Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

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 Found^TM 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!").