A Blue Star

http://xkcd.com/305/

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.

http://xkcd.com/330/

Rule Social-b. 99.1
If friends spend more then 60 minutes unable to decide what to do, they must default to sexual experimentation.

You’ve been buying your own booze at the local bar like a sucker ever since you turned 21. But with a stiff shot of science, you can hustle the tipsy into picking up your tab. Try this pub magic to score yourself some free rounds. — William Snyder

Wired has a nice wiki page about some different Bar tricks that you can do to win yourself a free drink or two.  DO Bar Tricks

There is also a great YouTube Video, 1000 different ways to open a beer bottle.

I hate internet explorer, I hate it so much. At lest once a day I curse it to the pits of hell to be torched endlessly by a Richard Simmons kazoo band. My hate for internet explorer mainly comes from my own laziness, I just don’t want to spend the time to create the same website twice, once for internet explorer and again for everyone else. I don’t believe that we should have too, Microsoft should follow the standard set out by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A standard that all the other major browsers support.

Internet explore hurts the internet.

A while ago I had this idea, to create a javascript that you install on your website that created a DHTML pop up if you browse the site with internet explorer. The pop up would tell you about the advantages of using other browsers, the disadvantages of using IE, and links to download locations. At the bottom there would be a check box that disables the pop up for a single session. next time they come back the would get the same pop up until they change browsers.

But it looks like someone else beat me too it. http://403day.org/

I would love to install this script on all the websites that I have Dev accesses to but that wouldn’t be nice. So instead I have installed it on my two biggest websites. Funvill.com and Abluestar.com. Funvill.com still pulls in about 20k a month in unique visitors even thou I shut it down about a year ago and Abluestar.com last month got 675k unique visitors thanks to stumbleupon. Between Abluestar.com and Funvill.com 88% of visitors are using Firefox and 11% internet explore. So basically I am throwing away 76k unique visitors in hopes that some of them will upgrade to a new browser.

I HATE INTERNET EXPLORE

Below I have included some hate quotes about internet explore that I enjoyed.

This is why web developers need to stop working around shitty rendering engines en masse. Every single time we - as developers - utilize hacks to make things work in IE where they’re fine in WebKit, Gecko, et. al., we further allow IE to be as bad as it is. Do you honestly think IE would be the POS it is today if the world’s web sites didn’t work in it? Every single time we work around it we provide Microsoft reason not to change anything. Literally. Microsoft’s biggest concern has always been backwards compatibility, and it is that reason that so many of the issues we have now we also had then. It would be one thing if IE7 had shown considerable improvement in this regard, but that simply isn’t the case. IE7 kept some bugs, and swapped out some well-known ones for others, which we now have to hack around, again.
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

MS doesn’t want those fixed. Seriously, they make money by ensuring that other browsers can’t compete because the Web is broken to conform to IE’s modifications of the standards. In this way they lock people into their platform. If IE was standard compliant, then soon Web apps would be standard compliant, and then why the hell would big companies stick with IE and an expensive OS, when they can just run Linux for free?
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

IE will never have the same functionality, at least in terms of standards compliance, as other browsers as long as MS is allowed to bundle it without also bundling competitors. The Web will remain broken so long as MS is allowed to abuse their monopoly and numerous other markets will be broken as well, with innovation intentionally slowed for their profit. It is long past time the government enforced the fucking laws against MS, despite all the campaign contributions they made to both parties
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

If browsers actually required that we provide valid code each and every time, things would be a lot better. How many browser security holes can be traced to a parser that would not have been affected had it simply seen invalid input and rejected it? How much simpler and faster would browsers be if they didn’t spend so much time trying to figure out what the person who wrote the code intended? How much more accessible would the content on those pages be to alternative browsers, like screenreaders?
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

We’ve been running for way too long on the mindset that anybody can build web pages. Web browsers were built with this mentality. If I’m integrating with an enterprise XML API, and I feed it bad data, it gives me the proverbial finger. Why should web pages be any different? If you want to put stuff online, learn how to do it properly. The web is a cesspool for precisely this reason, and you can’t blame the standards themselves. The XHTML and CSS specs are by no means perfect, but writing well-formed XHTML and CSS is not difficult. Requiring developers to ensure that every start tag has an end tag, proper nested order, alt tags, and the like, would go a long way toward keeping the architecture of the Internet sustainable. Granted, it might put sites like Myspace out of business, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that’s not a bad thing.
Source: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/07/1859205

“In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE’s 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU’s Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market.”
Source: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/192240

February 29 is a date that only occurs once every four years, and is called leap day. This day is added to the calendar in leap years as a corrective measure, because the earth does not orbit around the sun in precisely 365.000 days.
The chance of being born on leap year day is about 1 in 1,500, there are about 4 million people worldwide with February 29 as there birthday.

This is the algorithm that I used to determine if a given year is a leap year or not. I’m not sure where I got it from but it comes in handy when creating calendar applications.

if (year % 4 == 0) && ((year % 100 != 0) or (year % 400 == 0))
then leap
else no_leap

I’m sure there are more interesting things about leap years that I don’t know.
I suggest that you check out wikipedia.org page on Leap_year

This is a list of torrent sites that I use regularly. Ranked by popularity

• http://www.mininova.org/
• http://www.youtorrent.com/
• http://thepiratebay.org/
• http://isohunt.com/

My favorite bit torrent client is http://www.utorrent.com/

Introduction
There has been a lot of talk recently about the micro blogging. Micro blogging is a blogging platform that lets you post very small updates about your life, to help keep you and your friends up to date with each others lives. The services are kept very simple so anyone can use them easily.

Two of the biggest players in this field are Twitter.com and Tumblr.com. I don’t have any friends on any of these services so I decided to try them both out and see what they are like.

Who is more popular
One for the first things I do when evaluating two different online communities is look at the usage statistics. I usually will go with the bigger company, more stable, more secure, etc. According to compete.com twitter.com seems to have a pretty good lead on tumblr.com.
+1 point for twitter.com

Domains
I like having my own sub domain, personal preference that comes from the old geocities days. tumblr.com provides a sub domain while twitter.com doesn’t.
https://twitter.com/funvill
http://funvill.tumblr.com/
+1 point for tumblr.com

Who owns your data
I am very paranoid about losing my data or a free service that becomes pay and holds my data ransom. These are things that wake me up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Lucky both of these sites allow for offsite backups and YOU OWN your own data. They also let you use your own domain just incase your mini blog ever becomes super popular and you want to switch services.
+3 points for twitter.com
+3 points for tumblr.com

Post categories
tumblr.com lets you identify posts under media types such as text, photos, links, chat, audio, video, etc. twitter.com doesn’t let you set a category.
+1 point for tumblr.com

How do I create a new post
Both allow you to post via IM, Email, Phone, Client, API, etc
+5 points each twitter.com, tumblr.com

Themes look and feel
Twitter.com only gives you the very basic theme options, good enough for most people. Tumblr.com other hand gives you full control while keeping it simple enough for the basic user to use.
+2 points for tumblr.com (I really like there theme viewer/editor)

Conclusion
Go with whatever service has more of your friends on it. There both pretty much the same. If you are the first or a trendsetter I would suggest tumblr.com. I personally will not be switching off of Wordpress myself. Wordpress is just too powerful and I can host it on my own servers (+10,000 points) my own paranoia wont let me use any of these services for too long.

9 points for twitter.com
12 points for tumblr.com

The bin can be sealed by a ordinary magazine, useful for people who like to read on the toilet

Designed by SnowTone

APEX (a sf/horror magazine) announced that they would increase there payment rates to 5 Cents a word (professional levels) if they got 500 new subscribers for November. So far they are at 71 new subscribers, thats pretty good since its only the 9th. they are also running this contest that if you blog about there subscription drive or refer someone to there magazine you get entered in to a contest for a free subscription and a mug.

If Every Day Fiction (short stories daily) tried something like this we would be paying ~$50 or so for each story every single day. Approximately ~1500 a month or 18k a year. I hopefully we get there one day and we can pay authors what they deserve.

On Dec. 10, 1968, a uniformed man pulled over a bank car in Tokyo. He explained that police had received a warning that dynamite had been planted in the vehicle, which was transporting bonuses for local Toshiba employees. The four passengers got out and watched as the officer crawled underneath.

After a moment he rolled out, shouting that the car was about to explode. When the passengers ran, he got in and drove off.

Thus one man stole 294,307,500 yen in broad daylight, working alone and without harming anyone. The thief was never caught.

I stumbled on to “Lee Krasnow” work from a MAKE pod cast that I have included below.

I have always loved these types of puzzles, ring puzzles, box puzzles, ball puzzles. Each year my family would give me a bunch of them for xmas/birthday/etc. 10-15 new puzzles each year some are pretty complex but i have never seen anything as complicated as Lee Krasnow’s Barcode Burr.

With so many possible ways to notch the pieces (each of which would yield a different puzzle solving experience) Lee Krasnow decided to design the notches of the Barcode Burr so that the pieces moved in a binary progression. This means that when all six pieces are retracted, the first move is to extend piece #1 which will then allow piece #2 to extend. Once #2 is extended, #1 must be pushed back in before #3 may extend. Because #3 is extended, #4 is now able to move, but not until #2 gets pushed back in place. Of course #2 cannot move until #1 is extended again, and then once this happens #1 must be pushed back in before #4 can finally move.

I didn’t see a price tag on the Barcode Burr but I expect it to be pretty damn expensive.

Portal is one of the better games I have played this year. A black humor puzzle game thats not repetitive and is actually fun… Fun you remember fun don’t you? the way games use to be before we go all caught up in our new shinny graphics cards.

Anyways here is the ending song. Enjoy

Found via http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5268

BAXBEAR Release party Nov10 2007
9.00 PM - midnight November 10th 2007
EL Kartel
121A - 1025 Robson street
Vancouver B.C.

I have hundreds of these vinel toys, I just love them. Toy Robot is my hero.
I have been buying 1 new one every week for the last 2 years and amounted a decent collection.
I’m going, you should go too.
Say hi if you see me!

Assume A + B = C, and assume A = 3 and B = 2.

Multiply both sides of the equation A + B = C by (A + B).
We obtain A² + 2AB + B² = C(A + B)

Rearranging the terms we have
A² + AB - AC = - AB - B² + BC

Factoring out (A + B - C), we have
A(A + B - C) = - B(A + B - C)

Dividing both sides by (A + B - C), that is, dividing by zero, we get A = - B, or A + B = 0, which is evidently absurd.

I found this delouse paradox from http://www.paradoxes.co.uk

Every day fiction dot com is a website that publishes a ultra short user submitted stories. Starting in September, each day a a new short story of a 1000 words or less will be released and sent to the subscribers via email, or RSS feed. Users can also read the story online at Every Day fiction dot com and make comments. A story that short you should be able to read on your lunch break or on the bus to work, it should take no longer then 20 mins to read. So you should have no excuse about not having enough time to read a ultra short fiction like this.

Go and read a story or two. Every day fiction dot com

When I am on the hunt for new and interesting music one of my first stops is Aurgasm.us. Full, compleat songs, from musicians that I have never heard of before. and the best thing is that all the songs on there site are legitimately free so I don’t feel bad for stealing music.

An aural orgasm. Something amazingly pleasing (particularly music) to the ears.
I just listened the Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety and had multiple aurgasms.
Urbandictionary.com - aurgasm

The site provides a flash mp3 player so you can preview the songs from in the browser before you download them. RSS feeds and email subscription allow you to get updates in your inbox each week or so. Each post also includes a decent review and back ground infomation about the band or musicians.

I have found a few gems on this site including belleruche, julie-feeney, mungo-jerry, cibelle, elizabeth-catapult,

Great website, I suggest it to all my friends.

It looks like the site makes money from affiliate ads, at the bottom of each post that links to a site where you can buy there music from (most of the time its amazon.com)

The site gets its music from MySpace, and amazon.com and presumably he asking the artists before he puts it on his site all thou he doesn’t have to (you read the user agreement before you uploaded your music to MySpace right?) and from what I have seen he only picks artists that have released at lest once CD on amazon to get the affiliate ad money.

I have offent thought of stealing this idea, there is lots that I could add to this type style of website but with all my other projects I just don’t have the time. Maybe if I could find a musically endowed writer, that would like to work for a share of the affiliate ads and the opportunity to get there name out there.

Anyways Enjoy.

“Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili. Congress should pass a law making it mandatory for all restaurants serving chili to follow a Texas recipe.”
— Harry James, trumpet player.

A popular saying among self-proclaimed chili purists is “If you know beans about chili, you know chili ain’t got no beans“. The thought that beans do not belong in chili may be further credited to the fact that most “official” chili cook-offs do not allow beans. In many cases a chili will be disqualified if it contains such ingredients considered “filler”. Article I, A, 2 of the CASI rules states: “2. NO FILLERS IN CHILI - Beans, macaroni, rice, hominy, or other similar ingredients are not permitted.”

Anyone that has ever been to a real chili cook off knows that real chili tastes nothing like the stuff that you can get in a can from the grocery store. Its missing the bite, that you can really only get with good home made chili.

Chili should also be stored in the fridge over night before its ready to eat. Some say it seals in the flavor.  I tend to use a slow cooker to cook it over 48+ hours to create a really nice roasted flavor.

My chili recipe

What you need

• 4 lbs of lean ground beef
• 1 can of kidney beans
• 1 can of chick peas
• 1 can of black beans
• 1 jar of pasta sauce
• 1 tablespoon dried oregano
• 1 tablespoon crushed cumin seeds
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 can of diced tomatoes
• 1 can of kernels cone
• 1 package of bacon

Directions

1. Brown the ground beef and add it to the crock pot
2. Grill the bacon and cut in to small chunks  and add it to the crock pot
3. Add all the rest of the ingredients to the crock pot
4. Put crock pot on a low simmer for 24 hours
5. Refrigerate for 24 hours
6. Reheat and serve with bread and cheese

I have always had trouble striking up conversation with random people, I like to be introduced to someone first to have the ‘Its OK to talk to me’ smile and hand shake.

I hate getting that unwelcome, confused look that you sometimes get when you try to strike up a conversation with a random somebody and there trying to find out what you are trying to sell them.

To day I was reading one of my RSS feeds for BeyondRobson.com, and I came across this story can’t talk to vancouverites about Ok Social.

Basically its a button that you can wear that tells the world that its OK for you to talk to you. A button that tells people that you are willing to take some time out of your day to talk to a random person.

My first thought was who in there right mind would wear that button but over the day the idea grew on me and I ended up requesting on for my self from Ok Social. Apparently the buttons are free “The idea is to make this a friendlier place, not make money.”

Its an interesting idea, I hope it works out and I can’t wait to find someone else in the city that also has the button.

Want to help?

1. Wear a button. Get one at  info@oksocial.org
2. Give out a bunch of buttons to your friends to wear. Request a bunch of buttons… we’ll give them to you. It’s free.
3. Visit our MySpace profile and be our friend.
4. Download this simple printable poster and post it somewhere.
5. Send us your suggestions.  info@oksocial.org
6. Blog about us! This really helps to spread the word.
7. Steward OK in your city, school, neighbourhood, etc. Ask us how…

“Over at JohnCow.com they have a contest going on where there web hosting provider is giving away $500 prize! Here’s your chance to win a Playstation3,or an Xbox360, a Nintendo Wii, an iPhone .. you name it, they’ll pay it! Don’t miss out and check out their mad cow blog!”

JohnCow eh? there site is exactly like JohnCHow.co, same style page, same plugins, same everything. How evil is that? but if it gets you readers and subscribers and money in the bank it its still pretty evil.

*Look at me i stole there stolen image.

What is a Google twin you ask?

A “Google twin” is a person who shares your name, and whose information returns results on Google when you egosurf. They may or may not be currently ranked higher than you.

If your Google twin is ranked higher then you on google then you have to defeat him by getting your ranking for your name up higher then his.

Currently when you search for ‘Steven Smethurst’ on Google a engine casting site shows up at rank #1 followed by 5 pages (49 links) of me.

My goal by Christmas is to kill off my Google twin.
At lest off rank #1 preferably off the first page completely.

I’m not the only one trying to defeat there twin.
Jon Lee also has a plan on defeating his google twin, but he has a lot harder job then me with a last name like LEE.
While some people have it pretty easy, my friend Jordan Lapp killed off all his competitors with in the first week.

John Chow dot Com a local Vancouverite (or close by) who has runs a website that helps you make money is running a contest for a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor. To enter all you have to do is make a post about the contest (like this one) and mention there sponsor BluFur that provides hosting Canada

My desk right now has 4 CRTs on it, 2 are for my laptop and the other 2 are for my 2nd desktop. I got all of these monitors for free over the years as most people upgraded to LCDs.

Over the last few months all I have been hearing about is AGLOCO.

As I understand it, its a tool bar for your browser that monitors what you search for and replaces ads with there own and you get a share of the income. This is nothing new but it hasn’t been around since the dot come crash.

They don’t pay you for clicking on ads so the advertisers might actually get some value from this service unlike the ones from 1996. Since the users get no benifit from constantly clicking ads, the users should in theory only click ads that have value to them all so known as good leads.

AGLOCO goes to great lengths to help you get as many people signed up as possible by paying you a referral commission and creating forum letters for you to send to all your friends and family. They also give you a nifty grafic that shows your referral count.

Its an interesting service and I plan on trying it out for a few weeks to see how it goes.
Feel free to sign up underneath me and help me make some coins.
Who knows you might make some money too.

http://www.agloco.com/r/BBFJ0259

(more…)

Ms. Danielle is giving away a 30GB Microsoft Zune that she won from John Chow. In her contest you have to talk about her new blog site and link to at lest one post.

I checked out her site and found a interesting post right away my-top-5-favorite-childhood-cartoons and I decided to write my own top five.

• Tom & Jerry - Its the only one that I agree with that was on Ms. Danielle list. it was one of my favorite shows as a kid but it was on super early in the morning, 7am if I remember correctly. So I didn’t get to see much of it till my family bought a VCR and we where able to recored it. In my early 20s when I was a downloading pirate I downloaded the complete collection it took 2 months to watch it all.
• Tiny Toon Adventures - An instance favorite and will always have a soft spot for me. My favorite characters was Montana Max, and Elmyra Duff.
• DuckTales - The miss adventures of a bunch of ducks, I still remember many of the different episodes.
  
• Pinky and the Brain - As a kid that wanted to grow up to be a mad scientist and take over the world this show was a perfect fit.
• Darkwing duck - To this day i still hmm the opening title sequence. When I was a kid I use to draw all the characters from this show. I got pretty good at coping because of it.

One more because I watched way too much television as a child.

• TaleSpin - The Jungle Book charters delivering packages, a golden idea with 65 epps.

They just don’t make cartoons like this any more.
What are your top 5 favorite childhood cartoons? You only get to pick 5.

Here is a house that converted its backyard in to a corn maze and charge people to run the maze.
I seen this done many times with corn mazes where the maze its self makes more money then the actually corn could.

Goggle maps with satellite photo

Step up to the counter and check in with the cashier. You will see a posted time in which to get through the maze. Pick up your time card and punch in! Run through the maze to find the cheese and punch your card. Now you keep running through the maze until you find the finish. Once out of the maze you punch out at the counter. If you beat the posted time on your first try, you win a free t-shirt.

The problem with mazes like this is that you can always just use the right hand rule to find the end or cheese. If the maze was a disjoint mazes (circles with inside circles) then the right hand rule becomes useless, you would just go around in circles. You would have to use a Pledge_algorithm or something similar to find your way or randomly guess.

Found via Neatorama.com

There is not a kid in my elementary school that hadn’t heard of Mario by the time he was twelve, its ingrained in to our childhood. Mario and his friends will always have a special spot in our hearts.

Because there are so many fans of Mario and his friends after a while fan art, fan movies, fan flash animations start to pop up.

Here is a collection of a few of the better ones

• The Peoples Mario (flash animation of communists Mario)
• Six Sinister Things About Super Mario
• Communist-mario.com
• Burly Mario
• Evil Mario Grimly Surveys Dystopia

Most fans tend to make Mario out to be a bad buy, I wonder why?

If you have anther Mario contributed work feel free to comment with it and I will add it to the list.

Via GrowaBrain

I enjoyed them so much the first time I posted some riddles that I am going to do it again.

Answers after the cut…

1. A murderer is condemned to death. He has to choose between three rooms: The first is full of raging fires, the second is full of assassins with loaded guns, and the third is full of lions that haven’t eaten in 3 years. Which room is safest for him?
2. A woman shoots her husband. Then she holds him under water for over 5 minutes. Finally, she hangs him. But 5 minutes later they both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?
3. A magician was boasting one day at how long he could hold his breath under water. His record was 6 minutes. A kid that was listening said, “that’s nothing, I can stay under water for 10 minutes using no type of equipment or air pockets!” The magician told the kid if he could do that, he’d give him $10,000. The kid did it and won the money. Can you figure out how?
4. There are two plastic jugs filled with water. How could you put all of this water into a barrel, without using the jugs or any dividers, and still tell which water came from which jug?
5. What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and grey when you throw it away?
6. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?
7. This is an unusual paragraph. I’m curious how quickly you can find out what is so unusual about it? It looks so plain you would think nothing was wrong with it! In fact, nothing is wrong with it! It is unusual though. Study it, and think about it, but you still may not find anything odd. But if you work at it a bit, you might find out! Try to do so without any coaching!
8. You are participating in a race. You overtake the second person. What position are you in?
9. If you overtake the last person, then you are…?
10.  (in your head!) Take 1000 and add 40 to it. Now add another 1000. Now add 30. Add another 1000. Now add 20. Now add another 1000. Now add 10. What is the total?
11. Mary’s father has five daughters: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

If you know any good riddles feel free to share them with me.

(more…)

The urban cactus building
Found via boingboing.net, Who found it on archidose.blogspot.com

Urban Cactus is a housing project in the Vuurplaat section of Rotterdam by UCX Architects / Ben Huygen and Jasper Jaegers and done for Vestia Rotterdam Feijenoord/Estrade Projecten.

Due to its siting at the end of harbor, the architects chose to conceptualize the project as belonging to the “green nerve” rather than the surrounding urban structure.

They placed the 98 residential units on 19 floors, using the pattern of outdoor spaces to determine the overall appearance of the project.

The slightly irregular pattern alternates these outdoor spaces to create what are in effect double-height spaces. Each unit then receives more sunlight than a typical stacked composition.

Also the terrace area might be equivalent to a constant depth extended around the perimeter (say two meters), but their configuration creates larger “rooms” for gardening and for enjoying the outdoors and the city views.

Happy 420 everyone.

Here are some riddles that I enjoyed enough to save just for you guys.
Answers after the cut…

1. What goes round the house and in the house but never touches the house?
2. What is it that you can keep after giving it to someone else?
3. What comes once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?
4. The more you take, the more you leave behind. What are they?
5. What goes round and round the wood but never goes into the wood?
6. I have a little house in which I live all alone. It has no doors or windows, and if I want to go out I must break through the wall.
7. There are four brothers in this world that were all born together. The first runs and never wearies. The second eats and is never full. The third drinks and is always thirsty. The fourth sings a song that is never good.
8. It’s been around for millions of years, but it’s no more than a month old. What is it?
9. What belongs to you but others use it more than you do?
10. What fastens two people yet touches only one?
11. What is it the more you take away the larger it becomes?
12. I am the beginning of sorrow, and the end of sickness. You cannot express happiness without me, yet I am in the midst of crosses. I am always in risk, yet never in danger. You may find me in the sun, but I am never out of darkness.
13. What holds water yet is full of holes?
14. What goes into the water red and comes out black?
15. What goes into the water black and comes out red?
16. When one does not know what it is, then it is something; but when one knows what it is, then it is nothing.

If you know any good riddles feel free to share them with me.

(more…)

A few months ago I found a Youtube video of Sachiko Kodama ferrofluid sculpture. There are more then a few of them running around on you tube just search for Ferrofluid. There is also the snake oil project that I posted earlier.

They looked amazing and pretty simple too do, an electric magnet and iron core and a bunch of [tag]Ferrofluid[/tag]. I Could make one of these easily, it can not be that hard I said to myself.

So me and my artist friend decided to make our own. We choose to start small first, a glass dish with a iron bar glued to the center, and a electric magnet placed under the plate. If everything went well we would move on to more complex projects like a reverse water fall, or the jumping frog project.

At first we tried to make our own Ferrofluid but that didn’t work out too well. It turned out to be more of a brown mud that sort reacted to magnets but it wasn’t very impressive nothing like the videos that we had seen. After a few attempts at creating home made Ferrofluid we decided to buy some of the good stuff online. It was pretty expensive I think it was $230 CAN for a 1 liter bottle. I don’t remember where we bought it from.

The stuff is messy very messy, it stained my skin for a good week and imposable to get out of anything fabric.

The first thing we did was to put about 20 ml in to a small glass jar and put a rare earth (Neodymium-Iron-Boron) magnet to it. It was fun to play around using 3 or 4 magnets and making it hop from one place to anther but spikes where small less then 5 mm tall and not very impressive. We spent the first few days just playing around with it trying to get the spikes taller and seeing what it could do.

We found out later that all the sculptures that Sachiki Kodama did where under huge magnification and there is no way to make 3 inch spikes no matter how much magnetic force you applied. This was very disappointing it would not make the grand center piece in my living room that I wanted it to be. We had already spent $230 of the Ferror fluid might as well complete the project.

The first step is to get a working electric magnet powerful enough to pull the fluid up and around the iron rod. This proved to be harder then expected. Again the first thing we tried was to build our own electric magnet. We used a speaker, a iron core with copper wire wrapped around it 1000s of times in many different configurations, a yoke from an old TV, a solenoid from a car door. Nothing was powerful enough to pull the Ferror fluid up the rod. Anther disappointment and i was getting pretty frustrated with the whole project.

I wasn’t about to say die yet, I started posting questions on hack forums like the MAKE forums for help with my project. The people on the forums where extremely helpful and informative. In the end I decided to buy a industrial grade electric magnet capable of holding 500LBs on 12 volts from ElectroMechanicsOnline.com. The magnet cost about $170 with shipping but I was determined to get this thing working no matter what. Now I had the power to force this Ferrofluid in any direction that I wanted or so I thought.

The electric magnet came in the mail and the magnet barely did anything more then the Neodymium magnets did. Disappointed I gave up.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Materials list

• Ferrofluid 1 liter $230
• Holding electric magnet 500 lb $170
• Set of 30 different sized rare earth (Neodymium-Iron-Boron) magnet $50

The Eden project was inspired by Jon McCormack’s time in the Litchfield National Park, in Australia. The artwork is a self-generating, artificial ecosystem complete with rocks, biomass and sonic animals populated. The creatures evolve, move about the environment, emit and listen to sounds, forage for food, encounter predators and mate with each other.

After reading about projects like Eden and other artificial ecosystem I started thinking about other artificial ecosystem and maybe creating my own.

Each creature has a few attributes,

• ID - A unique identifier for every creature
• Sex - Male or female of the species males can only mate with other females, ect.
• Age - Depending on there genetic material each creature will have a different max age, once this age is reached the creature dies. if the creature does not mate before that then they do not pass on there genetic history.
• Energy level - If the creature does not regularly eat it will die off, it can eat the fool found around the land or the dead bodies of the other creatures,
• X - Where it is located on the map in the X plane
• Y - Where the creature is located on the map in the Y plane
• Genetic material - A linked list history of every creature before it, all its parents and there attributes, this information is used to set up the creatures initial properties. if the creatures parents lived a long life then this creature has a better chance of living a longer life.

The land or world has a few things in it

• Walls or boarders that are no passable
• Natural Food that can be eaten and grows by its self once a every year.
• Poison food that will kill the creature if eaten. the creatures have a chance to detect that it is poison this chance will increase and decrease independently on there genetic material.
• Dead and Alive creatures

Base behaviored of the creatures

• Creature of the opposite sex who meet each other creatures will have the choice of having mating. The choice is random and depends on the Genetic material of the creatures. Mating does not guarantee procreation its a random chance based off of the Genetic material. Mating consumes energy. The creatures can mate as many times as you like with as many different partners as it finds.
• If no food can be found and the creature has less then 20% energy left it will attack other creatures, depending on its Genetic material and energy levels the creature will either die or kill the other creature. The creatures may eat other dead bodies.
• if a body of a creatures is dead, it may be eaten by other creatures. if a year has passed and the creatures body has not been eaten it disappears.
• Dead bodies of creatures that died because of poison are poisonousness
• Moving requires energy

It would make a pretty interesting project.

In my endless wondering around the internet I found this interesting site middlezonemusings.com that had an intersting writing contest recently.

Write a story in 6 words

Some of the better entries include; In between her smiles, despair danced, Kittens are harmless! (Sophie’s last words.), Never was cutting toenails so fatal, ‘wedding cake, kids, debt, divorce, freedom.’

In the end there where over 400 entries the winners can be found on this page and include ;

• Need publicity. Start contest. Six Words?
• “Nice skin”, he said, replacing it.
• Inability to complete thoughts continues to
• Trust. Things work out. Soon, please.
• Smoking, thinking about his lost passions.

I came much to late to enter the contest but I came up with a few of my own, ‘Sam sunk deep in to his mind’, ‘I didn’t eat the Nichole’s mouse” ya I know they could use some work.

Interesting contest if nothing else