Prototype

This is the prototype of an improvised conceptual device.

I am testing out ideas for a new occasional series.

Heavy Plant

Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imagination to wish they were putting it on a tree or enough insight to see the irony that heavy plant machinery is commonly used in the removal of heavy plants.

Put yourself in the position of the trees, try to think like they might. The sign seems to suggest far more questions than it answers:

• How heavy would a plant have to be to warrant its own sign?
• Where on the transition from sapling to full tree might that point be?
• Is a single tree enough for a sign or should a tree in search of a sign join a copse to up their chances?

Just Write!

Got lazy and disinterested. Took a year off. Missed it. Had something to say about that. This says it better.

This week's links

If you aren't creeped out by elective plastic surgery the next 2 stories should fix that

Valeria Lukyanova, the Human Barbie Doll

http://www.gq.com/women/photos/201404/valeria-lukyanova-human-barbie-doll

"This Is Not a Barbie Doll. This Is an Actual Human Being." Not so long ago, images of a young girl washed over the Internet. She was impossibly blonde and impossibly shaped, and surely it was all a masterly work of Photoshop. Right? Michael Idov travels to meet with Eastern Bloc Barbie herself and discovers that her world is far more bizarre and twisted than anything in the photos By Michael Idov April 2014 More: When Human Ken Met Human Barbie Even More: Is Human Barb...

The GQ+A: Human Ken Doll Justin Jedlica on Meeting Human Barbie: The Q: GQ

http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-feed/2014/04/human-ken-doll-justin-jedlica-interview.html

E When Human Ken, an American whose real name is Justin Jedlica, met Human Barbie , it didn't go exactly as planned. There was no ride in a Beach Cruiser™. No steamy night in the dollhouse. Instead, Justin, 33, a self-described "housewife" who attained his look through 140 procedures, compared Valeria to a "drag queen." · · · So how do you and Valeria know each other? We met at a photo s...

Stem cells even more amazing than previously thought!

BBC News - Doctors implant lab-grown vagina

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26885335#TWEET1097810

Scans of the pelvic region were used to design a tube like 3D-scaffold for each patient Continue reading the main story Related Stories Will we ever grow replacement hands? Stem-cell livers grown in laboratory Scientists make 'lab-grown' kidney Four women have had new vaginas grown in the laboratory and i...

Look at the size of that needle! Not for me thanks. Anything that looks like that and comes with a "pain management kit" should be avoided.

Crowdfunded xNT Biohacking Implant Ships This Month | Digital Trends

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/soon-well-cyborgs-crowdfunded-xnt-biohacking-implant-ships-month/?tru=DyUN3#ixzz2yXsnwaH2

After mounting a successful crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo toward the end of last year, Dangerous Things is now ready to ship its xNT implant to consumers later this month. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, the xNT is an ISO/IEC 14443-A and fully NFC Type 2 compliant NTAG216 RFID chipset encased in a 2×12 mm cylindrical USP grade lead-free Schott 8625 biocompatible glass casing. In plain English, that basically means it's a tiny capsule designed to be inserted into your body (usually ...

Lazy post

Ooh look, a lazy blog post. How special.

Just some things I came across that I noticed.


Visual effects just keep getting better. However it seems we are now so consumed by consumerism that we're constrained to showcasing creativity as commercials (not that I'd have done anything different).

Science validates my coffee and beer heavy diet

Caffeine + alcohol keeps your chromosomes just rightSome telomeres are too long, and some are too short. Perhaps striking the right balance of caffeine and alcohol is the key to keeping them just right—as if you needed an excuse to have another hot toddy.

Cicadas attempt to deafen Sydney. This is the loudest year since I've been here without any question

Cicadas having a blast this year
Experts say the class of 2013 is already larger and louder than anything NSW has seen or heard for at least 10 years.

Theme party

Australia appears to love theme parties. I have been to more themed parties here than I would have thought reasonable. One was even themed 'the letter W'. I wore a puzzled expression all night and kept asking people, "What? No, really. What?!". I know how to party I do.

I loathe theme parties. They have the painful combination of over-enthusiasm, limited ability and enforced fun also common to amateur dramatics and office sports teams.

Theme parties are okay if you're a student in your first year of university and genuinely need a theme to help break the ice, even then they can be treated with a degree of suspicion. I found a wary participation and a willingness to make fun of yourself good idea at that point in life (any point in life come to think of it).

I can't remember whether it was my university or a friends where I went to a "traffic light party"; if you are attached and not interested in intimate company you wear a red badge or piece of clothing, if open to offers but not actively looking you wear a yellow one, and if you're up for anything you wear green. Inevitably by the end of the night those wearing yellow had drifted off to another party, the greens clung hopefully on, imagining that their shy glances and self-conscious conversational openings would be rewarded by finding someone as awkward as themselves, and all those wearing red had copped off with each other.

A similar degradation of behaviour is one thing I fear when attending any themed party. That one minute you'll be thinking how fun it will be to wear a big fake moustache and the next you'll find yourself sat next to a bubbling fondue set picking car keys out of a bowl.

The other major fear is the party-goer who has taken it all a bit too seriously. There is a certain type of person to whom themed parties present an opportunity to show off that they simply cannot resist, and in any case can barely suppress in everyday life. You know the person I mean. The one who can source a pantomime horse costume at twenty minutes notice and, given a little extra time, will also supply a willing volunteer to be the rear-end of same. Not only do these people show all the rest of us up by putting in far too much effort, they somehow do it absolutely stone cold sober and are quite often disgusted by my lack of effort and/or unwillingness to 'get into the spirit of it' until at least mildly inebriated. For some unknown reason these people seem intent on having the most talked about costume - regarding this as some form of moral victory - and so they patrol the room bugging anyone and everyone until they collect even the faintest of compliments. Quite often they will stay sober the entire time. Bastards!

Tonight, in case you haven't guessed, I have my office Christmas party. It has a Wild West theme (yes indeed, how very festive). I was cajoled into going by a co-worker. It's at a local RSL club a short distance from work. I work in local government. BAH, HUMBUG!!

Doodling is bad for your productivity

I appear to have had my notes interrupted by an inconvenient in-text dragon's nose. I hate it when that happens.

The trouble with tablets...

Kirk dealing with tablets Tribbles

[disclaimer - I wrote this a year ago but it still seems valid]

...is that once you've got one you need want a few of them. I really like the 7 inch tablet for casual browsing and it's exactly the right size for carrying around, but you can't make phone calls on it. If you want to do work then the 10 inch version is great for a portable device, but bloody hell it's heavy, and bulky.

Once you can also write on a tablet - the windows 8 tablet that I've been used has really good handwriting recognition - you also realise that the potential for this to be a go-to bit of kit in place of a notepad is enormous. However there is no way on earth I am going to start lugging around a lump like a 10 inch tablet that weighs the best part of a kilo to meetings out of the office.

Kitsch

I have always loved the mail order catalogues that come through the door for their unwavering devotion and enthusiastic marketing of tat.

Just occasionally one surpasses itself; the pictures that follow are all from just one catalogue.

Pity the poor fool who had to write the copy for these.

This week's links (weekly)

• A Personal Statement From Iain M Banks | SFX

  This is very sad news indeed.

  tags: blog

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Time

I used to have so much time and I used it so poorly. Now I have so little that I have to find ways of maximising the little I have available. Writing seems a distant and nostalgic dream, forgotten for a very pleasant but very busy present. I need someone to make me some time.



Note: I am not full of scotch. It's beer.

This week's links (weekly)

• BBC News - The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

• Official Google Reader Blog: Powering Down Google Reader

  This is really bad news. This appears to be Google dumping the only tool they really have for an open format in favour of...what? RSS is still useful and relevant it quite honestly doesn't matter that it's a geek thing, it powers how things like iTunes and podcasts work, and that's not just a geek thing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This week's links

• Making Rope (The old fashioned way) - YouTube
• mini. Quiet Babylon | The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations
  Hmmm Corporations as an invading, all conquering memetic AI infection. As a theory it has legs.
• Eat a Banana to Remedy Over-Caffeination
  Just fucking NO!!!!!! It took me ages to get this caffeinated why the bloody hell would I then eat the most foul fruit commonly available?
• Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator
  Because you should know this.
  • Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The quiet moments...

... Are where I draw breath. When no-one else is awake in the house or when there is ten minutes between tasks or appointments. That time in which one can have a cup of coffee and collect disparate thoughts together. They make the rest of the day tolerable.

Rather than filing the day with activity from start to end these times feel like they need to be valued as things in themselves to foster balance and focus. Have a cup of tea rather than making that phonecall that isn't really that urgent. Instead of filling these times by grabbing your mobile and jumping on Facebook or tweeting something no-one will read, look around, take a deep breath and just do nothing. Feel how the thoughts slowly start to flow back? Good, isn't it?

Trolleyed

This is one of those posts written to get the thought out of my head.

Abandoned shopping trolleys are urban clutter that speaks about the area it's found in.

An abandoned shopping trolley could mean any one or combination of the following:

• Can't afford a car
• Don't care about minor theft where commercial entities are the victim
• Bored kids live here
• Not my problem, it'll get cleaned up sooner or later
• The coin in the top is worth losing to get my shopping home without carrying it. What the hell I'll take a friend, we'll two trolley and plug them together so we don't even lose the coins

I suspect that abandoned trolleys are one of the things often targeted under zero tolerance urban management for these reasons. Getting rid of them immediately increases the feeling that the neighbourhood you're in is looked after and that the people in it actually care about where they live.

This is why it bothers me when I walk past 6 of these on my way to work in a neighbourhood which isn't exactly renowned for being wealthy but isn't exactly a hellhole either. Neglect of any sort bothers me.

Fraggles, Ben Folds Five & Nerdist

Okay Internet, I owe you (another) one, this made my day.

..and that was Thursday.

The view on my way home

Around the internet this month

A few things that have caught my eye.

What snake venom does to blood.

Oddly enough if you put enough rubber bands round a watermelon it explodes.

L

What would happen if you pitched a baseball at a significant fraction of the speed of light? XKCD has the answer.

So, as I was saying...

...or at least I thought I was... look I was writing something...or making something. It was important, I do remember that. There was some stuff I was angry about, some people I had to talk to and places that needed investigation.

Annoyingly people I know seem to have done a much better job of staying on top of this than I but I'm not letting it trouble me.

It would be good to know what I was doing though, I should try and remember that.

Always wondered about this...

From Evernote:

Why eating ice cream gives you brain freeze Clipped from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9219371/Why-eating-ice-cream-gives-you-brain-freeze.html

Why eating ice cream gives you brain freeze

Scientists have explained why eating ice cream too quickly can cause a painful headache - commonly known as brain freeze.

The ice cream headache known as brain freeze is brought on by a rapid increase in blood flow through a major blood vessel in the brain, the anterior cerebral artery Photo: ALAMY

By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor

10:00PM BST 22 Apr 2012

1 Comment

They hope to use the discovery to develop new treatments for migraine.

The instant headache brought on by ice cold food and drinks is the bane of the summer with ice-cream lovers often seen clutching their foreheads waiting for the gripping pain to ease.

Scientists have noticed that migraine sufferers are more prone to 'brain freeze' and wondered if the phenomenon could be turned to their advantage.

In experiments carried by a researchers at the National University of Ireland in Galway and Harvard Medical School a team of 13 healthy volunteers deliberately induced the brain freeze so the effects could be studied.

It was found that the pain was brought on by a rapid increase in blood flow through a major blood vessel in the brain, the anterior cerebral artery.

The ache subsided again once blood flow was restricted.

The findings were presented at the meeting Experimental Biology 2012 being in San Diego.

By bringing on brain freeze in the laboratory the researchers were able to study a headache from beginning to end without the need for drugs that would mask the causes and symptoms of the pain.

The volunteers drank iced water through a straw that was pressed against their palate and then drank water at room temperature.

Blood flow was monitored using a hand held Doppler.

It was found that the anterior cerebral artery dilated rapidly and flooded the brain with blood in conjunction to when the volunteers felt pain. Soon after this dilation occurred, the same vessel constricted as the volunteers' pain receded.

Co-author Jorge Serrador of Harvard Medical School and the War Related Illness and Injury Study Centre of the Veterans Affairs New Jersey Health Care System, said: "The brain is one of the relatively important organs in the body, and it needs to be working all the time. "It's fairly sensitive to temperature, so vasodilatation might be moving warm blood inside tissue to make sure the brain stays warm."

But because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induce pain, he said.

By constricting the blood vessel again the body could be acting to reduce the pressure before it reaches dangerous levels, he said.

Similar alterations in blood flow could be at work in migraines, post traumatic headaches, and other headache types, he added.

If further research confirms these suspicions, then finding ways to control blood flow could offer new treatments for these conditions. Drugs that block sudden vasodilatation or target channels involved specifically in the vasodilatation of headaches could be one way of changing headaches' course