I enjoy an (admittedly waning) interest in the Photoshop contests on fark.com, and recently they ran a contest where the theme was Find Nemo somewhere unexpected. A cute idea, with several ideas that were pretty damned funny. One of the most hilarious to me was this one, which is a spoof of a particular photo which has been showing up on my Yahoo! page as the most e-mailed, seemingly for weeks.
Monthly Archives: June 2004
Templates
A nifty group of template for various cards and boxes can be found at Mirkwood Designs. Useful for craft projects, no doubt, and the author does not mind if you sell products which use his templates. Rudimentary, but with some good ideas.
This origami CD case is more clever and more useful. I’ve used it a couple of times when I’ve needed a CD case for mailing, but didn’t have any handy. I’ve thought about making a PostScript template for printing them out with logos, perhaps I’ll get to it later tonight.
Dodgeball
Today’s weekend movie was Dodgeball, starring Ben Stiller, and featuring a large list of cameo appearances from some fun celebrities. Ben Stiller plays White Goodman, evil head of the Globo Gym, who is trying to buy out Peter La Fluer, played by Vince Vaughn, who owns Average Joes Gym. As one might imagine, Globo Gym is an evil corporate body beautiful kind of place, and Average Joe’s is the kind of place where I might show up and run on the treadmill. It’s a tired plot; David v. Goliath, we’ve seen it before a hundred times.
And yet, I found it funny. Really funny. I admit it with some embarassment, but it’s actually one of the funnier movies I’ve seen in quite some time. Perhaps it was the fact that I attended with a bunch of the younger crew from work, perhaps the stress of grinding out frames for Incredibles while worrying that my wife’s job is being outsourced to India is making me loopy, perhaps its just that I haven’t seen dorky guys hit in the head with wrenches enough this year, but I laughed a great deal. It’s not complicated, or deep, or even innovative. Stiller has turned out better performances, but perhaps none so over the top as this one, and it clearly works.
If you are looking for something cerebral, this isn’t it. If you want to see an absurd farce with lots of celebrity cameos, this is probably a good one to see. Aside: Lance Armstrong, you slay me.
A couple of caveats: Vince Vaughn looked like he slept through the whole production. Honestly guy, you are stealing the studios money when you sleepwalk through scenes. I don’t know what emotions you may have been trying for, but sheesh. The movie also leverages a few tired stereotypes: that people who are overweight are lazy, stupid or generally defective in character. It’s a common enough stereotype, and people continue to laugh at fat people when they fall down, and chortle when they think of fat people having sex. Heck, even I do occasionally, but the joke is just a bit too easy, isn’t it? C’mon.
Lecture over: even with the warts, this is a pretty damned funny movie. If you take yourself or your comedy seriously, you may not appreciate it’s finer qualities, but then you probably don’t go to see this one anyway. If you thrive on SouthPark and liked Baseketball, you’ll probably have a good time.
World Series Baseball
I was mulling over the mathematics of the World Series in one of my more bored moments, and decided to write some simple Python code to test an idea. The question underlying these graphs is essentially this: given that the probability of Team #1 winning any individual game is a probability p, what is the odds that the team will win the Series? And what is the average duration of the Series?
A few minutes of Python hacking gives the results in nice graphical form (courtesy of gdchart):
For some reason, the title along the Y axis of the second graph is screwy, I haven’t been able to figure out why. I’ll play with it later.
There are few surprises here: the probability graph is a sigmoid which begins at 0, goes through 0.5 at x = 0.5, and ramps off at 1.0. Similarly, the duration peaks when teams are evenly matched, somewhere around 5.8 games.
What was this worth? Not much. I just liked to make the graphs.
Python Neural Nets
Any tinkering I’ve done with neural nets is a decade or more in my past, but I’m still interested. Python News! provided this article on Hopfield networks as an intro, and the author and David Mertz wrote another that is also of interest.
Perspectives on a Classic
Ed Willis has an article entitled The Mythical Man-Month Revisited [Jun. 17, 2004] on onlamp.com. As I read it I can only imagine that the author is one of a number of young programmers who rode the dot.com bubble and now considers themselves hardened computer professionals, but who in fact have little experience or perspective on the field that they have chosen. Continue reading
Armadillo Scores Test Liftoff Success In Bid For X Prize
I woke up this morning with a bit of indigestion (when you are used to a rather spartan diet low in fats, the occasional indulgence doesn’t settle very well) and found Armadillo Scores Test Liftoff Success In Bid For X Prize, along with video of a vertical take off and landing for their test vehicle. Awesome.
It’s going to be a big week for the X-Prize. Burt Rutan and Paul Allen’s SpaceShipOne is scheduled to launch this weekend on a suborbital flight that will reach an altitude of 62 miles and carry an astronaut. Best wishes for a safe and successful launch.
I’m toying with the idea of blowing off a weekend of work and driving down to the Mojave Desert to see the launch. You only get a few chances in your life when you are forewarned of history in the making, and this very well might be one of them. I’ll do some research and see what the viewing opportunities are. If I don’t go, I’ll try to harvest some good video from websources after the launch.
Happy Anniversary!
Today is Carmen and my fourth anniversary. I can’t even begin to describe how terrific she makes my life and how happy I am that she agreed to be my wife. No trivial postings about baseball and the like, I’m off to a fancy dinner at the Pear Street Bistro. Tune in tomorrow more more trivia.
DIY for photography links
A nice collection of photography links can be found at DIY for photography links. I particularly liked the instructions for making your own Shroud of Turin, the GL-Cam page, and Gene Rhodes’ photoprojects.net.
The Brainf*ck CPU
Clifford Wolf wrote VHDL to implement a custom processor which executes the Brainf*ck programming language using a Spartan 2 FPGA chip. You can download the VHDL source and test cases from Clifford’s Homepage. Nutty stuff.
Misleading Headline
Sometimes you read a headline, and it just strikes you as odd. For instance, today on Yahoo! News, I read that:
Red Sox: Nixon To Be Activated Tonight
For some reason, I immediately thought of this image:
I wonder if he plays a good left field.
Let me give credit to www.gotfuturama.com for their terrific site which allowed me to find a nice image of robot Nixon (Season 2, A Head in the Polls). And apologies to Trot Nixon.
More silly USB devices…
Well, the plug in aquarium was completely useless, so this would have to score higher merely on the basis of utility. The iDuck USB Memory Storage Device is half rubber duckie, half USB memory drive. Strangely enough, I was thinking that I’d like a devil duck version, but I’ve been beaten to the punch.
Blog Additions – My Books and DVDs
I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but I added a couple of things on the sidebar to the right. A random selection from my book collection with an associated Amazon.com link will appear on the right, and similarly, another link for one of my DVD’s will appear under DVD. I don’t as yet have an Amazon associate ID, but then again, I probably don’t have very many readers either, so I doubt I will notice much. It’s mostly there just to give you guys an idea of the books that I read. I’ve got about twenty in the list so far, I’ll type in some more ISBN’s later and also do my DVD collection.
Enjoy!
Are really one nation under God?
Today the Supreme Court issued a ruling which reversed the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling that the phrase “under God” was unconstitutional. Instead of trying to present an actual legal argument about the separation of church and state, they chose instead to merely rule that Michael Newdow could not bring suit on behalf of his daughter because he did not have standing to sue. The decision resolves none of the issues surrounding the issue, and I suspect additional suits will be brought reasonably quickly to attempt to get the Justices to consider this issue and give a ruling.
Still, the court is telegraphing its intentions in its opinion in a way which I find fairly disturbing. I have to have more time to digest the full text, but Chief Justice Rehnquist seems very willing to allow the religious language in the pledge continue with what appears to me only the flimsiest of justifications. I find such reasoning inexplicable given the court’s consistent rulings in the area of school prayer.
I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this case.
There are some good articles on oyez.com concerning the case and the issues surrounding it.
Why POV-Ray is bad…
Apparently after two years of noodling around, the POV-Ray team has finally seen fit to release a new version of their rendering software. I can’t help but be mystified at how this project continues to generate enthusiasm among the amateur computer graphics community. Continue reading