Derelict
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Harbour Grace, Newfoundland.
Nice shot
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Across the Field
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We’re off to see the wizard…
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No bass, but at least you can get a recorder!
Bandology! For those who loved Skyrates, here comes another casual, online community game from the brain-trust at the Carnegie Mellon University school of game design. Choose your instrument, join a band, and play old-school mini-games to build up your skills. Or choose track B to start your own band, recruit new members, and manage your gigs and travel. (And BTW, Skyrates has now rebooted from the beginning, with a new map and much more fun stuff implemented.)
Skyrates, pronounced like “pirates,” is a flash game currently open for beta testing. Designed by a group of seven students at Carnegie Mellon University, the concept was to create an MMORPG that you could simply check on every few hours throughout the day, like you would with your e-mail. The outcome is a simple but enveloping, and somewhat silly game that manages to be addictive as hell while only taking up a few minutes per day. (plus it’s free.)
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Shipped off to a foreign jail for warez
The USA playing global sheriff isn’t new, but the reach of US laws is extending. Hew Griffiths isn’t a terrorist or a violent criminal, he didn’t even make any money from his crime. He pirated some software, from his home in Australia. So why is he in jail in Virginia? Some think we might as well join ’em.
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Microwave popcorn is the new asbestos
Diacetyl, the buttery-flavored chemical used in microwave popcorn, may be banned in California by 2010. The fumes from it cause terrible lung-disease in people who work around it.
Assemblywoman Sally Lieber (D) has introduced a bill to ban diacetyl use by 2010. The chemical is an artificial butter flavoring most commonly used in microwave popcorn. Numerous study have found links between the chemical used by flavor workers and a rare disease called bronchiolitis obliterans. For those of you who aren’t 2000 yr old Romans, that means that the bronchioles and some of the smaller bronchi are obliterated by masses made up of fiberous tissue. It’s like sticking marbles into the networks of tubes in your lung that connect fresh air to the alveoli, the little sacs where oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged with the blood. As you Romans can imagine, that’s haud sanus. According to the WaPo, flavoring manufacturers have paid out more than $100 million due to health lawsuits. An excellent case study and background to this whole mess can be found at Defending Science.
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Scrambled? Something like that.
The World’s Most Unbelievable Invention Pursuing the demand for fresh eggs, Chinese manufacturers have come across the most amazing solution: man-made chicken eggs. More Here.
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Videos of how to open things
How To Open Things is a site where you can post a request for other people to post videos that show them how to open something — a door with a bump key, someones’ clenched fist, a user account in Windows when you don’t know the password, a Magic 8 Ball, etc.
There’s a prize-component involved. The person who makes the request for videos must offer some kind of cash prize to the creator of the video that gets the most votes.
The site is brand new and many of the requests are silly, but I could imagine this turning into a very useful resource.
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fear!
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spiderman3/countdown/clock.swf
Watching it on an IMAX setup in Halifax tommorow night, hell yeah.
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Celebrating “Alice Day”
Today is Alice “in Wonderland” Liddell’s birthday, and by a happy coincidence, it’s also the day I scored the most beautiful edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass that I’ve ever seen. It’s one of the Anne Bachelier illustrated editions published by CFM in 2005. The book is an oversized oblong, tall and narrow, with Alice on one side and Looking-Glass on the other — turn the book over to switch.
Alice in Wonderland was one of the first books I ever read on my own, and I had a fat little school library edition that was reverse-bound with Looking-Glass, just like this one. But this one is really special — Bachelier’s luscious illustrations and the marvellous binding make this into more than a book, it’s a must-have artifact.
Jenn has been collecting Alice editions for a while, and she’s got some really nice ones, but I’ve never seen one quite like this. CFM also did a paperback edition, but I haven’t been able to find an online bookseller offering it. The publisher also offers a limited editions set of lithos of the Bachelier paintings.
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Vonnegut’s 2BR02B on Project Gutenberg
2BR02B, a story by Kurt Vonnegut, originally published in sci-fi mag ‘World’s of If’ but never published in book form has turned up at Project Gutenberg.
Everything was perfectly swell.
There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
The population of the United States was stabilized at forty-million souls.
One bright morning in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, a man named Edward K. Wehling, Jr., waited for his wife to give birth. He was the only man waiting. Not many people were born a day any more.
Wehling was fifty-six, a mere stripling in a population whose average age was one hundred and twenty-nine.
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52 weeks, 52 wonderful pieces of art
Start here and work your way up to page one to see the most remarkable achievement of DC Comics just-completed weekly series, 52. 52 weeks worth of amazing covers by artist J. G. Jones! A weekly blog for each cover starts here. This one was my favorite. 52!
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Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget.
Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Like they said in Strange Days, “Memories are meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason.” What happens when there’s a record online of every site you’ve ever visited, every flippant comment you’ve ever made, every embarrassing question you’ve ever asked? Maybe computers, like people, should be designed to forget.
From the article:
“My proposal aims to reintroduce the concept of forgetting over time into our digital realm. My goal is to shift the default back from retaining forever to deleting after a certain time. At its core, my proposal does not envision that users cannot change the expiry dates if they want to – the digital equivalent of taking a napkin of somebody’s address and putting it neatly in a file to preserve it. In a sense, we have had the ability to do that almost forever. But it required a deliberate act; and that is what I suggest our digital devices require from us, too.”
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The most pressing issue in Canada today
Controversy in Canada! It seems that Canadian politicians have nothing better to do. The hockey Don weighs in. The issue described in brief here. More press links here. Lastly, some comparible(?) incidents.
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Dream a little dream of me
The Fallout 3 that never will be. As far as western RPGs go, the Fallout series was one of the crown jewels. A spiritual successor to EA’s Wasteland, the games combined tragedy, black humor and all the cool of the retrofuture apocalypse. Although much of the creative team left to form Troika Games, and two (barely related) follow-up games were made, Black Isle Studios (who were also responsible for the Dungeons and Dragons-based Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate series, along with the epic Planescape: Torment) was planning a third sequel, but now Bethesda picked up the IP and plans to make an MMORPG. That little tech demo is all that’s left of one of the most demanded video game sequels in western RPG history.
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riding the synchronicity highway
20 Most Amazing Coincidences, “the noteworthy alignment of two or more events or circumstances without obvious causal connection” and other superlatives.
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Weeding out
Forbes Magazine Details The Top Ten Most Exotic Kinds of Weed (yes, the puff puff kind) with pricing and lovely pictures but no links to local dispensaries.
PS. Yer favorite weed that’s not on the list sucks.
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Spanish Solar Tower of Power
Wow, until now all I’ve ever seen has been passive solar power, where the suns rays are just collected and turned into electricity via powerfull solar cels, but redirecting the light via massive mirrors and into steam? cool, steampunk power to the rescue!
“The rays of sunlight reflected by a field of 600 huge mirrors are so intense they illuminate the water vapour and dust hanging in the air.”
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The cat’s out of the …. oh.
A New Brunswick woman is wondering how she made it through Saint John Airport security and all the way to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., with a live cat in her suitcase.
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With nature and a camera
Being the adventures and observations of a field naturalist and an animal photographer – An utterly charming picture of life in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1896.
St Kilda – "Many theories have been advanced as to the origin of the inhabitants of this lonely rock, and a curious tradition exists as to its acquisition by members of the outside world. The inhabitants of Harris and Uist agreed to make it the prize for a boat race, and accordingly set out to row across the intervening waste of waters. So equally matched were the crews in regard to pluck and endurance that they arrived at St Kilda almost at the same moment. The Uist men, however, led by a few strokes, and hopes of winning ran high amongst them when Colla MacLeod, the chief of the Harris gang, chopped his left hand off and flung it ashore over the heads of his competitors, and secured St Kilda and its satellites to himself and his descendants for all time."
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Limited Edition Coolness
20ltd.com is a new and unique online shop. They have 20 limited edition items for sale at any time, and each item is a limited edition made exclusively for 20ltd.com. And they have a jukebox with some great tunes on to shop by.
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How to Interview
How to conduct a job interview. 5 steps to conducting good job interviews and finding the right candidates. Contains answers to the infamous why is a manhole cover round question. Also, 10 common mistakes managers should avoid when conducting same. On the flispide, here are some tips for interview preparation, the 25 most difficult questions an interviewee can prepare for and some things to avoid saying in interviews.
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Peak Performance
Peak Performance is a website featuring dozens of articles on just about every aspect of sports science, including large sections devoted to cycling, swimming and sports psychology. Some of my own favorites deal with the beneficial effects of Omega-3 fatty acids, the Chinese government’s plan to dominate the Olympics, Veronique Billat’s 30-30 running workouts and how to increase growth hormone levels naturally.
RobDurdle.com 
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