Another Magic post.  Wow.  I’m completely flabbergasted, blown away, amazed, impressed, excited.  What a wonderful mechanic.  What a wonderful card. What creativity. And Mike didn’t even mention the best part, which is that the discard happens at instant speed, which is just what my multiplayer discard deck is missing, to the point that I was considering maindecking Vedalken Orrery. It will be a fun, challenging card to play, trying to keep track of what I’ve seen in my opponents’ hands to know if I can safely activate Nezumi Shortfang if I already have one flipped.

Follow?  I mean, if you play Magic, do you follow? Otherwise there’s really no chance you could follow, so go ahead and ignore the rest of this post. Here’s how it would play out: I’ve cast a Nezumi Shortfang and used it when my opponent has one card in his hand. The player discards that card, and I flip Nezumi Shortfang (if you haven’t followed the link to the card yet, do so now.) Then my opponent gets back to two cards in hand, and I have a second Nezumi Shortfang in play. What does my opponent now have in his hand? If he has an instant, I can activate the Rat, and in response he can cast the instant. Then when the Rat’s ability resolves, he’ll have one card in his hand, which he’ll discard. The Nezumi Shortfang will flip and become a second Stabwhisker the Odious (great name), but under the new Legends rule, both Stabwhiskers will die as a state-based effect. So for the cost of having his hand forced slightly, he’ll change my one-for-zero into a much more favorable (for him) two-for-two. So I’ll have to be really sure I keep track of what he’s holding, knowledge I should have received from Duresses and so forth. But what if he’s drawn a card or two that I haven’t seen yet? I’ll have to make a guess based on what he’s played so far: what are the instants he’s likely to be playing, and and what’s the likelihood of him holding one. Even if it’s a Giant Growth, it would probably behoove him to Giant Growth one of my creatures so that his hand can empty and the Rat can flip.

“[Phoebe] may be our first encounter with a Kuiper belt object.”

This guy takes requests for songs to write and record. The preceding bit consisted of excerpts from a song that is the opposite of a diss track. He also undertakes severely constrained writing assignments, such as writing a Christmas song about falling down the stairs using only words beginning with B, E, M, P, and S: “Similarly my back’s sore probably pained ever since sliding so effervescently past seventy stairs … So everybody better buy me some super excellent presents.” But that’s not quite as cool as the constraints on False Impersonation — read the Songs To Wear Pants To page for details.

ASCII Art Stereograms.  For real.  The fact that this is possible makes my brain hurt.

Great print quality on any paper, even sandpaper (up to 300 grit) … Quick printing at up to 9 pages per millisecond in black and 7 pages per hour in color

Pop quiz: Who’s this? (Nudity)

No, it’s not.  It’s this girl. (Semi nudity)

Another shot from the same shoot to strengthen the case. (Nudity)

But good grief, it’s convincing, isn’t it?  There’s an entire possible career open for this “Emmie”.

Overstock.com’s prices on books are amazing!  They undercut Amazon on every item I wanted to buy.  I thought that there would be no way they could undercut $10.50 for Eats, Shoots & Leaves (that’s 40% off list), but Overstock just wants $7.87 for it (55% off list).  Unbelievable.

Anton Chekov is a nicer guy than I would have expected. I have a couple of complaints with his supporting large chain bookstores rather than the independent booksellers that drove his early success, but at least he was nice enough to give a reading. A shame that B&N kicked him out. I’m not the only one upset: a woman in the audience was “shocked” and “outraged” that they would evict an author who was trying to give a reading. But it’s OK, after being thrown out he was considerate enough to hold a book signing in Union Square.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Read the page for details about the astute 11-year-old, as well as the student who apologizes to Chekov for missing his Central Park play last summer.

As someone with a fair amount of experience with tastings, I can assure you that the “New Cheerios” survey is completely plausible.

So many other bits to remark on.  Do you want to trade shoes?”  The time warp (“For the remaining five loops, I looked at my watch and said “5:25″ at the exact same moment; it was now part of our sequence.”) Could you keep a straight face during these stunts? I don’t think I could, and I have improv experience. And why do I find this wonderful and Tom Greene’s antics deplorable? (I think it’s because so many of Greene’s bits have a strong thread of inherent cruelty to them, and these don’t.)

I have a feeling that it should really bother me that I think this stunt would have been more impressive if the cupcakes were poisoned. I mean, OK, not really, but in a fictional story, say. No? OK, well, forget I said anything.

Weirdest.  Thing.  Since.  ToHearADuckQuackPressSeven.

I hate those period-delimited descriptions.  Can’t.  Stand.  Them.  But nothing else will prepare you for subservientchicken.com.  Don’t ask questions.  Don’t Google for information.  Just go and tell the chicken what to do.

OK, since I’ve been asked multiple times: You may have gathered from internal syntactic clues, such as the discontinuities in image and lighting between the end of an action and the neutral state; or from internal evidence from room objects jumping around untouched; or from external reasoning such as “with multiple people visiting, he can’t be reacting to every person’s request in real time”; or from his inability to perform certain tasks; or from Eliza-like errors of extracting keywords from larger phrases and using them in the wrong sense (”turn into a newt” causing him to turn in place); or from the inability to precisely refine or repeat actions (”jump twice” yielding a single jump, “turn around three times” not being performed three times) — But the answer is, no, there’s not a live guy in a chicken suit following your instructions.

You have almost certainly seen the late-nineteenth century motion study work of Eadweard Muybridge before, even if you did not know what it was. There’s a great online exhibit.

Tolweb’s Tree of Life web project is so cool, you wish it was 1000 times as detailed as it is. Among other things, you’ll learn that they don’t teach you about Archaea in high school (or didn’t me), bats are more closely related to humans than they are to rodents, penis worms and peanut worms are different, and water bears aren’t nearly as cute as you’d hope.

It’s painfully self-aware pop art, and I love it.  Check out the globe.  Everything is, unfortunately, sold out.

01/02/04 08:16:32

Artificial limbs controlled by mind power: “Brain implants that could allow severely disabled people to control prosthetic limbs with their minds could be ready for use within two years, according to a team of scientists.  Their claim comes after tests with monkeys showed that the animals could control a robotic arm using just their thoughts.”

Another cool link discovered through Random TinyURL: Rhetorical Systems’ TTS demo.  Really, try it.  [wav]

Gernot Katzer’s Spice Dictionary is an amazing repository of information on more than 100 herbs and spices.  Should be bookmarked by every culinary enthusiast.

Here’s an aerial picture of my house.  My neighborhood, anyway.

Read about RealDriver’s amazing full-sized cab simulator of a GP-38 for use with Microsoft’s Train Simulator.  They also offer a smaller train controller for use with this software and (soon) your model train set.

Let me introduce you to the easiest thing you have ever done to help fund progressive causes: Working Assets Long Distance.  Let Working Assets be your long distance carrier, and they will donate 1% of top-line revenue to carefully selected nonprofits.  Fifty are being funded in 2003, including Doctors Without Borders, Adbusters, Rainforest Action Network, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood.  Since 1985 they have donated over $30 million, including $6 million in 2001 alone.  The bills are printed on recycled paper, and every month for the first year you get a certificate for a free pint of Ben and Jerry’s (Vegans can give theirs to a non-vegan friend: Ben and Jerry’s used to sell eleven sorbets and six ices, but all have been dropped from their lineup.)  Combine that with charges of 7 cents per minute (with a $3.95 monthly fee), 180 free minutes, and a reimbursed carrier switch fee, and you cannot go wrong: that’s actually less than I paid with AT&T.  If you support progressive causes, I cannot think of a reason not not to take two minutes and switch your service.  You can do it all online.  Here’s the link again.

If you are bored, you can make a model Starship Enterprise out of an old floppy disk.

03:03:03 03/03/03

Do you remember making paper snowflakes when you were a child?  Now you can do so with a Java applet.

Allan I. Teger’s Bodyscapes are created by photographing miniature models positioned on the nude human body to give the impression of landscape.  They are quite striking.  I especially like Fishing Trip, Mountain Climbers, and Overlook.

The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize winner for chemistry is Theodore Gray, who made an actual periodic table.  You know, four legs, wood, the kind you can sit at to eat lunch, but with inlaid wooden squares on the top, and under each square a sample of the element.  The site is fantastic: this guy has a taste for statistics, sorting, and random information that may even exceed my own: on his Collections of Elements page, he sorts the elements in more than thirty ways, including “Elements [you can buy] at Walmart”, “Coin Metals”, and “Elements that spell OLiVEr SAcKS”.  He has a page on How to Get Your Own Element Collection, and each element has its own page.

He also has an interesting discussion on education at the site:

Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills.  They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.

Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons.  It was really, really hard to be a cave person.  The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex.  They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.

To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence.  It is also quite false.

A handful of eco-athletic types have embarked on possibly the most ambitious athletic activity of all time: a seven year, 40,000 mile walk from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn, with short boat rides across the Red Sea and the Bering Strait.  Be sure to check out their travel log, full of striking pictures.  I was especially taken by the photograph entitled Beasts of the Karoo 3 – Angora goats in the gathering gloom before a storm.

Looks like I’m a minor hit.  There was a post on MetaFilter about CSS art (basically, using a web browser to generate images in ways it was not designed to.)  Turns out I had already done this a couple years ago.  I quickly cleaned up my source code to ready it for release, and posted some sample images.  You can view the sample page (takes a while to load, probably only works in IE), the original image, the PERL script, and the MetaFilter discussion.

The guy who said “that’s beautiful” is quite kind.

Beautiful portraits of Japanese mushrooms (I’m not kidding.)  For a sampling of the different colors and geometries, check these links.  It’s really worth a look.  (Thanks to MeFi for the link.)

Remember the mcgees.org post about the Masai who donated fourteen blessed cows to the United States after they heard of the 11 September terrorist attacks?  How could Americans hope to repay such a touching gesture?

American tourists Edward A. Lefrak and Don Hutchins might have done a bit: Hutchins flew one of the tribe’s girls to the U.S., and Lefrak gave her a heart transplant.

Rob is cool.  Be sure to check out the other pages on the site, too.  They’re all cool.

Startlingly, “No, it never propagates if I set a gap or prevention” is a palindrome.  I could even see using that in conversation.