Damn, I'm now juggling crocheting, knitting, and quilting projects. I swear, if I ever mention taking up tatting, someone come slap me. One can be too crafty for one's own good.
Cool clocks! [both via PCJM] The Human Clock displays the time using individual pictures of people holding signs for each minute in the day. Very cool, though it isn't set up to let you browse the images so you have to just let time pass to see the various pictures. The Industrious Clock gives the time to the second, with each digit changing using video of a hand erasing the digit and writing a new one. A bit hypnotic.
This story of homeless children and the mythology they have created to explain why the world is so bad is the most heartbreaking thing I have read in a long time. [via Rebecca's Pocket]
I have no intention of bidding, but I am fascinated by the Survivor:Africa props Ebay auction. They keep adding stuff, and the bidding is higher than I guessed. However, the bids are dropping from when I checked earlier this morning - I guess some people didn't get approved by the agency that's validating the bids. At this point, the highest bid is $25,100 for the immunity idol, and the cheapest thing to bid in on is "Empty cans on a rope" at $490.
I did notice that the charity that is benefiting seems to have a lot of Hollywood connections - probably because the husband of the woman who started it is a producer. I somehow got the impression watching the show that they were more Africa-based and -focused, and more grassroots (I guess I confused them with the hospital they showed....), when in fact they do general research and get about 20 million dollars in donations a year. Not that that negates the good of their work, and there are certainly things that can only be done effectively with a lot of money and people. Their annual report even, at a glance, seems to show a good distribution of what the money goes to. You do check out the annual reports of the groups you donate money to, don't you? Your donations are only as effective as the agency managing them...
Another for LoTR fans, you can buy your very own One Ring, in a range of metals and lettering colors. I admit to spending a couple of minutes thinking it would look cool to wear one on a chain around my neck (like they show partway down the page) until I came to my senses and realized it would actually be unbearably dorky. Too bad... [via Windowseat]
There is a nice legal summary of the movie and music copyright issues stemming out of the DMCA and CSS in The Promise And Peril of Hollywood's Intellectual Property Strategy For The Digital Age, taking the stance that copyrights should be protected, but not at the price of the consumer being unable to make legitimate use of works they have paid for acces to. The current attempt to legislate a digital rights management scheme seems to eliminate the concept of fair use as anything more than viewing a work, individually, in only the way that the vendor (who, note, is not the creator) deems allowable. [via RRE]
More in the annals of not being able to predict our impact on the environment: Birth-control pill causing problems for fish [via News We Can Use]. Says the article:
Women who take birth control pills or hormone therapy are flushing enough hormones down the toilet to make male fish downstream produce eggs, a Canadian study shows. ... Male fish produce eggs in their testes. Female fish are stimulated by the extra hormones to produce eggs at the wrong times of year. And there are questions, still unanswered, about whether these chemically altered fish are capable of reproducing at all.They seem to have found that a city of even 6000 women on the pill is enough to get this effect - making this potentially significant. But given the obvious effects of chemical dumping in streams, and our so-so effectiveness in eliminating those practices, what successes can we anticipate in hoping for new drugs, or sewage treatment processes, to reduce these effects? Here's a new slogan it might be time to break out (for so many reasons) - "Mother Earth Loves Abstinence".
A little satyrical news humor fix, what with The Onion being on another break: Apple Faithful Ready "Ooohs", "Aaahs" for Jobs Keynote. Or Hard Drive Sick of All This Crap. Heck, just switch over to BBspot entirely....
So, if you are looking for a Lord of the Rings personality test, try here.
And, since this seems an opportune time to talk about it, I did go see the movie - opening night, of course. While I think the books are significantly better, and more so than just in the way that the book is "always" better than the movie, I thought it was a very good rendition. I could have done with less troll in Moria, and a lot more Lothlorien. My biggest disappointment was the non-existence of the strained relationship between Gimli and Legolas, and between dwarves and elves in general. First, because I love both Legolas's refusal to go free when his friends are blindfolded, and Gimli's request for a strand of Galadriel's hair. But also because it falls into a general simplification the movie makes of smoothing over the differences between the members of the Fellowship. The minimization of Boromir's resistance of Aragorn as their leader and eliminating the option of keeping the Ring with the elves contributes to this also. So, while I understand that the book must be simplified, part of the book's depth comes from the fact that there is not a simple good versus evil, and that the good people can be in conflict, even when they are sincerely trying to do good (witness Sam versus Frodo on the topic of Gollum in later books...). But, all told, the movie is a good simplification and faithful as far as it goes, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Last night we got a beautiful first real snow of the year - thick, fluffy wet flakes that clung to everything, falling on clear roads and leaving several inches that stayed white even though most of the day today. I'm glad I got back in time to see it.
Because it made me laugh out loud, I share with you a snippet from a recent Montykins on driving behind a guy in a pickup with as "I Never Drive Faster Than My Angels Can Fly" license-plate frame:
It also seems like he knows how fast his angels can fly. Maybe he's done some speed trials out on the salt flats, and determined that as long as he goes slower that 76.87 mph, he's protected from skidding out. But if he pushes it to 85.6, losing the slower of his two angels, he'll skid out but still be saved from smashing the windshield with his forehead. Frankly, if I were his angels (if I'm going to imagine being a guardian angel, I may as well imagine being both of them), that sort of scientific testing would have annoyed me. I would have taken a few runs off just to mess with his statistics.
You're already too late - these two guys are already in line in front of you for Star Wars Episode II (coming out over four months from now). Say they:
"Waiting for Star Wars is an art project designed to capture the evolution and journey of one person's wait for a single event (Star Wars Episode II). It will be captured by time-indexed photographs taken every hour as well as pictures and video of the people we interact with.Or, they're geeks with a good cover story. You choose. [via #!/usr/bin/girl]This project also explores the issue of the pursuit of happiness. It asks how much will a person sacrifice for a temporary acquisition, and questions whether a person can be happy with just food and shelter in pursuit of that acquisition. It also asks, will society as a whole fear or accept people for not desiring the things they desire, or for desiring things they consider frivilous or ridiculous. Finally, as we move into the next millennium, I wonder if our fast-paced society has become unwilling to slow down and wait for the things that bring us the greatest joy. This wait will test my mettle as I attempt to do just that."
It's a bad day.
It's a snow day.
When'd you get down to my bones?
-- Snow Day, Lisa Loeb
It's a train ride.
It's a bad day.
You're my medicine.
It's a full moon.
It's a snow day.
Where'll I find that wishing stone?
The beads, the records
all the calls, and the drinks alone.
I don't use profanity much in this weblog, but I'm so sick of that show fucking with us.
And while I'm happy with the Screenshot site layout and page format, I'll be trying out a new color scheme for the year. I'm still tweaking, so if it looks bad on your screen, let me know.
For my holidays, I spent a blissful two weeks almost entirely off-line, so I have a big e-mail backlog, and not many interesting links collected. I'll ramp back up over the next few days. But, to keep this from being totally link-free, I'll mention that the Brunching Shuttlecock's Geek Hierarchy is very funny (if you're a bit geeky yourself, though clearly not as geeky as the people listed). The Science Behind the X-Files [via PCJM] is a nice little site that hasn't updated in a long time, but back when X-Files didn't suck it pointed out the real science in the show and provided links to resources to learn more. You can also browse the Gallery of Unfortunate Christmas Cards [also via PCJM] and make sure yours didn't make the list. And, of course, stop by the Year-End Google Zeitgeist [via Breaching the Web] and browse their year-in-review-via-search query.
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