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Rat Brain Art

OK, this BBC news item is over three years old. But true weirdness doesn’t date.

Meet the latest spaced out modern artist – a picture-drawing robot arm in Australia whose brain sits in a petri dish in the US.
Working from their university labs in two different corners of the world, American and Australian researchers have created what they call a new class of creative beings: “the semi-living artist”.
Gripping three coloured markers positioned above a white canvas, a robotic arm churns out drawings akin to that of a three-year-old. Its guidance comes from around 50,000 rat neurons in a petri dish 19,000 kilometres away….
…The project represents the team’s effort to create a semi-living entity that learns like the living brains in people and animals do, adapting and expressing itself through art….
…The latest initiative is a development of the SymbioticA Fish And Chips project, in which the artist-scientists grew fish neurons over silicon chips to control a robotic arm that produced drawings and music.

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Art, General

Fed up…

Been struggling for the last three hours to get the new design for the Oakleaf Circle site cross-browser compatible.
Which means making it look right in IE6, as well as Firefix and Opera. M$, of course, have their own bowser standards that don’t nessessarily coincide with those of other browsers. Which means that only the very simplest of sites look precisely the same in all the major browsers. All too often, what looks pixel-perfect in Firefox becomes a wreck in IE.
Which means that what should be a quite simple design job in theory becomes, in fact, hair-tearingly complicated. And for no good reason at all!
Now M$ are about to release EI7. Nobody seems knows yet what new compatability problems that will bring – my dependable site for IE layout hacks, Position Is Everything, are still scrambling to rewrite everything.
Grrrr. I’m going off to have a nice cup of tea…..

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General, Rants, Techie Stuff

The Poet in Exile

Cover of 'The Poet in Exile'
The Poet in Exile by Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek used to be the keyboardist with legendary group The Doors. This rather slim novel is a bit of a mixture – part-wish fullfillment fantasy, part roman a clef. For a Doors fan, the early, gossipy, bitchy roman a clef part is the most entertaining – you won’t have much trouble guessing who the various pseudonyms belong to. It made me want to get hold of Manzarek’s earlier memoirs of his times with the Doors.
The wish-fullfillment fantasy part is harder to take. There have always been rumours that Jim Morrison faked his own death in Paris in 1971; here Manzarek takes this idea and runs with it.
His character starts receiving mysterious scraps of poetry posted anonymously from the Seychelles; he recognises the handwriting and style as that of Morrison’s. So he jets off to the islands to find his old friend. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to reveal that he finds the ex-Lizard King alive and thoroughly “gone native” with a georgeous Seychelloise wife and a pigeon-pair of kids. If you’re diabetic, this part is liable to send you into a glucose coma; Manzarek clearly loved and hero-worshipped Jimbo – and it shows, unfortunately.
However, there are some good bits here. A large part of the book is taken up with Jimbo relating how he spent his time inbetween “dying” and ending up in the Seychelles; this turns out to be a spiritual journeying involving gurus and Indian ashrams. In these stretches the writing isn’t too bad – in some other parts, I longed to get out my editor’s pencil, score through whole paragraphs with it and scribble “But where’s the dammed POETRY???”. Manzarek can certainly write very well about what it’s like to search for, and go some way towards, achieving spiritual enlightenment.
But on the whole, I was left a bit disappointed.
The Keyboardist can write pretty well, when he gets on the right subject and into the right rythm. But that doesn’t happen often enough here. He has a new novel, one that has nothing at all to do with Morrison/The Doors, coming out in a few months. I’ll certainly give that a read; without the wish-fullfillment factor intruding, it could be a lot better than this.

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Reviews

Compare and Contrast:

Terrorists in Court (1) : This week a storythat made the front page in all the national press: a British Muslim pleaded guilty to “plotting mass murder through a series of terrorist outrages in the UK and the US“

In one of the few major successes for anti-terrorist investigators since September 11, Dhiran Barot, 34, also admitted planning to use a radioactive dirty bomb in the UK that would have caused “injury, fear, terror and chaos”, a court heard.
Among the other targets for the synchronised bombings were landmark financial institutions in New York and Washington.
Another of his plans involved blowing up three limousines, packed with flammable gas cylinders and explosives, in underground car parks somewhere in Britain. The locations were not specified.

Hip hip hoorah! Another terrorist outrage foiled by our guardians!
But hang on – further down the page:

The crown did not dispute claims from the defence that no funding had been received for the plots, nor had any of what would have been the necessary vehicles or bomb-making equipment been acquired.

In other words, there was no evidence at all that this dastardly terrorist conspiracy existed outside the imagination of somebody who might be just an attention-seeking fantasist.
A possible clue as to what might be going on here lies in the very last paragraph of the story:

Mr Lawson said that by pleading guilty, Barot “makes no admission with regard to the involvement of any of his seven co-defendants in the conspiracy”. Seven other men, who deny all charges against them, are due to face trial next year.

(Non-)Terrorists in Court (2): This week a story that appeared in print only in local Lancashire newspapers: Two men arrested last week after police recovered a “record haul” of chemicals that could potentially be used to make explosives.

The police also recovered rocket launchers …. and a nuclear biological suit. The chemical components recovered by police are believed to be the largest haul ever found at a house in Britain …… Both men, Robert Cottage (49) and David Bolus Jackson (62), made separate appearances before a court charged with under the Explosive Substances Act of 1883 for being in possession of an explosive substance for an unlawful purpose.

Both these men are white; neither of them are Muslim. At least one of them is a current BNP member; BNP literature was seized along with the chemicals and weapons.
However, neither of the men have been charged with any terrorist offences. According to the police superintendent in charge of the operation, “It is not a bomb making factory” and not related to terrorism.
Phew! So that’s all right then…..

in:

General, Rants, The News You Didn't See

No title

Decided I’m probably going to dump the Amazon ads in the very near future. I’ve been using them on several sites for going on three years, putting their affliate link in the code whenever I mention a book or a film, and they’ve earned me the huge sum of £12.88 – in total. That’s not a good return. Plus, they’re a global corporation. Do I really want to support one of those?
But there wasn’t really an alternative – until now. Now Waterstones have started an affliate advertising scheme of their own. I’ve signed up for it, and I’m testing out their ads on another site. If they get good click-through results, then bye-bye Amazon!

If I start making real money through them, I might even wave bye-bye to the Google ads as well. I keep reading on affliate advertising forums and blogs that Google pay-per-click ads have had their day and that only a few big operators* can hope to make a living from them any more. Well, they’re certainly not making me a living – at the moment, I’m getting about only 20 – 30 cents a day from them. That’s not even enough to pay the annual hosting fees on my sites.

And Google is turning into a Global Corporation as well. How much longer will they manage not to make a mockery of their “Don’t Do Evil” tag?

*Like this Lucky b*st*rd – yes, that cheque does read $901,733.84!

in:

General, Techie Stuff

wO0t!

I believe that is the correct expression to describe the emotion of joyful satisfaction, whilst using this type of electronic media communication thingy.
Anyway, I have now got my computer up and running. Turned out the motherboard is perfectly OK. What was causing everything to stop was some incompatibility between the board and Win98. Basically, when I started installing the board, my poor old lady Windows saw the horrid-looking SATA drive controllers, shrieked in horror, covered her eyes, went straight into compatibility-mode paging and refused to come out. Result, no CD drive, no USB devices.
However, the internet is a wonderful thing. After a couple of hours trawling wthrough forums and help pages, I finally discovered the problem and the solution. Some diddling around in BIOS and the registry finally solved everything.
Almost everything. Still cannot get Win98 to recognise my USB card reader, which is puzzling. The first time I plugged it in, it was recognised straight away, without even asking for drivers (as I recall). I’ve download numerous USB card reader drivers (so many that I’ve exceeded my limit at Driverguide.com), but none of them seem to work.
I’m almost tempted to dig out an old HD and install XP on it, just to be able to download my photographs.

But, everything else is rosy……

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General, Techie Stuff

Aaarrrgghhh!!

1 Comment

I have spent the entire afternoon putting my computer back together and trying to make it work.
And it doesn’t.

To recap: a year ago, I bought a new motherboard. This worked fine for a few weeks, then showed signs of failure. I took it back to the shop, who told me the fault was mine – I hadn’t attached the MB with offset screws, so that it had touched the case and started shorting.
So, I eventually bought another board. Put it in properly this time, and couldn’t get the keyboard or mouse to work – at all, not just in Windows, so the failure was obviously hardware.
So I sent it back and asked for a replacement, and got sent what was supposedly a new MB. This MB wasn’t sealed up, didn’t come with any screws, driver disc or data cables. And looked a whole lot like the board I’d sent. But I didn’t query it – too trusting, I guess.
By then, I’d put my hard drive onto B’s machine. He wasn’t using his machine much, so we drifted along like that for several months, with me promising to get my machine working sometime. I was highly reluctant to start it; my poor eyesight made installing the board each time lengthy and incredibly fiddly, with all those tiny jumpers and connectors (several of which don’t correspond to anything in the MB manual). Holding a magnifier while trying to read a manual and put a connector on the right way is not easy. And having two MBs fail on me in quick succession shook my self-confidence.
But, finally, I bit the bullet this afternoon and set about installing it. And couldn’t get the mouse to work. Any mouse, and I have both USB and serial mouses. So my suspicion that I got my faulty board back would appear to be correct.

Sigh. Looks like I’ll have to fork out for yet another new board (I’ve been procrastinating too long to send the faulty board back again). Until then, I’m back on B’s machine.
B*gg*r

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General

This Hurts My Head….

From: Texas father Wants to Ban “Fahrenheit 451” From His Child’s Scool

“The book had a bunch of very bad language in it,” Diana Verm said. “It shouldn’t be in there because it’s offending people. … If they can’t find a book that uses clean words, they shouldn’t have a book at all.”
Alton Verm filed a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” Thursday with the district regarding “Fahrenheit 451,” written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1953. He wants the district to remove the book from the curriculum.
“It’s just all kinds of filth,” said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read “Fahrenheit 451.” “The words don’t need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class.”
He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, “dirty talk,” references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain.

So. Let’s get this right. Mr Verm wants to ban a book, that warns about the consequences of banning books ….. And he wants his child to read only books with “clean words” and no violence….
Has he ever read the Bible, I wonder?

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General

Where’s Soddin’ Morpheus When You Need Him?

I am having quite severe sleeping problems these days. I’ve always been a light sleeper, prone to wakefulness, but it was never a problem before. But over the last few years, when I developed knee trouble, then tendonitis, near-constant aching from some joint or other has made sleep difficult.
So I seem to have got into a vicious cycle of disturbed sleep at night, fighting to stay awake during the day, then getting so stressed from lack of sleep, and the dread of not sleeping, that I can’t relax enough to sleep properly at night, even though I’m not having much problems with pain anymore nowadays.
Result is that most days I’m grumpy and frazzled and snappy and finding it difficult to get any work done at all. So apologies here to anybody that I’ve lately chewed out without good reason.

Got to get the hardcopy Transit redesigned sometime in the next 10 days, and I haven’t got a single idea in my head. Been looking on the web, but there seems to be a dearth of print design sites – certainly nothing like CSS Zen Garden or Open Source Web Design. Most of the print-design stuff out there seems to be about newspaper design, which isn’t exactly applicable to an A5 booklet publication. Still, I’ve hit dry spots like this before, and always come up with something spectacular at the last minute…..

in:

General

How I’m feeling….

Yes, I’ve not posted lately. Been busy with lots of stuff, plus:

And you run, you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say

From Time by Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon)

Thanks to Orac

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General