Yule Be Rockin'

Hello one and everyone. By way of Christmastime greetings I have composed a simple video for all y'all. I'm probably only going to leave it up for a short while since it adds a fringe to the copyright of the music which accompanies it. It may be found here. I apologize if you read this and do not see your shining smiling face in the video. It was hastily thrown together. Perhaps a lame excuse, but there you have it. May the season find you all happy and without loss of limb or addition of taxes.

an unknowwwn holiday

Well, not a holiday as such.
But I would like to take this opportunity to announce:
4 January is national Trivia and Random Fact day.
Upon discovering this day, obviously designed in my honor, I elected that festivities of some kind should be held that day or evening. If you can come that day I will inform you of details. Either the Wagner festival or much more likely it is time for some people to see Uncorked... hmmm.

You know they say - how it was later said of Scrooge, he kept Christmas all the year... well... I keep random fact day all the year. so there.

Supply and Demand

If all the diamonds stored by major diamond companies were released, a perfect two-carat diamond would be worth about three dollars.

Edward Lear

CHAPTER IX
THE HISTORY OF THE SEVEN YOUNG GUINEA PIGS

The Seven young Guinea Pigs went into a garden full of Gooseberry-bushes and Tiggory-trees, under one of which they fell asleep. When they awoke, they saw a large Lettuce which had grown out of the ground while they had been sleeping, and which had an immense number of green leaves. At which they all exclaimed:

'Lettuce! O Lettuce!
'Let us, O let us,
'O Lettuce leaves,
'O let us leave this tree and eat
'Lettuce, O let us, Lettuce leaves!'

And instantly the Seven young Guinea Pigs rushed with such extreme force against the Lettuce-plant, and hit their heads so vividly against its stalk, that the concussion brought on directly an incipient transitional inflammation of their noses, which grew worse and worse and worse and worse till it incidentally killed them all Seven.

And that was the end of the Seven young Guinea Pigs.

Going like hotcakes

Get yours while they last. Think of it as a gift to your quite distant descendants.

And speaking of changes in the earth, whichever side of the global warming debate you find yourself on, I think we can all agree that scams don't really help anyone. Well, I suppose they help the scammers. My favorite parts of the article and comments: possibly 1/3 of Indian offset projects fail the additionality test, and the Norwegian organization that is flooded with $ from carbon-offset sales and is unable to execute projects that fill the orders. Bottom line for some people is that global warming provides a great business opportunity.

Ben, that is a wonderful piece of music. I had difficulty getting past the first few bars, though. I guess I need to practice more.

Hey, who all would be down for a holidays-time party? Time, place, activities?

I love living here

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling's Beijing duplex. She's cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He's been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it's a technical issue. This is the day he learns he's wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: "Yes?"

"Are you home?" asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

"Yes."

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door -- 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu's hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it's done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

*twitch*

The Sixth IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality
Tue, Nov. 13 - Fri, Nov. 16, 2007
Nara-Ken New Public Hall, Nara, Japan


ISMAR 2007 is over with great success!!

The conference general chair Haruo Takemura would like to thank everyone who helped to make the conference the success that it was with 241 participants. In particular, I would like to thank all of the sponsors, chairs and student volunteers for their financial support and dedication to the conference.
ISMAR 2008 will be held in Cambridge, UK, on a week of September 14th, 2008. More details will soon be available.

Riddle me this

A heterological word is one that does not describe itself. So... is 'heterological' a heterological word?


Don't injure yourself trying to figure it out. If you get tired, leave - go get something to eat, maybe take a little nap - and come back to it later. It will still be here.

If you don't like the implications and don't mind a bit of language theory, you can eyeball this article. It essentially points out that "'heterological'" and "heterological" are two different things.

When you have that down, consider the object in this image, which contains 3 copies of the phrase 'mobius strip', having the phrase only actually printed 1.5 times.



And finally, realize that it is possible to visualize more than 3 dimensions. (If you look at the number 4, you'll see that each axis can be seen as being at a 90 degree angle to each of the other three axes, although you can't really get your brain to see all 4 at once. Fun, huh?)