Riemann's Cut

Barack Obama: Dinner with Friends - 2011

2013-06-19T16:31:00.000+01:00

Click for larger image...

Mark Zuckerberg - founder, president and CEO, Facebook
Eric Schmidt - chairman and CEO, Google
Steve Jobs - chairman and CEO, Apple
Carol Bartz - president and CEO, Yahoo!
Dick Costolo - CEO, Twitter
Larry Ellison - co-founder and CEO, Oracle
John Chambers - CEO and chairman, Cisco Systems
Reed Hastings - CEO, NetFlix
John Hennessy - president, Stanford University
Art Levinson - chairman and former CEO, Genentech
Steve Westly - managing partner and founder, Westly Group
John Doerr - partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Image source [cryaz:one] via [youtube] More information [huffingtonpost]

I'm not sure what this means...

2013-06-18T16:43:00.000+01:00

... but it's probably not a good thing.

Links still resolve, even when the host is changed to the newer googleusercontent URL.

Images using the much older URL system are left unaffected.

вселенная-открытый океан

2013-06-18T01:15:00.000+01:00

вселенная-открытый океан (The Universe - an open ocean)

I decided I had better do a blog post on this book, considering the date, and the fact that a copy of it was sitting on one of my book shelves. It's the official [auto]biography of Валентина Терешкова (Valentina Tereshkova), pre and post her 1963 space-flight. Published in 1964, with a production run of one hundred and forty thousand copies. Like a lot of books I own, I had planned to transcribe the entire thing at some point, but there are ebook versions already floating around the internet anyway.

Pictured with Soviet leader, Никита Хрущев (Nikita Khrushchev)

Note from Терешкова. Click for larger...

There are quite a few pictures included in the book, including some colour-plates, like the ones above.

A close-up of one of the chapter block-prints.

The чайка (seagull) logo on the cover, under the dust jacket.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

2013-06-17T14:58:00.001+01:00

I hope to be as creepy as Nick Griffin, one day [twitter] - Top image via [ibtimes.co.uk]

PENETRAME: Mexicali, Mexico

2013-06-17T03:09:00.000+01:00

View Larger Map

I recently spent an hour on Google Street View, investigating the wall that divides Mexico from the United States of America. I came across the location above. I thought it interesting graffiti, so I Googled it, and found the video below.

Then I found this, more recent, picture on flickr [flickr], with completed roads, and extra paintwork. The flickr description spoke of a people who feel divided and separated by the border, or "wound" as they call it.

Penetrame - Spanish for "penetrate me".

Валентина Терешкова: The First Woman in Space

2013-06-16T01:34:00.000+01:00

Fifty years ago today, the Восток-6 spacecraft blasted off from the Байконур spaceport, carrying aboard, Валентина Терешкова (Valentina Tereshkova) [wikipedia], the first female human to travel into space. Due to her non-military background, Терешкова is also the first civilian to have achieved such a feat.

In total, she orbited the Earth 48 times and spent 70 hours in space. At the time, this was longer than the space flight-time of all male American astronauts combined. The flight wasn't without problems though. Терешкова suffered nausea and discomfort for most of the flight. There was also an issue with navigating the vessel, when an alleged design flaw manifested itself and had to be corrected. Терешкова describes this information as being hushed-up for 40 years [izvestia].

The Soviet space program had many other projects planned for female cosmonauts, but due to various set-backs (as well as a few male opinions regarding the purpose of women in space) all were eventually cancelled. It took nineteen years before another Soviet woman, or indeed any woman, to once again return to space.

The New Apple Mac Pro

2013-06-11T18:20:00.000+01:00

RIP Steve Jobs. Ashes [arlingtonmemorials] to Ashes [funnyordie].

Sceptic Cats Investigate Sexy Lamp Illusion

2013-06-09T21:25:00.000+01:00

Top science cats at work - images via Кот Редискин [kot-rediskin]

RTÉ News Explains "Big Data"

2013-06-09T17:43:00.000+01:00

What is this "Big Data" everyone keeps talking about. RTÉ News attempted to give an answer, but a Teleprompter flub made "Big Data" sound bad. The clarification however, made it sound even worse. Unedited video here [youtube] including Richard Bruton (Brutal Dick) saying how it will be great for jobs, jobs, jobs...

Big Data is: "the information gathered on all of us from electronic devices, including mobile phones."

Ballet Heels

2013-06-08T21:23:00.000+01:00

Ballet-heels are a, somewhat, notorious item of [women's] footwear; a type of "extreme" high-heel shoe, that seldom finds itself existing outside of fashion and fetish photography. As the name implies, the purpose of the shoe, or boot, is to position the wearer's feett so that they are en-point, or on the toes, as a ballerina would be accustomed to.

While I am quite a fan of the en-pointe pose, I'm afraid ballet-heels do nothing for me. I might go as far as to say that they look quite repugnant. I can't exactly pinpoint what it is about them that I don't like. Obviously the heel is a nuisance (it's like stabilisers on a racing bike) but I wonder if it's the whole concept that is off-putting. Even the model in the above pictures, Alexandra Potter, who has a website dedicated to the footwear, Ballet-Heels.com [ballet-heels], has mixed feelings about them. According to a quote on the front page of the site, she says: "Ballet Heels are the most beautiful and ugly shoes you would probably find on the global shoe market at the same time."

I think one of the reasons I find them so laughable is because whenever I see someone walking in them, I am reminded of that scene in the SpongBob Squarepants film (2004) [imdb] where Patrick Star suddenly appears in fishnet stockings, and boots that look dangerously close to being ballet-heels.

It could be argued that these are just ordinary high-heeled boots, and because of the pointed nature of Patrick's legs, this is just how normal boots might appear. I think what swings the argument in favor of ballet-heels though, are the moves he completes while wearing the outfit. You can compare his first with a picture of Dutch ballerina, Igone de Jongh, in similar grand battement pose. Patrick then pirottes, before springing into a grand jette, and finishing with a grand écart.

Whatever the truth of Patrick's boots, it leads nicely onto actual "ballet heels", where high-heels are used in dance. Progenitors of modern ballet, used heeled shoes, but high-heels in ballet are rare, though do exist, so I feel I should include some of the work of Hans van Manen as example.

Hans van Manen is a Dutch photographer, and dance choreographer. He has been producing and directing ballets for the Het Nationale Ballet company of the Netherlands [het-ballet], since the 1970's. I dug out an old DVD I have of Dutch ballets, and snipped a segment from an interview with van Manen, where he discusses how the shoe as an instrument of the dance, and determines the type of movement. He uses the analogy of a photographer using different lenses to achieve different photographs. At the start of the video you will see a rehearsal for "Pose", and at the end, a section of "Twilight". Both ballets utilise high-heel shoes.

In the following two videos you can see the full, modern, version of Twilight, as well as a short interview with the ballerina, which is once again, Igone de Jongh.

Sigourney Weaver

2013-06-07T19:03:00.000+01:00

Just messing about with Steve Scotts' "Ripley" silicone bust... [facebook]

Hell on Earth

2013-06-07T06:54:00.000+01:00

Californian wild fires. More images here [thaiphong].

Doppelgällagher

2013-06-05T01:45:00.001+01:00

The guy with the ice-cream is on to them. [flickr]

I Saw a Lamb with Seven Eyes; a Book Sealed with Seven Seals

2013-06-02T22:41:00.000+01:00

Revelation 6:7-8
7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

YouTube's Slow Motion Feature

2013-05-30T22:21:00.001+01:00

1/4 normal playback speed (audio sync is probably my fault).

Testing out YouTube's new "Slow Motion" feature in video enhancements, which utilises interpolated inter-frames. Not the best video footage to use but I'm sure I'll find something better to use it for in the near future. Captured at 720p, but YouTube wants to only play them at 144p...

Normal playback speed...

1/2 normal playback speed...

The New Flickr, Random Thoughts, and Bookmarklet Help

2013-05-30T15:59:00.002+01:00

Mmm... don't you just love the new flickr.

I realised what Flickr has become. It's become the new Photobucket. Photobucket (or as I nearly typed it, Phuckbotoet) had a humble start; a progenitor to the likes of imagebam or imgur. It progressively got bigger and bigger as the years passed, but try as they might, it never managed to become a wholesome photography site. It has remained a place where you upload glittery gifs and naked pictures of yourself. See photobucket.com in 2003 [web.archive.org].

Flickr's new layout still reeks of desperation: "look kids, we're cool too!", and that cascades into doubts over the rest of the service. Rather than being an incentive, Flickr's 1TB of free storage seems like a gimmick that cheapens the overall feel of the product. And ads, ads are never a good sign. Or more precisely, the introduction of ads, is never a good sign. What made Flickr stand out, was the high prevalence of professional photographers who were willing to pay for clean and reliable image hosting. It always had an elitist vibe about it. I stayed away from it for years because of that vibe, but over the last three or four years, it really began to come into it's own. Hipsterism faded, and everyday people saw it as a great place to upload their photography (note: "photography", not, "glittery gifs").

Now with the "cheapening" changes, it really has become a place to dump all the shit you have on your hard-drive. Any old scrap can go up there now. I have about 200GB of "odds and ends" imagery that I saved from the internet over the years. I'm thinking about offloading all that to Flickr now. Of course, in a few years I'll have to download it again when Yahoo inevitably closes down Flickr. Also, the maximum image upload is 200MB. That's the size of a couple of music albums, rar'd, and converted to a PNG. Or 1/3 of a standard pirated film. 1TB equates to a lot of piracy per account. Hey, I'm not advocating that, I'm just saying it's another possible "cheapening" the product.

In the meantime, here's some JavaScript I wrote, which will switch between the new-layout and something like the old-layout. I wanted it to toggle back and forth from anywhere, but because Flickr now uses "endless-scroll" if you go to the old-layout in the middle of a flow, you start back at the top of the page. Have fun trying to bookmark a page! Endless-Scroll, is something that should only be seen on places like tumblr.... oh....

javascript:if (document.domain.indexOf("flickr.com")!=-1){var urlStem = document.URL.split("?"); if (urlStem.length < 2){window.location = "?details=1";}else{window.location = document.URL.split("?")[0];}}else{alert("Sorry, not a recognised flickr photostream.");}

Bookmarklet ---->

If you drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, clicking on it will change the photostream layout, back and forth. Read more about this process on a previous blogpost [riemannscut]. Only works on Flickr photostreams and not Flickr sets. For a really streamlined version of the bookmarklet see the following single line of JavaScript that just appends the details attribute at the end of the URL.

javascript: window.location = "?details=1";

It's not much of a fix but I am sure clever Chrome and Firebox plugin coders are rapidly developing solutions to repair the layout design, which will bring previous functionality back to Flickr, but if not, god help us all!

To finish on some positives though: middle-click image = new tab still works, and RSS feeds still exist (even if they do still truncate after 20 images).

Further reading:
Dave Winer on new Flickr [scripting.com]
Someone who I followed on flickr has had enough and left: "I'm Leaving Before I Drown in this Ugly Sea Called Flickr" [flickr]

Most People think космонавт is Russian for Astronaut...

2013-05-29T15:02:00.000+01:00

... but they are wrong. It actually means "cat in a washing machine". An image search on Yandex Photos for "космонавт" [fotki.yandex.ru] provides the images above, scattered throughout the pages of results. Other varieties include children and dogs in washing machines, but these are quite few (perhaps two or three). Cats with bowls on their heads also make appearances. I made an on-line album of these images, which you can view on Google+ [plus.google.com]. Yandex Photos, or Яндекс.Фотки, is a type of Russian social media based on image sharing. A bit like Flickr, or more succinctly, Google's moribund Picassaweb.

To speak of of actual "astrocats", neither Russia, nor the Soviet Union, have ever sent a cat into space, but the French did. In 1963, "Félicette", blasted to an altitude of 160km, and then returned safely to Earth. Originally, a male cat named "Félix" was planned to make the trip, but he decided he had enough of it all, and went AWOL days before the launch. You can read more about them both on "Purr 'n' Fur" [purr-n-fur.org.uk].

And let us not forget the video of cats in zero gravity...

Madness Takes Its Toll

2013-05-29T05:51:00.000+01:00

Your browser does not support the video tag. Backup GIF in place.

And a 1080p 32second slower version on YouTube...

Why is Ben Elton Selling Pictures of Lenin on eBay?

2013-05-29T00:45:00.001+01:00

Item is described as a 1970's hand-drawn pencil portrait of the Russian revolutionary leader. [ebay] [#]

"You buy, is nice."

Dicking Around at TWiT - May 14th

2013-05-28T01:44:00.001+01:00

All footage taken from the TWiT online TV network [twit.tv], on May 14th. A lot of it came from show interregnums, and as such, did not appear on any podcasts. The only shows I tend to watch on TWiT these days are NSFW [twit.tv] and The Giz Wiz [twit.tv], and since they're both recorded on Tuesdays, I tend to just leave the stream open for most of the day. I'm not sure what non-viewers will make of the video but I edited it with as much innuendo, double-entendre, and shenanigans that the footage allowed for.

Tumblr verses Google+

2013-05-27T13:21:00.000+01:00

An image of ballerina, Melissa Hamilton [spirosphotographer], has proven to be my most popular tumblr share [tumblr]. Unfortunately, tumblr isn't very helpful when it comes to tracking and displaying information on how content travels throughout it's users. Google+ on the other hand has a very useful feature for such tracking, "Ripples". So I said I might try out the "auto-awesome" "auto-tag" "flipboard-knowledge-cards" "3D-content-traversal" "RSS-replacement" that Google announced during this years I/O conference. They made it sound like with this new hashtag system, people would find every piece of content on the internet ever.

I uploaded the same image with the same hashtags [plus.google.com] and waited for the magic to happen. I expected astounding things since I only have 31 followers on tumblr but over 500 followers on Google+. The image got hundreds of reblogs and likes on tumblr, and as I now discovered, it was already uploaded by others in the past. The activity on Google+ on the other hand was, well, non-existent really. Darran Crowley [google+] left a comment, but that's only because he knew I was upto something, and thought he might "win a prize". That was it. No +1's, no rehares, nothing.

A facetious test? Perhaps, but the hyperbole only came with this blog post. When posting the image on Google+ I felt neutral on what would happen. So what can we learn from all this. We learn that Yahoo bought something for a lot of money, where a lot of people, like clicking a lot of buttons, a lot of the time.

A Cure for New Flickr... ?details=1

2013-05-26T20:00:00.000+01:00

I'm sure you all love the new Flickr layout. Wonderful isn't it! Just in case you don't like the overcrowded, slow, resource heavy, dogshit interface to new Flickr, I discovered that there is some relief available.

I noticed that the layout in the "edit" screen for your own photostream looked similar to the old layout (spacing, dates, etc.) and the only difference in the URL was the appendage ?details=1. Adding that to the end the URL of someone else's photostream gives the same effect.

In summary: add ?details=1 to the end of a flickr url to "fix" it.

Badger, Badger, Badger...

2013-05-26T02:05:00.000+01:00


	[ telegraph.co.uk ]

Shocking: Assad Strangles Injured Syrian Rebel

2013-05-26T02:04:00.000+01:00

Looks legit...

This Shrew Looks like SpongeBob

2013-05-26T00:03:00.000+01:00

Spongebob image source [icollector.com] - Shrew image source [treknature.com].

And in other shrew news...

I saved a shrew from a drain today. I let him climb up a stick, then put him in a ditch. He'll probably be eaten by an owl but such is life.
— Gammagoblin (@Ygoblin) May 22, 2013