Joshua Rhys Taliesin O'Madadhain

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/24/muppets-singing-quee.html

...wow.

Pretty good choice of integrating existing tracks from the original recording and using original material.

The 1080p version looks pretty good full-screen, too, which is a nice change for YouTube videos.

My one regret is ( spoileriffic. )

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

I haven't looked at this closely enough to get a good handle on
exactly how the analogy to the Mandelbrot set works, but either the
concept or the images would be enough to make this worth passing
along, really.

The Kindle has never really grabbed me, somehow, and the crap that Amazon has been pulling around its content ("you thought you owned this e-book, but you were wrong, kthxbye") hasn't made me any more enthusiastic about it.

I also have reservations about e-books in general--while I value individual books, there are very few that I value to the tune of $250...and I do read books on occasion in contexts in which I wouldn't take my cellphone. (Waterproof e-book readers, anyone?) Plus I am somewhat fond of paper books' 'look and feel'.

All that said...the Nook does look pretty cool in several ways, and I wouldn't mind the opportunity to play with one.


On a vaguely related note, I am watching with interest to see what convergence (or divergence) happens in the design/conceptual/functional space occupied by ebook readers, smartphones, netbooks, and laptops.

http://dataphiles.blogspot.com/2009/09/machine-learning-protest-at-g20.html

Heh heh heh. :)

Star Wars Uncut: what happens when someone gets the looney tunes idea to recreate the original movie, shot-for-shot...crowdsourced.
http://www.starwarsuncut.com/trailer

Japanese cafe service as performance art:
http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html

Ornithology as performance art...in reverse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY

And to finish up, a music video involving Carl Sagan and autotuning...which is much cooler than it sounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all

Apparently not. (Sort of.)

http://robinsloan.com/2009/41/

I don't think that the author really knows very much about data visualization, but it's an interesting read. Plus it paints the Google campus in a very...different...light. :)

As a side note, I found this experiment of the author to be hilarious: http://robinsloan.com/2009/52/#more-52

http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2009/09/distance-learning.html

So been there. I can still hear in my head the BRRRRRRRIINNNNNGGG of the kitchen timer that I used, at one point, in a desperate attempt to get the amount of time I was spending grading assignments down to a manageable level (i.e., one in which I could actually do the work I was also getting paid for, for my other 50%-time job, rather than spending 80 hours a week on grading alone).

gaaaaaaaahhh.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/09/platonic-solids-beau.html

What I would call "Theme and Variations on Platonic Solids", which is
one way that you can tell I should never, ever be in marketing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/09/hubbles-greatest-hit.html

Astronomers' favorite images, plus some new stuff from Hubble.

It sounds like a nice upgrade in a number of respects, and as such things go it's pretty cheap--and I might even still have been able to get it for free with the package deal I got a couple of years back (details not important).

But it doesn't work on PowerPC-based machines. Which is what's sitting on my desk at home.

It's still a perfectly good machine. I've used it to do some pretty heavy-duty processing in my research a few years ago, it's got a decent amount of memory in it, it runs my games just fine...I could easily imagine using this machine for a couple of more years before needing to upgrade. The only substantial problem I ran into was a hard disk dying, and of course I replaced that.

I realize that Apple is basically a hardware company, and there really isn't a strong incentive to continue to support a processor architecture that they abandoned a few years ago. In their place I might have done the same.

But still, I'm bitter.

(Plus, snow leopards are cool, dammit.)

but that is some fast robot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk

Seriously, this is the sort of thing I imagined robots being able to do when I first encountered them in science fiction, so it's nice that we're finally seeing this.

Yes, I realize that getting them to display intelligence is still hard. This is still pretty cool, though.

So I was watching Mary Poppins today, on a DVD with subtitles.

During the fox hunt scene (inside the chalk drawing), Bert rescues the fox and brings him up onto his horse's tail (withers? whatever). The fox--which is clearly intended to be a Gael of some sort, probably Scots--turns around and starts yelling abuse, including calling the still-pursuing dogs something that is transliterated as "omadauhns".

Given that one derivation of "O'Madadhain" translates "Madadhain", IIRC, as basically "X's dog" (for some value of X I don't remember offhand), and given the context...yup, that's what he said.

I am vastly amused. Vastly, I tell you.

Update:

First: I misspelled the subtitle: it's "omadhaun".

Second: while "omadhaun" (also spelled amadan) sounds (I infer) a lot like "O'Madadhain", the semantics are both somewhat different and quite appropriate to my announcement: it means something like "idiot", "fool", "goofball", or "mindless [one]", depending on whether you're talking about current usage or the original myth-infused meaning. It is also apparently (and not coincidentally) the name of a now-defunct? Irish band.

I am now even more amused, on a sort of meta-level.

http://www.offworld.com/2009/08/offworld-gallery-the-games-fac.html

This tickles me.

It would be cool to see "action shots" in addition to still lifes, though. :)

high-frequency trading: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

How is this not considered abusive?

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html

Among other things, apparently native Russian speakers are better at distinguishing between light and dark blue...because Russian has no word for 'blue', but one for 'light blue' and one for 'dark blue'. And so on.

"Physical Dynamic Rendering", or the analog of CGI to physical objects:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcaqzOUv2Ao

*quietly boggles*

Granted, this is a video of a technology under development. But...wow.

...on surface of moon in large lunar soundstages:
http://www.vgg.com/tr/tr_102201_moon.html

heh. :)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-music-moves-us

Haven't read the whole thing yet, but it looks interesting and includes some findings that I wouldn't have expected.

This is not at all new--it's from 2004--but I figured, what the hell, I'd never seen it. So here, /., have some more PageRank. And maybe one of you all will enjoy this:

http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/04/10/20/1518217.shtml?tid=192&tid=214&tid=126&tid=11

I sure did. :)

in a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNFRLrP014

There are other, longer versions of this on YouTube (including
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UuFJoexdlU, which involves someone rocking a
Wagner tuba) but in this one you can actually hear the choir and get
closeups of them.

This would be pretty surreal even without the band's hairdos (if that
is the word) and glasses.

*quietly boggles*