The Big Bang
For the briefest moment of time everything that ever would be was contained within a space seemingly far too small for the mass that would emerge. A great history stretched ahead of it; a time when it would explode outwards, blossoming with life and colour and joy. There was a death on the horizon too, a time of withering and crumbling and fading into nothingness, but right now so far away as to be meaningless. This was its moment. This was its birth. This was its big bang. Oh, there was also sex with a bee to look forward to as well. That was going to be freaking awesome. Google+: View post on...
Jazz Busker
I could tell you about all the dreadful buskers that Chichester has to offer – I could talk at length about the bum notes from trumpeters as well as the key changes and pitches from various singers that were rejected by the original songs' composers on the grounds of violating the Geneva Convention against cruel and unusual punishment – but I'd like instead to talk about a very good one. I don't know her name and she seems very shy so I won't dare to intrude and ask. She is, however, an absolutely fantastic jazz guitarist, often playing along to a backing track from something by Ellington or Coltrane or some other proponent of the art with whom I'm less familiar. Unlike other musicians who sometimes haunt the precinct in the city she loses herself in the music, barely even noticing or acknowledging the passersby or those few who grace her guitar case with some change. So very jazz. #StreetPhotography #Music #Jazz #StreetPics Google+: View post on...
North Korean Friends
Coming this week on Pyongyang Mandatory Viewing Channel One is a brand new sitcom… North Korean Friends! Join Monica, Ross, Phoebe, Joey, Rachel, and Choi Chin-u every week as they grow up in the most wonderful city in the most wonderful country in the world discussing how much they love Kim Jong-un. Episodes will be set in and around Central Dirt Area, a hip and happening place to discuss how good it is not to have any coffee thanks to the wonderful leadership of Kim Jong-un. The first episode will air this Friday and is titled The One Where Everyone Loves Kim Jong-un. You are hereby instructed to consider this episode to be the finest thing you will have seen on your...
The Dream Of Knowledge
Congratulations sleeper! You have been selected to have the Dream of Knowledge, answering that question that keeps plaguing you, that question you raise so often, that question that plays on your mind as you drift off at night. Remain calm and control your breathing as information is imparted to you. You will awake slightly despondent but this is perfectly normal behaviour. Shall we begin? Ah, begin. That’s a loaded word, isn’t it? It’s a word tied to matters temporal and it’s precisely because of matters temporal that this dream has become necessary. But I’m probably confusing you. Still, when have dreams ever been straightforward? If you want you can ask this translucent chicken, a remnant from the dream you can barely remember before this one which we so rudely interrupted. We can wait. Stop! The translucent chicken’s answer is a lie! Let us really begin. Picture the multiverse. In your dream the multiverse is this infinity pool at the top of a skyscraper. See how it perfectly reflects the night sky. See every star and galaxy upside down in its mirror surface. Well, try to ignore them. They’re kinda distracting. Instead, look at the surface and watch what happens when a single drop of rain hits the infinity pool… Sorry, what? Well, I don’t know. It’s a dream. The raindrop could have come from anywhere. I know there aren’t any clouds. Look, I already said the reflection was distracting. Can we get a move on? The raindrop hits the surface of the multiverse and a universe springs into being! Expanding, rippling… And fading. The universe came into being, existed, and died, but the multiverse lives on! This is not the knowledge we want to share but it’s a start. Now look at many raindrops hitting many points on the surface of the infinity pool. Each one is a universe springing into existence from a big bang event through to heat death when the ripples lose energy and stability returns to that part of the multiverse. Each universe has its own laws of physics, concept of time, religious fundamentalists, and so on. Right now, outside this Dream of Knowledge, you’re living in your universe on the crest of a wave at a point in time on its ripple towards nothingness. No, this doesn’t explain biorhythms. Why would you even ask that? Do people still believe in that? Wow. Really. Wow. Well, good, it’s nice to see knowledge can travel in two directions. Let’s get back to the rain, shall we? Are you wondering what happens when two raindrops fall too close to one another in the multiverse? You are now?...
If Architects Had To Work Like Web Programmers
This morning I saw a retweet of a tweet linking to a site republishing an article from a now defunct website which apparently couldn’t discern the source of the original post, and because I found the article amusing I decided to share it too. But before I could do that I wanted to have a little hunt to see if I couldn’t find out who the original author might have been because, you know, it’s nice to do things like that sometimes. Sometimes. Using Google’s date range searching I initially tracked the first instance back to the 30th November, 2000, and this article. That article referenced a link that no longer existed but thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine I was able to grab a copy from 2001. Still no source cited so I was about to publish a copy when a thought occurred: as well-known and impressive as Google is when it comes to searching it’s not widely understood by the internet masses that it doesn’t search everything. In fact, it doesn’t even search very much of everything in the grand scheme of things. Add that to the fact that as it’s changed the way it ranks sites, sites have changed the way they present information. This means that if you’re looking for something really old you might sometimes be better off using an older search engine. Well, that was my excuse to try out some search engines of yesteryear and I’m sticking to it. As luck would have it, the first engine I tried was Excite‘s (this coming not long after I’d been reminiscing about its chat feature) and that very quickly led me to this page where the owner had fortunately saved me any more work by including the following information: * * * * * April 2012: Marina Garrison emailed me to say that she has a hard copy from circa 2002, with David F. Leigh given as the author. Nov 2012: Duane Parks emailed me to say: I wrote this rant about 1981 while working as an Engineering Manager at NCR in Cambridge OH defining and designing new Retail Terminals. After returning from a high-level project review with company vice-presidents, I wrote this during a forty-minute rage and gave copies to a few people in my department. I did not sign the work, not wishing to jeopardize my position. By the next day, it had been posted on several bulletin boards. The issues I wrote about are obviously common for creative people in all kinds of businesses and industries. I’m not sure how or when the rant made its way to the web....
History: America’s Dust Bowl
Reproduced with permission from the neOnbubble Learn You Some History series of student learning guides. This is a concise guide to the 1930s’ Dust Bowl that occurred on the prairies of America using photographs from the Library of Congress. America faced a problem in the 1930s. The Great Depression meant that average people couldn’t afford to buy foodstuffs that were grown by farmers throughout the states of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. This in turn left the farmers with a surplus of crops but no means of selling enough to pay for the luxuries to which they’d become accustomed: champagne, personal dirigibles, butlers, etc. Insanity threatened the farmers’ existence and some took to synchronised vegetable-picking much to the embarrassment of the wider American public. An ingenious plan was enacted by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace to encourage farmers to grow a different sort of crop, one that would be free to the people of America and would give the unemployed something to do. That crop was dust. The idea was that by distributing dust freely people would be obliged to clean up a bit more giving them essential training for farmers’ butler and maid roles when the economy picked up. The farmers would be compensated for the new crop from federal coffers. Roy Kimmel of Texas coordinated the efforts. Prairie farmers quickly adapted their land to grow the new dust, often producing far more than they could reasonably store in sheds. New farming techniques needed to be learnt too. Tractors and dirigible-drawn ploughs were of no use in dust farming, the work requiring more manual labour. Farmers needed to wait for the right height of dust build-up before harvesting which led to booming business for the Oklahoma Measuring Stick Company, one of the few success stories of that period in America’s history. Dust distribution was highly successful, managing to blot out the sun when released in storms and culminating in huge amounts of cleaning throughout much of the midwest of America. The area soon became known as the Dust Bowl. Despite the apparent successes, however, it emerged in 1935 that there was a serious side effect to the dust crop. Physical disabilities of the young started to increase within the affected regions. In particular, Cranium Gigantism emerged mostly in boys leading to the adoption of oversized headwear. Dust Bowl farmers were reluctant to alter their farming techniques again even with the removal of the subsidy. The American government was forced to intervene in late 1937 and used its weather machine located in St Louis to drench the area and destroy the remaining crops. The production of so...
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