Category: Uncategorized

I’ve always been fascinated by chaotic aperiodic tiling along the lines of the famous Penrose tiles. So I was delighted to find a site that actually sells Chaos Tiles. The creator of Chaos Tiles, Ed Pegg Jr., runs the mathpuzzle.com where I spent a long time puzzling and wandering. His links page by itself is worth the price of admission (free). Highly recommended. One of the more entertaining places I ended up in was the Theseus and the Minotaur puzzle on the LogicMazes site. It’s so damned easy to lose track of time on the web, I’ve lost track of time just thinking about it.

Golan Levin’s homemade tidbits page links to numerous beautifully executed Java applet/artworks, along the same lines as work by Scott Snibbe and Martin Wattenberg. Take a look at the e.e. cummings poem that spools out one word at a time. There’s so much expressive space in this domain, I hope we see a whole raft of explorers like Golan.

Who says Latin is dead? Rident stolida verba latina! The Net is just the place to revive a dead language. Esperanto speakers of the world, unite! Your time may yet come, too.

This is in the wish-I’d-thought-of-it category: Am I HOT or NOT?. So simple and so compelling. These feedback-to-the-masses sites satisfy a deep human hunger. I just wish I could see which revolution they were leading to.

Blog much? Blogging, short for web logging, is a Great Big Trend these days, and since Paracelsus doesn’t like missing bandwagons, he’s got one of his own. What is web logging? It’s really just a convenient combination of “dear diary” and bookmarking, sort of a web surfer’s journal. What makes it a Great Big Trend is that it lends itself to building up a community of bloggers. This is just the sort of thing that’s needed to turn lonely one-off web pages into things that busy people actually read. The Paracelsus Rambles blog is powered by a free online service courtesy of Blogger. It’s a terrific service, and you can’t beat the price.

Funny stuff on zeldman.com: The Advertising Graveyard: Real Ads That Almost Ran. One of the better ones, from the Hoboken BrewHaus: “One of our authentic double bock beers, and you’ll feel like you’re in Germany. A few more, and you’ll feel like invading Poland.”

You’ve seen enough photographic webcams. Take a more prosaic look at the world with the help of the Star Chamber Prosecam.

An interesting experiment in searching the web Pandia (from Norway).

I did a little more shopping around, and this is much better free desktop planetarium than the Cosmic Thing: Heavens-Above. Endless [free] content unrolls before your eyes. Here’s the view from my back yard.

stating the obvious has an entertaining piece about uber-geek Jamie Zawinski. I remember thinking how annoying he was when I first saw his Netscape internal web page that blared out “my cubicle is cooler than yours.” I work with people like this every day.