mcgees.org

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.

Are you good at seeing “Magic Eye” stereograms?  This ghost image is amazing and somewhat unsettling.

From http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~etzpc/gif/.

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.

“The original VisiCalc program that ran on the IBM PC in 1981 still runs on today’s PCs.”

You can download VisiCalc, forerunner of today’s spreadsheet programs, from the website of its original co-author.  Do not worry about hard disk space; the program is only 27,520 bytes, smaller than many image files on the web today.

I have my Review of www.[number].com Sites.  I have my Survey of Four-Letter Domains.  I have nothing near as cool as THE SECRET LIVES OF NUMBERS.

I don’t know if you have heard the story of the Masai tribespeople learning of the September 11 attacks on  the world Trade Center.  It was only after one of their own returned from his studies abroad in the U.S. that they learned of the tragedy.  In proper oral history tradition, he sat down with them and told them tales of the attack.

The Masai could not comprehend of a building so high that a man would die if he jumped from the top, but the returned Stanford University student, Mr. Naiyomah, explained that these were buildings stretching high into the clouds, that there were giant fires, and that men with special tools and equipment went into the buildings to try to save lives.

The tribespeople were relieved that their friend was unscathed, and they were angry.  The village’s chief warrior, Mr. Oltetia, explained that if they got ahold of Osama bin Laden they surely would have to kill him.  They recognized, however, that bin Laden must be a powerful man to have caused this devastation, so he could not be killed directly.  Instead, the warriors would surround him in the bush and strike with spears and arrows.

Mostly, however, the villagers were saddened.  They asked Mr. Naiyomah to help find an important American.  Mr. Naiyomah contacted William Brancick, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.  This past Sunday, he flew to a game preserve and then was driven two hours over very rugged roads to reach the village.  The villagers were waiting for him.  At a ceremony in a grassy clearing, the village bestowed a gift of fourteen blessed cows to help the United States.

This put Brancick in a difficult position, and he explained that it would be very difficult to transport a small herd of cows to America.  He told them he would probably sell the cows, use the money to buy Masai jewelry, and give the jewelry to America.  I have no indication about whether this was a faux pas.  Cattle are very important to the Masai, who believe that all cattle in the world belong to them.  Their exhaustive use of the cattle parallels the Native Americans of the Plains’ use of bison.  The animals are tapped for blood and milk, which are mixed together and drunk (this is, one would expect, highly nutritious.)  When the animal is killed the meat is eaten and all the parts used.  As Mr. Naiyomah explains, “It [the cow] is sacred.  It’s more than property.  You give it a name.  You talk to it.  You perform rituals with it.  I don’t know if you have any sacred food in America, something that has a supernatural feel as you eat it.  That’s the cow for us.”

I am touched by this gesture, but I cannot figure out how to write this post so that it does not sound condescending to the Masai.  Their act was so generous, so naïve, it reminds one of the gift of a child.  What an uplifting tale.

The New York Times has more info (registration required; you know the drill.)  Also, an American has set up a fine “thank you” site.

This clock is really cool.  Even cooler than the Industrious Clock.

The overpriced cable company that serves the new house has one of the most frustrating sales departments I
have ever dealt with.  I am ordering from them cable television and cable modem services.  To
get the cable television installed, however, I have to wait until the cable modem gets installed.  I
cannot even schedule an installation for the cable television until the cable modem is
installed.  This was scheduled for the 30^th of last month, but the guy never
showed up.  It was rescheduled for this morning, but the guy did not show up until 2 p.m. (Jenn waited
around for him.)  Jenn told me he had finished, so I called Ernesto (my rep) to schedule the installation of the cable television service.  Here is the conversation:

Ernesto:  Hi Josh, we can get the home installation taken care of now.

Josh:  Great!

Ernesto:   OK, how many televisions do you have?

Josh:  Two.

Ernesto:   OK.  So on the first one we’ll set up a cable box.  That’s 64
basic channels, plus 77 digital channels, plus [some number] of music channels, plus four talk radio
channels, plus ten HBO and eight Showtime.  On the other television you will just have the 64 basic
channels.  After the first month [that I’m receiving for free as a promotion], if you choose to
keep it, it will be $65 per month.

Josh:  The $65 includes the pay channels?

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  And how much would it be without the pay channels?

Ernesto:   $43 per month.

Josh:  OK, so I would then have the sixty-whatever basic channels, the 77 digital
channels and the music.

Ernesto:   No.

Josh:  I’m sorry?

Ernesto:   No.  You wouldn’t have the digital channels.

Josh:  I’m trying to figure out how much it would be if I just dropped the HBO and
Showtime.

Ernesto:   So you don’t want the digital channels?

Josh:  No, I am interested in the digital channels, and I’m trying to see how much that would be without HBO and Showtime.

Ernesto:   $65.

Josh:  (pause)

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  Ernesto, does that include the HBO and Showtime?

Ernesto:   Errr, yes.

Josh:  How much would it be for the service without HBO and without Showtime?

Ernesto:   $43.

Josh:  $43?

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  Does that include the digital channels?

Ernesto:   No, but if you, I mean if you want to, I mean you don’t have to decide right
now, you can tell us after the first month….

Josh:  Ernesto, I’m not trying to be critical or to complain here.  I’m just trying
to find out how much this will cost.

Ernesto:   OK.

Josh:  OK.  Can I get the digital channels without subscribing to HBO and
Showtime?

Ernesto:   Of course.

Josh:  How much would it be to have the digital cable box, but not have HBO and
Showtime?

Ernesto:   $6 more per month.

Josh:  OK, $6 more.  So the total cost would be $49 per month, right?

Ernesto:   Errr, yes, $49.

Josh:  That sounds pretty good.

Ernesto:   OK.  And if you want the digital channels at some point, that would be
only $10 more per month.

Josh:  (pause)

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  I thought you just said $6.

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  For the digital cable box it would be $6 per month.

Ernesto:   Yes, $6 for the box.  And then if you decided you wanted the
digital channels that would be only $10 more per month.

Josh:  Why in the world would I want a digital cable box if I didn’t have digital
channels?

Ernesto:   (pause)

Josh:  One can’t be used without the other, right?

Ernesto:   Right.

Josh:  So it’s just that you guys list them separately, you need both to get the digital
channels, right?

Ernesto:   Huh?

Josh:  To get digital channels, I would need to pay $6 per month for the digital cable
box and $10 per month for the digital channels.

Ernesto:   Yes.

Josh:  So it would be $16 per month in addition to the $43.

Ernesto:   Uh, $16 … err … right.  That would put you around $60 per month.

If you have a policy against responding to spam you get, skirt around that problem by responding to spam I got.  Go to the Bombay Sapphire (gin) website and participate in their gorgeous interactive contest.  You could win a beautiful piece of art valued at over US$5,000; but even if you don’t win, the site design and the artistic merit of the content makes the trip worthwhile.

20:02 20.02.2002