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Tag Archives: high weirdness
Link O’ the Day
Hamlet: The Facebook News Feed Edition
Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.
Polonius is no longer online.
Brilliant! (With a tip of the linky-link hat to champignon)
Okay, so.
I don’t like beer.
I don’t know how to cook.
I don’t know how to brew beer, except that the process involves mashing up some kind of grain at some step along the way. Oh, and I think yeast are involved, too.
I don’t know a thing about spices; see reference to “don’t know how to cook” above.
Nevertheless, last night I had a dream in which I came up with a new recipe for beer (which, just for the record, I don’t even drink). Said recipe involved nutmeg (which I know is a spice of some sort) and curry (which I believe to be a spice of some sort). I brewed large quantities of this beer, which I then loaded into the back of a station wagon, so that I could drive all over merry old England (a country I’ve never visited) selling it to pubs and bars.
Apparently, it was a big success, and by the end of the dream, Molson Brewing Company (a company I wasn’t even sure was real–I had to Google it just now) was negotiating with me to buy the rights to the beer for millions of dollars.
Either I have a secret font of arcane, esoteric knowledge buried deep inside my head somewhere, or someone else has been using my brain while I’m asleep. Would you even put stuff like curry and nutmeg in beer? I have no idea.
Holy crap! Coolest thing EVAR….
…via physicsduck
Video of a French guy who makes triodes (a type of vaccum tube) by hand. And when I say “by hand,” I mean glass envelope and all.
Pay particular attention to his testing equipment.
Man, this is really, really, really cool. If you like tech, you like seeing tech made, and you like old school tech, check this out. Worksafe, sound.
Linguistic musings
Axes seem to hold a special place in the collective consciousness of English speakers. Why is it, exactly, that we speak of axe murderers (usually in the context of “I’m not an…”), but we don’t attach the weapon of choice to the descriptions of other murderers? One never speaks of a knife murderer, or a gun murderer, or a blunt-instrument murderer…
It’s the Terminator Kama Sutra!
The house on the rock
When I was last in Chicago, dayo and I drove about three hours into Wisconsin to see a house.
Not just any house. To understand this particular house, imagine that you were a space alien. Imagine that you came from a strange culture that did not build buildings. Maybe you lived in caves, or, I dunno, burrowed parasitically into the flesh of gigantic alien space walruses or something. Or maybe you lived in trees like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, and went everywhere barefoot because your fantastically advanced magic hadn’t ever got so far as to develop shoes.
Anyway, the point is that you don’t build buildings. And then, let’s suppose you’d heard of a thing called a “house,” which was an enclosed structure divided into “rooms.” Armed with this knowledge, you set out to design and build a house, but you weren’t quite clear on what exactly a “room” was.
If you were this space alien, the house that you built would probably be The House on the Rock. The Web site and the brochures describe it as the “grand vision” of a guy named Alex Jordan, but I’d say it’s not so much a “grand vision” as it is a study in ad-hoc chaos and arguably the world’s greatest monument to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It’s an enclosed structure. It’s probably about a hundred thousand square feet or so, and it’s three stories tall, more or less. I say “more or less” because it wasn’t so much “designed” as it was thrown together over time by a man whose grasp of architecture and construction was theoretical at best, and the result is…um, well, it’s hard to actually call it a building, really.
You go in, and you find that it’s a hallway. It’s kind of like being inside a living organism, like the organic space ship on that science fiction TV series whose name I can’t remember with the one chick who’s really hot and shoots lots of people, only more so. The hallway winds and twists and ascends and descends more or less at random, and occasionally it widens out into a place with a bed, or a table, or some other object of furniture you might expect to find in a domicile. It’s hard to say how many rooms there are in this house, because the house doesn’t really do “rooms.” Wide spots in the hallway-tunnel-alien-innards-thing pass for rooms, for the most part, and going from one place to another sometimes involves taking a route that’s…unexpected.
I took many pictures, and they’re very large. For those of you who don’t mind the crushing bandwidth: onward!
People Unclear on the Concept
Microsoft, in their ongoing efforts to make computers and computer-related products easier to use, has an Official Windows Vista Help Page explaining how to open the box that Windows Vista comes in.
If they need a Web page explaining how to open the box, the cynic in me suggests that they’re still a little fuzzy on this whole idea of “user-friendly”…
The Internets: Not just for porn any more!
The Internet is a great place to see things you’ve never seen before. No, I’m not talking about videos of people falling down the stairs or hot lesbian sex with alien tentacle monsters; you can get those in real life on most weekends. I mean…other stuff. Strange stuff. Stuff that Man Was Not Meant to Know.
Like, for example, Cthulu/Winnie The Pooh fiction.
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie,
That’s not dead which can eternal lie,
And in aeons strange even Death may die —
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie.
And it’s not just isolated little bits. This stuff is everywhere. And its not just Pooh. Even Dr. Seuss has a dark and brooding madness lurking beneath the surface.
And it gets stranger. Everyone knows about the Great Pumpkin, who rises from the pumpkin patch to fly about the world. But few know the full truth, the eldritch horror of the Great Old Pumpkin. Fewer still have learned that truth and not been driven mad.
This content-free post brought to you by the letter C and the number–oh, God, I can see forever!
Steve Jobs is God
So last night, I went to bed very late. I don’t know if it was spending the entire day playing World of Warcraft, or eating little besides leftover Subway and frozen microwave dinners, or perhaps the fact that I was working on my Web site every time I was waiting for my mage to recover mana, but for some reason I was visited by the spirit of Steve Jobs in my dreams.
The dreams were so vivid that when I woke up, I could almost feel the presence of Steve there in my bedroom. I remember talking to the Great Mr. Jobs about the inside skinny at Apple, and learning some rather…remarkable things. A small part of our conversation:
Me: So when Apple switched from PowerPC processors to Intel processors, you made it possible for users to run their old PowerPC programs.
Steve: Yes. We created an emulation program called Rosetta, which emulates a PowerPc processor on an Intel processor.
Me: Other people have done the same thing before; there’s an open-source program called PearPC that runs Mac OS X on Intel computers. But it’s very slow. I’ve seen it run; it takes about half an hour to boot. How did you get Rosetta to run so fast?
Steve: Well, for technical reasons, emulating a RISC processor like a PowerPC on a CISC processor like the ones Intel makes is very difficult to do. At first, our emulation program was very slow, too.
But then we thought, what if the laws of physics are changed? Is it possible that under different fundamental laws, emulating a RISC processor on CISC architecture might be easy? So when our engineers started going down that path, we discovered we could get much better performance.
Me: Come again?
Steve: It’s quite simple, really. Rather than emulating a processor, what if Rosetta emulated an entire universe–one where the laws of physics made running PowerPC code on an Intel chip easy? We searched through a large number of parallel universes, and found one where the basic physical properties of the universe gave us the results we wanted.
Me: Wait a minute. Are you telling me that Rosetta doesn’t emulate a processor, it emulates an entire universe?
Steve: Exactly! We got the idea from watching The Matrix. When you launch a PowerPC application, Rosetta brings a new universe into being. This particular universe has non-Euclidean geometry; it turns out that Euclidean geometry is particularly bad for emulating RISC on CISC.
Within the laws of this universe, it’s easy to run PowerPC applications on the Intel processor found in all our current computers, like our best-selling iMac or our high-end Mac Pro.
The only drawback to this approach is memory. Emulating an entire universe within Mac OS X requires significant memory, which is why we recommend that our users who still find themselves running legacy PowerPC applications install at least two gigabytes of RAM. You can add more memory to your computer as a build-to-order option from the Apple store.
Me: And this actually works?
Steve: Oh, yes. Emulating an entire universe involves more overhead, of course, but the speed advantage you get by running RISC code on a CISC processor in non-Euclidean space more than makes up for it.
Me: I’ve noticed that when I keep my computer running for a long time, PowerPC apps can suddenly start to slow down.
Steve: Yes. We’ve observed that issue in our labs as well. It has to do with the formation of life in the parallel universe.
Me: What??!
Steve: If you let Rosetta run for long enough, eventually life will arise in the universe it creates. Because emulating the complex functions of life is a processor-intensive task, the performance of PowerPC applications can diminish over time.
It’s impossible to predict precisely when this slowdown will occur, because life doesn’t always arise at the same time or in the same way. We’ve found that on an eight-core Mac Pro system, it usually takes about three or four days for life to appear. On an iMac or a MacBook, it can take longer.
When this happens, we recommend that our users quit all their Rosetta applications. This causes Rosetta to destroy the parallel universe. When you launch a PowerPC application again, Rosetta will create a brand-new universe without life in it, and performance will be restored.
Me: Is any of this life…intelligent?
Steve: Sometimes. If you let your PowerPC applications run long enough, you may see intelligent life inside of Rosetta. When this happens, you’ll notice a significant slowdown of your PowerPC apps. We recommend that you quit all your apps at this point.
Me: Waitaminit–isn’t that murder?
Steve: Technically, no.
Me: But…you’re destroying an entire universe full of sapient life!
Steve: If you look at it that way, sure. We look at it as freeing system resources.
Me: But…it’s life!
Steve: Yes. We thought about releasing a game based on Rosetta, to compete with The Sims. The game would allow the user to interact with the parallel universe created by Rosetta and take a hand in shaping the life that formed there.
Me: And?
Steve: It turns out our market research shows that people only want to play with games that emulate human life. And not just human life, but middle-class twentieth-century American human life. Dealing with non-human sapience in a non-Euclidean universe didn’t have the same draw, so in the end we left it out of iLife ’08. However, we’re working on a smart backup feature for Leopard that we’re very excited about.
Me: Do you mean Time Machine?
Steve: Oh, no. That’s a data recovery app that folds the fabric of space-time to recover accidentally deleted files by grabbing them from a past version of this universe. The new smart backup feature uses the intelligence of sapient life in a parallel universe. But that’s all I can say about it right—
And then I woke up. No more WoW and frozen TV dinners for me, I think.