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Archive for July, 2008

Theory of the Precious Object

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Some years ago I developed a crackpot idea I call The Theory Of The Precious Object. This theory is based on the following observations: Crows, racoons and other animals are known to be attracted to shiny objects. Many products which succeed in the marketplace resemble the objects which attract these animals. Our attraction to these […]

Earthquake knocks ink off puzzles. Ink manufacturers sad.

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

There was a 5.4 earthquake here in southern California today, and it had a curious effect: All the heavy black areas were knocked off of my Kakuro puzzles. While they are slightly less attractive, I’m told they use up considerably less ink and toner this way, so I guess I’ll keep ’em. I hope you […]

Fun with the Droste effect

Sunday, July 27th, 2008

Via this Digg post, I found this awesome image manipulation tool called MathMap, and a Flickr group of photos using Escher’s Droste effect. Mathmap has been around for a while, as a plug-in for GIMP and more recently as a standalone program for Mac OS X. If you want to get a better idea of […]

Hubble Kaleidoscope goes Online

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

The Onion reports that the Hubble Space Kaleidoscope finally went online Tuesday, capturing the first images which prove beyond a doubt that the universe is utterly crazy looking. According to the article, the HSK features three fine-guidance optical control sensors, a wide field and planetary camera, a faint object spectrograph, and three primary rectangular plane […]

Weezer sing-a-long

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Weezer recently invited the audience to bring their own instruments, while they were taped for Nissan Live Sets. My friend Mike attended and had a blast. He’s one of the guitarists on the left. More videos from this event here: link