Bob Dylan – I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine
tilt-shift ducks in flight
My favorite flickr photo pool:
The Challenge: Anyone who vertically tilt-shifts a duck in flight will get $50 from me.
Rule #1: Real tilt-shift
Rule #2: Real fucking duck* (they’re the ones that go ‘quack’)*duck has to be flying on it’s own accord — please, do not kill a duck (or a pigeon and dress it up as duck) and throw it in the air. Disused swimming pool optional.
The top five tags associated with the group: realtiltfuckingshift, arax35mmf28ts, australia, fuckaduck, realfuckingduck.
The number of photos in the group: 1.
We are Siamese if you please
Second installment from Siam in which we drink Thai whiskey, eat grubs, read Kawabata, watch fighting white elephants and listen to she-males croon…
oh my Buddha
The 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/RT Sport Edition
If confounds as much as it amuses (via iowahawk).
psychedelic hanta mice
Scientists dusted deer mice with colorful powders to track the spread of hantavirus.
For two nights during the spring and fall, toothbrushes were used to apply colored powders to five mice at each of the 12 sites, resulting in each site having five different colored mice: pink, blue, green, yellow and orange.
The next day, the researchers viewed mice captured in animal traps under an ultraviolet light (black light), looking for fluorescent powder on each mouse’s head, ears, mouth, feet and tail.
“If mice were in contact with a powdered mouse, you’d see the colored bite mark on their ear or tail, or color on their genitals,” said Denise Dearing, a biologist at the University of Utah and lead author of the study published online Jan. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Mice having the most contacts with other mice (and therefore most likely to spread the virus) were 11 percent heavier than the rest of the mouse population.
The researchers say that bigger mice likely have the largest foraging range since such mice need to snag more food. In addition, the heavier mice could be territorial, and so would be defending a nest or food resource. And bigger mice are older, meaning they have more experience defending territory than do younger mice.
Breastfeeding
Speaking of breastfeeding, a woman can’t post pictures of herself breastfeeding on facebook:
The deletions have spurred Facebook members to stage protests both online and offline. Dozens of supporters gathered last Saturday at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., while online, and more than 11,000 members participated in a virtual “nurse-in,” or changed their profile photos to images depicting women breastfeeding.
The controversy began after several women began noticing that photographs of themselves nursing their children had been flagged for removal. They formed a group called “Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene!” to protest a policy that prohibits members from uploading any content deemed to be “obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit,” which can include images showing exposed breasts.
How to prepare the perfect boiled egg
Where t = tempurature and c = the circumference of the egg. Martin Lersch points out:
As is evident from the formula, the boiling time depends on the size of the egg. For a larger egg, a longer cooking time is needed. The circumference of the egg is easily measured around the thick end using a piece of string which, after marking of the circumference of the egg, can be measured using a ruler. I have prepared a piece of string which I keep in the kitchen with three knots at 13, 14 and 15 cm respectively to make it even simpler.
The boiling time also depends on the starting temperature of the egg, T0. This also makes sense as it will take longer to heat up a cold than a warm egg to the desired temperature. In fact, the temperature difference between a room tempered and a refridgerated egg amount to a difference in boiling time of 30 seconds.
Martin Lersch is an organometallic chemist in Oslo, Norway and his site, khymos, is an invaluable resource for those interested in molecular gastronomy.
Dear Clusterflock
Where/what was the best meal you have ever had?
The burnt-down, froze-up Taco Bell
featured by JustinSpace in one of his holiday blog entries from North Dakota
reminds me of the old Polar Bear ice cream shop near Lake Cliff Park in Dallas. A faintly Moorish igloo.
Back in the wayback days, the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Polar Bear’s neighbor was an establishment that sold fresh-squeezed orange juice and was shaped and painted to resemble an orange. The orange juice shack no longer stands, but the Polar Bear building may still exist. It would appear to have evolved into a Mexican-food joint. And so we come full-circle.
My surrogate Mom calls the Internet the ARPANET.
October 1972: First public demonstrations of the ARPANET. International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC).
One of the best known demos features a conversation between ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s artificially-intelligent psychiatrist located at MIT, and PARRY, a paranoid computer developed by Kenneth Colby at Stanford.
People get on my nerves
I am not sure I understand you
You should pay more attention
Suppose you should pay more attention
You’re entitled to your opinion
What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?from a conversation between PARRY and the ‘Doctor’ via the ARPANET
(Via Computer History Museum)
My Mom calls the Internet the Mainframe.
I hope she never stops.
Please welcome Emily Grace Burleson
Born at 3:58 PM on 1/5/2009. 9 lbs 12.3 oz and 19 in long.
My personal blog entry is here.
Castle Valley Solargraph
Following up from the fascinating pinhole image a few days ago, I thought it would be good to share the pinhole work of Becky Ramotowski and in particular a recent set of Solargraphs she has produced. This latest one took my breath away. It is a nine day exposure on photo paper taken in Utah. She is also a talented astronomer and writer.
Why I need to go to Chicago:
3D images of 2D games
From Dotter Dotter via Chewing Pixels
When I say
that I can’t keep my pants on, I don’t mean to imply that the ladies keep throwing themselves at me. The problem is that I have virtually no butt.
cities made of jello (and other things)
Science of Charisma
One student of charisma thinks that Oprah Winfrey may be the most charismatic American of us all. John Neffinger is a founder of KNP Communications, a consulting firm that teaches clients how to be more charismatic through a particular combination of traits: strength plus warmth. “Winfrey shows lots of warmth both towards suffering people in her stories and towards people in her audience (i.e., ‘You get a car!’), and her nonverbals show she genuinely shares their sorrows and joys,” Neffinger says. “But she is also very stern and tough on folks who she feels have done wrong (just ask James Frey).”
Drawing on the work of Harvard and Princeton psychologists as well as the American National Election Studies, KNP emphasizes “nonverbal cues,” the aspects of how a person’s physical carriage combines with his words to himself to be persuasive. Nobody is better at this, Neffinger argues, than Winfrey, but other examples of strength mixed perfectly with warmth include Ann Richards and Fred Thompson. And, of course, “Reagan and Clinton are the two obvious examples.” Not to mention Barack Obama, “24″ actor and insurance pitchman Dennis Haysbert, and English actor Idris Elba.
mri
So, we went out Saturday to celebrate Amy’s mom’s birthday (she doesn’t like it when I refer to her as my mother-in-law 
) and Amy’s sister told me since a portion of the first pin they tried to put in my ring finger broke off — and is now lodged in the bone — I’ll never be able to have an MRI…. Could this be true?
The potential scenario seems gruesome.
pink iguanas
Pink iguanas on the Galapagos point to a much earlier evolution than Darwin’s finches.
During Darwin’s visit to the Galapagos in 1835 his observations of finch varieties with different-shaped beaks scattered across the archipelago’s some 100 islands were a key element in his formulation of the principles of evolution.
His studies on how one type had evolved into several after a probable chance migration thousands of years earlier from the Latin American mainland lay at the heart of his major work “On the Origin of Species,” published in 1859.
As the finches spread around the islands and their populations became cut off from each other, the birds adapted to the food locally available by developing beaks of a shape most suitable to harvest it, his research showed.
Darwin did not visit areas inhabited by the pink land iguana and so missed the species, whose existence suggests diversification in the Galapagos happened some five million years ago. That is far earlier than attributed to most other Galapagos species like the finches, Gentile said.
something, 24
He had named his daughter Ablasom.
iPhone Sketches
Quick sketches by Stef Kardos done with Brushes on the iPhone. (thanks, Dale)
parking lot corner
East Liberty Post Office parking lot, Pittsburgh, PA.
Dear Clusterflock
How do you define your personal space?
AI?
The HAL of Clusterflock just told me to slow down. I was posting comments too quickly.
