Zeitgeist

Wednesday.

I lack focus, I'm afraid. Working on the TopSecretProject ... a bit bored of it, still waiting for various components to come together. I just want this sucker launched. End of July for a beta is the goal.

In the meantime I am playing with the Facebook API ... it's rather cool.

Other than being code geek, not a lot going on.


This is incredible: Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon's new map for war and peace A new doctrine for waging war and, crucially waging peace and a system for managing politically bankrupt states. The failure in Iraq is because although the US can wage war, it cannot transition a state. The question is: What happens between war and peace?

International security strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett outlines a post-Cold War solution for the foundering US military: Break it in two. He suggests the military re-form into two groups: a Leviathan force, a small group of young and fierce soldiers capable of swift and immediate victories; and an internationally supported network of System Administrators, an older, wiser, more diverse organization that actually has the diplomacy and power it takes to build and maintain peace.

“Hasty pudding, also Indian pudding, is a porridge-like dish of cooked grain.”

- Hasty pudding (Indian pudding) - Wikipedia

Hasty Pudding is a band waiting to happen.

And if you are making a Hasty Pudding or some Porridge, you may need a Spurtle

“An M2M system would enable machines to make intelligent choices, execute self-guided adjustments, and communicate with one another, all without human intervention, in a way that they presently cannot. As envisioned, an M2M intelligence system will work with a broad spectrum of machines, from wireless tools and sensors to robots, spacecraft, and computer grid systems. The goal is nothing short of machine self-dependency.” - Partnership to Develop Machine-to-Machine Intelligence System

“15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up” - 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense: Scientific American

“Flying saucer -- the term -- was coined 60 years ago, when salesman and pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in a "V" formation over Mount Rainier, Washington. Arnold told a reporter on June 24, 1947 that the UFOs flew erratically, fluttering and tipping their wings, like "a saucer if you skip it across water" -- and a worldwide subculture was born.” - Out of This World: 60 Years of Flying Saucers

“Life-sized Gigantor memorial to be erected” - Life-sized Gigantor memorial to be erected

“Archaeologists have revived the debate over whether a spectacular Bronze Age disc from Germany is one of the earliest known calendars.” - BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Calendar question over star disc

Drawing with HTML (via leclercalexis2).

What the hell!?

“Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?” - A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

New Theory on Old Debate: Comet Killed the Mammoth - washingtonpost.com

“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

“Scholars have come to learn that there was more to the culture of Kush than was previously suspected. From deciphered Egyptian documents and modern archaeological research, it is now known that for five centuries in the second millennium B.C., the kingdom of Kush flourished with the political and military prowess to maintain some control over a wide territory in Africa.” - Archaeology - Kingdom of Kush - Egyptian Civilization - New York Times

The River by Bruce Springsteen.

That's some good Blues Harp ... and the Harp Tab if you want it.

Zeitgeist

Hi.

Not a lot to say. I was going to post this weeks Zeitgeist and then realised that I can't post my usual links of levity. The government has invaded the Northern Territory to complete the dispossession started two centuries ago. It's all pretty f*cked.

We're not sending doctors or counsellors or medicine or food or shelter. Just troops and police.

Oh, and the plan has come under strong attack from the man whose report inspired Howard to act.

Given what we know about the Stolen Generation, and paternal approaches to our indigenous communities in general, this is a shameful period in our history.

And all to get elected one more time.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

An actually-on-Wednesday Zeitgeist. Good for me.

Nothing to report. WorkWork. TopSecretWork. Usual stuffs.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - Wikipedia : “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs.”

ClientCopia - stories about stupid clients. Stuff gets boring fast, but still a few amusing moments for a lunch hour.

From the Department of the Obvious:
“What happens when you take a 40-year-old CIA memo on losing a war and replace the word “Vietnam” with the word “Iraq”? The result is a set of conclusions that are just as true today.” Foreign Policy: The FP Memo: The Endgame in Iraq

I'M IN YOUR NEWSPAPER WRITING MAH COLUMN:


Tommy and I invented LOLporn last week. Oh yes. Imagine some rude pictures with captions like "YOU HAS A FLAVOUR" and "I AM IN YOUR ****" and ... well, probably something about a "BUKKITS" but I am not touching that one.

Work gets a little boring.

Artifacts from the Future - Fido Fusion:


Jesus holding a dinosaur proves creationism. Or something:


For making your blog much betterer:
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing

I like this one:
Writing Tool #1: Branch to the Right

CritBuns - Supporting creativity where others can't. It's a chair cushion thingy for sitting on the floor.

I want this:


The Best Thought Experiments: Schrödinger's Cat, Borel's Monkeys

“Suppose that, many years from now, we have constructed a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. In other words, the computer takes Chinese characters as input and, following a set of rules (as all computers can be described as doing), correlates them with other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose that this computer performs this task so convincingly that it easily passes the Turing test. In other words, it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a human Chinese speaker. All the questions the human asks are responded to appropriately, such that the Chinese speaker is convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human. The conclusion that proponents of strong AI would like to draw is that the computer understands Chinese, just as the person does. Now, Searle asks us to suppose that he is sitting inside the computer. In other words, he is in a small room in which he receives Chinese characters, consults a rule book, and returns the Chinese characters that the rules dictate. Searle notes that he doesn't, of course, understand a word of Chinese. Furthermore, he argues that his lack of understanding goes to show that computers don't understand Chinese either, because they are in the same situation as he is. They are mindless manipulators of symbols, just as he is — and they don't understand what they're 'saying', just as he doesn't.” - Chinese room - Wikipedia

Some space thing that I can't remember (Galaxy M81, maybe?):


This article is AWESOME. Read it!
“As Bruce Sterling puts it: "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach."” - Charlie's Diary: The High Frontier, Redux

The gist:
Space is basically really really BIG. The amount of energy it would take to get someone and some equipment to the nearest star is REALLY REALLY BIG too. And it gets worse from there.

“Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", IPA: [ˈtsuːk.tsvaŋ]) is a term used in combinatorial game theory and in other types of games (particularly in chess). Zugzwang means that one player is put at a disadvantage because he has to make a move — the player would like to pass and make no move. The fact that the player must make a move means that his position will be significantly weaker than the hypothetical one in which it is his opponent's turn to move. In combinatorial game theory, it means that it directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss.” - Zugzwang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joy Division live:

Monday

Someone felt as average as I did this morning and went on a shooting rampage through the city. Or something. News is garbled. At a train station, which should come as no surprise ... murder in Melbourne is much more likely to occur at a Connex-related venue.

It's not actually funny.

On a lighter note. Terrribly unenthused about WorkWork this morning ... I am desiging some software by saying "make it work like this other software that's really good and open source and anyone can download and use for free". If you look up "Pointlessly Futile" in the dictionary there would be a picture of my sad face and a note to "See also: Tautology".

Thursday Zeitgeist

Thursday. Normally Thursday is my Friday, but today Thursday is just Thursday. Working tomorrow. Work-work not TopSecretProject-Work.

Right.

My brother and his girl are staying with us at the moment, he's in town touring with
Bobby Flynn ... Idol runner-up from last year. Saw them play live and they are very very good. Bobby is incredibly talented. And my brother is an extraordinary drummer. Check em out.

Not so many links this week, but the whale one is pretty amazing. How old do those things get?

19th-century weapon found in whale

“A Krasnikov Tube is to create a space warp behind the space ship as it travels at near lightspeed to some distant star system, and then use the "tube" thus created for the return trip. This distortion of space has an interesting property for the return trip: it gets you back home shortly after you left, no matter how far you go.” Krasnikov Tube - Wikipedia

“Tay al-Ard (طی الارض or طيّ الارض or طیّ الارض - literally "folding up of the earth") is the name for thaumaturgical teleportation in the Islamic religious and philosophical tradition.” Tay al-Ard - Wikipedia

Astronomers find most massive star ever discovered

Colour schemes of Butterflies

Woman jailed for testicle attack

"Testicle Attack" would be a great metal or punk band name. If you're into such things.

Visualizing Global Web Performance with Akamai

Google PageRank: What Do We Know About It?



Muhammad is No 2 in boy's names in the UK

Thought for Monday

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful... and you blink and take a step back.

That's the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.

All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.

From my mate Seth

Keating

Transcript of interview on lateline last night with Paul Keating

The real question today with the economy growing so rapidly and unemployment so low is why doesn't the tinder box go off? That is, why don't we get the big bang? The big bang in inflation and in wages back into the old dismal cycle? The answer is because of the structural changes. Nothing to do with Mr Costello's economic management ... nothing to do with Peter Costello and everything to do with Labor's structural changes from the '80s.

The great lie of the Howard Government in respect of workplace changes, they are simply a set of arrangements to keep unions out of workplaces. They've got nothing to do with productivity and the quicker we move away from that kind of discriminatory structure to a truly trust based co operative sharing of work and workloads, then we get back to reasonable levels of productivity and again, reasonable rates of growth in real wages.

Wednesday Zeitgeist

Day late, because the script I use to parse the RSS of my Tumblr link blog and generate the HTML for the Zeitgeist is not on my laptop and I couldn't be bothered writing another script. Sorry about that.

And yes, I am that guy ... parsing RSS to generate HTML for your edification. I am sure you're jealous of my elite hacking skills, because we all know that chicks dig skills.

Nothing much else to report. Working on stuff, hanging out. Usual.

Oh dear. First rule of boxing - don't just stand there. Need to fast-forward to the 30 second mark. And ignore the bad music. It's a weird thing that people do to these fight videos.


That's Don Frye, who looks suspciously like my father-in-law. He is awesome, over 40 and still fighting. Like some sort of MMA Rocky ... brawler with a magic chin. He's also mental. There's a fight we're the ref stops it before he taps out in an arm-bar because it looks like he WON'T tap out. Am arm bar is basically where you get someone's arm between your legs and bend it the wrong way with your bodyweight. If you don't submit your elbow snaps. The guy must be nuts.

My occasional addiction to MMA (now through the unified UFC and Pride) continues unabated. I must be nuts.

Category:Ship Types

The Profit Calculator

Splash, Splash, You're Dead: The Military's Next-Gen Water Gun: The SPP-1 flying-nail pistol came into service in 1971. It is more compact than the Underwater Defense Gun and half the weight, and even now is standard issue for Russian combat divers, including a section of the Presidential Security Service that patrols the flooded sewers connecting the Kremlin to the Moskva River.

“Number of stars in the visible universe = 30 billion trillion (3x10²²)” - The Universe within 14 billion Light Years - The Visible Universe

Or our nearest neighbours: The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars

The Traveler's Dilemma. Game Theory

Schneier on Security: Cyberwar

Steam Trek: The Moving Picture (Star Trek Parody)


HowTo: Make your own M41-A Pulse Rifle, the rifle from Aliens

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

“Russia has repeatedly claimed that the majority of these manufacturers produce AK-47 without a proper license from IZH.[17][18] The Izhevsk Machine Tool Factory acquired a patent in 1999, illegalising manufacture of the Kalashnikov rifle system by anyone other than themselves.[19]”: AK-47 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nessie caught on tape (via goochcamper)


Further investigation has reveleaed that Nessie was caught on tape by a guy who thinks Aliens talk to him. May not be reliable, is all I'm saying

Q&A: Seth Godin Says 'Know When To Bail'

“Speedy solar storms carrying a billion tons of charged gas through space let out a thunderous scream before they unleash satellite-stopping radiation storms that slam into Earth's magnetic field.”- Radio ‘Screams’ Forecast Dangerous Solar Storms

Startup Search. Directory of web technology startups. I am not in there. Yet.

The LOLs never stop: LOL BOTS

Desktop Tower of Money: 3 tips to profit from casual games

Glyphius Copywriting Software Review

The Office and Others

Spending so much time at MagNation that I've started to refer to it as "the office" ... as in "heading to the office, now".
When this project is launched, it will be thanks to this place as much as anything else. At least the free coffees have stopped, I was starting to get insomnia.

The project is coming along quite nicely. Learning many new things about Ruby On Rails, and generally enjoying myself.

Out of contlol

Someone has made a programming language from LOLCatese: lolcode

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
    UP VAR!!1
    VISIBLE VAR
    IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE

I cannot tell you how amusing I AM IN YR LOOP is to me (Not to mention AWSUM THX and OH NOES as Try/Catch blocks).

There is a promise by a game developer that if the language becomes Turing Complete he'll develop a game using it.

KTHXBYE

Startup

I love being a Startup.

In MagNation in the city, free coffee, cutting code, working on Empire.

Magazines if I get bored.

Delightful

Wednesday Zeitgeist

I humbly present to you the biggest Zeitgeist ever. Somewhat of a backlog of links. Some of these might be duplicates, I guess. My links are a bit all over the place.

I continue to work on my Hare-Brained Scheme(tm), it's coming along nicely thanks for asking ... and it's not that hare-brained either, I am very excited about it all. Other than that ... Mrs Android is busy as a bee on her thesis, which is not very much fun at all.

I am slightly addicted to World of Warcraft. So much fun. I've been playing with some people from work, hanging out and grinding away, killing the wildlife and collecting items.

Gunpowder Scarification

Weta Originals Rayguns - GOLIATHON 83Infinity Beam Projector - I want one so bad. but $1000 ...

$1000!?

IFRAME remoting made easy

AJAX file uploads in Rails using attachment_fu and responds_to_parent

Sax Solos

NASA - Crescent Rhea Occults Crescent Saturn

Web 2.0 free buttons maker!

Blaine Cook on Scaling Twitter (via Google Video)


VASSAL is a game engine for building and playing online adaptations of board games and card games.

Strange alien world made of 'hot ice'

Sacrelicious!
Bible Fight

Waterboarding

Line Rider Super Mario Bros. 1-1 (via shadon1nja)


Hacknot - The Three Ages of The Developer

Kardashev scale
Kardashev scale

The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev.

Things I learned setting up my new server
Using J and K for navigation in Google Reader comes straight out of VI (and probably other pointy-headed *nix apps).

Zombie Last Supper via www.myconfinedspace.com


'Cheese': The New Cheap, Deadly Street Drug

May 14, 1939: A 5-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Mother on Record
May 14, 1939: A 5-Year-Old Becomes Youngest Mother on Record

High Power Job



Google Operating System: How to Add Search to Google Reader

gears of war (mad world) (via gears0fwar)


The Underbelly of a Web App

Chris Anderson: Technology's Long Tail (video)

Infinite Loop:


Gmail Manager - manage multiple Gmail accounts from Firefox

Cool business card designs

“A new study suggests that culture may shape the way our brains process visual information.”

- Can culture dictate the way we see? - being-human - 04 May 2007 - New Scientist

Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger

Octopus-Dumpling soda via news.3yen.com


Nanoweb - The PHP Web Server

Because sometimes evil wins.

It's Pikachu!


LOLTrek


The Incredible Edible Belgian Chocolate Anus

Web 2.0 Map. There be dragons ...


Universe - Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Army Tests Fighting Robot

"Designed to fly on a Black Hawk, the [MULE] will carry two 7.62mm machine guns and two Javelin anti-tank missiles and feed camera data from its on-board sensors."

“Notifications, the way you want them”

- brightkite.com

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups

Code Guardian Part 1 (via CeeGeeProductions)


Open the Future: The Early Signs of the Long Tomorrow - "IBM researchers James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S. Modha assembled a simulated mouse cortical hemisphere (that is, a functional half of a mouse brain) on one of the smaller BlueGene/L supercomputers. They then ran the simulation -- at ten seconds of computer processing equal to one second of brain function."


EarthNow! Landsat Image Viewer

Baseline Rhythm Calculator

...

Some days are just like this I guess.

Only trouble is that so many of my days have become like this.

Worst Movies Ever!

In lieu of a real Zeitgeist, I give you this:



The horse stunt is incredible.

I saw Shark Attack 3 at Blockbuster ages ago. I knew it would be awesome.

Shame

I don't know if you see the news about the "Honour Killing" videos put on the web. Don't watch it.

Just know that the world can be a pretty fucked-up place.

What can we do about it?

90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

You might see a Hexadecimal number somewhat similar to this:

90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

popping up on the internet.

It's the encryption key for HD-DVD players.

"90 9F 11 20 9D 63 D4 5B C7 42 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" ... isn't actually the key, because sites are being taken down for publishing it, despite the fact that there is no way of protecting a number or string. But anyway, I don't want Google to block my blog.

The whole exercise demonstrates the futility of trying to block access to media. If you can access the hardware (and we all have to in order to play the stupid video or music), you can break ANY encryption. That's just the way it is.

It's all just maths!!

Zeitgeist

Greetings. Wednesday is the new Friday. Or at least it is if you are me and only work 3 days a week. Rest of my week is work on Top Secret Project. Hopefully ready to launch pretty soon. How excitement.

Otherwise, nothing to report.

A sexual arms race waged with twisted genitals has been discovered in waterfowl.

Jazz Mutant - some weird-ass music console mixing effects pad thingy. Bjork has one.

I want a Kaoss Pad. Just so you know.

For your perusal and edification: Dragon Precinct. Fantasy Crime Fiction. I kid you not.

Eta Carinae - the most massive star that can be studied in detail



The Homunculus Nebula surrounds Eta Carinae. The Homunculus was created in an eruption of Eta Car whose light reached Earth in 1843.

Homunculus.

I just love that word.



I read "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" and all I learned was this word:

Revanchist
1. The act of retaliating; revenge.2. A usually political policy, as of a nation or an ethnic group, intended to regain lost territory or standing.

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality: "physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism -- giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it"

On that note ...

The End.

Reflections on one's last day of full-time work

Change one line
Run compile task
Run jar task
Run run task
Test
****
Still doesn't work
Change one line
Goto 0

------------------
The End.

Zeitgeist

Yesterday started as a Zeitgeist and ended up something else. So I'll try again.

Flurb - A Webzine of Astonishing Tales. Rudy Rucker is involved. He is a terribly interesting sci-fi writer and mathematician. His *ware Tetralogy features sentient plastic. Nice.

I don't believe in God and all I got was this lousy Atom thingy:


I'd like to see something more aggressive, perhaps. "My God invented the Bomb and proved your God didn't exist and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

From: Available Emblems of Belief for Placement on Government Headstones and Markers. Our dear friends the scientologists don't want you to know what their emblem looks like for copyright reasons. You can see it here though. I didn't want Tom coming to my house with a Cease and Desist.

Important things to remember #89364589345:



Laura Bush has reassured us all about Iraq: Laura told Anne Curry on the Today Show, that the American people need to know that "no one suffers more than their President and I do."

I want a t-shirt that says: "What would Bartlett do?"

Things I am thinking about:
Information Software and the Graphical Interface.

Ah. So much fun. Godzilla vs The Mushroom Kingdom!




Lame Technology Mascots. This is why Software people should steer clear of design:

Clippy "It looks like you're writing a fax":


Duke the Java Blob Thingy:


17th Anniversary of the Hubble Telescope:



Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered Outside Our Solar System

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it and because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extra-terrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X"

The End.

Lest we forget

Short and sweet.

Anzac Day today.

Crush went to the Dawn Service with some of her students. I think I may have grunted at her as she left at 4am or some such ridiculous time.

During the week I learned about the Armenian Genocide. While we commemorate Anzac day on the 25th, the 24th marks the beginning of the Armenian tragedy . Arguably, the invasion at Gallipoli was one of the catlysts of the Genocide, and it was to be a harbinger of the terror that followed through the 20th century.

I'd never heard of it. We learn about Anzac day, but nothing about the other tragedy that was unfolding. Maybe we just don't have the space to care about all the bad things that happen?

Anyway.

On a lighter note:

I need this. Kerry-Anne was selling it. She wouldn't lie, would she?

It's an inflatable couch thingy for crunching your abs - you rock backwards and forwards getting 3 EXCERCISES IN ONE.

The buff model using it was trying not to laugh.

I also saw a inflatable thingy you put under your mattress to turn your bed into a automatically recllining one. All the footage was in fast forward, with models trying not to move. The claim that it "inflates in seconds" doesn't mention that about 120 of the seconds are need.

I love those hare-brained products.

Now I am off to drink many more coffee.