By the year 1990 there could be as many as 10,000 computers in britain.

Experts like Computer Jones will eventually become irrelevant as, by then, computers will be able to program themselves, clean their own laser ribbons and will even be able to help us organise trade union ballots. -- From Look Around You: Computers

Look Around You is brilliant. It is like a technology magazine TV show from an alternate reality 25 years ago. I can't express my love of it enough. Do whatever you must (Bit Torrent?) to find any of these episodes. The most insane and insanely cool thing I've seen lately...

The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

What is it?

Technically, you would only need one time traveler convention. Time travelers from all eras could meet at a specific place at a specific time, and they could make as many repeat visits as they wanted. We are hosting the first and only Time Traveler Convention at MIT in one week, and WE NEED YOUR HELP!

Why do you need my help?

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.Quoted from: The Time Traveler Convention - May 7, 2005

Well, I'm not going this time around, but I'll catch it again when they invent time travel. I think I've got this immortality thing down now. 30 years strong, and still feeling good!

With every point I expressed that ran counter to a view she held, she removed one article of clothing. Soon she sat on my couch naked, gently pulling at her untrimmed pubic hair, staring intently but not quite invitingly at me. The growing hard lump in my throat was just outpaced by the one in my pants. I was a little nervous because we had agreed on the last two points--the need to reconsider the option of nuclear energy, and drilling in the Arctic--and I noticed her oversized nipples were no longer hard. Luckily, she was, by this point, determined.
"What do you think" she began provocatively, "of the President's plan to privatize Social Security?"
I sighed with relief; this was as sure a promise to seal the deal as her asking if I had a condom.Quoted from: I Fucked Ann Coulter in the Ass, Hard

No, not me. Some other guy. I just found this link. And it made me giggle with evil glee because Ann Coulter is really a bad, bad person.

Just when you think nobody is reading...

[inlink]robin,386[/inlink]
[inlink]terry,419[/inlink]
[inlink]jason,123[/inlink]
[inlink]uncutsaniflush,50[/inlink](I always thought you were "uncut" mr. saniflush...)
[inlink]ajay,337[/inlink]
[inlink]metalpeter,332[/inlink]

OK, OK, so I will concede I wrote too hastily and forcefully about FGM. Still, I do believe that the true extent of the damage done to infant boys in circumcision is seriously misunderstood and underrated. All those videos of it last night just pushed me over the edge. The screams!

And when I mentioned female circumcision in haste, I was not thinking of clitoridectomy, which, as I understand from reading, is generally included in the procedure. And, yeah, I agree this must be like having the head of your penis lopped off along with the foreskin.

But I'm so glad to see that most (e:peeps) wouldn't damage the boy. Good on all y'all.

    The National Organization of Restoring Men is a non-profit support group for men who have concerns about being circumcised, are considering foreskin restoration, or are in the process of restoring their foreskins. Our aim is to help men regain a sense of self-directedness -- physically as well as emotionally.Quoted from: NORM - The National Organization of Restoring Men

Last night Penn & Teller's third season of Bullshit! (http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do) started with an episode addressing circumcision. This is a topic that is dear to me (http://www.wdog.com/rider/mannish), especially since one of the early mythologies of my life is how the doctor botched my own circumcision, leading to an extended recovery period (although, no disfiguration beyond the intended disfiguration).

Here's a question, and I mean this as a serious feminist: Why is female circumcision widely reviled as barbaric and often listed as a human rights / civil liberties threat (and rightfully so), but male circumcision happens millions of times every day in "developed" countries all over the world, and nobody cares? Seriously, the difference, as I see it, is that female circumcision is advocated by religions and cultures that are considered inferior to western religiion (Judeo-Christianity) and western cultures. That's the difference. Those people who circumcise women are "savages" and "witch doctors" but the people who circumcise males in western culture are "doctors" and "rabbis".

STOP CIRCUMCISION NOW. Tell me you circumcised your boy and I will consider you guilty of mutilation. Lots of people are guilty, but that's no excuse. Just quit it.

The website linked above links to lots of info about restoring foreskins using nonsurgical methods. A little extra attention in the shower each day can see significant results in 2-3 years towards restoring the foreskin. Don't believe me? Look at the photos on these sites (this link is SFW and warns when any nudity is coming up, but then again, have you ever seen a circumcision? If you think a foreskin is ugly... *shudder*).

I was all taken in by (e:zipzock)'s post about the Comix Cafe ([inlink]zipzock,8[/inlink]). I thought it was a comix (books) cafe, and I was like, "Wow, a cafe dedicated to comic books? How cool!"

Alas, I am my own bad standup comedian... (*rimshot*)

But on a day like today I am wanting to avoid news of the pope and Columbine and most everything else. Let me fill my holiday with goodies from the Interwebs, and allow me to share some of my private stash:

Missing Image ;(

The link goes to twoplayer comics, which is the latest addition to GF! Written by longtime GF! staffer, Aaron Stanton, and inked by Noah Kroese, a totally great artist (both working out of Moscow, ID), twoplayer comics provides another POV on gaming and gaming culture.

So we had much better luck with the scanner camera today. We're starting to get the hang of it, and we got some great photos today. Mostly I'm just going to post up some photos for you to check out. I am also going to link to a gallery on my website where you can check out hi-res versions of the images.

So first off, here's what we did to make it work: We discovered an old opaque projector we had from awhile back and hadn't used in ages. It was a kid's art tracing projector called The Tracer. We bought it at a garage sale for like $10 about 10 years ago. It uses just a very basic (probably plastic) lens that happens to come off (because you need to focus the image on the wall).

We also got a couple of new boxes. We haven't painted or felted the insides of the boxes, and it was super easy to fit them in. We used a Canon LIDE 35 scanner, and the boxes were 15x12x10 inches. We placed the scanner inside the box, affixing it with duct tape at first, but eventually velcro tabs (velcro can hold anything to anything -- no artist should be without it, but we had used up our supplies). We made an X hole for the USB wire and ran it out the computer. Of course, we removed the lid of the scanner.

The first box is pretty much intact, and we've left one side open. The scanner rests in it as described above. The second box is completed the same way, except we cut the flaps off the open side. On the closed side we cut a circular hole to insert the lens. Then we inserted the one box into the other. We can slide the boxes to adjust the focus, and so far we've determined that 11-13 inches is prett good for a distance of about 5-6 feet. Here's what it looks like:



So what do the photos look like? Well, check my gallery here (http://www.shawnrider.com/scannerCamera ) for the whole show. But here are a few for the Strip:

Just to prove that we can take normal pictures, here are me and Sarah in classid mode.


Here is an example of distortion over time. As the image was taken (as the scanner scanned) I was playing with three dogs, Janis, Dolly and Mickey. It was fun.


And here's an example of multiples -- you get this effect by quickly changing position partway through the scan one or two times. It's hard to get right, and when it happens it kind of makes a weird pop-out effect a lot of the time. Notice the dirty apron -- that's what happens when you USE an apron, gentlemen.


These give a decent idea of the kind of fun we're having with the cam. Aside from the cool old meets new aesthetic, it really does new things in representing time and motion. It's like a super slow exposure without the blur. Each instance is sampled discreetly from the preceeding and following moments, creating that banding you see in the image. The image is crisp at the instant it's recorded. The images are literally sets of very narrow images captured in sequence.

So begins the saga of the scanner camera -- skip below if you want to see the first two shots..

What is a scanner camera? Well, I'd link to the fellow's page who describes it, but it's totally down now. And the Google Cache doesn't have any photos in it (cuz the site is down). So I'll summarize -- basically, think of a pinhole camera with a really big pinhole and instead of a bit of film in the back, there's a scanner.

We bought the Canon LIDE 35 USB-powered scanner (no extra plugs, super light, small, and works great) at CompUSA (thanks Fred!) and got some boxes from Office Max. We kind of screwed up when we built it because we didn't realize we should get boxes larger than the scanner and put the scanner on the inside. We have gotten some new boxes and will build version two tomorrow morning.



We thought we'd be able to use a regular camera lens, but didn't realize that the fellow who thought this up had actually disassembled the second-hand lenses he found and got the lens itself out. So if anyone has an extra overhead head laying around, let me know. Or a camera lens you don't mind giving away. Otherwise, we'll hunt the SuperFlea next weekend and make due with the Viewmaster lenses we grabbed from the toy section at Target. Why don't kids have cool toys like telescopes anymore???

Anyway, here are the first two images taken with the camera. Well, technically we took some nice photos of "white" and "black" a few times. But you can actually see things in these. These are the houses across the street, shot through a pinhole this evening. I'll post more details about the camera when we get it working better, especially if the other guy's site doesn't go back up soon -- I know lots of people want to know more about this, so we'll share our experiences.

On with the images!

I love open source stuff, but the prevalence of closed, corp software makes the decision something of a pragmatic one. For example, I run a videogame website. I cannot go All-Linux because then I wouldn't be able to play nearly as many games. Although there are some great games available for Linux, it's just not really an option. As a developer of internet media and multimedia, I also feel like it's essential to be able to simulate the user's experience as much as possible, and that means Windows.

But I appreciate being able to modify and customize software, and I believe in open source development and the creative commons and all that good stuff. I've tried to get students to use the free Photoshop alternative, Gimp (http://www.gimp.org) but its hard to justify -- there are like no jobs looking for Gimp skills and thousands looking for Photoshop skills.

So then I found GimpShop. (http://www.plasticbugs.com/) It ain't perfect, but it's pretty dang sweet. It definitely makes it easier to go between GIMP and PS. That's for sure.

The Experimental Gameplay Project: create 50 to 100 games in 1 semester. New games every week.

The Rules:

* each game must be made in less than 7 days
* each game must be made by one person, including all art, sound, and programming
* each game must be based around a certain "toy" ie. "gravity", "vegetation", "swarm behavior", etc.

Some really cool indy games here. Check it out: