Author: Don

Miscellany

If you’re a creative sort, you have an opportunity to collaborate with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, the deadline is next Monday. I wish I’d heard about this earlier.

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Coming attractions: Pixy might be able to see Comets Lemmon and PanSTARRS now. The latter should be visible to those of us in the northern hemisphere soon.

There are more comet pictures here.

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Vertical, Inc., is considering whether to translate Yusuke Kishi’s Shin Sekai Yori. If an English-language copy of the novel would be worth $25 to you, go to Vertical’s Tumblr page and “like” it. They need 4500 people to express an interest before they’ll undertake the project, and I was only #699.

Kishi does have one book available in English translation. I’ll probably include The Crimson Labyrinth in my next Amazon.com order.

If you’re not watching the anime Shin Sekai Yori, you’re missing one of the finest — and most nightmarish — science fiction stories ever broadcast.

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Bambi Meets Godzilla, rebuilt:

You can watch it in 1080 if your computer can handle it.

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Professor Mondo‘s novel is now available as pixels at Amazon.com. I just got a new pair of glasses, so I’ll probably wait for the print edition and read it the way books were meant to be read, on dead trees. You can read one of his short stories here.

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A note on current events in the Catholic Church: everything you read in the secular press is complete and absolute BS. Don’t believe anything you read. I suggest checking in occasionally with Elizabeth Scalia if you want an informed perspective.

Meanwhile, here’s the Vatican version of March Madness, and Christopher Buckley’s introduction to simony.

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guess_who

Which famous British poet is this? The answer is here.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

Hard time

During my youth, I was sent to four grade schools and three high schools, public and parochial, where I spent most of my time feigning attention and wishing I could go off by myself and read and explore all day. I eventually realized that the purpose of these schools had nothing to do with learning. They existed to keep me under close supervision and out of my parents’ hair during the day; any real education that might happen was incidental. The American school systems, public and private, are the greatest achievements in day care in the history of civilization.

I’m not the first person to observe that. In 1972, John Holt wrote that

society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. Mom doesn’t want them hanging around the house, the citizens do not want them out in the streets, and workers do not want them in the labor force. What then do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? We put them in schools. That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.

(Via Joe Carter.)

No swimming

Y

At the same time the cathedral was being renovated, across the street a new, gigantic YMCA building (with two indoor swimming pools) was being built. Now that it’s finished, construction workers are demolishing the old building, where I used to swim laps in the crowded basement pool. The picture above was stitched together from nine snapshots taken over the fence around the site with my little go-everywhere camera.

Quote of the day

The Sanity Inspector:

In the 30s, serious intellectuals traveled to the Soviet Union to hail it as the future of humanity. In the 60s and 70s, writers, actors & other assorted glitterati went to Cuba to be schmoozed by El Jefe. And now North Korea has hauled in…a retired basketball player with a penchant for shock publicity. The quality of useful idiots is on a definite downward trajectory.

Insomnia and czárdás

Early this morning, after I had given up on getting any more sleep, I discovered that there are a number of full-length ballets on YouTube. Coppélia is a favorite of mine. The melodious score is worth listening to even if you are not interested in dance, and the story almost makes sense. There’s even a mad scientist (or magician). The video above is a Bolshoi Ballet performance.

Others I found include La Bayadere, The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and more, often in multiple versions and occasionally in HD. There’s also opera.

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And now for something completely different: Japanese Vikings, singing songs of [censored].

Update: And the video is gone. This is what you missed.

Stonehenge Lite

standing stones

We got six inches more snow yesterday, which makes 20 inches since Thursday. I took the scenic route to work this morning, passing by the “standing stones” in a nearby park.

Update: Here’s the panorama. Right-click and pick “little planet” for a different kind of view.


Standing Stones in Riverside Park in USA

This was assembled with Panorama Studio Pro. Hugin, which I had been using, is free, but it’s finicky, and I got tired of constantly finding and editing control points and still getting glitchy output. I also considered PTGui Pro. It has more features than Panorama Studio, notably HDR support, but it didn’t do quite as good a job stitching images together in my tests (though both worked much better than Hugin), and it costs twice as much.

Quote of the day, anime edition

Arhyalon, in a discussion of “aristocracy”:

So, is it impossible to show noble characters well on film?

Not at all. In fact, it is done very well over and over again today. By the Japanese in Anime.

One also sees it occasionally in British films. The Japanese and the English, both peoples with a long history of a noble class, seem to grok nobility in a way that the Americans and New Zealanders just do not.

Nonsense and stuff

Presenting the Pulp-O-Mizer.

Prairie pulp

(Via dotclue)

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While researching jurisimprudence, I came across some additions to The Rules:

Cunningham’s Law – The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.

Muphry’s Law — The principle that any criticism of the speech or writing of others will itself contain at least one error of usage or spelling

…

Chuck Jones’s Law – If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a bunny.

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Via the professor, here’s the Monty Python “Happy Valley” skit. which I hadn’t come across before.

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I quit watching teevee decades ago, so I missed this classic commercial. (Via Robbo.)

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When assembling a web page, be sure to close all tags. (How large a monitor would you need to read the final line above the footer?)

(Via Dustbury.)

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Even rapidly-flowing, basaltic lava, such as that which Tolbachik is currently erupting in Kamchatka, is dense stuff, as illustrated by the process of taking a sample, above.

Here’s a spherical panoramic movie of a helicopter touring Tolbachik. You can click and drag to change the direction of view.

Since lava is so dense, is it possible, with the appropriate footwear, to walk across a fresh flow? Sometimes, if conditions are right:

At Etna you can walk on small lava flows with good hiking boots (it might be their last hike, though), because the lava is more viscous than on Hawai’i. However, you won’t try on a larger flow because heat radiation is so huge.

You go first.

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Mt. Ranier

Mt. Rainier erupting the Milky Way.

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Some true rock music, made with volcanic phonolite.

Musical archaeology

The worst time-sink on the internet is TV Tropes, followed by Wikipedia. And then there’s YouTube, where I got trapped this weekend. I wondered if I could find some of the barely-remembered songs I heard back in ancient times. Many hours later, I had located quite a few. Here are some I unearthed. You can judge for yourselves whether these were buried treasures or something else.

Continue reading “Musical archaeology”

The horror, the horror

Who is more terrifyingly cheerful? Pinkie Pie?

(Via Borepatch.)

Or Fuura Kafuka?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OeDFWPgD2Aw

Looking up

Cathedral ceiling
Cathedral ceiling

I got myself a late little Christmas present, a (not quite) cheap Korean 8mm lens, and I’m seeing what I can do with 180°. The picture above of the full length of the Wichita cathedral’s ceiling is essentially a single frame. ((To be precise, It’s three exposures combined via Photoshop’s HDR function, but they’re stacked on top of each other, so to speak, rather than stitched side-by-side into a panorama. Each exposure contained the entire ceiling.)) The lens is manual focus, but that hardly matters: set the focus to two or three feet, and at f8 the depth of field contains the whole world.

Using the new lens, I did successfully make a spherical panorama, without the tripod visible, with just seven exposures. It’s not really difficult, but it’s not quite as easy as Florian Knorn would have you believe, at least with the freeware I use.

A few notes

A couple of noteworthy post titles:

Proposition: “The collective national IQ peaked in 1967, and has eroded since.”

From the comments:

I read a study years ago claiming that, since the Late Victorian era, the average written sentence loses five words per decade. ((Um, just how long was the average sentence in late Victorian times?)) I cannot claim to know the methodology of the study, but if it’s true, we may all be communicating in grunts, soon. Actually, some of the teens I hear on cell phones seemed to have reached that stage.

Another study I read claimed that, in the late sixties, early 70’s, one needed a vocabulary of about ten thousand words to comprehend a television news show, or to read a newspaper. In the eighties and nineties, it was five thousand.

Ignorance of Botany Is Ignorance of Literature

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Wonderduck is giving Vividred Operation a close look — a very close look, from a variety of viewpoints, from many low camera angles. Better him than me. Can you guess what is a vivid shade of red? Hint: think Strike Witches.

Izu Oshima, by the way, is a real place and a frequently active volcano — sometimes spectacularly so. If Oshima gets feisty during the course of the series, Vividred might be worth watching after all.