Dan Q
In the style of her comic, The Aber Effect, and in the light of recent protests about the religious implications of a comic, Claire has made a marvellous one-framer, shown below:
Much thanks to Claire for allowing me to publish this online.
In the news: Inside Move: ‘Futurama’ may get new lease on life. That’d be fabulous.
This is just a piece of genius filmmaking. 5 friends in Machynlleth made huge chipboard letters akin to the ones famously on the hills above Hollywood did so secretly, deploying the letters the night before Mach’s weekend-long film festival started.
But better than that, they filmed themselves doing it and entered their short movie into the film festival they did it for. That’s just brilliant. A well-deserved award was given.
For more, see the original article from the BBC.
The Guardian ran an interview with Hayao Miyazaki, director of such films as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Tonari no Totoro. My favourite bit of the interview:
Miyazaki taps a cigarette from a silver case. The Disney deal suits him, he explains, because he has stuck to his guns. His refusal to grant merchandising rights means that there is no chance of any Nausicaa happy meals or Spirited Away video games. Furthermore, Disney wields no creative control. There is a rumour that when Harvey Weinstein was charged with handling the US release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki sent him a samurai sword in the post. Attached to the blade was a stark message: “No cuts.”
The director chortles. “Actually, my producer did that.”
Bush approves of ‘Intelligent Design’, we hear, a theory that’s gaining popularity amongst some Christian groups as a competitive scientific approach to the theory of natural selection. It specifies that while evolution has occured, it was guided by an intelligent force.
But the thing that it’s fans repeatedly fail to notice is that it isn’t a demonstrable scientific theory. To be considered as a scientific theory, it has to be impirically demonstrable, at least in theory, to be false. Evolutionary Theory can be proven false, because theories of evolution state that they could be proven false by the discovery of any single species who’s history can not be explained by it’s own terms. Intelligent Design’s “fail” demand is that it is proven to be incorrect for every species. Just like theories that both “God exists” and “God does not exist”, Intelligent Design can not be proven false, and therefore is untestable and unscientific!
I have no problem with the existance of a theory of intelligent design: in fact, I’m honestly surprised it’s taken so long to get a foothold, as it is a great theological explanation for the way species have been (so far) proven to be while maintaining creationistic ideas… but it is not, by definition a ‘scientific theory’.
It’s been a long day.
On the up-side, Egg have stopped writing to me to tell me I am over my credit limit and instead, today, wrote to me to tell me they were bored of telling me I was over my credit limit and so they have increased said limit. Go Egg!
I see that the council are still recommending that people don’t swim in the sea off Aberystwyth, with signs all along the promenade, after a pollution incident at the weekend, although they’ve allowed access to the beach again. I called the hotline number and determined that the sewage leak most likely occured at the pumping station near Rummers.
My suspicions were confirmed today when I took this photograph on my way to work:
Singing Benches Let Loose In City, writes the BBC. Just plain weird, say I.
Lib Dems win in Ceredigion over Plaid Cymru, by 219 votes, after a recount. Our little election party just took off…
The Register have got a well-written analysis of the people involved in the recent “ricin terror” case, with a look at how this relates to Al-Quaeda, ID cards, and politics. It’s worth reading.
Got home videos? Send them to Google! That’s the message that Google co-founder Larry Page is trying to put out.
In anticipation of launching a “video search” system, Google wants a stack of material on which they can test their “video spider” – a program which will hunt for keywords (spoken, or on-screen) in video material, so that it’s searchable in much the same way as web pages already are.
Fucking weird.
A brave physicist claims that black holes don’t exist at all, but what we are interpreting as the existence of black holes – where stars have collapsed into tiny, superdense masses with an event horizon within which matter/energy escape is almost impossible – are actually… dark energy! (yes, yet another dark-matter/dark-energy claim)
It’s a good one, though, and helps explain a lot of things. His theory is that these dark holes, as they’re undoubtedly going to be called by the mass media, attract matter over spacetime on the “outside” of the event horizon, but repel it from the inside, transforming electrons into positrons as they leave, thereby causing radiation (as we see from suspected black holes, but wouldn’t expect) as they collide with matter in the dimensions we’re used to.
In any case, it’s a brave little theory which is also probably wrong. But you can read it on nature.com anyway.
Do you remember Ceefax, that wonderful service from the BBC that seemed so cool until you discovered the internet? Well I do. And so does a Dutch consultant who set up a system, on the web, for searching Ceefax pages.
Well; in any case; I thought that his site was fun (in a nostalgic kind-of way) but hard-to-navigate, so I’ve developed a sensible front-end that’s far more reminiscent of the way Ceefax works: Ceefax Browser On Scatmania. Give it a go.
Claire and I’s grand tour of the United Kingdom brought us yesterday to Terrington St. Clement, near Kings’ Lynn, in Norfolk, where Claire’s dad lives.
As I anticipated, this has resulted in me here, too, helping to repair computers. Claire’s dad’s PC was a mess – Ad-Aware reported 183 malware/adware programs, Norton Anti-Virus reported 10 threats (2 of which were actually installed viruses). I don’t know what the solution is to the problems caused by hundreds of thousands of new people – who do not know about the risks – appearing on the internet, but I hope that somebody works it out soon: even the BBC have started to take notice of the increasing problem of “zombie” networks, particularly in the UK, which lead to denial of service attacks, spam floods, breaches of privacy, and annoying pop-up ads.
And there’s no excuse, really – Windows users can get AVG (anti-virus), ZoneAlarm (firewall), Ad-Aware (anti-malware/adware), Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (e-mail client) and be safer by hundreds of orders of magnitude than they are with Internet Explorer and a wide-open pipe. And all of this software is free. With the increase of the awareness of this problem by mainstream news sources, you’d think it would spur people into protecting themselves (just like the coverage of the “War On Terror” by mainstream media made people paranoid about radiological/chemical/biological terrorist attacks). Ah well.
In any case: we’ve been traipsing around North Norfolk, meeting people and eating excessively. I’ve just about recovered from a minor leg sprain I sustained while ice skating in Preston earlier this week, and all is well.
Glad to hear that Sian‘s Troma Night went well (can’t remember where I heard that from). Missing all you Aberites. Hope to see you all soon.
I have a hard time believing that this story is true: it’s just too crazy – but the photos are good and hard to forge without more resources than your average internet prankster. So, here’s the tale as it was told to me…
There’s a company in the States that sells automatic car washers as a complete solution, including the washing system, cash box, installation of the building, etc. These are completely automated: you drive up, put your money into the machine, then drive through.
In any case; after the installation of a particular one of these machines, the owner noticed that the return from the machine was not so much as should be expected. Diagnostics were run and the cash processor seemed to be okay, so everybody was at a loss. The owner even went so far as to accuse the supplier’s staff of having keys to his cashbox, and returning to the scene to steal the money.
Eventually, at his wits end, the owner set up security cameras to try to catch the thief in the act. Here are some stills from the footage:
The first image. Yes, that’s a starling that’s just landed on the coin return slot.
And there’s the starling, wriggling in to the coin return slot, where, presumably, it’s pushing it’s way up into the cash box through the return chute.
The starling with some coins!
The starling’s dropped a couple of coins, but is still wriggling to get free of the slot with it’s remaining prize.
Apparently, they later determined that it was not one, but several, birds who were robbing the car wash. Following them discovered a cache of loose change on the roof of the car wash and beneath an exposed root of a nearby tree.
So; what do you think – real or fake?