Month: August 2005

I love The Onion…

CNN reports that “nearly four months to the day since he announced in a hoarse voice on his evening newscast that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, longtime ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings died Sunday.” I am very saddened to hear this news, as I was a regular viewer of ABC News specifically because I preferred Jennings’ reporting to that of the other network news anchors. Just last week I actually wondered how he was doing in his chemotherapy, but obviously the cancer had advanced too quickly. ABC News has posted a nice retrospective of his life and career. He will definitely be missed.

Infinite Flickr: The Movie will blow your mind…

ypsi~dixit has an interesting post that contains a computation of how many punch cards it would take to read an MP3. The answer?

“Assuming a non-Hollerith encoding with eight bits per column, and an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps CBR, there would be 36,864 cards in that deck, and the card reader would need a throughput of 205 cards per second. It might be wise to include an 8-column sequence number, however, so that a misordered deck can be repaired by a card sorter; with 72 data columns per card, the total is precisely 40,960 cards (40K cards), requiring a 228 card/second throughput.” The 21 boxes of cards needed would by 5 feet 9 inches tall.

Punch cards are before my time, so I can’t claim any direct experience with them. My earliest storage technology was cassettes on a ZX81; now that was high-tech! I have to agree with his closing thought: “That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory astonishes”…

FlickrBlog describes some of the cool new features that Flickr recently introduced. Clustering allows for a more control over searching through sometimes ambiguous or redundant tags, and Flickr: Explore! allows you to automagically explore “interesting” photos from the last 24 hours.

Leave It To Bush is a hilariously weird video; volumes 2 and 3 are great as well…

Flickr user brevity’s photoset “50 people see…” is pretty cool:

I wrote a program to blend Flickr images which share the same tags. No human is involved in choosing, positioning, or blending the images.

Suggestions are welcome for new tags to try. The best tags imply a certain composition, like “sunset”, although I’ve gotten some interesting results with abstract words too.

eChalk has an amazing page dealing with color perception that demonstrates just how much our perception of color is influenced by surrounding hues. I’ve seen one of these examples before, but the movable masking graphics included on the page really highlight the illusions.

Snopes.com, a definitive source for determining the veracity of “common fallacies, misinformation, old wives’ tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items,” has collected some very funny user requests:

Every day our inbox fills with hundreds of questions that range from the routine to the extraordinary, the mundane to the fantastic. While we’re honored that our readers think to turn to us with these head-scratchers, many of their queries are too obscure or complicated for us to answer. Among the more unusual questions that are sent our way, we sometimes find a few seemingly posed with such a sense of urgency that we can’t help but wonder about the circumstances that prompted them — and the results.

Makes you wonder about some of those people…

Last Tuesday’s Doonesbury comic caused some controversy because of the use of the nickname “Turd Blossom” to describe presidential advisor Karl Rove. Funny thing is, this is not a made-up moniker, but is actually one of the nicknames used by W for Rove. I have no problem with it…