Archive for May, 2008

hell’s bells

Dell is guilty of fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices, according to a ruling by the New York State Supreme Court. Damages have yet to be determined, but Dell maintains that it is committed to offering the best possible service. I have always claimed that I’d never buy a Dell machine. This proves exactly why I will not. The list in this article is unbelievably long and it’s remarkable what all Dell was able to get away with. Their machines have never worked for me and this just gives me another reason never to support them.

Take the red pill

Out of this list, Dark City, The Truman Show and Brazil remain three of my favourite films of all time. If you haven’t seen them, I highly recommend you do. I have to watch Waking Life, never seen it. The others are pretty fun as well. Donnie Darko, Matrix, and I Heart Huckabees are brilliant films. If you haven’t seen them, I’d put them up there on the list.

My English teacher once told me that good short stories were the ones that spoke to universal truths.

These were the stories that go beyond mere characters and their antics through an imaginary universe. They offer an insight into the human condition: what is life? what is truth? what is reality?

The same could be said for memorable films. Only films convey their meaning in a more sensory way – using both audio and visual elements to enter the mind of the viewer.

And perhaps even shift your perspective.

The following 10 films are chosen because they shed light on the forces at work within our lives, this very moment. They use satire and metaphor to approach the truths that would otherwise be too difficult to understand, or too terrifying to comprehend.

Most of all, these films challenge you to wake up.

new CLI interface

okay so i’ve had some good and bad reviews about this new user interface. here’s a few issues that i wanted to address.

firstly, i found this via jason’s site. it’s essentially a command line interface emulator for wordpress and primarily bears resemblance to a classic vt terminal.

secondly, it’s not meant to render images. when it does, it does so in 8 bit. if you wish to see the images, please change the theme using the sidebar.

thirdly, i know the site breaks when using Opera and IE8. haven’t heard about any other browsers in which it breaks yet. do let me know if your browser does not work. in these browsers though, you should be able to switch the theme and get it to render with a GUI.

i’ve removed the ls command as it was going through the entire archive of posts.

i appreciate all the feedback. i really do. i know a lot of it pretty broken, but i’m working on it as i get time. credit goes to jason for getting me more involved into this. when you get a moment, go check out his Linux Log as well. jay, i’m taking partial credit for converting you over entirely from windows to linux. i know you were mostly there on your own anyway.

Update: Okay this is more headache than not so I’ve gone back to this GUI.

brave new world

well, at least GWB did something right. aldous huxley had it all wrong, there won’t be a brave new world after all.

This past week, President Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which would protect people from being discriminated against by health insurers or employers on the basis of their genetic information. ‘the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). GINA is the first and only federal legislation that will provide protections against discrimination based on an individual’s genetic information in health insurance coverage and employment settings. 

 

hancock

the new trailer for will smith’s new movie, hancock is out at apple.com. it looks amazing.

the holy sinner

just going through sadequain’s page on wikipedia. it’s a sad but briliant. he really was a genius.

In an interview he said, “People ask why I don’t paint flowers, butterflies and landscapes? I tell them that I seek the truth and I am after reality. I am not inspired by someone posing against the backdrop of roses in a vase or pink curtains. What inspires me is a person who has gone hungry for hours and is struggling for survival. The expression that lights his face at the end of the day when he has finally found some scraps, that is what touches me. I am a painter of the expression of reality.” Self proclaimed “Faqir,” Sadequain was outside society’s worldly greed or hypocrisy and called himself “speaker of truth.”

Best known for his calligraphies, Sadequain painted abstracts, drawings, and sketches on thousands of canvases, volumes of paper, and multitudes of other conventional and unconventional materials.

bug eyes

Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, forgotten for the best part of a century, lies a tunnel linking London and New York.

It was built on the whim of a Victorian inventor with the aim of linking two great cities and developing the kind of friendship that still exists today.

But bad fortune befell the venture – and the tunnel lay idle ever after.

Until today, that is, when the project was rekindled with a modern twist.

Using a giant “electronic telescope” and state-of-the-art technology, England and America were joined once again when the tunnel entrances were reopened beside Tower Bridge in London and Brooklyn Bridge in New York.

It meant that New Yorkers and Londoners could wave to each other across the sea and begin the kind of mute dialogue that was only a dream all those years ago for eccentric engineering entrepreneur Alexander Stanhope St George (deceased).

Or at least, that’s the way the story goes.

the economist

the story of stuff is a fascinating little video clip about 20 minutes long. take some time out and watch it. you really need to. no, no, you really, really need to.

rick deckard

so one of my favourite blogs is da vinci automata, as listed in my links celebrating all that is steampunk and clockpunk. along similar lines comes a  new blog by a buddy, which looks rather promising and i hope to be reading up on it regularly. just wanted to give you guys a headsup about it.

Till Malfunctions Do us Part” promises to be a rewarding read if you’re into science, technology and the way humans interact with their alternate counterparts in these genre’s, the robots. it’s about human relations and how we are influenced and the way we interact with machines ever more so in the world today.

object permanence

While for many infants a thing out of sight is also out of mind, there is a developmental milestone, called object permanence, that children reach when he or she realizes that the object exists even when it can’t be seen. The term was coined by child development expert and psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget believed most children reached the object permanence stage when they were about eight or nine months old. However, all children develop slightly differently, and may reach this stage earlier or later than others.

Piaget studied the concept of object permanence by conducting relatively simple tests on infants. He would show an infant, or young baby a toy and then cover it with a blanket. A child who had a clear concept of object permanence might reach for the toy or try to grab the blanket off the toy. A child who had not yet developed object permanence might appear distressed that the toy had disappeared.

Parents, of course, have tested object permanence for years with young babies. Games of peek-a-boo with a three month old are quite delightful because the child will often be pleasantly surprised each time one covers one’s hands with one’s face and then reappears. According to Piaget’s theory, the delight results in the sudden reappearance of the parent, who magically disappeared and came back. Children over five or six months may also hide under blankets and expect that their parents can’t possibly find them, since the child cannot see the parent.

Lack of object permanence might also explain why children tend not to fuss as much when they are younger and the parent leaves. Yet this is not always the case, and calls into question some of Piaget’s theories. For instance, studies testing breastfed week-old infants suggest they can easily differentiate between their mother’s breast milk and other breastmilk. Basing the concept of object permanence on what can be only visually perceived discounts what can be heard, smelled or touched.

In complete dark for instance, a baby far too young to have developed object permanence may feel comforted by the touch and smell of a mom sleeping nearby or picking up the baby. The mother exists even before the sight of the mother can be determined. Thus vision cannot be the only factor guiding object permanence.

However, it is clear that as infants begin to expand their visual perception they may seem quite surprised by the sudden visual disappearance of a beloved toy or person. They may however be still able to smell, hear or sense the missing object. This suggests that the infant has more ways of perceiving than were summarized by Piaget in his development and testing of the theory of object permanence.

what matters most, or lack thereof

Researchers say they have found about half of the universe’s missing matter hidden in the spaces between billions of galaxies thanks to the Hubble telescope.

This normal matter, which is called baryons, was created during and after the Big Bang, and should not be confused with dark matter, researchers said.

“We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,” said astronomer Mike Shull of the University of Colorado after an extensive search of the local universe.

“What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe.”

Read the rest of the news here.

mensa anyone?

Leading logic puzzle supplier Conceptis announces a new website today dedicated to logic puzzle enthusiasts. Promised to be the most advanced puzzle website ever created, conceptispuzzles.com aims to change everything about how we play logic puzzles on the Internet.

The site was designed with the sole intention of providing exceptional puzzling experience. Both newcomers who have no idea what logic puzzles are about as well as experienced “beyond Sudoku” puzzlers who seek new challenges and varieties will enjoy the range of puzzles and features. The site includes Sudoku, Kakuro, Battleships, Hitori, Slitherlink, Hashi, Pic-a-Pix, Link-a-Pix, Fill-a-Pix, Maze-a-Pix and Dot-a-Pix puzzles in dozens of variants and hundreds of models. All puzzles are playable interactively and printable online, providing a content and gaming platform which is by far the most advanced of its kind in the world.

vexing software

The internet has brought us many joys. It’s rewritten the rules of business and pleasure.

And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time (‘let’s use it to make sure our customers have the latest software’, for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.

Here are just ten of the guilty parties who try to do the impossible: to make us hate the internet and wish it had never been invented — and who very nearly succeed.

gasoline alley

We all know gas prices are crazy lately. But how much are you really paying. How about this…

Check out the highest gas prices across the globe courtesy of CNN Money and Air-Inc.

10 Most Expensive Places to Buy Gas

1. Eritrea $9.58
2. Norway $8.73
3. United Kingdom $8.38
4. Netherlands $8.37
5. Monaco $8.31
6. Iceland $8.28
7. Belgium $8.22
8. France $8.07
9. Germany $7.86
10. Portugal $7.84

And the U.S.??
108. United States $3.45

let them eat cake

You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

food waste

Grocery stores discard products because of spoilage or minor cosmetic blemishes. Restaurants throw away what they don’t use. And consumers toss out everything from bananas that have turned brown to last week’s Chinese leftovers. In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten. Fresh produce, milk, grain products and sweeteners made up two-thirds of the waste. An update is under way.

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