Category Archives: Uncategorized

I need to plug this site: Skyscraper Page. Despite its not so imaginative name*, the site is a veritable gold mine of information both awesome and mundane, listing skyscrapers all over the world, with their construction dates, heights, floor count, and other information, along with scale sketches for most. Sadly, though it lists every building… Read More »

Even though much art is concerned with representing the real, it’s not about photo-realism so much as it is about interpretation and re-presentation. Spotted this lovely quote which captures that: Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more easily he will… Read More »

Played Cellcraft this morning, which turned out to be one of the best science education games I’ve seen in a while. First off, here’s a screenshot of my cell being attacked by viruses (click to zoom). Note the various organelles, as well as the use of ATP, nucleic acids, amino acids, fatty acids, and glucose… Read More »

So, it’s my birthday, again. This is, in fact, a very important one, as I’m 32, which is 25; in binary, I’m 100000, a suitably venerable age, I think. Only 224 more years until you can’t encode my age in a single byte anymore. A couple of people asked what I’m doing to celebrate… For… Read More »

While I’m not terribly concerned about the privacy implications of Facebook having access to the fairly insignificant drivel I usually post there, what really bothers me about it is the fact that it represents a whole chunk of my life wrapped up in a company database that I can’t get access to, except through the… Read More »

If you’re paying any attention to web technology, you’ll know that there’s excitement building around the possibilities of HTML 5. For the lay-people out there, HTML is the language used to write web pages. We’ve been using HTML 4 since the late 1990s, and while it’s pretty great, there’s things that are a real pain… Read More »

Despite the crazy, panicked reporting about people fleeing Tokyo, the latest information I can find (from the Wall Street Journal, citing the Tokyo Metropolitan Government) states that radiation there has been steadily dropping; now down to 0.05 microsieverts/hr, one 16th of the level reported on Tuesday. Apparently this is within the normal range of radiation… Read More »

Been meaning to post this for a while – the December 2008 issue of ‘The Army Lawyer’ containing, on page 66, an article entitled For All “Intensive” Purposes: A Primer on Malapropisms, Eggcorns, and Other Rogue Elements of the English Language, describing a range of common mutations of the lingo. Found one of my favourite… Read More »

Aftershocks up and down the country over night. Woke up once or twice, but they’re pretty mild up here. What’s interesting is the area over which they’re occurring – no longer confined to around the fault, they’re happening in four clusters; one under land in Nagano, another under the ocean west of Akita in the… Read More »

When the earthquake struck last week, it felt slightly disrespectful to write enthusiastically about anything else, let alone the little, joyful things in life, like food. In the face of such tragedy, they seemed so trivial. For a while I wondered: when is it OK to be happy again? To laugh? How soon is too… Read More »