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June 28, 2005

Iconoclastic pyroclastic

Every school boy knows about lava, but have you ever heard of pyroclastic flows? It's a lavaless emission from a volcano, and Nature's Forces of the Wild had some great footage of one of these huge clouds spilling down the mountain and spreading across the sea on a cushion of steam of its own making.

Another powerful image from episode 4- thousands of emus bunched up against a fence. El Nino causes droughts in Africa and Australia. The emus have to leave the interior of the continent to find water. Farmers fields have water, but hundred of miles of fence (erected to keep dingos out) separate the emus from their goal.

Posted by tbailen at 12:43 AM | Permanent link to this post

June 21, 2005

Das Drogen

Reese, on Malcolm in the Middle, after being drugged by his grandma: "I used to think thoughts. Now my thoughts think thoughts."

Posted by tbailen at 05:25 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 20, 2005

Cell is born

Cell, the processor that will run Playstation 3, is profiled in Business 2.0's The Cell of a New Machine. Check out what it will do for graphics:


"I've waited four years to show this to somebody," says engineer Barry Minor. Using a joystick, he maneuvers above an incredibly lifelike three-dimensional representation of Mount St. Helens. The flyover is smooth and exhilarating, but the most mind-blowing thing is that this is an exact replica of the real mountain, down to the location of every ridge, dome, and lake. A few feet to Minor's left, a Pentium 4 laptop with an extra graphics processor groans away, trying to render just a single frame of a mountain using a more traditional technique employed by today's high-grade computer graphics systems.

Fine, impressive enough. Real time rendering will become even more realistic. Games will be more life-like, etc. etc. But check out this hack Minor does to his Pocket PC- "[it's] lashed to a small computer board with a GPS chip, a digital compass, and two accelerometers. It can wirelessly send his location back to the Cell-powered server running his terrain-rendering program, which then return a 3-D image of the landscape to him. A hiker lost in the fog could use this device to see a realistic image of what's beyond the mist or over the next ridge. 'It tracks just like a video display on a camcorder,' Minor says, 'but instead of looking at this world, it is looking at a virtual world.'"

Posted by tbailen at 06:20 PM | Permanent link to this post

Prairie restoration

Dane County Parks recruits volunteers to help with restoring natural prairie areas in the parks. Each Tuesday and Thursday morning during the summer finds the group at a different park. I'm going to try it out tomorrow. These links will be helpful if it's something I find interesting:

Posted by tbailen at 11:49 AM | Permanent link to this post

June 16, 2005

Three stories

Excellent commencement speech by Steve Jobs to Stanford grads.

Posted by tbailen at 07:44 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 14, 2005

Wooden mirror

A mirror made of wood? Welcome to the digital age.

Posted by tbailen at 10:26 PM | Permanent link to this post

Right target

One of the points from meditation today- it's ok to judge an act, but it's not good to judge the person. "That act is wrong" is a healthier viewpoint than "you are wrong." In other words, hate the game, not the player.

Posted by tbailen at 09:56 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 12, 2005

Papa found out

Holy crap, there's a music video for Me & Julio [Down By The Schoolyard], although it wasn't made until 15 years after the song's release. In it, Paul Simon plays basketball with some kids in the city.

Posted by tbailen at 06:26 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 11, 2005

Except in Nebraska

Microsoft's advertising department has come a long way since Steve Ballmer did TV spots himself [video]. I found this when I read the Wikipedia entry for Slashdot subculture, which does a good job of describing the memes on that haven for News for Nerds.

Posted by tbailen at 07:55 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 03, 2005

Kory's insight of the day

A group of us were watching Fear Factor. One stunt was at a morgue. The competitors were put in a plastic bag, handcuffed, and had worms dumped on them. Then the bag was sealed and slid into one of the morgue's chambers. One girl said that she was afraid of the dark.

Kory: That's a good quality for a girl with big knockers.

Posted by tbailen at 11:19 PM | Permanent link to this post

June 02, 2005

Failed logon

eDirectory gave me this error message when I tried to log on today: "The requester is not serviceable".

That's what she said.

Posted by tbailen at 04:48 PM | Permanent link to this post

TPS

My company has an Idea Generation Form (Form #75-2330)

Posted by tbailen at 03:32 PM | Permanent link to this post