(G)astronomy

(G)astronomy, article by Pascal, doing what he does best and most, puncturing authority balloons. It's about pleasure and morality, but somehow he also manages to get the color of the universe mixed into it, don't ask me how. :-)

Megan Fox: Stop Comparing Me to Angelina Jolie!

Megan Fox: Stop Comparing Me to Angelina Jolie! article.

Fox even interjects when asked if she wanted to follow in Jolie's footsteps of starting out as a sex symbol before taking on serious roles.

"Angelina Jolie was always a Method actress," she says. "She'd been nominated for Golden Globes before she ever did 'Tomb Raider'."

I think Megan is being very cool here.

Celebrity-hysteria is way out of control, though. There seems to be an insatiable hunger for ever more young, pretty idols to put on pedestals, shower with gold, and then tear down and devour. I mean, Megan has been in two action movies, she is pretty, and suddenly she is a top-flight star? Come on.

It sounds like she is grounded though, for which I congratulate her. It's a good thing in any life, but the movie star business can be lethal if you're not, sometimes literally.

More on Brushes

Here's a video about the iPhone painting app I blogged recently.

Hi-rez version here.



---
Here's a funny thing, for some weird reason, this video was linked as "related video" to the iPhone art one. Didn't see that one coming. But I must say I never saw the day coming when we would witness an official Gillette video on how to shave your groin!
(Note one might think an electric razor would be more gentle in that area. Not so. Now you know. :-)

Various pics

Pics collected today from various sites, several from 9gag.com.

Charlie bit me

A hundred million views on youtube! Holy frig.



Update: Read the blog, get the tee-shirt!

Fallingwater

Frank Lloyd Wright's famous house Fallingwater.
Pictures - video - article.
It's a really cool house in many ways, but the one thing I just don't get is that you can't see the waterfall from inside! That's like hiring a world-class chef and then always just ordering chinese take-out.

Reincarnation

There are many accounts about people, often children, remembering past lives. Here's one (video) of those which takes a lot of conviction to dismiss.

Since we don't seem to have the faintest clue what consciousness really is, I don't think reincarnation needs to go against any faith, not even materialism.

The Worleygig is six

My pink-haired friend Gail's blog, the Worleygig, just turned six, and it growing rapidly in popularity.
I've known Gail for ten years now, we started talking because she's a rock journalist, and I asked her questions about some of my fave bands, like Ministry and Skinny Puppy, who she'd interviewed.
(She also interviewed me years ago.)

Apple keynote (and new iPhone)

New Apple Developers Conference Keynote speech. (Sadly not by the still-recovering Steve Jobs.) The main features are a new iPhone, new 13-inch and 15-inch notebooks, and the next major version of the operating system.
Phil Schiller has slimmed down. Good for him, for a while there, he just got bigger every time we saw him.

Update: an interesting development is an upcoming e-book buying and reading app for the iPhone. I prefer bigger screens, but I admit it's a very clear screen, and the interface looks just excellent (short demo about 1.20 in the keynote). I'm sure it'll be popular.
I'm doubtful though about reading magazines on the iPhone screen (they will have lots of mags and newspapers available for subscription). I don't even like many regular web pages on my iPod touch, very often the screen is simply too small for it work well.

Update: one weak feature of the first two generations of iPhones has been the camera. It was just not very good. And now they finally updated it to a new one, 3MP. I'll be interested to see how good the results are from it, it might be the thing which makes me finally get an iPhone myself, so I finally can always have a camera on me.
Judging from the keynote (about 1.48), it seems really promising. And even has video.

Bullfight turnaround

Bull wins bullfight. You might like to see it if you like to see tables turned on what many consider a cruel "sport", but be warned: the pictures are gruesome.

A cold

Man, I have the worst cold I've had since I can remember. When I woke up this morning (after noon), and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I almost fell backwards into the bath tub. I could play 3rd Zombie in Day Of The Living Dead without make-up. [Update ten hours later: it seems to be easing off already. Zippidy.]
And I need one of these:


Well, I'm doing the basics, fluids, vitamins, rest.

-----------

Another couple of fun Japanese inventions.
The butter stick really tickles my funny bone.



At first I thought this was for the toddler's protection, and a neat idea:

But heck, I guess they can pitch in with the housework too.

Update: Magnetic Mary points out this kind of "unuseless" invention has a name: Chindogu.

Dear Josie

From a commenter:
I would love to make a comment, but "anonymous" has found me out to be an idiot, so I won't further validate the opinion of "anonymous."

For new readers: we have an occasional commenter, usually writing as "anonymous", who can be rather direct with his/her comments. Once when pressed, he/she gave the name Josie.

Dear Josie,
I still welcome your comments. I have refrained from deleting any comments at all, ever, even those who are not comments on ideas or issues, but on people.
I can take criticism, or at least I'm trying to learn. And I let all comments remain, so people can see that I'm not editing in order to make myself look better. But it's not just me, I'm not the only one you're addressing, so I have others to consider.
How about a little more civility, huh? Personal attacks either on me or on other commenters are not all that productive, in my opinion. We're all friends here.
Respectfully yours, Eolake

Cheapness

I think "cheapness" is an interesting thing. It seems that for some people it just hurts too much to pay for something, regardless of what they received or if they have the money.
For example Cary Grant, he got more money for one day's filming than many people make in a lifetime. And yet he was famous for always Being Elsewhere when the check arrived in restaurants. Amazing.

My dad told of when he was a lad, he was sent by his dad, a house painter, to collect a bill from one of the richer families in town. But always when he arrived, they would "sadly" only have a five hundred kroner bill, which was a big amount of money in those days (boggles the mind they even made such a bill), and of course he couldn't give change. So one day his father sent him first to his friend the butcher Karl, and actually borrowed the necessary change before he went. Problem solved.

Unusual restaurants

Unusual restaurants.
Some of them I like, some of them, really not. I think it's safe to say that toilet-themed or hospital-themed restaurants trade more on the novelty value than on any aesthetics involved.

Kindle and iPod talk

Thanks to Bert for finding this fun video. Text-to-speech is slow to mature, but I find that now it is definitely good enough now for an alternative reading method.
How do you get the text into the iPod Shuffle, I wonder?

360 degree photos

Here's a man talking about that 360-degree "Matrix" photo setup I made fun of last week.
He's by the way a prime example of a widespread modern speech-impediment (two of them actually)... If you were to make a drinking game of how many times he says "like" or "you know" even in this short video, you'd get alcohol poisoning.

Of course I was making fun rather of the need to see celebrities from 360 degrees in the same nanosecond. Not so much the system. I'm sure there will be actual good uses for a system like this, in science for instance.

Best sex lasts just minutes, says study

Best sex lasts just minutes, says study, article.
"according to the survey by US and Canadian sex therapists, what most people describe as 'satisfactory' sex usually lasts anywhere between three and 13 minutes."
-

The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator

The English-to-12-Year-Old-AOLer Translator, bot.

My "9" preview comment would be:
"LOKS LIEK TERMINA2R METS TEH MATRIX METS A R BFOR3 CHRISTMAS!111!! LOL AN OD MIX!!11!1! LOL NOW IV3 LIEKD SOM3 OF BUR2NS MOVEIS A LOT (BATMAN AND B3TLEJUIEC FOR EXMPLE) BUT JUST AS I WAS N3VAR SUR3 MUSICALS WIT PUPETS WAS A RILLY GOD IEDA IMM NOT SUR3 AN ACTION THRIL3R WIT PUP3TS (THOUGH CGI IT SEMS) SI A GOD IEDA!1!1!1!1 WTF IMM NOT RILLY SURE IL B EMOTIONALY INVASTED IN WHATHAR A LITL3 WOKNG HAND PUPAT CAN ASCAEP DA ROBOT SPIEDR
IT!1!!1 WTF LOKS RILLY GOD THOUGH!!1!! WTF LOL TEH DASIGN OF TEH BUILDNGS AND MACHIENS AND SO ON I LIEK!!111 WTF LOL"

Olympus Pen speculation

For the camera fetichist: a few considerations about the compact system camera coming in a week.

Why am I so interested in this camera (and future ones in the same category)? Because I'm a walk-around photographer. I love walking around for hours, photographing, maybe mix it with sight-seeing and lunch with friends. And a regular DSLR like my Nikon D90 is just not handy in such a situation, it takes too much attention, both from yourself and from others. On the other hand, while pocket cameras now, especially Canon's, give amazing image quality, in some aspects (like speed and low depth-of-field and low-light), they are not really "serious" cameras. It's technically possible now to have the best of both worlds, and I hope we get it soon.