Author: shacker

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Spam Plants

Spamplants Romanian-born computer artist Alex Dragulescu turns crap into gold — he’s developed a computational analysis system to transform ordinary spam into renderings of organic-looking plants (though some look more like sea anemones to me). via c|net:


For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail–including subject lines, headers and footers–to detect relationships between that data. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it’s sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant’s ability to grow.

Dragulescu has also done similar projects with architecture, weblog text, transit, etc.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You
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Secret Agent Tools

Spent a couple days with a stomach bug while in Minnesota. Miles (3.5 yrs) was concerned, and tended to my spirits one day by bringing me a series of Lego assemblages, which he called “secret agent tools” (he alternately referred to them as “old fashioned”). He’d disappear for five minutes, come trundling back upstairs with a new one, lay some terminology on me, and vanish again. Had a laptop with me in bed, so took notes, which I’ve left unedited here.

secret agent tool – shoots orange juice and pancake syrup and apple juice and clouds. when it shoots out clouds that brings dinosaurs back to the world. And the secret agent tool makes a sound like “Mooooo.”

crab claw – bites a crab and then the farmer fire axes the crab – the farmer shoots the crab with a fire axe and then people can eat the crab for dinner.

“I’m going to make three more toys for you because I’m nervous that my daddy is sick because he’s my special friend, so I’m going to make three more and then that’s all” (he made a total of eight more).

The second toy was called “iceberg tabasky headphones” and it m n nn nb

The third toy was a “Vizerator” or “paper cleaner” and you put paper in a hole and people made new paper

the fourthest toy – shooted out fire and then people could cut down old trees. You can also hold this one.

the fivest toy: shoots out canonballs – “The Sockador” – for cutting down old trees and the swords will come back to life and people can hold them. You can hold this one.

The next one is an evaporator — it cleans up the old garbage and old pieces of paper and the fire dragons come back to life.

this one is “evaporator 2” and it cleans paper AND keyboards.

a keyboard typer big tragasky panpot aggregator – it spurts some goo from here and it cleans out people from here and then the dinosaurs live in the futures.

then he stuck a tire in my eye and said “you get these rings for being so helpful today.”

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TCP/IP Over FireWire

A few years ago I noticed that OS X started offering “FireWire” as one of the tcp/ip connection types, alongside ethernet and modem. Sounded intriguing, but couldn’t imagine a situation where it would be useful.

The brilliance of this arrangement dawned on me over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself in a house with a DSL connection but no router — DSL modem feeding their eMac directly. To get my laptop online without taking their machine off the network, just enabled connection sharing on their Mac, connected a FireWire cable from it to me, and I was online, slickr-n-snot. All of my posts here over the past two weeks were made over FireWire.

Heck, you could even plug a laptop into the back of an external FireWire drive. Effortless.

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Why I Don’t Do Link Exchange

For years, I’ve received email requests to engage in link exchanges with other sites. Because Google and other search engines base a site’s PageRank in large part on the number of incoming links to that site, many webmasters and SEO types see pre-meditated link exchange as an easy way to build rank.

I refuse nearly all link exchange requests, to this or any other site I manage. On occasion, webmasters have taken umbrage at my refusal. Because I’m tired of explaining why I don’t do link exchange, this page exists to explain why I think the practice is wrong.
Continue reading “Why I Don’t Do Link Exchange”

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(Really) Defending Marriage

Marriage Classique is subject to greater threats than those presented by gays tying the knot — divorce and adultery, to name two. Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis says a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage won’t go far enough. Salon:

If the sanctity of marriage is to be preserved, Davis deadpanned, Congress should “outlaw divorce” and make adultery “a felony.” In addition, Davis said, “We should prevent those who commit adultery or get a divorce from running an office. Mr. Speaker, this House must lead by example. If we want those watching on C-SPAN to actually believe that we’re serious about protecting marriage, then we should go after the other major threats to the institution.”

At least 29 members of Congress are divorced.

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YouTube License Fine Print

With more than 100 million videos per day being viewed, YouTube has become an important distribution channel for new musicians. But someone’s got to pay for all those terabytes. If you’ve been wondering what kind of business model was going to keep YouTube afloat, look deeper than AdSense. Try the fine print:

“…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Wired blog: “Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get “edgy”; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky’s still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video.”

Not saying the terms are unfair, necessarily. You get what you pay for. But they are extreme, and musicians looking to break the surface of the water through the service should be paying attention.

Via Mal

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Plastination

Plastination Spent the day at St. Paul’s Museum of Science — mostly to see the amazing Body Worlds exhibit currently on display. Dozens of human bodies with liquids and fats replaced by polymers for permanent preservation — through the miracle of modern plastics, these are the mummies of our age. Actual circulatory and nervous systems in exact shape of the bodies they occupied. Brains and brain stems and spinal cords pulled from the skull and spine and draped out behind bodies like capes for maximum visibility of the musculature and skeletal systems that lay behind, as the bodies continued to do the things they had done in life – teach classes, shoot arrows, play basketball, run.

In some examples, bodies had been sliced into perfect longitudinal strips, allowing viewers to compare the organs and organization of healthy and unhealthy bodies. In others, brains sliced and plasticized in place so you could see dendrites descend into cerebellum, out through base of skull, down spinal cord, trace all the way to fingertips. Penises and vaginas in full, un-sexy, functional display (you can imagine the comments left in the guest books). A man’s entire musculature free of bones, standing free, touching its own skeleton as if friends. A man walking with his own skin draped over his shoulder, as though it were a coat. “Winged Man” with all muscle groups splayed outwards, enabling you to see the marvelous intricacy of related muscles. A father with young child riding on his shoulders, mother walking beside, all three of them composed of nothing but their own blood vessels.

A bit of revulsion after first entering, quickly replaced with absolute fascination, both at the marvelous intricacy of the human body (or in awe of God’s work, depending on your leaning), and at the amazing process that makes the examples possible. A few videos online at the Body Worlds meta-site.