(Via Bayou Renaissance Man.)
See also A Ilúvatarinya! En ná pelecco cárinyesse.
Author: Don
Level 6 dream
I ran one of my photographs through the Deep Dream Generator,1 over and over again, eventually yielding the above image. Can you identify what the subject was? (Click to enbiggen.)
Here’s an intermediate stage:
Spoiler
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and the original:
Spoiler
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A few more:
In the news today
• An explosive announcement concerning Yellowstone National Park
• A re-visioning of Mononoke Hime
• A history of “conceptual writing”
• An audio plugin to blend divine proportion into your music Update: now offline.
• Live tribble cam Update: now offline.
It’s possible that not all of the above news releases are related to today’s date.
Update:
More Kansas weather scheduled
We had a brown Christmas here this past winter. We’re going to make up for that with a white Easter tomorrow, or so the weatherman says, with one to three inches of anthropogenic global warming falling after midnight.
Today was the first time in nearly three weeks that the wind wasn’t furiously howling all day long. I was finally able to get out to the botanical garden to take some pictures.
Ursine melodies
Here’s a set of variations on a simple traditional tune, “The Bear.” Since this is played entirely on the white keys of the piano, the critter most likely is a polar bear. As usual, it’s my computer playing, not me.
Update: The score is here for the morbidly curious. You can right-click and download the mp3 here.
Black pawns matter
I’m rather preoccupied at the moment, but I’ll be back eventually. In the meantime, here’s a chess problem to amuse you. There is something wrong with this position. Find the problem, correct it, and then find a mate-in-one for white, no matter how you fix it. You can find solutions in the comments here.
Odder ends
Did you ever get the feeling that, if only you could figure out just what the hell was going on, you’d wish you hadn’t?
Solomon in all his glory couldn’t touch my coffee options!
Hillary Clinton or Cannibal Corpse: Easy Decision
(Via Ubu.)
Sakura, sakura
Here’s a handy schedule of expected cherry blossom bloom times, in case you should be heading to Japan during the next few months. If you can’t go to Japan, you can visit the botanical garden in Wichita, where the Okame cherry, above, has just started flowering.
The Japanese apricot is in full bloom now. Thanks to new construction and landscaping, it is no longer possible to get close to tree, but you don’t need to get close to appreciate its powerful fragrance.
A bunch of princesses
From tonight’s dress rehearsal of The Firebird.
Blue and black
I spent the evening photographing a tech rehearsal for a dance program. Here are three of the pictures. There are about 1600 more to go through. The dress rehearsal is Thursday, and I’ll probably take at least as many more then.
Mind your head
Some aspects of GATE are not well thought-out, e.g., the girls’ armor. What purpose do the pointed projections on the pauldrons serve? If one of the warrior maidens tilts her head to the side, she’s liable to pierce her ear or worse. Also, I don’t recall ever seeing any of the girls with helmets, even in the middle of battles. It may be that on the far side of the gate women’s skulls are so thick and dense that head protection is superfluous, but I am skeptical.
Hell has frozen over …
… and pigs are flying. Dennou Coil has finally been licensed for North America. The Mouretsu Pirates movie has also been licensed.
Comforting thought
Only one or two of the candidates are as bad as Mussolini. The others are, well, better than Mussolini. I think.
Moore notes also that “Many people have lead perfectly good lives under perfectly awful governments;” which is probably true but not particularly reassuring.
Fuzzy details
I did some preliminary spring cleaning in the tiny garden out front, and kept one of the plumes from the clump of ornamental grass (Miscanthus sinensis?) to give Helicon Focus a workout. The picture above was composed from 48 slices and has a depth of field of about three inches.
Technically still winter …
… but there was some color at the botanical garden yesterday.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The calendar says it’s February, but it’s May outside. I took the day off, and in a little while I’m going to go out and enjoy the weather. While I’m out, here’s some miscellaneous nonsense for you. As usual, I forget where I found most of these.
The more Pope Frankie flaps his mouth, the more I miss Bennie and J.P.
Continue reading “What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?”
Reflections in the baptismal font
This afternoon in the cathedral.
Here we go again
While I might have felt earthquakes at a greater frequency during the year I lived in San Francisco, during the past few years I have experienced a larger number here in Kansas than in all the years I lived in the allegedly more seismically-active west, most recently earlier this hour.
Footnote on Sulphur Island
An unexpected volcanic hazard:
One of the few videos of a phreatic blowout on Iwo Jima turned out to not be phreatic at all. Instead it was heat affecting an old 16 inch shell from Iowa that had fallen into the ocean. As the spot inflated up and became the new beach it dried out and heated and “boom”. Volcanic artillery is something of a novelty. Cryptoshelling with magmatic release…
Evil and odious
Years ago, when I was a youngster in Bigamy City, Utah2, I played games stepping on the cracks between sidewalk blocks while walking home from the park. My favorite was as follows:
Step on a crack with the right foot.
Step on a crack with the left foot.
Reverse that: left, then right.
Take the entire sequence so far and reverse it: left, right, right, left.
Now take the entire eight-step sequence, and reverse that: left, right, right, left, right, left, left, right.
And so on.
I could usually keep the sequence straight for 64 cracks or so, but eventually I would either be distracted by something or run out of sidewalk. Later I found that if you arranged black and white boxes in a square grid using the sequence, the sides of which square were a power of two, you’d get a pattern with a high degree of symmetry. You could also use “0” and “1” to represent the elements of the sequence, which led to other sorts of games.
Last night, while browsing around online, I discovered that my game does in fact have a name: the Thue-Morse sequence. I was amused to see that one of the ways of generating it involves the notion of “evil” and “odious” numbers.