A certain high school English teacher of my acquaintance (now retired) famously posited a definite inverse correlation between the intelligence of his female students, and the size of their breasts. Well, science is suggesting that this might have been a false conclusion. It was already known that men find curvy women more attractive and that they live longer. Now research… Read more →
Year: 2007
I (heart) public domain
From Japanator: Did you know that right now you can get a handful of Akira Kurosawa films for free? Like, as in legally for free? That’s right! The nice people over at Japan Probe have pointed out that some of the master’s films have fallen into the public domain. Archive.org has them available for download right this second. Among the… Read more →
Am I Getting More Childish?
One of two things is true: either my sense of humour is regressing, or the quality of the humour purveyed by Cracked in the Internet age is much improved from the last time I read the print magazine (approximately 21 years ago). I remember Cracked magazine as an inferior reflection of Mad magazine–itself not known for highly intelligent humour (horrible… Read more →
SurveillanceSaver again
Following up from the recent post on SurveillanceSaver, I saw that very talented writer M. John Harrison had also been playing with it. Just let me quote him: after a bit, the narrative possibilities collapse, the intensity of your gaze subsides & these are just empty corners of the world again. It’s a bit like hitch-hiking & not getting a… Read more →
Fear The Dreadhawk
Offered without comment. Read more →
Massey Lectures 2007: Follow-up
You may recall my lengthy post about attending the first of the 2007 Massey Lectures. I just wanted to point out a couple of things about that: Ideas is currently hosting MP3 versions of the lectures. If you subscribe to the Ideas podcast, you would already have them, but you can download them directly as they appear on the podcast… Read more →
Seam Carving You Can Play With, Plus More
Remember back in August when I was so delighted with the paper and demonstration video on seam carving technology? Well, now I can play with that technology. And so can you. Or, at least, you can if you use the Gimp, since the Liquid Rescale Plugin now puts that algorithm into it. (And why wouldn’t you be using the Gimp… Read more →
Making The Point With Art
I could write a dozen blog posts about living in the surveillance society, and not make the point as clearly as Michael Zoellner did by writing SurveillanceSaver. There’s nothing that will drive home the point that we’re in the midst of omni-surveillance like someone adapting some of the information flowing from that constant surveillance into casual artOK, maybe it’s a… Read more →
Just In Time For Christmas
One of the online fora I am active on included a pointer this week to a blog post showing some interesting Laotian rice wine: (You can see an even bigger version of that photo at the author’s Flickr page.) I’m not opposed to liquor with stuff in it generally–but there is some stuff that probably doesn’t belong in my booze.… Read more →
Maybe There’s A Reason We Associate Wisdom With Age
I’m leaving the title off of this until the end–read it first. Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and… Read more →
On cross-border shopping and smuggling
So, during a particularly boring meeting today, I ran the numbers on the recent smuggling effort. I ordered 32 items from Amazon.com and had them shipped to a friend in Boston. Of those, one item is one that for some reason isn’t available from Amazon.ca (and indeed, can’t be ordered from Amazon.com to a Canadian address!), so we’re going to… Read more →
A small discussion on US$ and Canadian$
While I was in Boston last week I took advantage of the relative strength of the Canadian dollar versus the US dollar to purchase a pretty large set of stuff. I made a 32 item order from Amazon, which I had delivered to a friend’s house, and I suspect the savings of doing this were vast: I got the benefit… Read more →
Maybe I should reconsider that whole law school thing
Well, that was a waste of time. Oh, and irony. (Of course there was already irony and detailed irony.) Read more →
Halifax Harbour
I’ve been messing around with some software to do image stitching, for the purposes of creating panoramic images from a series of simple digital snaps. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but tonight was the first time I’ve had a moment in several weeks. So, here’s my first test image: a view of the south east end… Read more →
The perils of the dark side
So, if you are the sort of person who has a fair bit of interaction with the shady computer underworld–you know where to find a download of anything, or a way to find a crack or a serial number for anything, etc, it is almost unavoidable that at some point you’re going to step into the crap and run into… Read more →