Not that he would ever stoop to drinking Americano, but things are percolating again over at the CoffeeCzar’s place. Follow him to interesting places like the Takagism Crimson Room puzzle and Chris Pratley’s blog for enlightening discussions about bugs and product design from inside the throbbing heart of Microsoft.
Read the CoffeeCzar’s blog and encourage his Large Software Company to support blogging and wiki-related products.
Here is a site entitled Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space? I have to confess that I never did, but having once seen the title, I was consumed by a desire to see what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space. I followed the link and looked at the movies, and they did not disapppoint. Surf around until you find the bursting sausage-shaped balloon on the pedestal. No Freudian subtext, just fascinating slo-mo fluid dynamics. Sometimes a bursting sausage-shaped balloon is just a bursting sausage-shaped balloon.
There are Star Chambers and there are Star Chambers. Maybe you’re thinking of the 1983 film starring Michael Douglas. Or maybe you’re actually thinking of the old original Court of Star Chamber. Then there is, of course, this humble site, whose moniker grew out of a running joke among four friends across many Tuesday night beers. But ask Google to show you a “Star Chamber” and (today, at least) the top choice is an online game called starchamber.net. It looks like a sort of Magic, The Gathering kind of thing set in space. Read this review if you’re curious. Anyway, the creator, Paul Dennen, asked me to provide a link his way, so here you go.
I’ve been having some problems with posting comments to my site. Something to do with “Date” objects not being created. I even lost a few of my posts in a most mysterious fashion. If you posted a comment that coughed up an error message and failed to appear, I’m sorry about that. I’m still waiting to hear from my hosting company about what the dang deal is, but I think they’re spending all of their time stomping out MyDoom fires. If you’ve ever had a problem like this with your Movable Type blog, let me know.
Lenticulars, also known as “winkies”, are those goofy quasi-3D plastic gimcracks that are good for two-step animations showing things like Jesus looking up to heaven or dancing girls wiggling their hips. I never thought they’d be useful for anything but cheesy gimmicks. But they turn out to have numerous cheese-free applications in the modern world. For one thing, you can now buy a Sharp laptop with a three dimensional lenticular display. And then there’s this nifty lenticular map of Manhattan in which three different maps come together in one virtuous unit: Urban Mapping. Make sure and run the Flash demo to see how it works.
Amazon likes to recommend books to you using a phrase like this: “Customers who bought Ferret Husbandry also bought Ferrets for Dummies.” Jumping from book to book like this, you can build a web of interconnected books. What can you learn from such a network? And is there a market for a book called The Dumb Husband’s Guide to Ferrets?
Some folks at orgnet.com, a company that makes social network analysis software, have built one of these Amazon networks, and the results are very entertaining: Political Patterns in Books. Building a network of political books, their plots demonstrate the dramatic divide between what left-leaning and right-leaning people are reading these days. Only a few books appear to be read by both sides. With all the talk about blue states and red states this election year, ask yourself, do you read red books or blue books? Finally, here’s some campaigning advice from orgnet:
See someone reading Sleeping with the Devil? That is someone you can talk to about your candidate. If they are reading Bushwacked or Dereliction of Duty — the most central books in each cluster — then either give them a high-five or a sneer, you won’t change their views.
About this sturdy rodent (Marmota monax a.k.a. whistle-pig) pivots all of winter. You’re safely through the first half by now. How much more of this blasted cold must we endure? I don’t know about where you are, but we’ve had the 2nd coldest January on record here, so I am happy to indulge in Old World superstitions of dubious merit if it will take my mind off the freaking cold for a while. So Happy Groundhog Day to you, and may his shadow do whichever thing it needs to do to make it warm and have tropical drinks appear.
Happily, football also falls into the category of topics that take your mind off the weather. The Patriots have won themselves another Super Bowl, and I am pleased.
Have you ever suffered the occasional doubt that Divine Providence is manifest? Do you ever wonder why, if God is so great, He doesn’t make himself a little more obvious (not to mention useful)? Maybe you just haven’t given Him the right opportunity. If your home or place of employment is outfitted with a Yo, God! God Detector, you just may get the sign that you seek. Prayer is your most likely avenue to grace, but high-quality instrumentation can’t hurt.
I keep running into interesting scripts and alphabets these days: Elvish, Tamil, Malayalam. Recently I came across this site: Alphabets of the World. I would have been in heaven if I’d had access to such a thing as a seventh grader. I remember going to the great big library at the local university as a kid and looking for resources like this. Codes and secret languages a common enough geek-boy pastime, but there’s also a deep-seated and universal appeal to exotic-looking hieroglyphics. They embody and radiate the notion that meaning is present yet hidden from view, which is itself a pretty good working definition of that hard-to-pin-down word mystery. Unknown glyphs reek of the mysterious.
Back on a more mundane plane, the Alphabets of the World site offers many practical explanations. Have you ever wanted a compact explanation of why Arabic writing looks the way it does? Want to learn the story of the origins of Cherokee or Korean scripts? This is a good place to visit.
Finally, lest I be accused of being too focused on the way languages look when written, here is a site that details (obsessively) how one particular English phrase sounds when spoken by people from all over the world: speech accent archive. It’s fun to browse around. I found the person from North Carolina, and sure enough, that woman could have grown up next door to me.
Hey, look at this: Navan links to my blog. And Navan speaks Tamil. I have always been fascinated by exotic-looking characters and writing… that’s how I got started on Elvish (which now seems to be taking over my site). Ever since I bought Nakanishi’s Writing Systems of the World years ago, I have been enchanted by Tamil writing. Elvish is a made-up language, but Tamil is spoken by millions, and it looks beautiful. It’s interesting to consider that Tamil looks completely mundane to those millions. But I guess Elves don’t get worked up about Elvish, and igpays don’t get frothy for Pig Latin.
At first I thought Navan had spotted my blog from half a world away, but then I realized he works at my company! Intriguingly, he has a link called How to read Tamil. I studied it for a while, but sadly I am still no closer to reading Tamil. But Windows XP and Internet Explorer did a fine job of digging up the right font for me. At least I think so. But of course… I don’t read Tamil.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 