When I saw the thumbnail for this image, I thought it might be some kind of cosplay version of Voltron or something, like a Gundam or whatnot. So when I clicked it.. not so much.

Wil Shortz, the spiffy dude who creates the New York Times crossword puzzles every day (I can only complete puzzles from Monday thru Wednesday, they get harder as the week progresses.. the Friday and Saturday , was recounting a story he’d witnessed while visiting a recent forum/seminar/something that had to do with Wordgame producers and whatnot. I heard it on the radio (NPR’s Weekend Edition, comes on around 9:30am Central US time on Sundays) so forgive me for the vague details.

He was reading the little outline/program dealy for a seminar wrap-up and some sequence of words in the listing, if you took something like every 2nd letter of each bulleted line, you came up with “HIDDEN CONTEST: DRAW TWO NAMES” and there was a hat at the table with supposedly random names placed in it. There were actually only two names there — the proposer and the proposed-to were called up. Now that they had everyone’s attention, the guy proposed and there was much merriment, yes-saying, and the whole shelob. Very clever, random seminar puzzle-making person!

Well, actually, now that I’ve typed all that out, I guess NPR actually backs up their shows as a podcast you can stream from their site. The episode in particular is found here. Before you hit this week’s show, instead scroll down to Live and Learn under the Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz.

If you keep listening, you’ll hear a weekly on-air word puzzle, where they reveal the week’s puzzler as well as playing an on-air game with the randomly-drawn winner of the people who sent in correct entries. Plus you could win a bunch of geeky wordgame prizes. This week the prize list was read to us by none other than Bob Saget!

Oh well. It’s now free for Windows-based PC games, whereas before only people with the premium gold membership could utilize functions like playing online games with each other. Now, however, according to a Gamespot article (almost cited it as Gamestop), and confirmed by an InformationWeek article that the PC-version of Xbox-Live is now free for the asking.

Estelle Getty, who played Momma on The Golden Girls, died Tuesday, a few days after her 85th birthday, from unspecified causes according to an LA Times article.

I really wasn’t a big fan of the show (especially because of Blanche.. ick), but Momma and the lady who kept recounting stories from back in St. Olaf held my attention for the few parts that Blanche was thankfully absent.

I’ve been trying to test out what I’ve come to simply refer to as a flip-flop animation, using two or more pictures played at 10ms each in an endless loop (animated GIF). The example below was one of my Random Images a while ago, and got me to experimenting on how one might be produced.

Random Image From A Previous Post

I tried it out at first taking two pictures that I thought were relatively side-by-side — by just pressing the shot button once, then again. I then edited them together using the default frame time of 10ms with a trial version of GIF Movie Gear that I got and have since enjoyed so far. What resulted were two images that, instead of looking 3D, actually shook like an earthquake (and almost panic-attack inducing, I might add).

I’ve created a new Flickr account, twothreeeight, to showcase most all of my photography in general, including this set of experiments. However, when viewing them from Flickr itself, you’ve got to click on the View All Sizes button above the preview thumb in order to see the actual animation sequence.

It was then that I remembered my camera had one of those less-oft used functions of rapid-ish-ly taking multiple shots with only one button press, so I decided to try using that, and with GIF Movie Gear lined up a Shot1/Shot2/Shot3/Shot4/Shot3/Shot2 loop, so that it would go back and forth up and down the line — moving the camera only what I estimated to be very minutely. Not that much better!

After this semi-failure, I wondered that perhaps my angling really wasn’t as deep as it should have been, so I tried a few outside instead.

Zooming In: Fail

Going Around a Shrub: Fail

Looking Down A Street: Fail-ish

The last one was probably the best try, but still not quite what I was trying to do.
I’ll still have to experiment with this more, but take a stab at it yourself and let me know how it comes out — maybe even provide a link?

Going officially online at the end of 2008, a new Medical wikipedia (edited by qualified persons, though, presumably) is set to provided a massive clearinghouse of information regarding oddles of medical topics. The site can be previewed starting today at Medpedia.com according to a FoxBusiness.com article.

Incidentally, Google (who is rumored to be in talks with purchasing Digg, btw) unveils its new wiki competitor, Knol.. “like Wikipedia, with moderation,” according to ArsTechnica article. We’ll see about that.

In the news some time ago, ran a story regarding so-called anti-teenager devices that broadcasted an unceasing tone at a frequency audible only to people generally around 25-30 or younger. If such a tone were to be sounded in a classroom, for instance, the teacher would not realize it but the students would become agitated by the disturbance. For more info, see articles from Jpost.com and TheAge.com.

Instructables’ recent article about how to craft such a tone-emitting device re-stirred my interest in it, so I began a search for perhaps some software that could generate it or an MP3 of the pitch so I could try it out.

Turns out the Internet Archive has a page hosting it found in FLAC and WAV.

I played the tone myself, starting with the volume completely silent and slowly turning it up. For some reason, I can hear a particular faint tone at one specific spanse of volume, but not the others, neither being the softest or the loudest. It’s not really at all irritating; but then again, I can tolerate incessant intermittent low-battery beeps on a smoke detector for days without being irritated by it.

Can any of you hear it? You, that is, being someone out of the 3800 regular visitors I’ve gotten in the past week. Yikes!

Yes, I know it’s supposed to be “Defense” but that’s how the author spells it =P

It’s a corny (acorny?) flash game where you’re a squirrel sitting on a tree branch and you throw nuts at oncoming predators (who gnaw at the tree briefly) while you try to protect it. It’s not terrible, but the absence of a more precise aiming method makes starting out a little irritating (but you can buy a trajectory bonus soon, which I’d advise as the first powerup you choose). I quit after my first loss, but you may find it a bit more enjoyable =P

You pretty much just use the mouse, by clicking on the squirrel and drawing back like a pool shot, but accounting for gravity (perhaps more like drawing an bow-and-arrow shot). See if you can beat my score ^_^

Tree Defence