brrr. brr brr Brr brr BRRRRR.

(3 comments)
2004.01.10
Record setting low temperatures in Boston, -3. The previous record of -1 was set in 1875. More gist for the mill of idiots who don't realize that what's somewhat-mislabeled as "global warming" is more like "climate instability"...some weather guy was saying this was an odd patern, cold air straight from the north pole, and not down over Siberia-Alaska-Canada. (Random techie note: IE, smart enough to allow line breaks by hyphens, isn't smart enough to disallow line breaks between negative signs and the following numbers without use of <nobr> tags)

Which doesn't mean it's all "our" fault, but it is our problem, and I'm disinclined to assume what seems to be a pretty solid consensus in the scientific community (at least the scientific community that isn't being directly paid by big companies to battle the other scientists) of humankind having a big influence on the problem is bunk.


Ramble of the Moment
I've been noticing a trend in media design, and I'm trying to find out if it has a name...roughly, it consists of using realistic computer-generated images in iconic ways. For example, some of the imagery certain weather reports use is really amazing, they extrapolate from satellite data and have effects of soaring and zooming into certain regions of the country. And I think the clouds they were showing this one time were real, but then they showed realistic looking snow falling from them, to indicate the affected areas...but when I thought about it, I realized those snow flakes would be the size of small cities. And in this one video game "Knights of the Old Republic", which is a fairly traditional "RPG" (Role Playing Game) with turn-based combat... (i.e. you do your attack while they just stand there, then vice versa) but it looks as if it's playing like a legitimate action game, there's no special battle mode, and overall it looks like a scene from a movie. You can still run around and stuff, though that temporarily drops it out of combat mode.

It's kind of an odd concept, photo-realistic animation being used symbolically. Can anyone think of any other examples of this? Especially old ones...


Manifesto of the Moment
From the geeks point of view, dating is just a problem waiting to be solved.


Quote of an Old Moment
John's going to be freeballin' it in a skirt in my house? Oh good.
Mo
During our trip to London, Mo learned that the party John was hosting at our place had a kilt theme. (I'm 'backlog flushing' my Palm Pilot, and I didn't want that little gem to be lost for the ages.)

Continuing the Palm process, I was surprised that "misunderstanding modern art" gets zero hits on Google...well, at least 'til this page gets searched. I'm not sure why I jotted down that phrase in my palmpilot. Maybe it had to do with Damien Hirst's work entitled "Beautiful, cheap, shitty, too easy, anyone can do one, big, motor-driven, roto-heaven, corrupt, trashy, bad art, shite, motivating, captivating, over the sofa, celebrating painting" which I thought should've added a few more lines along the lines of "kiss my ass you poor wankers who make like 1/100th of what I do for this".