It’ll be a random smattering of micro-blogging till tomorrow morning – in the mean time, why not check out the song below, entitled The Reds, by Flash Pulp’s very own Jessica May?
As a chaser, enjoy this wonderfully surreal Burning Piano Guy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISIPq-LtvJI]
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost.
– W.S. Anglin
I hate posting up youtube clips without comment, but, this video, a visualization of a Mandelbox which I found via Coilhouse, is beautiful, and requires very little chattery on my part.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO9ugnn8DbE]
To most outsiders, modern mathematics is unknown territory. Its borders are protected by dense thickets of technical terms; its landscapes are a mass of indecipherable equations and incomprehensible concepts. Few realize that the world of modern mathematics is rich with vivid images and provocative ideas.
– Ivars Peterson
Friend of the site Captain Pigheart has posted up some short videos of his dramatic recountings.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFFK3JlJdfk]
Just a quick note to point out that Sam Van Olffen, one of my favourite artineers, put together a tribute to Frank Frazetta. (Not pictured at left.)
Pulp was obviously deep in Frazetta’s veins, so much so that they’d likely have needed a sieve if he were to visit a blood bank, but for my money Van Olffen is the pulp of our times – that man can attach a rotary barreled chain-gun to anything.
Just a quick note to cast further light on the barnacle-encrusted jabbering of Captain Pigheart, yarn spinner and peglegged entrepreneur.
He’s a favourite around the skinner.fm labs, and he now has mp3 versions of his misadventures available for sale.
[It should be noted, in case you can’t scrape together a couple of doubloons, that most of his recountings are available to be read on his site].
A silent sample:
It were the kind of island where a man longs to bury his treasure. Alas, me gold was now being colonised by humourous octopi who amused themselves by hurling coins at me splashing crew.Now I knows ye may be afeard for the safety of meself and me crew and yet ye should worry little, for this maroonin’ lark is bread and butter to us pirate types. Ye forestation were lush as Eve’s own lady garden before she choked on the serpent’s apple, so we’d not want for sustenance. In time we’d assemble a rude craft to take us back to our wives and other foes. In the meantime we rigged shelters and foraged amongst the local flora for spit-roastable fauna.
– From Pigheart’s Tale of The Delicious Sweet-Monkey
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5lMJtQOKSY]
One-way adhesive is important for climbing because it requires little effort to attach and detach a robot’s foot.
“Other adhesives are sort of like walking around with chewing gum on your feet: You have to press it into the surface and then you have to work to pull it off. But with directional adhesion, it’s almost like you can sort of hook and unhook yourself from the surface,” Cutkosky said.
After the breakthrough insight that direction matters, Cutkosky and his team began asking how to build artificial materials for robots that create the same effect. They came up with a rubber-like material with tiny polymer hairs made from a micro-scale mold.
The designers attach a layer of adhesive cut to the shape of Stickybot’s four feet, which are about the size of a child’s hand. As it steadily moves up the wall, the robot peels and sticks its feet to the surface with ease, resembling a mechanical lizard. – Stanford University News
So, you’re sitting at your desk on the tenth floor. You’re sipping on your stale coffee, and trying to ignore two arguing co-workers in the next cubicle who can’t settle on who was funnier, Webster Long or Arnold Jackson.
You stand, hoping a leg-stretch will help you wake up a bit from your morning funk, when you notice the things on the window.
At first you figure it’s one of the utilitarian winba-bots that took over cleaning the building a few years back, but then you realize there are far too many of them: a double row of spry four-leggers sprint from the bottom of the glass, disappearing over your head.
That’ll be the day you learn the insurance company renting the 15th floor is actually a front for drug running ex-nomenklatura.
I’m pretty pleased with the intro song for our newest serialization, The Glorious, so I thought I’d post a link to it, as well as some info.
Victor Herbert’s (1859-1924) “March of the Toys”. Victor Light Opera Company under the direction of Nathaniel Shilkret. Recorded in 1927. – from Archive.org
A quick follow-up to audioboo-ography 4.
St Raphael’s is situated in the former Charlottenburgh Township, now South Glengarry on the seventh concession back from the St Lawrence River. Commenced by Alexander Macdonell, vicar general and future Roman Catholic Bishop of Upper Canada, this large stone church served a congregation of Gaelic- speaking Catholic Highlanders who had settled in the easternmost county of Upper Canada in 1786. – St. Raphael’s Ruins – About
In an attempt to circumvent the corruption that has long kept Afghanistan in the shape everyone knows and invades, NATO has set up a novel system for paying the Afghani soldiers they are training.
(Historically, the company leaders would be entrusted with a lump sum to be distributed to individual soldiers – this turned out to be a great system for making rich company leaders.)
The International Telecommunication Union says 72 percent of Afghanistan’s population is now covered by a cell phone signal. By contrast, fewer than one person in a hundred has a fixed telephone line.
– An otherwise unrelated The Cutting Edge News article from last year
Cellphones are apparently as ubiquitous in Afghanistan as anywhere else, a fact that is now being exploited. A text message with a unique code is sent to Afghan troops, who can then take the code to a local cellphone chain store and exchange it for cash. NATO reimburses the chain stores, and the circle of life is complete.
More info is available at Associated Content, or at your local recruiting station.
Note: I will continue to append creators I encounter to the end of this post – please leave a comment if you know of one I’ve missed.
For demonstration purposes, I’ve included a number of versions of myself, as well as adding my impressions of each site. For those creators that didn’t seem to include a simple method for saving to a file, I used Print Screen and pasted the image into MS Paint.
One of the originals, South Park Studio
Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator: Kind of a neat one, but it could have used some more variety.
Speaking of variety, I was pretty surprised by the variety in Dream Avatar Creator. It’s unfortunate that the final image size is so small.
My Avatar Editor is basically a Mii creator, and the bodies are horrible.
The Simpsons Avatar Creator is neat, but, to me at least, all of the results feel a little generic.
I like the cartoon-style of Planet Creation’s avatar creator, but I may be biased, as it’s one of the few that I encountered that seemed to cater to my choice of hairstyle.
Doppel Me has some great options – and I really like the feel of the final product – but, like Dream Avatar, it’s held back a bit by sizing.
Update:
Man about town, bmj2k, of Mr Blog’s Tepid Ride, noted The M&M creator in the comments. I believe it actually acts as a cautionary tale regarding hair on candy.