - like ransom notes on an old TV series. It's been offline for awhile , but no more. The ransom note generator is back, rewritten from scratch. It now has an RSS feed, an improved gallery and a bunch of new effects. Enjoy :-)
Great power stems from being in the path of information. I was reminded of that this weekend while watching (across the Limpopo) the media blockade surrounding the recent Zimbabwean election. With this lesson in mind I got to thinking about all the image hotlinking strix.org.uk carries. It's a lot, more than half of my bandwidth, and it costs money.
For the non-technical, hotlinking (or inline linking) is the practice of using files hosted on someone else's server in the HTML of web pages coming from your own server. It seems a perfect externality, shifting hosting costs from one site directly onto another. Site owners - jealous of their content and sensitive to the bottom line - can get very worked up about it. When being derogatory, the practice is referred to as 'leeching', 'bandwidth theft' or 'theft of service'.
I'm not as eager to assume it's a bad thing. If someone likes something on strix.org.uk enough to want to share it with their readers, that's pretty cool. One depressing evening in 2006 I drew a picture and posted it to the blog, a hotlink turned up with it in a greek blog post. What could be a better compliment for someone learning to draw? Sure, it'd be better if the blogger had copied it to their own server and provided an attribution link, but color me pleased. I'm happy for my stuff to get more exposure, hence the copyleft (cc) license.
In the more contemporary Web 2.0 view, hotlinking isn't a big deal. The nature of syndication and data mashing usually requires sources of information that are separate from the applications people use to combine and filter it. Most of the web applications I write hotlink images from other sites, sanctioned by the likes of flickr and youtube, and any number of services - from Google Reader to Babelfish - hotlink strix.org.uk. It's a good thing.
But.. there are some circumstances where the benefits are not as obvious. Those circumstances look like this:
Behold! a LolDuck. I've no idea where it came from, it was found on a forum and to the forums it returned. Such is the way of the LolDuck. The hotlink was copied from post to post and site to site, reproducing virally and exponentially. This site serves one every few seconds, and it's a lot of bandwidth to bear for nothing in return. The benefit? I am now in the path of information.
Since the image comes from strix.org.uk the file referenced by the link can be changed at this end. Thanks to the magic 'Referrer' field it can be done with some discretion, serving any image at all on any site with the hotlink. The LolDuck may not provide a direct benefit but it has created a microphone, an organic, unintentional broadcast system to say anything at all to surfers on hundreds of other sites.
The only question now is... what to say. One can tell where individual people are on the net (Referrer), where they are in the real world (IP address), that they're bored enough to be surfing Lol and can put an image on their monitors. Advertisers would love to be in this position. Most webmasters at this point do something distinctly uncreative; they replace the image with a tiny 'No Hotlinking' graphic and dismiss the opportunity.
Not I, but what to say? 'Vote Obama!', 'Womens Rights Are Human Rights', 'Help A Nun Kick The Habit'. Maybe. PSAs are Plan B. Best idea so far is to interact, to play a game with web surfers and engage them. An image lottery. I gathered together some random funny pictures, some disgusting shock pics, and some hentai (brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things). The concept is a drinking game to be played with friends, every time the hotlink is loaded an image is chosen at random, if it's hentai, drink! If not, everyone can still laugh and groan at the funny/gross images. Though it needs some refining, the hotlink now looks something like this on forums/myspace:
And like this as a youtube background:
The hotlink directs people back here to play an expanded version of the game, an AdSense banner kicks a few cents toward the hosting costs, and someone gets drunk and giggles at Japanese sex comics. Everybody wins. So, if you came here wondering why there's strange and random crap appearing on your website, now you know. Feel free to copy stuff from strix.org.uk if you'd like to use it. Please link back :-) Thanks.
If anyone has an idea for a better use of this ability (other than Goatse on MySpace), I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Over the course of a day your idea could be broadcast to tens of thousands of people all over the web.
Imogen Heap - Just For Now: I love this performance, she samples and mixes her own voice as she sings, layering it and harmonising with herself. This should be a genre. [$0.02]And the genre should be called: Dancing With Marionettes[/$0.02].
The new Google AdSense Terms and Conditions behoove me to have a privacy policy, and it's about time. This document may change as the site and my situation does, but its spirit will remain the same. Laws change and I'm the type of guy that likes to roam around, I'm never in one place I roam from town to town, And when I find myself a-fallin' for some girl I hop right into that car of mine and ride around the world, Yeah I'm the wanderer yeah the wanderer, I roam around around around... so sometimes the law I'm subject to will require changes to this policy.
For the purposes of this document: 'I' means Strix, the owner and operator of this site. 'You' means you, the person reading this. 'The Software' means the collection of code powering strix.org.uk and its associated domains. 'The Site' means strix.org.uk and www.strix.org.uk. 'Douchebag' means Joel Osteen, Myanmar Premier General Than Shwe and any corporate legal or PR representative. This policy applies to human users of The Site I reasonably believe to be acting in good faith. Spammers, spam, associtated robots, Douchebags and any person engaging in illegal activites of which I disapprove are not protected by this policy. For example: a citizen of the Maldives quoting from the Bible is breaking the law of his home territory, but will still be protected by Strix.org.uk wherever possible.
Please note that strix.org.uk uses Google AdSense, and Google collects and stores a great deal of information about your travels on the web so as to better target ads to you and for this Site.
Protection of Personal Information
Strix.org.uk does not collect much private information, save for IP addresses in the webserver log and email addresses associated with blog comments. This information is not released to third parties or the public except in cases of spamming or when legal/personal threats are made. If this information is requested by actors to whom I do not have an obligation under South African law, I will usually destroy such information before a legally binding request can be made. In cases where third parties contact me to request the email address of Site users, I will forward that request to the user to allow them the discretion of responding. Search terms, when dissociated from IP, referrer and session data are not considered personal information and may be mined, aggregated and published.
Freedoms of Speech
I fully support your right to free speech. You can - or at the very least: should be able to - say or not say whatever you please on your own website. On my Site, however, I expect comments and other user-submitted content to conform to a minimum standard of civility and good taste. This does not mean that you cannot criticize myself, the positions of others, or espouse views radically different to my own. It does mean that bigotry (homophobia, sexism, racisim, etc) trolling (divisive comments that serve no useful purpose), personal attacks and offensive stupidity (eg, haulocaust denial, advocating violence) will be removed. I very rarely delete comments or other user-submitted content because I am fortunate to have a pretty excellent crowd here and it is seldom necessary.
If you have any further, specific questions, please ask them in the comments field below this post.[read on...]
I passed this sign today outside Grahamstown Checkers. My Afrikaans is non-existent but suddenly I know what the membership tattoo will be when I get that Apocalyptic Easter Suicide Cult off the ground. Now Recruiting! Join Today! Our Passover Balls Have The Most Fruit!
This peculiar and somehow comforting sentiment is from starrgirl at Associated Content:
Sock yarn has gone delicious. Besides all the available fibers, like cashmere, silk, merino wool, alpaca and more, there's a riotous choice of ... every shade of the rainbow and in patterns that "self-stripe" as you knit. Artisans hand-dye yarns into beautiful combinations ... try Superwash yarn ... There are lots of methods for knitting socks ... double pointed needles, circular needles, toe-up, cuff-down, magic loop, two at a time. Knitting socks can challenge you forever. The world is so full of sock yarns now that you'll want to try them all.
Researchers from the British Sea Life Centre group of aquariums have published a study detailing the sex lives of these charming, shag-happy little weirdos. The results, in brief:
According to the Wikipedia:
Scientists at 15 aquariums studied 90 seahorses of 3 species. Of 3168 sexual encounters, 37% were same sex acts. Flirting was common (up to 25 potential partners a day of both genders); only one species (the British Spiny Seahorse) included faithful representatives, and for these 5 of 17 were faithful, 12 were not. Bisexuality was widespread and considered "both a great surprise and a shock", with big bellied seahorses of both genders not showing partner preference. 1986 contacts were male-female, 836 were female-female and 346 were male-male.
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