Waggle Dance

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Amazon go-bots in the air (updated)

[Yes, just as expected, some already are loading their shotguns...]

[Amazon is already presenting this on their site.]

This will of course raise howls from luddites, but I'd love it, it's almost enough to make one move to an urban area.
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I wonder though where they will drop the parcels, especially in the case of apartment buildings.

I've actually been thinking about how we could make delivery of physical items follow the development of digital delivery. I had not considered drones, but of course, it's perfect.

No mail for you today, you Net-addicted freak! (updated)

It seems that the computer gremlins really don't want me to do any emailing today.

First, just as I had settled down to handle all the over-nigh email, business and personal, crack-bzzzzzz-ummmmm.mmm... The power went. All over the neighborhood.
That took a couple of hours.

Then when the power was back, possibly because of the sudden interruption*, Apple Mail app was angry with me and said it would have nothing to do with my mail files. It would have to "import" ALL the mail again! Now, I am not sure what it means, because it already *has* all the mail, where does it have to "import" it from?

Well, that has already taken at while, meaning hours. I've used Mail for 3-4 years, and guess how many messages it has to reestablish? One million, three hundred and twenty-two, nine hundred and sixty-one emails! Holy mama funk. Ridikuwush.

*After all these years, I've now finally decided to get an Uninterruptible Power Source, UPS.

Update:
OK, I got the UPS Battery Backup today. Man! That thing is only slightly bigger than a shoe box, but it weighs like a TV set! Solid fokker!
It seems pretty simple, and I've got it plugged in and working now.
I would say "I should have gotten one years ago", but actually Northern Europe has pretty stable electricity, and this is the only the third outtage I remember in 11 years (back in Denmark, I don't recall any... well, actually one, back in the early eighties, and maybe a couple when I was a kid), and the first which actually happened while I was on the computer. Still, it was a rather abrupt feeling, and it did seem to mess up Mail causing it to take hours to reestablish itself, so I feel good about having it.

"Eat jelly, you purple freaks!"

The headline (and my new motto at the top) is from Despicable Me 2.

I could write a long review about all the things I find brilliant about that movie. But I'm sure there are already hundreds of good reviews doing that. So I'll just say: if you like computer-animated comedies, you'll love this. Get it. (If you can display 3D, even better, movies like this are made for it.)

One of the telling aspects of a great animated film is the LIGHT.
Click on this, and enjoy that wonderful light.

By the way, I think they make a little mistake by featuring basically only the Minions on covers and such. I feared that the other characters, for example the girls, would take a secondary place to them. Fortunately this is not true, it has a full character gallery, all used well.

One of the best new characters is Lucy Wilde, agent of the Anti-Villain League. This adorable redhead is a mess of delightful contradictions: She is bubbly, inventive, tough and super-resourceful, a bit bashful, clumsy, slightly sadistic and yet loving, and a martial-arts master.

"These super-people are real, and they are on our side"

Interesting people with super-normal skills (or "powers").
For example, Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 days! And he ran from NYC to San Fran in 75 days! Holy damn.

Kim Peek had eidetic memory. He had memorized 12,000 books perfectly. When he was offered a book on gambling to read, he refused, saying that using his powers for gambling would be "unethical". That really stumps me. I know that casinos ban gamblers who can count cards, a rare skill. That to me seems to be the unethical thing. You set up a game with some rules, making sure that overall the odds are all on your side, making lots of money. Then because one person has exceptional natural skill, you refuse his right to play! That's like banning somebody from playing basketball because they are too tall or can leap too high.

Then there's Wim Hof, who scoffs at winter.
He has been dubbed "Iceman," because the Dutch have no imagination. Hof's ability is so great that even when submerged in freezing water that would pretty much kill a normal human in a few minutes, his body temperature barely drops, and when he climbed Everest (in bicycle shorts, we really can't stress that enough), he said it was easy.

I think these and other examples lend a lot of credence to the idea that the Universe is not all that damn physical, but a sort of live hologram, created and controlled by some kind of Mind or Lifeforce outside of it (which we ourselves may ultimately be part of). In other words, anything can happen.

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And a guy who can split an air-gun pellet in half with a sword. The thing can't even be seen with the human eye!



(What is it with the Japanese and their super-noisy TV show? It's like they are so repressed in most of life's aspects, that when they do let loose, they go all overboard.)

Mette and drawing

Some of the photos/paintings in the last post reminded me of this one from the mid-nineties, one of the very first drawings I made on a computer:

I made it from a photo I took of my friend Mette:

It was taken indoors, hand-held, with a tiny pocket camera (which shot film), the outstanding Konica Big Mini (had a great lens). We made big prints from some of these shots, and I'm amazed at the quality we got, given those factors.
I was so careless about the technique because I'd imagined them only used as basis for drawings, but they turned out much better than expected, so I've used them for all kinds of things. Mette had a big print of this one framed on the wall where she lived with her parents, and she said people really liked it.

Living paintings

Bert found this really cool page of models which were skin-painted like various types of painting/drawing techniques, then photographed.

A toy amongst beasts

This could be expanded. If somebody were really clever and had the funding, I guess a small tree-climbing remote-controlled camera box could film abes in trees. It would have to be damn strong though, and able to hold on strong, those things have each the strength of ten men (I wonder how, they must have a different kind of muscles). And it should perhaps be camouflaged, and move very slowly, so they get used to it.

But what an engineering challenge! Even without any big animals around, making a good tree-climbing robot is a tall order. I doubt anybody has made anything like it yet.

Datamancer out

RIP, Richard Nagy, Datamancer, has died, seemingly in a car accident in California.
(Someone said recently: "Every year we postpone self-driven cars, thousands more die.")

Way too young.
I considered him a friend, and a working genius.
I was one of the few lucky enough to get one of his works while time was.

(I even made it work with an iPad!)


Update: I'm happy to see that he managed to sell the big project, The Clacker. I'd heard that the eBay auction didn't work. It would have been sad if he'd not been able to sell it after years of work.

"Funny moments"

 "You remind me of an old girlfriend of mine."

An Instagram Movie

This video is put together from pics found on Instagram.
I dunno... apart from a couple of things, like the rocket-shaped ice lolly being juxtaposed with the rocket, I don't see why it's so interesting. (The pro site I found it on were very enthusiastic indeed.)
OK, it's a fresh idea, and it's taken some labor, but I don't necessarily think these things alone will make something Good Art.
Am I just getting too old? Should I give up trying to understand "yoof culture"?

Expression

The most important aspect for art in connecting with an audience is expression. Not just what expression does it have, but perhaps even more importantly: how much.

This is not as obvious as it sounds. Many artists (in the widest possible sense) get so wrapped up in the technique, and in their own relationship with the work, that they forget about the audience. And as a consequence, many many works of art have barely any expression at all.