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| Friday |
the Sixth of December, 2002 |
| The Google Catalogs
beta is rather astonishing - you can search a huge stack of
OCR'd US mail-order catalogs for whatever
rubbish takes your
fancy, and it displays graphically-highlighted extracts of page scans.
Entertainingly, the OCRing has been done at such a catch-all level
that searching for very
simplistic
ASCII-art
will return results with bits of pictures highlighted. (And there are
a few places where the software couldn't quite
make something out.)
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CAMRAD Update #6
"The class action complaint alleges that Bonzi
deceptively and fraudulently commandeered millions of internet users to
Bonzi’s commercial websites through dissemination of tens-of-millions of
fraudulent Internet advertising banners that impersonated computer error
messages."
Bonzi
are being dragged to court over their naif-misleading faux-alert-box
banner adverts. Absurd compensation aside, it's about time this sort
of thing was regulated.
Elsewhere, a case of corporate-sponsored
automated
telemarketing is being investigated by the ASA, although it's an opt-in
thing for people remiss enough to actually give their phone number to a
previous promotion, so probably won't amount to much. Full marks for it being
a campaign for Minority
Report, with all its advertising-dystopia ambience, though.
(I'm toying with the idea of setting up a communal Campaign for Real
Advertising weblog - any takers?)
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| Wednesday |
the Fourth |
| Kennings
are a particularly Norse brand of poetic metaphor that I hadn't met before.
Looking
at them more closely, they can be expressed as groups of four
terms, connected in a standard "a is to b as x is to y"
fashion - by following the connections in different ways, we can derive
four different, sturdy metaphors from a single pairing.
Example. If we decide that "sheep is to field as cloud is to sky", we
can consider sheep to be field-clouds, clouds to be sky-sheep, fields to
be sheep-skies and think of the sky as a cloud-field. All terribly
obvious in hindsight, but my brain didn't read and twist metaphors this
neatly a few hours ago. It has since, and will from now on. Thankyou
Ben.
(And sorry Joh...)
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"The below-sheep clouds warm mirrors over snow-soft sky."
Electric Sheep Poetry;
lazy proof that if you spray-paint
fifteen poetic words onto some sheep, you shouldn't be too
surprised when they occasionally herd themselves into poetic sentence
fragments. Still not really sure where the quantum physics enter into it,
though, unless sheep possess some odd properties on the subatomic level.
Perhaps they do.
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| Tuesday |
the Third |
"After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions
of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only
non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have
family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won't
listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?"
Automated Christian spam email, that's who. After you've been saved, the
Rapture Letters service will send a smug email to your evil atheist friends every
Friday afternoon, something for them to think about while they're waiting for NTK.
[via Leonard]
According to this fantastic timeline
of the end days, there are likely to be a good five and a half
months of peace between the initial Rapture and the opening of the first seal;
some twenty or so automated reminders for us to repent our sins. After that, the Internet should
be able to reroute around the apocalypse until at least the sixth seal.
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| Monday |
the Second |
"I recall particularly the illustration of one of the
first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war. The artist had
evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there
his knowledge ended. He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without
either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading
monotony of effect. The pamphlet containing these renderings had a
considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader
against the impression they may have created. They were no more like the
Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being. To my
mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without
them."
I presume H G Wells was specifically
having a go at these 1897 illustrations
of War of the Worlds, when he published the book, but he could just
as easily have been commenting on quite a few of the
covers since, from the leather armchair of his time machine.
Rather startlingly, Edward Gorey illustrated a 1960 edition; both the
cover and
a few illustrations.
[via Sore Eyes]
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