The end of the galaxy is at hand . Or... well... might be when our galaxy has traveled two million light years to collide with the Andromeda galaxy.If you were watching the "CBS Evening News" broadcast live from Times Square on New Year's Eve, you might have seen a billboard advertising CBS News out in the square behind Dan Rather. You might have looked at the well-placed billboard and wondered just exactly how it was that CBS was able to place its ad so fortuitously. The truth is, it didn't. The billboard and the advertisement for CBS did not exist. The image was digitally imported onto the live CBS broadcast and used to obliterate real objects, the NBC Astrovision underneath the New Year's ball and a Budweiser ad.
Total Lunar Eclipse, January 21 . In echoes of the occasional recurring "niggardly" thing, the English Working Group on Racism in Children's Resources declares Baa Baa Black Sheep racist , ignoring that whole 1275 wool tax thing. Isn't it great that we've been freed from the shackles of interpreting history in our own contexts? Niel Bornstein and Kendall Clark, whom I've crossed paths with occasionally, have started a new weblog at http://www.monkeyfist.com What we have here is a failure to communicate: man calls phone sex line, ends up talking to wife . Scary Devil Monastery Meme OTD, after discussion about Sun being the "dot com people", and all the other .com advertising: Just don't .com in my mouth. Canadian World Domination . Marylaine takes on the case of Elian Gonzales in My Word's Worth . That vocal minority that thinks he should be kept here sure is loud. Aggressive violent boys more popular . No real surprise there. It's funny that this should come up at the same time that Frank forwarded on this note about using saliva tests to identify violent children . Wonder what the correlation between cortisol levels and business success is? I have a dream . You've gotta take seriously those aeronautical engineers who publish their work on GeoCities : Via AVWeb , the Rotopter (in his defense, it's more a teaching project and intellectual exercise):The results will be catastrophic for our galaxy and could spell the end of our planet. "It will be a major car wreck, and we're the Yugo in this one," said Ohio astrophysicist Chris Mihos. As a result of the collision the solar system, at present safely located out on a quiet galactic arm, could end up at the hotbed centre of the new coagulated galaxy.
"the initial idea of the Rotopter was simple: to replace the progressive motion of a flapping wing with rotation of the one around vertical axis. Designing a link mechanism that drive the wing (blade) in flapping movement and enable free rotation around vertical axis was not difficult. Much more challenging turn out to be creating a device that will allow variation of the wing incidence angle."
I've been talking with Charlene a lot about placebos and homeopathy and whatnot, and then yesterday had an interesting discussion: A friend, who shall remain nameless, was in another part of the country, and on the recommendation of an acquaintance went to an alternative healer to talk about some muscle and joint aches he's been having. The healer diagnosed him however that particular healer does, and recommended some expensive concoction made from some obscure root, which "is very popular in Chinese medicine". Looking at the ingredients list, and being familiar with procuring fresh Chinese ingredients for food, the friend decided that he could purchase said concoction more cheaply back in the bay area, so paid the healer, got a small bottle from which to work as a reference, and returned. Back in the bay area, he went from shop to shop, finding variants, until he walked into that one shop with the incense smoke and the ancient man sorting bottles behind the counter, and sure enough, the man had both the root, and tinctures made from the root. Figuring that he wouldn't get closer to the source of authentic information, my friend asked, with the aid of an interpreter, what the function of this root was. Apparently he's been drinking hair tonic for his joint problems. Beware Chinese medicine as dispensed by Caucasians. A new RISKS digest , in which Bruce Sterling points out that you can make messages invisible to Microsoft Outlook readers by putting "begin" and two following spaces on a line by itself (actually, I think this may affect more than just Outhouse). Aaaaigh! Someone just forwarded me the NPR funding spam again, not only that this was after we'd had the discussion about the very same letter on the very same mailing list forwarded by the very same person a year ago. I don't mean to be like, cruel, or anything, but... well... never mind. A new Topping the News , snippets of sex news from around the world. Also in the Spectator , a slightly interesting interview of Albert Ellis by Anthony Petkovich: Can you give me an example of one of your shame-attacking exercises? Sure -- read Screw magazine in the subway, that's a good shame -- attacking exercise. MarkV has some pictures of the eclipse . A new RISKS digest including the "real" story behind the missile toting kangaroos I've ragged on XML a lot, and I've expressed my complaints with the philosophy underlying XML-RPC before in this forum, but the XML-RPC interface for Manila spec coupled with some things Lindsay Marshall has talked about (throwing together lots of cross platform apps in Tcl/Tk ), and some stuff I discussed with Carl Coryell-Martin, and whether or not I like the underlying technologies it's clear that desktop apps that communicate with the web are coming fast and hard. It also seems clear that your average user doesn't want the mental abstraction that I'm thinking about when I preach "no new user interfaces", that new extremely limited applications that force a structure and way of thinking (Microsoft calls them "wizards") are going to be popular.So my sister is getting married in Las Vegas (I don't know either, when queried on the matter she said "well, it's better than Toledo", which is true, but...). I never thought I'd get near Vegas in my life, but it appears that that's gonna happen, so if anybody has suggestions on cool things to do and see in the area in late April, I'm interested. I don't know what the desert is like around there, or what's worth checking out, or even how the bloom is in that part of the season in that area. And who knows there may even be some stuff worth seeing in Vegas itself. While poking around to find prices on cheap flights to Vegas I discovered that Alaska Airlines runs on Microsoft products. Amazing what those crashes and error messages tell ya, huh? Sigh.
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