Monday Morning “Impediment to Productivity” – 20071105

Hi,

One website down, three to go. That’s the short short version of my week. I won’t go into all the in’s and outs of the stuff that has been driving me crazy suffice to say it was busy. One of the neat things though is that I found some stuff I hadn’t heard for ages when I reloaded my MP3 player. I do this regularly but this week I just picked a block of stuff at random and shot about 400 songs across. There was a lot of early Christie Moore and Moving Hearts, some Robin Trower and an old reggae band called Third World. Quite a buzz really.

I didn’t have time to get back to Minotaur to pick up the new William Gibson either.

Cragganmore ScotchSo armed with a glass of Cragganmore and some ice it’s time to “Alez Sillies”

Let’s continue on with last weeks literary theme.
Rudy Rucker is amongst other things an author, he wrote cyberpunk novels back in the mid Eighties. I’ll be honest and say that I always found the ideas totally amazing if the execution was a tad uneven. Move forward to now and Rudy has released his novel “Postsingular” as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download.
Here is the short version
The regulation issue mad scientist creates a race of nants that eat the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth (it could have been iEarth). However, an autistic child memorizes a long string of numbers that poisons the nants and causes them to reverse themselves (luckily, they’re engaged in reversible computation) and put the planet back. Time passes and another race of benign nanos are released on the earth, and then it gets really silly. This is full of great ideas that will bang around in your brain for ages and the execution is awesome. This one is a ton of fun.
http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/

The Daily Mail seem to be ripping of a better class of writer these days. The first sentence of this news story (I am not making this up) would make HG Wells proud:

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

In Well’s 1895 book, the human race has evolved into two distinct species, the highly intelligent and wealthy Eloi and the frightening, animalistic Morlock who are destined to work underground to keep the Eloi happy.
http://tinyurl.com/2ertkd

The Pneumatic Anatomica, is an illustration by ~freeny over at Deviant Art, shows the totally absurd and oh so over the top detailed anatomy of a balloon doggy. Who knew it was all so complicated. I still get the giggles just thinking about this one.
http://freeny.deviantart.com/art/Pneumatic-Anatomica-53318794

Flashgame time. Today to give the left and right arrows aand the space bar a break we will play the highly addicting MarvinSpectrum, a game that tests your frantic use of the up and down arrows. We got jumping, we got leaping, we got running we got diving! And all sorts of fun stuff with which to put your razor sharp responses to the test. Warning: it gets really hard, really fast.
http://armorgames.com/games/marvinspectrum.html

Tuesday is “The Race That Stops The Nation” here in Melbourne and there will ba ton of champers consumed in either celebration or commiseration depending on which way your 50 cents went. Now have a look at the glass in your hand an spare a thought about how they keep the bubbles in there, waiting for the big moment. This will put you in good company, back in the 16th century Leonardo Da Vince took time out from his “making Dan Brown richer than God” code and had a look into bubbles and foam dynamics. Believe it or not there was a paper published back in 2002 on just this subject. It was written by two French dudes and the cynic in me says “wow what a way to scam a case or two of champers”. I think we should toast their success.
http://www.europhysicsnews.com/full/13/article3/article3.html

Over at http://www.notdeadyet.com.au/duggup/ you will find some new additions to the ever-growing collection. My Favourite this week is Silver City Highway and Jools found a band called the Paperboys (they’re from Canada).

If you have some spare time head over to Bland On Bland (yes that Ian of MFI fame) and check out the poem he did for SIN, it’s a beauty.
http://ianbland.com.au/category/bland-on-bland/

thatch

{Currently listening to Enigma and Nightnoise (now there’s a brain damaging combo on shuffle) }
{Currently reading: O’Reilly CSS Cookbook and the MySql online notes }
{Quick Status Check: Going to Hell. like you are surprised}
{Crop Circle Status: It’s over for another year. Bother. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2007/2007.html }

Published
Categorized as Mondays

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