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April 28, 2005
Today's LInks
It's either totally cool or totally stupid - Airbus Industrie successfully flight-tested their behemoth A380 (callsign F-WWOW) yesterday. Here's a page at Airliners.net developed to planespotting the '380.
PookMail! If you're concerned about giving out your email address to a website or person you're not sure of, PookMail will allow you to set up a 'disposable' email address (@pookmail.com) that will expire in 24 hours. It even has an RSS feed for your pookmail addy so you can get the mail that way, too.
Feet First! This guy has spent a lot of time staring at (and photographing) the feet of greatness. A collection of photographs of the shoes of the stars.
CNN: Boy's Campaign Saves Bugs Bunny - "Eleven-year-old Thomas Adams thought Warner Bros. had gone daffy when he saw the company's plans for a new cartoon called "Loonatics," based on Bugs Bunny and his Looney Tunes pals.The grimacing, hollow-eyed, power-fisted prototypes of a futuristic Bugs, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner struck the boy as dark and scary. In the words of Daffy Duck, he found them "dethh-picable."
The Hubble Telescope is 15 years old - in celebration, NASA has released a pair of really nice poster-size images.
Follow-Up: A Gallup Poll says 50% of United States citizens say Bush misled them on WMDs. Taking into account the margin of error, this accurately reflects the voting public in that country. I know exactly what colour the home states of the other 50% are. Oh, and 53% say that the invasion of Iraq was "not worth it."
Here's a trick: How to make a ring out of a coin. I think I'm going to try this!
Posted by Hamish at 10:08 AM | Comments (0)
April 26, 2005
Today's Links
This week (April 25 - May 1) is TV Turnoff Week. While the material being offered by the major US networks is well past laughable (in both the positive and negative connotations of the term) I think this protest's getting a little outdated - perhaps we should have computer-turnoff week instead - the net is where the real rot is setting in these days.
It's final and official - No WMD's found in Iraq. How many times and in how many different ways does this need to be said? Of course, it doesn't matter - never has. And I'm beginning to wonder if it wasn't really about the oil, either. I think it might be just about fear. Making the American public so scared they will rally behind any leader they believe has the balls to defend them. Not smarts - just balls.
The Italian media magazine (online and print) Neural has published its May issue - not to be missed! It's truly an incredible read. (link goes to English edition)
Posted by Hamish at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2005
Today's Links
DP Review Does the D2X: Using a new Nikon D2X camera, Michael Jones photographed the rollout of space shuttle Discovery from the VAB to the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
Link to image gallery on DP Review.
(Via Boing Boing.)
SOCAN wants 25% tariff on legal downloads of music - they are more of a threat to music business in Canada than P2P. So says UoO Law Professor and columnist Michael Geist.
This is so fakkin' cool. This fellow has edited the entire "Straight Outta Compton" album by NWA (Niggas With Attitude) down to just the swearwords, and posted them as mp3s on his site. Get'em while they're hot.
Posted by Hamish at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
Higher Priced Cigarettes Mean Profit for Marlboro
The BBC reports today that Marlboro's owner, Altria Group, has seen an 18% jump in profits for the quarter ended due in no small part to higher cigarette prices. The company's US cigarette sales for the first quarter of 2005 were $43 Billion for a profit of $2.6 Billion. Billion! And for the rest of the world, sales were $201 Billion - that's for one cigarette company, for one quarter. According to the story, Altria sells half of all cigarettes purchased in the US. Do the math and that means that cigarette sales in the US alone are over $340 Billion per year. Altria, it should be known, also owns Kraft Foods.
Now, I used to be a smoker - for 10 years - and Marlboro was my brand of choice. I quit because I always said I never wanted to influence my children to smoke - or subject them to a smoker's house. So my wife and I quit well before we even conceived our first child. Cold turkey, too. But that's another story. I digress - with all the anti-smoking marketing going on, I have to wonder how much of an effect it's having other than making us feel better about ourselves for speaking out if the cigarette companies are still seeing enormous profits and revenue - seemingly in direct contrast to the anti-smoking trend.
Posted by Hamish at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
Today's Links
My son Ethan turned three years old today. He greeted this news with a "Woo-Hoo!" and a stream-of-conciousness rant on candles, balloons and cakes. It's good to be three, I think. I read somewhere that three is the time when one's brain really fires up and starts getting creative. True dat, he has his toys interact with one another now, playing out little stories he concocts for them. Pretty simple stuff at the moment but I can see it's going to get more complex in short order. The downside is that his brain is creative 24-7, which means his dreams tend to be much more vivid and he is not always happy about that - more nightmares. But on the whole he's a better boy for it. I think this is going be an exciting year for Ethan. He starts junior kindergarten in September. A big step for both him and his parents. I can't believe this little man who only recently required total assistance just to keep him alive, will be stepping onto a school bus and venturing away from the nest under his own volition. Wow.
Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte's Principles - a detailed "course" on applying the good work of Tufte to the ultra-modern (and yet not so) world of the web.
So there's a new Pope in town - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany was chosen by his peers as the next pappa of the 1.1 Billion 'people who identify themselves as being of the Catholic faith'. A former member of the Nazi Youth (it was compulsory at the time) the 78 year-old Pope is known as an ultra-conservative hardliner, John Paul II's official church bulldogma. As he is not likely to spend a long time in office before he dies, I see Ratzinger's appointment as a transitional one - sort of like a having a transitional girlfriend after a breakup, to keep house while the Church looks for a young conservative (of which there are very few) to groom for the position. By the time he dies, within the next 10 years, they should have either found someone in their 50s or early 60s, or have given up the chase and bowed to public pressure and elected a moderate to replace Benedict XVI. By that time, it will take a young moderate Pope at least as long as John Paul II did to pull in the reins, to let them out again. Should be an interesting generation.
The Morning News: Never Say Neverland Again: "A contest was recently held to find someone to write the official “Peter Pan” sequel. Though author Geraldine McCaughrean was chosen from hundreds of candidates, James Finn Garner shares with us the openings from a number of rejected applications."
Google Maps has expanded to include the UK - cool! I hope they get the Satellite pic function online soon as well.
What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Apparently I speak 45% General American English, 25% Yankee, 15% Dixie, 10% Upper-Midwestern and 5% Midwestern. This probably means I'm Canadian, although they don't seem to have that option (surprise!).
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing - one of the most significant and recent examples of the United States' vulnerability to attacks from within. One fellow has posted a remembrance of being a resident of Oklahoma City that day.
Posted by Hamish at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
April 15, 2005
Today's Links
This just put a smile on my face - click on the horses.
Photosight.ru is a photo hosting service - in Russian - but you can navigate through the site pretty easily just by clicking on pictures... Impressive stuff!
Posted by Hamish at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
Today's Links
Easy Peasy. SCIgen - An Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator. Pressed for time? Need to be published fast to get that CompSci street cred you've been dreaming of? Look no further.
"AbstractThe theory approach to Scheme [21] is defined not only by the visualization of RPCs, but also by the significant need for checksums. After years of confusing research into telephony [10,30], we disprove the deployment of voice-over-IP, which embodies the important principles of artificial intelligence [16]. We describe a flexible tool for synthesizing object-oriented languages (CAL), which we use to demonstrate that the well-known autonomous algorithm for the improvement of Byzantine fault tolerance by Taylor et al. runs in O(n!) time. Despite the fact that such a hypothesis at first glance seems counterintuitive, it fell in line with our expectations."
The CSM has a very good article on native american casinos. We in Canada are only scratching the surface with the relatively few native-run casinos we have - in the States it's pervasive and inescapable - to the point that some bands are offering to give up land titles in their impoverished home territory in order to build a lucrative casino on richer soil.
Posted by Hamish at 08:36 AM | Comments (0)
April 12, 2005
Today's Links
Ubercoolische is a serial riff on the current techno scene... Of course they have t-shirts.
Lickr modifies your experience with Flickr by removing the (sluggish) Flash code from Flickr pages, replacing them with quick-loading html on-the-fly. Cool!
The Shot - I'm not a huge fan of golf but I know a good play when I see one and Tiger Woods' bunker shot on to the green on the 16th at the Masters this past weekend(wmv file) was nothing short of incredible. Of course, Woods' sponsor Nike was right 'on the ball', slapping their logo on the moment. Doesn't matter - he's the one who's excellent.
Posted by Hamish at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Today's Links
Well, I'm back from vacation - well-rested, etc... On with the links!
Unless you were buried upside down on the dark side of the moon last week, you might have heard that Roman Catholics are currently Pope-less, after the death of Karol Wojtyla. The media frenzy that greeted this event, fresh off the carnival surrounding Terry Schiavo, was just slightly beyond the outer limits of completely, freakishly pathetic. CNN covered the event for days on end, and based its operations in Rome, breaking away only occasionally to report on current events. It seemed as though the media decided THIS one death was more important than anything that has occurred in recent memory. And it was joyous. At times, it seemed as though we were watching the Santa Claus Parade instead of a funeral, the way the commentators were feting the proceedings. Anyway, Kuro5hin is concise as ever in his analysis of the effect that Wojtyla had on the world... i.e. not quite so worthly-of-sainthood as the media would have us believe.
Copyfight Update: Michael Geist, copyright pundit extraordinaire, has a really good article on the Canadian version of the P2P battle.
Posted by Hamish at 09:37 AM | Comments (1)
April 03, 2005
Greetings from Cuba
Hello all... no blog entries for a week while I´m on vacation in Cayo Guillermo, Cuba. Sun, sand and daiquiris!
Back Saturday.
Posted by Hamish at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)