Overdoing addresses

Considering that every time you add a letter, you multiply the number of potential addresses by twenty-six times, (notice how short-URL sites can make addresses for many millions of pages using only around five or six letters)  I find it remarkable how some site software finds it necessary to pile on endles letters in addresses. See this one I just came across:

https://photos-3.dropbox.com/i/o/Tf5EFzvWp3849AVRhk-tPpS72yqaXzWj9A2iTCB8oMZI,sPd2iUeV_5EX_JsXd3-0Ah6T4cYD1b7-JSagFaSNtfEg/3036623/1323370800/ff924e3/Bland_009.jpg

Holy mama.
(I changed it a bit since it wasn't for public access.)

H&M Uses Fake Bodies With Real Heads For Models

[Thanks to Joe]

H&M Uses Fake Bodies With Real Heads For Models, article.

I knew that magazine girl pictures are so processed that they are as-good-as artificial, but I did not know that they had started with completely computer-generated bodies. I don't see much reason why the faces won't soon follow. Is this the beginning of the end of the model profession?

A Scottish bicycle trip-out

[Thanks to Neeraj]

Pretty friggin' incredible machine handling.
I'll bet somebody will put a guy like this in a chase in some action movie, like they did with the jumper in Casino Royale.

 
(Bigger video)

How do they even built the bicycles to take this?

One molecule thick

It's funny how the creative process is very different from one person to another. For example, JK Rowling has a lot of extraneous background stories, family stories, and futures which are not in the books. But William Gibson has said that once when asked "so during this book, what's happening in Denver?" he said: "I have no clue". He laughed and said "the whole thing is one molecule thick."  He apparently does not need to have revealed to him one iota more than just what is going into the book.

Gibson is also, so far as I know, an extremely intuitive writer. Whereas some writers work via an intellectual process, based on what they've learned about how stories work and so on. Some, like my old teacher Algis Budrys who died last year, work one way sometimes and the other way sometimes. He once woke up in the middle of the night with a whole long story complete in his head. He got up and wrote it all down in sketch form, which he appreciated the next day, for after sleeping he had forgotten it.

"Let us take higher"

[Thanks to Igor]

... I see this and think "OMG!"
But then I realize I can't take a walk through my town without passing at least five establishments, "bars", peddling legally a substance at least as damaging as hashish. I wonder if alcohol will ever go the way of opium and hashish, and the way tobacco seems to be going?

Not that I'm preaching for or against anything. I take a little liqueur on my icecream, but if I take enough to get drunk, I get a headache, so that's as much the reason I don't drink as the lives it has ruined in my family.

Any addiction (and pretty much any activity can become an addiction) can be damaging if overdone. I don't think we have a good solution to addictions, because that would demand that we cure the psychological reasons people get them in the first place, and those go deep. But maybe the best one is general legalization and broad education.

A pinhole photo in an egg

[Thanks to Phil]

A pinhole photo in an egg, article.
The egg shell is both the camera and the photo. What an excellent idea.
Now block the opening with a wrought-brass pin-holed plate, trying to restore the natural egg-ness of the shell. With the black tape seal the structure. You’ll notice that the shell is really transparent: to avoid any problem, wrap it with the black cloth, carefully leaving out the pinhole. During each stage of this process the egg could break. Usually it does.

I suspect this will become an art form like that thing with photographing the viewfinder of a medium format camera, only better and more timeless.

The Dragonborn Comes

Much as games, not the least computer games, don't interest me much personally, I think there are aspects of them which are a modern art form, or support and include art forms, visually and otherwise.

A printing statement

[Thanks to Charles]

Q. What is the rule for including the place of printing with regard to an e-book, which is not actually printed on paper anywhere? If this information is necessary, where should it be inserted in the front matter? Many thanks for your response.

A. Conventionally the printing statement goes on the copyright page, along with the place of publication. It’s not clear under what circumstances it would be “necessary” to include a printing statement in an e-book, but if forced, write “This book was not printed
anywhere.”

From: University of Chicago Press

Neville grows up

There's a great filmed conversation/co-interview between JK Rowling and Dan Radcliffe on the extras disk of the last H Potter film. One of the funny things Jo says is about Neville in the movies: "you cast this plain-looking kid, and then he grows up to become this sort of Rock God..."

Somehow they managed in the movie to make him still look pretty much like Neville though. And admittedly he is one of those chameleonic people who look very different from picture to picture.

Anyway, how lucky were these people with the three main actors? To find three kids who not only are perfect for the roles, but keep being so, and all stay around and does great work through eight movies? Amazing. And does it through the great pressure of both adolescence and stardom. Huh.

Harry Potter really is an amazing phenomenon. Not only the sheer unprecedented size  of it, but also the character. It's really, I think, the only thing of the kind I really like (not that I'm a huge fan, but I like it). Take Narnia or that Compass thing for example, they just don't really interest me at all. There's something about Harry Potter which makes it more trans-gender in some way. Maybe it is a certain extra foundation in logic, which matters more to the traditionally left-brained men than to women, for better or worse. JK actually talks a little about that in the interview. Not to be accused of being sexist, I think that taking a lot of stock in logic is as much of a weakness as it is a strength, since it tends to block intuition to some degree (hence the concept of Female Intuition), and of course any person of any gender can lean any way on this matter.

Re the scale, I just saw that the HP movies are the highest grossing film franchise of all time. That's astonishing, considering Star Wars and everything. I'd not imagined that. Especially with Star Wars, which has so many hard core fans who have seen each movie dozens and dozens of times.

Update:
Talking about Good Job Growing Up:

Good deal on Olympus

Thanks to MacObserver for pointing to this good deal for an xmas present, a compact zoom camera for, at the moment, $99 at Buy.com. Olympus is a very good brand, so this has to be an excellent deal.

on Intuition

Intuition isn't the enemy, but the ally, of reason.

           -- John Kord Lagemann