Thursday, October 28, 2010

World Clock

Click Here for active site. (needs Flash)

via: Nag in the Lake

Air Show Disaster

Via: Pete

Monday, October 25, 2010

Not practical, but what the heck

Now That's Nifty

This custom built wooden car rides on a 1986 Toyota truck frame and gets power from a Chrysler 318 engine. It is driven by an automatic transmission and has just 1,800 miles on its odometer. The whole body is made of cedar and its interior is just as cool as the exterior.

You just know that some inspector, somewhere, is filling out the forms necessary to put a stop to this public menace. The nanny state has its ways.

Back to the Noosphere

Media ecology, feeding frenzy, and the inevitable self-serving self-examination. Why yesss... we did slip up a little on that one cuz... and protecting our freedoms ( the advertiser ) and our way of life. A tweet from the corner drunk becomes a major breaking news story in a matter of hours.( and you can find more opinions on the reporter's Facebook page with explosive up-to-the-minute suppositions) Be right back after this message. (cue the John Williams break theme and bring up the chattering daisy wheel printer sample a bit) Not to denigrate a show business supplied noosphere, but I felt better informed when I was cut off from the blather and froth during fleet week. I'd like to vote for the freedom from mendacity. On to my slightly neglected link-dump.

The first bit is about the press, as you may have guessed. First a story that caught fire, with more and more revelations (My God, we coulda been blowed up) When a cooler head says wait, this doesn't make a lick of sense, the story magically transmogrifies. A report on a report of allegations, made by a book that you can buy for $27.95.DEFEND YOUR RIGHT TO KNOW, BUY IT FROM OUR SPONSER. The second link could profitably be interpereted as a knee-jerk turf defense. The third is political, NYT is tring to position itself as a bit more blue colar without loosing its base on the Upper East. It's hard to effect change with the same people, the same policies, and the same ownership, behind the same closed doors.

  • Shelton Story Bogus: The device is a critical link in our system of command and control, is handled by a military aide, and if it were missing, I am certain it would have been noticed -- immediately, not months later. So, what was actually lost? Shelton may have a story to tell here, but so far, it does not hold together.
  • Head Start on Smear: The US major papers of record have yet to fill their opinion pages with supposition, slander and rumor concerning Wikileaks and its most visible representative, Julian Assange. That’s for the week to come. But the New York Times has already gotten a head start in its news pages.
  • Change we used to believe in: Well, yes! Obama couldn’t have said it more eloquently himself. But with all due respect to Secretary Donovan’s blogging finesse, he wasn’t promising action. He was just stroking the liberal base while the administration once again punted. In our new banking scandal, as in those before it, attorneys general in the states, where many pension funds were decimated by Wall Street Ponzi schemes, are pursuing the crimes Washington has not.
Yes kids, I'm old enough to remember when Rocky and Bullwinkle was a new show, with new episodes. Yikes! Here is the creator's obit.
  • R.I.P. Alexander Anderson: ...but few were more obscure, or more important, than Alexander Anderson, who died Friday at 90 in Carmel, Cal. Anderson created the characters Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose and Dudley Do-Right, and the vaudeville-style format, for the 1959 animated program Rocky and His Friends and its 1961 spinoff The Bullwinkle Show, known collectively as Rocky and Bullwinkle.
The next is a bit of security related computer tomfoolery. This one raises a more basic question. A program is a series of yes or no voltage pulses sent to the tick of a controlling clock. Once it's on your machine, it can be decompiled. When a program is in widespread use killing people, the people in question will find a way to get a copy. If you think a remote controlled weapon can't eventually be turned on its user, I've got a great bridge to sell you. The second story is about making-do effectively with the things at hand.
  • Predator Drones sued: Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi), a small Boston-based software development firm, alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client. Subsequent evidence and court proceedings revealed that the "government client" seeking assistance with Predator drones was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Wheelbarrow Launchers: It shouldn’t be so surprising, considering that lots of Iraqi insurgents came out of Iraq’s huge Saddam-era military, or that some had help from elite Iranian agents. But here’s an overview of some of the more ingenious, lesser-known innovations in asymmetric warfare that insurgents developed during the Iraq war to neutralize the U.S.’s conventional advantages.
Here are some of the more questionable policy shenanigans the folks in the back room have been up to. The third one comes under the - what the heck did you expect - rubric.
  • Saudi Arms Sales: And look, it's preferable to starting a war with Iran, but the trajectory of America's relationships with the countries that had the most direct role in incubating and fomenting the terrorism that slaughtered thousands of Americans and continues to threaten the West is an enduring curiosity. To put it mildly.
  • Insider Trading inside the Beltway: What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, according to the law. Nor would it be illegal for him to tip someone else, say, his largest campaign contributor.
  • That's Our Job: The U.S. said Iran shouldn’t interfere with Afghanistan’s internal affairs following a report that an Iranian official gave an aide of President Hamid Karzai a bag filled with packets of euro bills.

Yes, It can happen here.

  • A Rationalization of Evil: A doctor quoted in the article notes the irony that this occurred at the same time that the United States was prosecuting Nazi medical experimenters for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Pumpkin Pie

Dichromatism on Your Plate

In some regions of Central Europe, salad dressing is made preferably with pumpkin seed oil, which has a strong characteristic nutty flavor and striking color properties. Indeed, in a bottle it appears red, but it looks green in a salad dressing or mixed with yoghurt.

As you can see from the picture, pumpkin oil can give your dressing a good look in the cruet and it changes its color when poured or in a thin layer on greens. It's a bit hard to find, and pricy, but no more than good olive oil. If your menu has been wandering around the Mediterranean olive groves a mite too long, this is a healthy break. The usual caveats for specialty oils apply; buy fresh, store dark and cool, and go with a real purveyor.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Good Night, Moon

Good Night, Moon

On Tor Books: Written by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, Illustration by Tim Bower

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

I'm Only Sleeping

My friend Scott (Burridge) playing at a Buffalo coffeehouse.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Holy Cow

Figures of Speech

Marsha Tosk is an NYC artist. Tough way to make a living, mind you, but someone has to provide the merchandise for gallery openings. The hand crafted Malbec and free range chicken with localy grown freekeh don't pay for themselves. To this end Artist Tosk has produced a sales kit with all the goodies.

  • A nebulous Artist's statement including such things as pregnable, health of the environment, Leda, and allegorical.
  • A genuine coffee table sized tchotchke with enough cute and cuddly to exclude anyone not in the biz. ( I didn't borrow the idea, I merely was exploring the terrain suggested by earlier, nameless illustrators )
  • An advertisment in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the price. One darn quick way to let all your friends on the Upper West know how much disposable cash you can spend on your bleeding edge tastes.

Let's hope this project puts some food on Ms. Tosk's table.( you don't get an artist's discount at the grocery) She has some very well wrought pieces in the other part of her site, well worth looking at. $850 is a bit steep for borrowed clever, but so isn't an ad in the Times.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Philosophical aether

It's Monday already. Fleet Week 2010 is taking all my time lately. The picture above is the first deliveries to Pier 30-32. Today Al and I spent the day helping to mount antennas on Pier 35. Just to help out, the monitor on my laptop started to flicker, then got rather artistic, then simply gave up the ghost. Over time, I've installed so many mods, both physical and soft, that I think the poor baby is farpotshket. That's a roadie term, borrowed from Yiddish, meaning one too many layers of duct tape. As long as I'm muttering about my computer, here are two links about what others are doing with theirs.

  • The New Hacker Frontier: Wireless tire pressure monitoring systems, which also were touted as a way to increase fuel economy, communicate via a radio frequency transmitter to a tire pressure control unit that sends commands to the central car computer over the Controller-Area Network (CAN). The CAN bus, which allows electronics to communicate with each other via the On-Board Diagnostics systems (OBD-II), is then able to trigger a warning message on the vehicle dashboard.
  • Avatars in the workplace: Walk the halls of any large business over the last decade or two and you will have seen most of the workers “living on the screen,” joining in the vast and intricate world of modern commerce made possible by the Internet. Look over their shoulders and you will see that some of these workers are not just living on the screen but, in a sense, in the screen. They are immersed in elaborate virtual worlds as avatars, on-screen identities that can be controlled to produce some sort of movement, gesture, and speech.

The next two links are about writing. I chose the first one because it is one of the best examples of null content I've seen all week. You're all set to R&R down at the deep end of the philosophical pool when you realize that the author hasn't said a darn thing. My personal bug-a-bear is the concept of a higher morality. Higher than what? How much higher? (3 feet 9 inches) What kind of philosophical aether did you spin to provide the metric. It sounds a lot like the dreaded relativity that was dismissed in the first paragraph.

  • How do ideas have consequences: The intellectual bubble of a false, relativist understanding of freedom casts a shadow over our whole society and profoundly affects the terms of moral and political debates. So in a way it is everywhere. But if we limit ourselves to fighting its effects piecemeal we will often end up shadow-boxing, lunging at an elusive target that may seem to slip away only to reappear in more subtle and virulent forms.
  • Article about a scientific paper: In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?"

Here's a bit of history. It contains something about patronyms I sort of knew, but didn't. I think it's related to the way The Royals name themselves. (or not, I leave that exercise to the reader)

  • Homogenization and the State: Western state-making, writes Scott, in the seventeenth and eighteenth imposed permanent patronyms as a condition of citizenship. This was largely to help organize and to make it easier for states to properly perform a census.

A bit of business.

  • McDonald’s health insurance: So the big Wall Street Journal article today is about fast-food giant, McDonald’s, threatening that new provisions in the Affordable Care Act will mean that they may need to dump healthcare coverage for thousands of employees. Here’s a handy table of exactly what sort of insurance McDonald’s provides:

And of course, this , that, and the other about our current political zoo.

  • Meet Jim DeMint: OK, so we'd have missed out on some good songs, and that Ending Slavery thing was a good deal, and Ken Burns wouldn't be as rich and famous, and a lot of grizzled men who like to play soldier-man dress-up would have to go back to the Star Trek conventions where they belong.
  • The Angry Rich: Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
  • A Real Conservative Foreign Policy: So what would a truly conservative foreign and defense policy look like? Such a policy would focus on separating the wheat from the chaff of what is truly important for protecting and advancing the vital interests of the United States rather than focusing on objectives, which, while worthy, do not have a significant impact on those interests.
  • Hegel on Wall Street: In pondering this issue I want to, again, draw on the resources of Georg W.F. Hegel. He is not, by a long shot, the only philosopher who could provide a glimmer of philosophical illumination in this area. But the primary topic of his practical philosophy was analyzing the exact point where modern individualism and the essential institutions of modern life meet. And right now, this is also where many of the hot-button topics of the day reside.