My last post entitled “a cool picture” is an image of a bullet moving through some fluid medium at somewhat high velocity. I took the liberty of doing a reasonable simulation of this event. I did this for almost no reason other than as a challenge to myself and as what can only be described as my ability to endlessly procrastinate my OP. I show images of said simulation below. (more…)

Yes, this was linked on digg. Regardless it’s a cool picture. Pretty much every important feature in a flow like this can be seen with a lot of detail. Don’t really know how they got this shot or any specifics. (more…)

I can remember quite well back to my days of youth listening to children’s albums (they were tapes back then). I am sure I could still belt out a rough sketch of ‘Baby Beluga’ or ‘Bananaphone.’ I remember going to see ‘Sharon, Lois, & Bram’ at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum (the largest in the world no less). However, children’s music was always kind of odd for me. I can remember happily listening to children’s tunes on Nickelodeon but I also started watching MTV when I was about 6 or 7. This was when they still played almost exclusively music videos. There was an odd likeness between these two channels. The kids songs on Nickelodeon (i.e. ‘The Cat Came Back’ and pretty much everything on Sharon, Lois & Bram) were always coordinated with cartoons or video essentially making them into the children’s equivalent of MTV music videos. The real counterpoint was the child like nature of a lot of MTV music videos. I remember being enthralled with ‘They Might Be Giants’ and ‘Ah Ha’ music videos. So I have always been a big believer in the Disney and Pixar philosophy that just because its for kids doesn’t mean it has to be dull or simplistic. The converse also being true. Music listeners often time forget that even ‘adult’ tunes can be quite whimsical and even… childish. Therefore, enter indie rock children’s CD’s. ‘For The Kids 3‘ is clearly not the first stab at this (it is 3 after all) but it does an excellent job. (more…)

Thanks for posting this. I haven’t been able to dedicate any time to music recently and I’m really in need of some good new stuff. Any recommendations in addition to those made in the post would be welcome.

Today I bought a random book at a store on State St. in Ann Arbor, MI (Shaman Drum, which is an interesting little bookstore). It is, “An Imaginary Tale, The Story of “. It looks to be fairly technical, but also appears to be the so-called “story” of the development of imaginary number theory. Now, a whole bunch of this book is a bit beyond me right now I think, but it might be pretty fun. I really shouldn’t be buying stuff like this knowing full well that I won’t have time to finish it anytime before my OP (Nov. 2nd). Cheers.

Dear MLB.com,

As evidenced by your almost immediate response to the release of the iPhone on your mobile updates page for real-time info, stats and pitch-by-bitch play, some non-trivial number of your customers must have iPhones by now. Anyone who reads this site with any regularity would know that I waited in line to get an iPhone on the day it was released, and was pleased by your response. Even though most of the places I watch or check baseball have some sort of Wi-Fi, I still prefer the low-bandwidth version a large part of the time. However recently you have decided to put a banner ad across the top of most of these pages. This means that on any of the real-time game stat and pitch-by-bitch windows, the most important stats are now obfuscated as there is no longer enough real estate on the iPhone screen, and no real way to scale the image. This is pretty much me just whining however it has resulted in me not using that page very much anymore. If it is necessary to use ads at all, I am sure there is a more logical way to place that ad so the content doesn’t suffer.

Thank you,
acosta

Since I have been meaning to punch out some quality posts for vdov I thought I would wrap up a couple odds and ends here. I have a couple mini reviews on the topics of music, religion, a book, movies, and some updates from the vdov crowd and those over to the right of the page in our blogroll. (more…)

The good people over at The New Criterion have seen their fair share of problems recently. As some of you might know, I had done some consulting work for them and it was just one thing after another. None of them were anyone’s particular fault, though the accumulation of a wide range of issues resulted in near-constant problems and downtime, including multiple root-level and apache-level comprimises. I’ll avoid describing the evolution of those issues, but this last one is just funny, mostly because I haven’t ever really seen this type of stuff before on one of my own machines. (more…)