moon phases

Started this before change to "New Blogger", as backup in case of trouble with digiphoto blog "In a Small Dark Room", or rants & links blog "Hello Cruel World" . Useful - at one stage Dark Room was there, but like the astrophysical Dark Matter, we could't see it ... better now, but kept Just In Case.

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There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought.
Mark Twain (letter to Joseph Twichell after his wife's death)
[me, on a bad day]

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WRITER'S LINKS
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Writer Beware
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(and my Wish List)

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Women & Children, et al  
Women & Children, et al
If you look at the behaviour and rhetoric of past Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, you'll find very similar attitudes to that of Islam. Orthodox Jewish women must cover their hair, for instance. Of course, all three of these religious traditions are closely connected, having evolved from each other.

Look at the history of repression of the whole population, and women, in Europe over much of the last millennium based on Christianity; extremely harsh punishments, punishments for religious differences or offences such as not attending church, blasphemy, or having an illegitimate child. Women in both Jewish & Christian thought are almost defined by having children.

Even the more militant versions of current Christianity, all you have to do is substitute God for Allah and the inflammatory speeches you hear reported as showing how Islam extreme is will be almost indistinguishable.

I heartily disagree with all of this type of ideology, whatever religious background it comes from.

My working theory is that the ideologues have seen how the progressive developments in Christendom have lowered the power of the church, and, in order to keep power, have decided that the only way is to keep the restrictions on as hard as possible -- see the history of how the Islamic progressive thought and science of some hundreds of years back was quashed. (And before you say that their intentions may very well be honest and good, so were Torquemada's.)

On another, not unrelated, subject [LINK TO SMH ARTICLE]:
Perhaps the "militantly childless" are reacting to all those years of pressured bullying about their child-free status -- see also remarks about repression & reproductive definition of women, above. We definitely need less either less people in Australia or a more sustainable lifestyle, and recognising that women have lives (90 years of them) and interests beyond family support is one way of getting off the vicious cycle of ever-increasing human pressure on the rest of the world -- see recent report on human impact on the environment decreasing our children's' inheritance, excerpted and linked below.

www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx
Experts Warn Ecosystem Changes Will Continue to Worsen, Putting Global Development Goals At Risk
Wednesday, March 30, 2005 -- London, UK
www.maweb.org/en/article.aspx?id=58

A landmark study released today reveals that approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth – such as fresh water, capture fisheries, air and water regulation, and the regulation of regional climate, natural hazards and pests – are being degraded or used unsustainably. Scientists warn that the harmful consequences of this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years

... Ecosystem changes that have contributed substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development have been achieved at growing costs in the form of degradation of other services. Only four ecosystem services have been enhanced in the last 50 years: increases in crop, livestock and aquaculture production, and increased carbon sequestration for global climate regulation. Two services – capture fisheries and fresh water – are now well beyond levels that can sustain current, much less future, demands.

Experts say that these problems will substantially diminish the benefits for future generations

...The MA Synthesis Report also reveals that it is the world’s poorest people who suffer most from ecosystem changes. The regions facing significant problems of ecosystem degradation – sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, some regions in Latin America, and parts of South and Southeast Asia – are also facing the greatest challenges in achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals ...

Links
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment - News and Press Releases page
www.maweb.org/en/news.aspx
"Popularized" Version of Synthesis Report
www.greenfacts.org/ecosystems/
www.maweb.org/en/Article.aspx?id=57

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:23 pm

 
Inconstant Blogger  
Sorry, haven't been able to get into writing anything much except relating to the elbow-deep drifts of forms & legal documents that needed to be fixed up by this week or a large chunk of the house of cards laughingly known as my life will lose its insubstantial grip on reality, or at least a working facsimile of same.

Some forms still demand a typewriter. I was able to unearth my old Spanish manual (not Manuel) one. With working ribbon. Ha! Bureaucracy foiled again.

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 6:14 pm

 
Schiavo v Other Cases: Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds  
nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006178.htm

These same guys who’re enthusiastic about the death penalty, nonchalant about military and civilian deaths in Iraq, and perfectly ready to cut funding for everything from prenatal care to basic public health and safety infrastructure, invoked an extrajudicial, extraconstitutional “culture of life” to justify their media coverage-oriented meddling in the Schiavo case.

Back in his Texas days, Bush happily signed legislation that made it easier for hospitals to pull the tubes on unresponsive patients, even ones whose known wishes ran contrary to it, whose families were opposed to it, and who might conceivably have had a better-than-zero chance of recovery.

What made the difference? That legislation back then was about money. This legislation now is about votes.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006178.html#77359
The extra special fun part of Bush's having signed that law in Texas is that it has apparently recently led to a black baby in that state having HIS feeding tube pulled--against the express wishes of the mother.

www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3087387
Baby dies after hospital removes breathing tube
Case is the first in which a judge allowed a hospital to discontinue care
March 16, 2005, 12:10PM
By LEIGH HOPPER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:32 pm

 
Orcinus - The fruits of hate  
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/03/fruits-of-hate.html Orcinus -- The fruits of hate
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Don't you think it's kind of funny that when the rabid right goes a-hunting for people with "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," people whose "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," they only seem to cobble up relatively insignificant figures on the left?

Because it's also kind of funny how many times the most horrifying cases involving young people whose senses of morality, religion, politics and culture have been monstrously warped by outside forces with a hostility to basic decency turn out, in fact, to involve young people whose beliefs emanate from the far right, like Minnesota teenager Jeff Weise, who just shot up his reservation high school ...

Weise's hostility to multiculturalism was well fed by what he could find on the Internet, the bulk of which was produced by white supremacists, including an outfit called Nazi.org, the National Alliance, and Don Black's neo-Nazi Stormfront organization. You remember: the same folks who broke up Jesse Jackson's Florida appearance in support of George W. Bush in 2000.

Here's a reality check for the mainstream right: right-wing extremism has always been, and always will be, the most vicious proponent of beliefs that destroy the basic fabric of civilization. They worship violence and bigotry and racial and religious hatred. That's as true in the United States as it is in the Middle East.

When you go looking for threats -- and the people who both associate with and benefit from them -- a good place to start might be the American right's own bloody back yard.
9:54 AM


More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 2:59 am

 
Orcinus -- The Succubus  
dneiwert.blogspot.com/2005/03/succubus.html
Orcinus - The Succubus - Wednesday, March 23, 2005
There are many kinds of evils, but there is a truly unique and awful quality to the evil produced by naked racial and religious bigotry. People in Red Lake, Minnesota, can tell you all about it.

What the strange saga of Jeff Weise reveals is one of the more remarkable qualities of that evil: Even when consigned to the fringes and shadows, it retains a kind of vampiric half-life that has an ability to not only survive but adapt, finding fresh clawholds wherever it can, and then fester and grow -- almost inevitably exploding in violence.

Many of the attempts at analysis so far have emphasized the peculiarity of a minority -- Weise was Native American -- adopting neo-Nazi beliefs. But for researchers of the far right, it's perhaps not so surprising. After all, it has been known for some time that the Ku Klux Klan has actively attempted to recruit tribal members from the Lakota Sioux and other reservations for years ...

That's how the Succubus lives. It dwells in the shadows -- unseen by those who purposely deflect their vision from it, because it serves their own interests to do so -- until it becomes strong enough to venture out into daylight. And then it kills.

Every time.

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 2:36 am

 
Flatiron Magazine - Centenary  
Flatiron Magazine - The Flatiron Building at 100 years

http://www.flatironmag.com/proudlady/images/flat1.jpg

1902, and in New York City, on the corner of 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, the city’s first skyscraper, the Flatiron Building, neared completion.

Structural steel works — 3,680 tons of it — stabilized the building, the first constructed this way in New York. Soaring to 285 feet with its 21 stories, the Flatiron was, at the time, considered to be one of the most structurally sound buildings ever constructed.

Images of the Flatiron Building had appeared well before its opening. Its unusual shape and its conspicuous location at the crossing of two of the world’s most famous thoroughfares — Fifth Avenue and Broadway — brought a great deal of attention to this monumental curiosity.

Coinciding with the introduction of the picture postcard — a significant mass media of its time and an indicator of popular sentiments — the Flatiron Building perfectly suited the card’s vertical format
...
Deemed to be the windiest corner in the city, the site also gained fame as a place to catch a glimpse of a slender ankle as the winds sent the ladies’ skirts sailing, sometimes even over their heads. A special police assignment staked out the corner and the officers’ task was to shoo away the many oglers with the phrase “23-skidoo!”


One of the building’s first tenants was the publishing firm of Frank A. Munsey. Publishing Munsey’s Magazine, he was also associated with a string of other New York City newspapers, such as The Sun, The Globe, The Star, the Daily News, The Evening Telegram and The Herald. Munsey’s offices occupied the 18th floor. Coincidentally (or maybe not?) this very same space is currently home to another publisher, St. Martin’s Press.
... The paintings of John Sloan, the writings of O. Henry, the photographs of Stieglitz and Steichen, all immortalized the Flatiron Building — even Katherine Hepburn had her take on the building. In 1979, when asked in a 60 Minutes interview with Morley Safer what it was like to be a legend, she replied that it was like being some grand old building you pass and look up to. And if she had to compare herself to a building, which one would it be? Hepburn responded without hesitation: “The Flatiron Building.”

The film industry continues to make use of the Flatiron and its formidable setting on Madison Square as a backdrop in a host of films including The Cradle Will Rock and Godzilla.

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 2:04 am

 
DailySnap.com: City of Angels  
DailySnap.com: City of Angels
http://dailysnap.com/images/2005/0325.jpg

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:56 am

 
Notes on the Architecture of the Flatiron Building - New York (USA)  
www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/03/22/flatiron_gets_wrapped.php Gothamist: Flatiron Gets Wrapped

While some New Yorkers are looking for pieces of Flatiron charm in the dumpsters (sometimess fruitlessly) on Broadway and 22nd Street, most people will be seeing another result of the almost endless renovation of the Flatiron building: A huge H&M ad will be wrapped on the front of the Flatiron's northern point. Oh, yes, the Scandinavian value retailer will get to place a 15,200 square foot ad which will feature a woman in a linen suit, according to the Daily News ... H&M ad manager Steve Lubomski said the ad was the most expensive they had ever purchased and that "It's great to take a landmark building and make it our own. It's a desirable area with a lot of great shopping, plus there's not a lot of clutter." ...


nydailynews.com/front/story/292304p-250165c.html New York Daily News - Exclusive: It's a wrap, H&M
Fashioning giant ad on Flatiron Bldg.
BY TOM VAN RIPER
The Flatiron Building is getting a nose job - courtesy of clothing designer H&M.

The retailer with nine stores in the city has struck a deal to hype its upcoming spring line by slapping one of the city's biggest billboards on the rounded corner of the historic Flatiron Building at 23rd St. and Broadway, the Daily News has learned.

Construction begins today on a one-day project that will turn 200 feet of scaffolding into a black mesh advertisement.

So by this evening, anyone heading south on Broadway or Fifth Avenue from the Empire State Building will be hit with an image of a woman modeling an H&M linen suit wrapped to the top of the famed curve of the north-facing facade
The splashy ad is the latest in a trend that's seen a growing number of big billboards on city office buildings - from a multitude of spots in a renovated Times Square to midtown locales with ads for Commerce Bank and Hearst Magazines.

But some don't like to see the phenomenon spreading to classics like the Flatiron Building, even for a temporary campaign that will help cover up some unsightly scaffolding.

"It's a landmark building, it shouldn't be done," said ad exec Regina McMahon, who works up the block.

Laurie Greene, a Holtzbrinck saleswoman who works in the building, said the billboard would likely upset the over-40 crowd that didn't grow up saturated with ads.

"I doubt people in their 20s and 30s will care, I know I'm used to all the advertising that's been spreading," said the 35-year-old Greene.

www.glasssteelandstone.com/US/NY/NewYorkFlatiron.html Architecture of the Flatiron Building - New York, New York, United States of America
Also known as: Fuller Building
Built: 1902
Designed by: Daniel H. Burnham
... the Flatiron Building is a favorite of New Yorkers and admirers around the world. Perhaps because it symbolizes so much of how New Yorkers see themselves -- Defiant, bold, sophisticated, and interesting. With just enough embedded grime and soot to highlight its details. The Flatiron's most interesting feature is its shape -- a slender hull plowing up the streets of commerce as the bow off a great ocean liner plows through the waves of its domain. The apex of the building is just six feet wide, and expands into a limestone wedge adorned with Gothic and Renaissance details of Greek faces and terra cotta flowers. The building has two claims to fame -- one architectural, the other cultural. Some consider the Flatiron Building to be New York City's first skyscraper. It certainly was one of the first buildings in the city to employ a steel frame to hold up its 285-foot tall facade, but not the first. Some felt its shape (like a flatiron) was less artistic and more dangerous. They thought it would fall over, and during construction the Flatiron Building was nicknamed "Burnham's Folly."

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:46 am

 
 
www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/16/crocheting.php
Cabinet Magazine Online - Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane: An Interview with David Henderson and Daina Taimina
("Crocheted model of pseudosphere (the hyperbolic equiabvalent of a cone) by Daina Taimina. Photo courtesy Steve Rowell/The Institute for Figuring

Until the 19th century, mathematicians knew about only two kinds of geometry: the Euclidean plane and the sphere. It was therefore a deep shock to their community to find that there existed in principle a completely other spatial structure whose existence was discerned only by overturning a 2000-year-old prejudice about 'parallel' lines. The discovery of hyperbolic space in the 1820s and 1830s by the Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nicholay Lobatchevsky marked a turning point in mathematics and initiated the formal field of non-Euclidean geometry. For more than a century, mathematicians searched in vain for a physical surface with hyperbolic geometry. Starting in the 1950s, they began to suggest possibilities for constructing such surfaces. Eventually, in 1997, Daina Taimina, a mathematician at Cornell University, made the first useable physical model of the hyperbolic "

[tag: knitting][tag:craft][tag: mathematics]

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 8:21 pm

 
Some Unpublished Letters  
Peter Costello & all his fellow high-population growth supporters should be right out in front defending the people of Macquarie Fields.

Jesse Kelly, at the centre of much recent kerfuffle, has, at 20, a 2-year-old child. His grandfather is 53 now, so he became a grandfather at 33, when most of those slackers in the population stakes are only considering having their first child in a few years.

It's obvious the country needs many more Macquarie Fields to reach that 50 million population our businessmen and property developers so much desire. Yes, a country full of fast breeders such as this would be a great contribution to the Australia of the 21st Century, and a grand memorial to the forward-looking governor commemorated in its name.


It was my impression that "tenderhooks" are the smaller-sized young "tenterhooks", which haven't hardened up yet.
Marinaded briefly in white wine with a few herbs and quickly steamed or tossed on the barbecue hotplate, they make a light side dish for summer, whereas the tastier, but tougher, tenterhooks are best slow-cooked at a low temperature in a casserole or winter soup.

The SBS documentary on spy flights on Saturday was both a record of technical advances and an interesting reminder of a part of history often passed over. Testimony showed how both sides in the Cold War could be deceptive & ruthless in pursuit of their beliefs.

The section mentioning the support of the US for "partisans" in Eastern Europe, sabotaging & waging guerilla war on the USSR did strike me rather: would we call them "terrorists" today?

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 10:22 pm

 
 
Mar. 14th, 2005
07:09 pm - that's entertainment

By gum, TV can indeed teach, and occasionally there are the most delicious morsels dropped into the educational mix: night before last I was unable to stop wathcing two successive programs on vulcanology (on the Discovery Channel), one concentrating on the titanic 1815 blast-off of most of an Indonesian volcano called Tambora. One scientist (the world's primier expert on Pompeii) was excavating what turned out to be a carbonized household on the slopes of what's left of Tambora while another, working with the logbooks of the British Navy in the Pacific, constructed a computer model of the recorded impact of the blast on the world's weather (though this was not known at the time). Love the idea of His Majesty's ships, being mostly underemployed, as floating meteorological stations since in their boredom they took temperature, wind, and other sky-and-water type readings every two to four hours and recorded them, along with their exact position on the ocean at the time.

The plum in the pudding, however, was this: because of the sun-blocking effects of so many tons of Tambora being thrown into the upper atmosphere and blown round the globe, the summer of 1816 was the coldest on record in Europe (and New England, where people referred to it as "eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death"), leading to huge crop failures, famine, and, of course, bread riots in France. One of the places hardest hit was Switzerland, where that summer consisted of three solid months of cold, driving rain.

Now, think back: who was vacationing in Switzerland in the summer of 1816? In a rented villa on the shore of Lake Geneva? One of 'em had a club foot, and another was his doctor, and then there was the wife of another poet -- ? YES!! A little party of talented British literatti. Fortunately for us, all their picnics got rained out and their hikes were quenched by chilly temperatures. What did they have to do except go back indoors and, when the parlor games gave out, sit down by the fire and *write*?

Hence, "Frankenstein", and Dr. Polidori's short vampire piece, and I forget what else -- but what else do you need? A vast mountain blows its stack in southeast Asia, creating the largest volcanic death toll in recorded history (they said 117,000 but to that you'd have to add the secondary deaths of all those Swiss farmers who quietly starved in their high, muddy valleys, and similar victims elsewhere); and out of all this catastrophe, however indirectly, comes one of the totemic monsters of modern times, and the seed of his alter-ego the blood-sucking vampire!

Ah, history -- the gradual revelation of its elegant interconnections ranks among the best entertainments in the world.

Comment on
www.livejournal.com/users/suzych/17258.html
Mar. 14th, 2005
07:09 pm - that's entertainment

"The Year Without a Summer" caused by Tambora naturally also caused
disruptions to crops and the health of both humans and their animals. The
resulting wave of famine and disease in Europe caused rioting there, while
nearly a hundred thousand died from them in Indonesia, and there were
similar problems in the North-East USA and Russia. It's generally accepted
that this also inspired "The Last Man", (1826) by Mary Shelley.

http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/index.html
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/SheLast.html

I read this some years back, and one thing that was interesting was that it
was set in the 21st Century, yet much had not changed, e.g. in transport
and communication. It rather made me wonder whether it was Mary's own
mindset, or that the idea of constant, world-overturning change hadn't yet
set in. It also makes you wonder what basic things people looking to the
future now would miss.

See some notes on eruptions in the introduction of the Geophysical Research
Letter, vol 32, in February 2005 at http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/437.pdf
. It also mentions the very disruptive, eruption of Laki, in Iceland --
not as explosive, but much longer-lasting, in 1783-84. I wonder if this
may have contributed a few straws more to the French Revolution in 1789?

This poem is also supposed to be partly inspired by that dreary year

Darkness
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swing blind and blackening in the moonless air
Morn came and went – and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires – and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings – the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Lord Byron (1816)

while the extraordinary sunsets after Krakatoa's eruption are thought to
have helped inspire Edvard Munch's "The Scream", if you read his
description of the scene that had such an impact on him.
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=37280
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_1007062.htm
(Based on When the Sky Ran Red: The Story Behind "The Scream" by
Donald W. Olson, Russell L. Doescher, and Marilynn S. Olson | Sky &
Telescope | February 2004, p. 28-35 )

[tag: environment]
[tag: history]

Jan. 26th, 2005
10:59 pm -
gigantism in Amerika

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 11:50 pm

 
 

Y...Yttrium You scored 40 Mass, 25 Electronegativity, 64 Metal, and 30 Radioactivity!

Yttrium? Yttrium??? You're messing with me, right? That's not a real element. Really? If you say so. Okay... how about: You are really a solitary creature, and you're somewhat set in your ways. You work, consciously or subconsciously, towards the betterment of society, but I guess you do this by befriending it's strangest elements. You're kind of a spaceman/woman, but in the end you're allright. You should try to be with the benign weirdos of the world because, by goodness, no one else will. Oh, it says here that you are abundant on the moon. Interpret as you will.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 28% on Mass You scored higher than 14% on Electroneg You scored higher than 85% on Metal You scored higher than 85% on Radioactivity

Link: The Which Chemical Element Am I Test written by effataigus on Ok Cupid

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 8:13 pm

 
 
Realeyes3d Brings Handwritten Messaging To Samsung Phones
Tuesday March 8, 02:16 PM

PARIS, March 7 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/-- Realeyes3D, the pioneer in handwritten messaging and other embedded applications and content services for camera phones, announced the world-premiere availability of handwritten messaging on Samsung's SCH-S260 handset, released in Korea. This launch follows the signing of an extensive global agreement, under which Samsung has licensed Realeyes3D's w-Postcard(TM) and Digitizer(TM) handwritten messaging applications for integration as standard features in its camera phones.

With Digitizer- and w-Postcard-enabled camera phones, Samsung and Realeyes3D open up a new frontier in inter-personal mobile communications. This new messaging medium lets mobile users exchange not only typed text or photographs, but also diagrams, maps, or their own handwritten text. With handwriting being one of the most personal means of human expression, handwritten messages can convey more than the words themselves. Emotions, moods and feelings can be expressed in a handwritten message. Realeyes3D remembers the renowned media guru and theorist Marshall McLuhan: "Typing reduces expression... from personal to impersonal..." This is true in any written language, and even more so in non-Latin written languages such as Korean, Japanese or Chinese. Richer than text messaging, and more personal than regular picture messaging, handwritten messaging is a brand new complement and a rich alternative to text and picture messaging.

"This agreement is a strong validation of our founding vision: namely that camera phones can do more than take pictures. Beyond simple image editing, which are applications that are becoming common place, today we are bringing truly differentiating and innovative features to the market, thanks to Samsung's visionary and innovative partnership. Using Samsung phones enabled with Digitizer and w-Postcard, users can now communicate more extensively, more naturally, and can maximise their camera phone experience. We are looking forward to adding millions of fun and informative handwritten messages to the growing volume of mobile data being exchanged in all markets worldwide."

Digitizer allows mobile users to jot down any type of personal message using a regular, everyday pen and paper or surface, and requires no specific accessories. Digitizer quickly analyses the image and the message is extracted from the image into the camera phone. The result is a black-and-white, crisp, legible handwritten picture message that can be shared immediately with others. In addition to words, messages composed with Digitizer can be notes, maps, scribbles, drawings, artwork, or even small pre-printed articles. For mobile users with non-Latin alphabets, Digitizer is an ideal way to overcome the limitations of text messaging and quickly exchange short personal messages for the first time.

w-Postcard allows camera phone users to add comments, notes, doodles or drawings to the pictures they have taken with their camera phone. Mobile users simply overlay the image they have taken, or stored, with the handwritten content that they've created with the mobile phone's camera. In addition, w- Postcard allows users to personalise the handwritten messages even more by changing the size and colour of the overlay, and move it around on the phone display.

Both applications are powered by Realeyes3D's patented ink extraction technology.

About Realeyes3D

Realeyes3D designs, develops, and markets award-winning embedded applications and content services for users of mobile camera phones. Our applications enable new camera based usages in mobile messaging, gaming, and personal productivity. The Phone2Fun product portfolio enables camera phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and mobile content specialists to increase their value proposition to consumer and professional camera phone users. A private company headquartered in Paris, France, Realeyes3D is backed by private equity investors I-Source Gestion (http://www.isourcegestion.fr), (http://www.siemens.com/mobile -- acceleration), and Partech International (http://www.partechvc.com). For more information, visit http://www.realeyes3d.com.

CONTACT: Andrew Durkin, MUSTARD PR, Tel: +44-0-1753-889100, M: +44-0-7887-998407, andrew@mustardpr.com, for Realeyes3D S.A./

Web site: www.realeyes3d.com
www.partechvc.com Partech International
www.siemens.com/mobile Siemens Mobile Acceleration
www.isourcegestion.fr I-Source Gestion
SOURCE: Realeyes3D S.A
ASIA PULSE

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:14 pm

 
Yarn Harlot: TSF FAQ  
Yarn Harlot: TSF FAQ: "
Knitters Without Borders

This page is the home of Tricoteuses Sans Fronti�res or Knitters Without Borders.
TSF was born as a response to the tsunami disaster on December 26th 2004, but exists to fundraise for M�decins Sans Fronti�res/ Doctors Without Borders."

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:59 am

 
 
Xopher ::: March 03, 2005, 05:35 PM
My favorite Zen koan is

"When the traffic increases, it becomes nothing; when the traffic decreases, it becomes something."

This is known among the Wise as the Traffic Koan.

Faren Miller ::: March 04, 2005, 11:01 AM

Xopher, re your "zen koan" on traffic, a ways above, here's something from a recent Jon Carroll column on SFGate:

"I have a mantra that I say. Perhaps you would like to learn it. 'All the atoms within me were once the atoms of the sun. All the water within me was once part of the great oceans of the world. I am by the universe and of the universe, and I embrace all suffering and transgression, for I am it and it is me and holy mother of God that son of a camel's placenta just cut across four lanes to tailgate an airport shuttle that of course is going 15 miles above the speed limit and oh look here comes a Camaro it's a race pigs pigs pigs may you rot in hell, and I love every creature because I am part of every creature, amen.'"

writersalmanac.publicradio.org/docs/2005/02/28/#friday
FRIDAY, 4 MARCH, 2005
Poem: "Writing" by Howard Nemerov, from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission.

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

Knitters Without Borders
www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/tsffaq.html
This page is the home of Tricoteuses Sans Frontières or Knitters Without Borders.

TSF was born as a response to the tsunami disaster on December 26th 2004, but exists to fundraise for Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders.

a Mnemonic for pi

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:57 am

 
Singular "their" in Jane Austen and elsewhere: Anti-pedantry page  
Singular "their" in Jane Austen and elsewhere: Anti-pedantry page

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 12:33 am

 
 
JEF RASKIN, CREATOR OF THE MACINTOSH COMPUTER, DIES AT 61
jef.raskincenter.org/home/index.html
www.raskincenter.org/pressrelease.html

Pacifica, CA February 27, 2005 -- Jef Raskin, a mathematician, orchestral
soloist and composer, professor, bicycle racer, model airplane designer, and pioneer in the field of human-computer interactions, died peacefully at home in California on February 26th, 2005 surrounded by his family and loved ones. He had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Jef created the Macintosh computer as employee number 31 at Apple in the early 1980s, revolutionizing computer interface design. Jef invented "click and drag" and many other methods now taken for granted by computer users. He named the Macintosh project after his favorite variety of apple, the McIntosh, modifying the spelling for copyright purposes.

Stickman fight scene
formenmedia.ign.com/media/news/image/hardcore/stickfight3.swf

[tag: history]
[tag: obituary]

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:24 am

 
Hidden cash stash in secret bank account revealed!  
Subject: RE: Hidden cash stash in secret bank account revealed!
From: Me
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 7:53 PM
To: Diane

Well, you'd definitely NOT want to be a teller or middle management.
They're being squeezed badly.

To get the cream, you need to be in the "upper" levels of management. Then you earn several times the 'average' wage of the usual hard-working 60-hour-a-week stiff, plus getting share options & bonuses that somehow always come through despite poor performance. Then, even if you get sacked for bad work, the contract you've negotiated gives you several years worth of salary. (This has been quite a scandal here over the last few years, where people who've nearly wrecked companies & been forced out have taken 'separation payments' or 'compensation' of up to $13,000,000.)

I've always, personally, put the duties of the company first to your customers, then your (operative) staff, then your shareholders. Legally, however, apparently company directors have to consider their shareholders first, hence my final sentence below. [With the usual cautions; some of our major financial disasters of the 1980s were banks (even State Banks) getting in over their heads following deregulation of what they could do.]

-----Original Message-----
From: Diane
Sent: Tuesday, 1 March 2005 11:37 PM
Subject: RE: Hidden cash stash in secret bank account revealed!

Wow, where do we sign up for a job in banking!

-----Original Message-----
From: Me
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 8:28 PM
Subject: RE: Hidden cash stash in secret bank account revealed!

A couple of weeks ago, in Chris' mail that is sent on to me as administratrix of the estate, a replacement transaction card for an ANZ account I'd never seen before arrived. I went in on the next business day with my usual batch of paperwork (death certificate, letters of administration, driver's licence, medicare card, rate notice, etc.), to either close it or transfer it to the name of the estate.

After the final $5 monthly service charge was taken out, we mutually decided to close the account. Rather than transfer the remaining balance directly to the estate account at a different bank or make out a bank cheque, the lady at the enquiries desk gave me the funds in cash to deposit into the estate account and told me final closing statement would be sent straight away.

Final Statement
Original Balance on 21/12/1995 = $490.10
Total Interest paid since = $6.17
Total Service Fees since = $494.00 (22 x $4; 41 x $6; 32 x $5)
Closing Balance on 21/2/2005 = $2.27

There were no other deposits or withdrawals.

How good a business is banking?

They haven't sent any mail about this account since 2002 (and possibly earlier), had no fiddly administration of transactions and ended up with not only all the original balance, but also managed to claw back $3.90 of the $6.17 interest, 63% of what they paid out.

Buy shares now.

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 9:44 pm

 
 

Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?

greatchange.org/ov-simmons,club_of_rome_revisted.html

fter reading The Limits to Growth, I was amazed. Nowhere in the book was there any mention about running out of anything by 2000. Instead, the book's concern was entirely focused on what the world might look like 100 years later. There was not one sentence or even a single word written about an oil shortage, or limit to any specific resource, by the year 2000.
... The group all shared a common concern that mankind faced a future predicament of grave complexity, caused by a series of interrelated problems that traditional institutions and policy would not be able to cope with ... The book then postulated that if a continuation of the exponential growth of the seventies began in the world's population, its industrial output, agricultural and natural resource consumption and the pollution produced by all of the above, would result in severe constraints on all known global resources by 2050 to 2070 ... At the time, the technique of conducting computer based integrated modeling was quite new ...

The book painstakingly acknowledged that the model's work was still "preliminary" ... The decision to publish the results ... was driven by a desire to quickly get the issues into the public domain ... and spark debate ... about the changes needed to avoid the catastrophic elements that the model indicated would occur by 2070, absent any changes.

the book's conclusions were quite simple. The first conclusion was a view that if present growth trends continued unchanged, a limit to the growth that our planet has enjoyed would be reached sometime within the next 100 years. This would then result in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

The second key conclusion was that these growth trends could be altered. Moreover, if proper alterations were made, the world could establish a condition of "ecological stability" that would be sustainable far into the future.

The third conclusion was a view that the world could embark on this second path, but the sooner this effort started, the greater the chance would be of achieving this "ecologically stable" success.

The book is beautifully written. It takes only a few hours to read. I would highly recommend it to anyone. It is an interesting mixture of simple, tried and true economic laws, combined with a terrific dose of logic ... essentially lays out an optimistic outlook on how easily these limits to growth can be altered if a real effort to accomplish this is made at an early stage, rather than attempting such changes too late.

The most amazing aspect of the book is how accurate many of the basic trend extrapolation worries ... still are, some 30 years later. In fact, for a work that has been derisively attacked by so many ... there was nothing that I could find in the book which has so far been even vaguely invalidated.

The most profound message which The Club of Rome passionately urged people to consider is the power of ... exponential growth and the danger of the gap that existed between the world's rich and poor. That message is still alive and well ...

Why is this message so mute to so many? Will it take a hasty wake-up call to finally create the meaningful questioning of how this enigma is solved? The Club of Rome got the whole picture right. It was the rest of us who missed the mark!
... all the major conclusions are precisely on track. So far, not a single observed trend has emerged to allay the worries and concerns laid out by the Club of Rome.
Sadly, the dialogue and increased in-depth analysis that The Club of Rome so hoped would begin as a result of their publication never occurred ...

The Club of Rome still exists. It has commissioned more than a dozen other reports, though none ever attracted the widespread attention of The Limits of Growth.

Its most recent report* was published in 1995 and dealt with the world's unemployment dilemma. "Interim" reports on the problems of governability or the lack thereof and on the global warming problem were presented at its last meeting, held in Puerto Rico in 1996.

So the Club is intact, but the passionate concerns spelled out by The Limits to Growth have clearly cooled.

*This was written in late 2000, so things may have changed since.

More ... [permalink] posted by Mez at 1:02 am