Add some maple syrup to this mix and I’m sold. I’ve always cranked up the heat and put a lid on the saucepan. Because I like my bacon crispy. But this looks better.
Breakfast here we come…
Category: Culture
Think you’re a Scissors, Rock, Paper gun? Take on the supercomputer
The New York Times has created the world’s fastest scissors, rock, paper player. A computer that draws on the memory of 200,000 games and analyses your most likely move based on patterns. I took a stab, and 200+ games later I declared the computer the winner. I reckon it’s slightly harder than the games in the Alex (the) Kidd games. I thought the “the” was their – but not according to Dr. Google.
“Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.”
I tried thinking really hard about the best possible move and picking the opposite. I tried picking the same move ten times in a row and then changing it (I won that one, but lost the nine before that).
What are your strategies? With real people I like to call my moves in advance just to get people doublethinking. Then, if they think I’m trustworthy, they win the game, but I win the game of life. And if they don’t – I win both. It’s win/win.
I wonder if asking people what they call the game (ie the order they frame the three options in) is indicative of a person’s stock throw? Maybe it’s the one they put in the middle. I’m definitely a rock guy. Mainly because in my family a win came with the opportunity to physically demonstrate the action of the winning item. And a rock is more fun to dish out than scissors.
Robots from a war zone
There’s just something a little bit nice about this. A US soldier named Rupert Valero who loves action figures, especially robot/transformer types, has been building toys from scraps he’s picked up around Afganistan and using them to impress the local kids.
He’s made a bunch of robot things using plastic bottle lids.
Rupert makes these things when he’s bored, in this interview he says he’ll pull out his knife and start working away on his plastic creations in spare moments while he waits for the artillery cannon he works on to be put into action. But it’s not something solely for his benefit.
“When we are outside the wire, and interact with the Afghan locals, I take some of my little creations, and you see the eyes open wide on these little kids. I think I put in my humble talent to some use if it means winning hearts and minds of the Afghan people.”
“Out here, it’s 4th world, not even 3rd world. Kids are corrupted at a very young age. Boys are brainwashed to be soldiers, girls to be literally work horses. The kids we see out on patrol have never seen a He-Man or DCUC Batman. Afghan children play with rocks and dirt, which is never in shortage.”
You can buy a few of them on Etsy, and see a bunch of his previous creations on Flickr.
Via hilobrow.
My Life in Albums: 1999: Powderfinger, Pumpkins and an Eternal Nightcap
1999 was a big year for me. We moved to Brisbane. I started year 11 at school. I was suddenly meant to be taking things seriously. And I started earning a little bit more money than the $2 a week we were previously entitled to. So I could afford to buy a few more CDs.
For the first few months of our life in Brisbane we were living in a modernish rental house in Keperra. With a pool. Bells, and whistles. And I remember this song was doing the radio rounds…
Eminem didn’t really do it for me in a big way. I do remember enjoying Cake in that year…
But the defining album for me from 1999 was Powderfinger’s Internationalist. I bought it with the proceeds of an afternoon spent cleaning the fence at our new house (where my parents still live).
I also discovered the Whitlams, properly, in 1999, when I got me a copy of Eternal Nightcap (incidentally, we saw them two weeks ago with the Queensland Symphony. We had second row seats and they were amazing. Playing through Eternal Nightcap plus some more recent hits)…
This was also the year I discovered the Smashing Pumpkins. Thanks largely to my obsessive friend Benny. And my friend Damien who brought me a pirated copy of Siamese Dream back from China. Disarm has embedding disabled – and I think it’s the best song on that album, followed by Soma…
And Today…
This Ben Kweller cover of Today is pretty cool.
The Great Gatsby: NES Edition
I just played the Nintendo version of the Great Gatsby. Well. Sort of. The Classic F. Scott Fitzegerald novel has been adapted to the classic gaming system. But with a catch. It’s online.
You can play it here. Here’s some shots from my play through.
Someone at Mars Hill doesn’t hate video games
This is pretty funny.
There’s this old school universal cheat code from the days of the NES called the Konami Code.
Go to Mars Hill’s website and enter it – just hit the combo of keys above on your keyboard + enter – and you find an “Easter Egg.” Somebody there knows more about gaming culture than they’re letting on, because the code takes you to Driscoll’s ill-conceived rant about video games, posted and discussed here the other day.
H/T ChurchCrunch
Mmm. Type Sandwiches
This brings some of my favourite subjects together – typography, Helvetica and burgers. Delicious mix.
Via this Flickr set. There are more sandwiches there. But I love this one:
And this one:
It’s π day in 5 days…
The 14th of March (3.14) is pi day. Assuming you write the date like an American. Pi day. It makes the world go around. Pi day has an official website. Where you can get some digits of pi. For fun.
To celebrate the awesome magicalness of Pi. Here are some bits of pi.
This guy used the decimal points of pi to make music.
Here’s a pumpkin pi (via BoingBoing).
And a π necklace. Correct to a lot of digits.
Or this one, with almost 4,500 digits of pi.
Get a hold of a pi clock…
Or a clock where π features but isn’t central… if you want to display it all year around.
Have some pi drinks. With π ice cubes.
Finally. Check this out. Blow your mind. Eat a pie for pi day – and use pi to help calculate the size of portions required. Because pi is just the other side of pie.
Here are some π posts from my archives.
My Life in Albums: 1998: Discovering JJJ
So my dalliance with crappy pop and boy bands didn’t last all that long. I graduated to crappy Australian guitar angst driven teenage rebellion just a year later. Actually, the move was probably happening earlier than that.
Regurgitator’s Black Bugs, Spiderbait’s Calypso, Massive Attack’s Teardrop, and Custard’s Music is Crap were all on my radar around the same time (1997-98).
But for me, 1998 is the year of The Living End. Heroes to a generation of Australians. Now an incredibly tight live act replete with double bass. Well. They’ve always had a double bass. They haven’t always been that tight live though. Judging by the clips I sorted through on YouTube (the official film clip for this song has had embedding disabled by request).
I think I scored the Living End’s debut album with a CD voucher I won at school, or maybe it was a birthday present. I remember hanging out in my room listening to it while reading Redwall, by Brian Jacques. Those were the days.
Words can’t express just how excited I was to be hanging with the cool kids, musically speaking, when I discovered the Living End. Though my frenemy, Sam Conway (who tried to put out the Olympic Torch with a fire extinguisher) made it clear to me that the cool kids had moved on from the Living End about the time I discovered them. In hindsight there was probably some causation there, not just correlation. Better yet. The Living End could be turned up to 11. Which was especially useful when my family decided to pull up stumps and move to Brisbane.
Other notables from the year included this little number by Grinspoon.
Though, for a while, I had merged Green Day and Grinspoon, in my head, and was adamant that I really liked the band Greenspoon.
And of course, there was the Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony. Performed here with Coldplay, because, well, that’s kind of cool.
My life in albums: 1997: The wander year
Everybody has a musical awakening story, and a musical skeleton in the closet. Despite my relatively awesome beginnings, my life in albums almost went off the rails in my first year of really liking music. My sisters and I used to watch Rage on a Saturday morning. And before I’d really discovered the magic of radio we used to make mix tapes by holding the tape recorder up to the speakers.
One of the songs on high rotation on Rage in that year was Hanson’s Mmmbop. Still a catchy little number. Even if Taylor does look remarkably feminine.
My sisters were hooked. This album was on high rotation in our house. All the time. I know all the words to all the songs. My middle sister bonded with her now husband when they sang some Hanson songs together after church one night, their “recessional”, or whatever the song at the end of the wedding ceremony is, was another Hanson song, and at their wedding reception I used the song Madeleine to draw people’s attention back from their conversations to the original proceedings (that’s my sister’s name). Anonymity lost.
But for me, it was perhaps a darker musical year. One week my attention turned to Video Hits after Rage. I remember it like it was yesterday. This song came on. Some guys were walking into a haunted house. The music started. There was thunder. And then there was boy band magic. And some sort of werewolf.
I got on my pushbike and rode down to my sisters’ netball games on the other side of town. In Maclean, NSW. So not far. The song playing over and over in my head.
Am I original? Yeah.
Am I the only one? Yeah…
I saved up my pocket money ($2 a week plus mowing money in those days). And one day, on a trip to the Gold Coast, I think Pacific Fair. I had a look around Toys’R’Us. And a couple of other shops. And then walked into Big W. And came out a changed man. If not for that moment I would not have been bullied at school for a whole year, for thinking that the Backstreet Boys were cutting edge and awesome. I read the liner notes, and most of them thanked Jesus. So they were Christians too. And back then, at the age of 13, I thought Christian music was pretty cool. In fact, a year later, a Christian band called Aroma opened my eyes to rock (listen to the song Maggot here). And from there… well, you’ll have to wait until 1998’s post.
These were the only videos I could find easily and embed…
If I recall, there was a certain very good friend of mine (I won’t name – but he blogs and I’ve linked to him heaps, and he likes Pixar) who borrowed my CD and also enjoyed it.
Please think twice before posting Christian parody songs on YouTube
This is awful. Don’t these children have parents…
Via Christian Nightmares.
“What you going to do with atheists? All those pagan atheists?
I’m going to set them free. Make them Christians just like me”
I hope they don’t think this song is part of that process.
But it could be worse.
I’m happy for you to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs died in the flood, I like the Bible too. And I think taking it seriously is important. But please. Please. Please. Don’t take a song like this, and turn it into a song like that. Just awful. If people think your cause is ridiculous
Positive Movie Reviews from my cinephile friend Phil
This may be premature. Because there’s only one post so far. But you should totally check out my friend Phil’s new blog where he reviews movies. He knows all about the fillums. So you should read. Interact. Subscribe. Do all those web 2.0 things. Stalk him.
Welcome to Phil’s All-Positive Movie Reviews. If there’s something I don’t like in a movie, you won’t hear about it. I am, by nature, a pessimist, making this blog something of an exercise against character. I had considered starting a blog of reviews in which I rubbish the rubbish as much as I laud the laudable, but then I remembered that I want to work as a screenwriter and I’ll really be shooting myself in the foot if I start picking holes in the work of people I want to work with in the future. So I figure, if I don’t say any negative stuff, no one can be offended.
Back in the olden days of blogging, when I was a wee lad using blogger and posting on Nathan Goes to Townsville my friend Phil and I started a group blog. Just the two of us. It was grand. It stands the test of time. If by “test of time” you mean “still exists” and it resides, now defunct, at this link.
Phil and I co-wrote the OCC, a little Christian soap opera parody about the kind of camps you go to as a hormonal, post-pubescent young-adult man looking for a wife. I’ve posted it before, but you can find the five episodes on YouTube.
But now, Phil lives in Melbourne and I, in Brisbane. And so. I have to get my dosage of Phil via this blog. Which I heartily recommend. Though that’s like the kiss of death for a blog. Most seem to get a “go read this” link from me and then wane into once a year stiltedness.
Explosive Art: There’s something very cool about art with bombs
This is amazing. The creation at 2:06 is just mind blowing. And wall blowing.
The Breakdancing breakdown: do the “Coffee Grinder”
So, hands up if you want to be a breakdancer? No, too busy busting a move all over those polished floorboards hey…
Apparently breakdancing is one of the four components of the hip-hop lifestyle – so says one of my friends when I asked what the difference between rap and hip-hop is. The answer “rap is something you do, hip-hop is a lifestyle”… the other two components (in addition to rap and breakdancing) were, from memory, graffiti and DJing… anyway… if the above shirt (one of my favourites) doesn’t do it for you, perhaps you’ll appreciate this list of breakdancing moves on wikipedia. Seriously. Hundreds of them.
Including:
“Coffee Grinder/Helicopter: Go down on one bent leg standing on your toes with your hands on either side of your bent knee. Other leg is lying flat out on the floor beside you. Swing the leg that’s on the ground. To avoid being hit by your swing leg; you pick up your hands and put them back on the floor, then use them to pick the rest of your body up lifting it over your swing leg. Drop your body and repeat.”
Teaching life lessons by the power of embarrassment…
This guy didn’t do so well in an exam. So his mum dressed him up with a cardboard sheet that tells of his bad grades and says “honk if I need an education”… and now this is on YouTube. Way to go lady.