Yes, a second helping of link sausage this week. Think
of it as post-Thanksgiving leftovers.
- An amusing
open letter to a dangerous driver about to discover expensive
Karmic payback. Go giggle. (Link from
leiacat)
- The dangers of
sex near the speed of light. Apparently it's not a good idea
to have sex with your relativity. (Link from
leiacat)
- The dangers of
blindly following the computer's instructions -- in this case
a GPS navigation system that told a driver to make a U-turn on a
highway. (Link from
thespian)
- An ironwork VW Beetle.
Pretty. Odd. Impressive. Probably a bit chilly in wintertime.
(Link from
merde who got it from
arthane)
-
Multi-flash camera captures real life images and renders them in a
non-photorealistic line-form compared to the line-art style of
a 1980s A-Ha video. "Multi-flash imaging promises to facilitate
and pioneer complicated rendering of mechanical objects, plants, or
internal anatomical parts. Because of its ability to detect depth
discontinuities [even in low-contrast subjects unsuitable for
ordinary edge-detection postprocessing of a conventional image],
it may render shapes that would otherwise be difficult to perceive.
For instance, a car engine could easily be captured in a
non-photorealistic image and then superimposed over an actual
photograph of the engine resulting in a superior manual illustration."
Referred to as "computational photography", it uses four flash strobes
and determines edges/shapes based on differences in the shadows cast
by each. The examples make the advantages quite clear. (Link from
That Mailing List)
- Are you one of the many fen/Marklanders/SCAdians who have
daydreamed of building a castle someday? There's a builder
who specializing in exactly that since 1980:
Castle Magic combines
ancient and modern construction techniques to get the best of
each. <snark>I just hope they build castles better than
they do web sites -- using Javascript for basic navigation;
their web developer needs to be thrown in the dungeon.</snark>
(Link from Fred)
-
John Gilmore is taking on the TSA both more broadly
and more directly than Penn Jillette. (Not sure where I
found this -- MetaFilter perhaps?)
- If I've linked to this one before and then forgotten
that I've done so, it'll only demonstrate how badly the
problem needs to be solved, right?
Keeping Found Things Found: "The classic problem of
information retrieval, simply put, is to help people find the
relatively small number of things they are looking for [...]
from a very large set of possibilities. [...] A follow-on
problem also exists which has received relatively less study:
Once found, how are things organized for re-access and re-use
later on? What can be done to avoid the need to repeat the
process by which the information was found in the first
place? (If, indeed, it is possible to repeat this process.)
We refer to this as the problem of Keeping Found Things
FoundTM or KFTF. Our current
research project focuses on the KFTF problem in the context
of World Wide Web use. Follow- on projects will look at
variations of the KFTF problem as these occur for email,
electronic files and paper files." (Ironically, I don't
remember how I stumbled across this site.)
-
The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time, by
John Scalzi, describes "The Assassinationof Saint Nicholas"
("The newscast, a hoax created by 20-something wunderkind Orson
Wells as a seasonal allegory about the spread of Fascism in Europe,
was so successful that few listeners stayed to listen until the end
[...] Instead, tens of thousands of New York City children
mobbed the Macy's Department Store on 34th, long presumed to be
Santa's New York embassy, and sang Christmas carols in wee, sobbing
tones."), "Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas", The Lost Star Trek
Christmas Episode: "A Most Illogical Holiday" ("Mr. Spock, with
his pointy ears, is hailed as a messiah on a wintry world where
elves toil for a mysterious master [...]"), and "A Canadian Christmas
with David Cronenberg". (Link from
doubleplus)
-
Lord Of The Rings themed body jewelry (mostly tongue and navel).
Some of it strikes me as being a little bit silly, but I kind
of like the idea of sticking my tongue out at someone and having
the Eye of Sauron glaring at them as a result (but not enough
so to run out and get my tongue pierced just for that). They're
certainly leaving a lot of the potential untapped though.
(Link from
theferrett, who made the priceless comment,
"But I wanted a Prince Albert that made it look like the head of
Gandalf's staff!").