TT : Homer Shrugged

1) The trilogy that I actually care about is complete. The Golden Transcendence : Or, The Last of the Masquerade is here, and it doesn’t dissapoint. I’ll write my review soon.

Is it just me, or did the book jacket’s designer rip off Zhaan from Farscape?

(image from http://farscape.bittersweetblue.net)

2) Ebay auction: The Simpsons Homer as Atlas A La Carte Statue

Very impressive.

3) How a google search for video drivers helped ‘s mom grow her vocabulary.
Isn’t technology wonderfull?

4) Learned about this in “This Old House Magazine”. There’s a company that makes a table saw that senses the change in capacitance between wood and human (and as this demo shows, pigeon) flesh and stops momentarily.

Watch the videos here. would probably get a kick out of that.

5) There was an article in the Bulletin about Atoms for Peace.
Dammit, where’s my Ford Nucleon?

(image from conceptcarz.com)

The Last Martian

Dr. Ede Teller is dead.

Just a few days ago I was reading an article in the Bulletin which badmouthed Teller and praised Ulam as the true inventor of the Big One. I hope the author feels bad now.

Tom Jennings, the inventor of Fidonet, drew this great portrait of Dr. Teller.

“He is rendered here in materials befitting his life; water color on lead; ground electron tubes frame and pockmark his face, the whole embalmed in layers and layers of yellowing shellac. The materials used should last 10,000 years, hopefully longer than his effects. “

Avoiding the cliché of mentioning Dr. Strangelove, Jennings compared him to Dr. William Haber of “Lathe of Heaven” and Thufir Hawat of “Dune“.

I always liked both of these characters, and thought that I would have tried to do what they did in their position. Even if the odds are bad and your actions might make the situation even worse, something needs to be done.

Now, may I point your attention to an article by “Democrats = mediocrity; Republicans = lottery ticket”. It seems to me that Democrats favor a tactic used by Pirx the Pilot in “Pilot Pirx Tested ” – inaction for the fear that all actions will only make the matters worse. They always assume that it’s a Zugzwang.

Oooh, I want this poster.
.

Band On The Web

Everybody knows that Dr Fun was the first cartoon on the World Wide Web. What do you mean you didn’t know? Ignorant mumble mumble. But a lesser known fact is that Les Horribles Cernettes was the first band on the Web.

According to this site:
“The Cernettes began when a patient CERN secretary was made to wait and wait and wait for the return of her permanently-on-shift physicist boyfriend. In an attempt to garner his attention, she asked physicist Silvano de Gennaro to write a song about her life, and got a few girlfriends to back her up. Then she stepped onstage in 1992 during CERN’s annual Hardronic music festival, and sang “You only love your collider” to the whole CERN population.”


“But the Cernettes’ real claim to fame is being the first band on the Web. In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee asked Silvano for photos of “the CERN girls” to publish on a new information network he’d invented. The image you see below is the first photo ever featured in a Web browser.”

“Collider” is pretty good, but “Liquid Nitrogen” is even better!

“You poured liquid nitrogen down my spine
as you told me you didn’t love me any more
and run off with the girl next door
…”

Pure genius. They are all so damn talented. Too bad they didn’t record any more songs. Their stuff is some of the best coding music that I have. I wonder if I’d like some more conventional Doo Wop music…

Mmmmm, Photo Cakes….


“Lords” (located at on Flatbush Ave near Brooklyn College).

This reminded me of that Simpsons episode where Homer falls into the third dimension and stumbles into “The Erotic Cakeshop” . And you know what, the solution to this mystery was just one google search away:

“There is no real `Erotic Cakes’ storefront; that was made up for the scene. The real storefront is Rose Photography, 13567 Ventura Blvd. The establishment appears to be mostly vacant, save for a few ladders. It’s right between Yoshi’s Japanese Restaurant (red roof) and The Coffee Roaster.”

What Swoop?

Just now, talking to my boss on the phone, I used expression “in one fell swoop”, referring deployment of files from SourceSafe. I am puzzled about what “fell” means. I thought it was related to “swell”. I could not have been more wrong:

From http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-fel1.htm
We now never see it outside this fixed phrase (or perhaps only occasionally in poetic use) but once it was a common word in its own right. One of its relatives is still about: felon, which comes from the same Old French source, fel, evil. Originally a felon was a cruel or wicked person; only later did the word evolve to mean a person who commits a serious crime.

That’s fitting, especially considering the nature of SourceSafe.