This is a very interesting blog:
http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/
The articles fall into two main (color coded) categories: political (blue) and scientific (green). Currently there seem to be more science articles, but the political posts come in waves.
Tennis Ball Cannon
on
Old Toy Modding?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm sure many (most? all?) of us at one time or another have modded the packages the toys came in. My favorite package mod is the tennis ball cannon. I long thought this was something every kid had done since it was so common in my neighborhood, but I've since learned many children did not create recreational explosive devices, so I'll briefly explain the cannon.
Materials: can of tennis balls (the old metal kind), lighter fluid.
Tools needed: can opener, matches.
Procedure: 1) Open the can of balls in the usual manner. 2) Using a "triangle punch" style can opener puncture a hole in the SIDE of the can at the closed end. 3) Make a small dent in the can about 3 inches from the closed end so that a tennis ball dropped in the open end will lodge inside and leave an open volume at the base of the can. 4) Set the can closed end down on the ground making sure the open end is not pointing in the direction of anything you might miss if impacted by a tennis ball projectile. 5) Squirt some lighter fluid into the can through the triangular puncture at the base. 6) Light a match and touch it to the puncture hole and FOOOOM! Out comes the ball at an impressively high velocity.
This endeavor always degenerates into a game of burning tennis ball soccer. The balls soak up lighter fluid nicely and continue to burn for a good long while. This game is played on a road with cars parked along it to serve as obstacles under which you do not want the flaming ball to go, but under which the flaming ball does eventually end up resulting in children running away screaming to hide. The car never seems to explode like on TV however.
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www.smithtwins.com
In the future, busses will lift passengers up into the sky for no really good reason.
In other "news," the mighty Peter Jackson reportedly uses a telephone to transmit voice data in real-time to his mom. Rumors also suggest that he and other key players in the production of the widely acclaimed LotR trilogy purge their bodily waste into a toilet.
Has anyone done or seen an analysis of the cost of tape vs CDR/DVDR/HD not in meaningless terms of $/MB but in terms of actually being able to retrieve archived files?
In my experience the failure rate of tape easily overshadows the apparent cheapness of its storage capacity. It doesn't take many retrieval failures for the cost of recreating files/data to offset the apparent cheapness of tape's $/MB.
I'm happy you brought Project Gutenberg into the discussion. PG is a wonderful resource. When the project was nascent in the 1970s and 80s reading ASCII on your TRS-80 probably seemed pretty neat. But now that the PG dream of preserving and distributing the printed word through digital technology has stagnated into a dogmatic cult with the goal of preserving ASCII it's time to reevaluate the meaning of Project Gutenberg.
Those of us who are literate and computer savvy and have seen places other than the USA recognize the harm that reducing printed material to chunks of ASCII does. And far from mere loss of formatting or typographical embellishments much of the meaning of a text is destroyed when run through the chunky sieve of ASCII conversion. Most accented Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Non-Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Typographical features such as relative type size, style, and formatting are either lost entirely or reduced to the low-res rendering capabilities of monospaced ASCII. ASCII has no provision for rendering traditional methods of communicating typographically such as small caps, ligatures, distinction between hyphen, endash, and emdash, etc. despite the fact that virtually every printed text makes use of these features.
Digital technology has progressed without our friends at Project Gutenberg. There is an alternative to ASCII which is now standard to all major computing platforms: Unicode. From the unicode.org website:
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers (well, those who have moved on from their TRS-80s, anyway).
Why not use technology that attempts to accomodate the typographical traditions inherent in your source material rather than reducing that material to fit an obsolete technology?
And even if you still cling to your belief in the infinite beauty, timelessness, and universality of ASCII, please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very interesting blog: http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/ The articles fall into two main (color coded) categories: political (blue) and scientific (green). Currently there seem to be more science articles, but the political posts come in waves.
On the origional forum, I was saying something of the similair (except not nearly as well written!! hehe)
No, no, no. Let's be clear here. The article was not well written. It was well "architected" whetever the fuck that is.
I guess it's similar to the way in which I constructed this reply from precast concrete building components.
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The world's greatest stuff: www.smithtwins.com
I'm sure many (most? all?) of us at one time or another have modded the packages the toys came in. My favorite package mod is the tennis ball cannon. I long thought this was something every kid had done since it was so common in my neighborhood, but I've since learned many children did not create recreational explosive devices, so I'll briefly explain the cannon.
Materials: can of tennis balls (the old metal kind), lighter fluid.
Tools needed: can opener, matches.
Procedure: 1) Open the can of balls in the usual manner. 2) Using a "triangle punch" style can opener puncture a hole in the SIDE of the can at the closed end. 3) Make a small dent in the can about 3 inches from the closed end so that a tennis ball dropped in the open end will lodge inside and leave an open volume at the base of the can. 4) Set the can closed end down on the ground making sure the open end is not pointing in the direction of anything you might miss if impacted by a tennis ball projectile. 5) Squirt some lighter fluid into the can through the triangular puncture at the base. 6) Light a match and touch it to the puncture hole and FOOOOM! Out comes the ball at an impressively high velocity.
This endeavor always degenerates into a game of burning tennis ball soccer. The balls soak up lighter fluid nicely and continue to burn for a good long while. This game is played on a road with cars parked along it to serve as obstacles under which you do not want the flaming ball to go, but under which the flaming ball does eventually end up resulting in children running away screaming to hide. The car never seems to explode like on TV however.
---
www.smithtwins.com
In the future, busses will lift passengers up into the sky for no really good reason.
Pak introduces Sci-Fi to whole new audience: Women. Sci-Fi chick-flicks. Maybe I'm just a guy, but I don't see a future in this sub-genere.
In other "news," the mighty Peter Jackson reportedly uses a telephone to transmit voice data in real-time to his mom. Rumors also suggest that he and other key players in the production of the widely acclaimed LotR trilogy purge their bodily waste into a toilet.
Oh yeah? Well, I was able to put up TWO Christmas trees during one break! So there.
Has anyone done or seen an analysis of the cost of tape vs CDR/DVDR/HD not in meaningless terms of $/MB but in terms of actually being able to retrieve archived files?
In my experience the failure rate of tape easily overshadows the apparent cheapness of its storage capacity. It doesn't take many retrieval failures for the cost of recreating files/data to offset the apparent cheapness of tape's $/MB.
I'm happy you brought Project Gutenberg into the discussion. PG is a wonderful resource. When the project was nascent in the 1970s and 80s reading ASCII on your TRS-80 probably seemed pretty neat. But now that the PG dream of preserving and distributing the printed word through digital technology has stagnated into a dogmatic cult with the goal of preserving ASCII it's time to reevaluate the meaning of Project Gutenberg.
Those of us who are literate and computer savvy and have seen places other than the USA recognize the harm that reducing printed material to chunks of ASCII does. And far from mere loss of formatting or typographical embellishments much of the meaning of a text is destroyed when run through the chunky sieve of ASCII conversion. Most accented Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Non-Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Typographical features such as relative type size, style, and formatting are either lost entirely or reduced to the low-res rendering capabilities of monospaced ASCII. ASCII has no provision for rendering traditional methods of communicating typographically such as small caps, ligatures, distinction between hyphen, endash, and emdash, etc. despite the fact that virtually every printed text makes use of these features.
Digital technology has progressed without our friends at Project Gutenberg. There is an alternative to ASCII which is now standard to all major computing platforms: Unicode. From the unicode.org website:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers (well, those who have moved on from their TRS-80s, anyway).
Why not use technology that attempts to accomodate the typographical traditions inherent in your source material rather than reducing that material to fit an obsolete technology?
And even if you still cling to your belief in the infinite beauty, timelessness, and universality of ASCII, please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?