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| sneedle flipsock |
11 April 2004: fun's fun but a girl can't dance all night |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This week:
Spectator sportThere seems to be a new web-based spectator sport emerging: watching the sellers and storytellers on eBay. People are exchanging auction URLs by e-mail without any intention of buying the products on offer, merely for entertainment value. There was the man who modelled a wedding dress and told a (possibly fictional) sob story about how awful his ex-wife was; there's the roadkill cookbook with photos of meals that look disturbingly appealing; and then there's the dad who sold his son's Playstation in revenge for various youthful misdemeanors. What weird eBay stuff has turned up in *your* mailbox recently? 11 June 2004 | top of page Recovering from creative burnoutWhen your cool, creatively fulfilling job suddenly seems like just another pile of crap to get through--when you just don't care about the groovy stuff any more--you need help. Here's how to recover from creative burnout. 10 June 2004 | top of page Dancing with catsFlipsock friend Neroli kindly test-drove this article about dancing with cats. Her response: "I laughed until I sobbed. No, seriously, here, at work, sobbing at my desk with laughter." 10 June 2004 | top of page Vote thoughtfullyRomantic primitivism is the belief that traditional ethnic cultures provide a better home for humanity, more fair, more healthy, more harmonious, than modern societies do. It's based on a fantasy, not on facts. If you want to live a full life then modern civilisation, not romantic ethnicity, deserves your thoughtful vote. 10 June 2004 | top of page Web and 'netSometimes when you go to a web site's home page, you find yourself automagically redirected to a URL with a much longer name--usually something with slashes and queries and numbers and commas in the address as well as the usual letters and numbers. Done badly, this kind of web programming can render a whole site invisible to web users and to search engines. Here's how to do it well, with a minimum of effort. Whether you’re managing an intranet, a government portal or a university web site, Gerry McGovern says, "Creating a usable web site is not the objective. Nor is making everything on the web site findable. You might only want people to easily find the most expensive products. Making your website maximise profits over the long term is the objective. Persuading people to do the things you want is the objective." In April we noted a study of 150 million web pages that found most don't change much over time, and a page's previous change rate is a good predictor of its future change rate. Now Microsoft reveals the method used in the study. The free Thumbshots Ranking tool allows you to compare results from several search engines for a single keyword or term. Sony's new e-book reader, Librie, can let you read Tolstoy's War and Peace nearly seven times with just four AAA batteries. Remember the newspaper in "Minority Report"? Just over the horizon are other low-power, flexible display technologies that "could spawn scores of new applications such as displays that can be folded like newspapers, embedded into fancy furniture, or rolled into tubes so military commanders can take a ream of digital maps into the field." 10 June 2004 | top of page Questions for the thoughtful managerIn the spirit of stocktaking season... Bruce Watson reckons managers need to take stock now and then, to make sure they're focusing on the right stuff. He groups some provocative questions into five categories:
9 June 2004 | top of page Mid-year resolution: the art that disturbsFlipsock friend Paul got in trouble this week at work, because he made art out of an office memo and a collection of bunny drawings by people with neurological disorders. Apparently the art disturbed and/or offended another employee (who clearly doesn't know Paul terribly well). The art is normal behavior for Paul; the trouble is not. Paul's e-mail describing the kerfuffle started with the subject line "My art has succeeded", which made me smile :-) One of the problems for artists, it seems to me, is that they tend to acquire friends who like their art. That means it's sometimes hard for an artist (animator, writer, film director, whatever) to tell whether they've succeeded in their aims for a particular piece of work. Also, those friends tend not to be the ones who are seriously disturbed or affronted by the messages or themes of that artist's work: I mean, if you're constantly offended by someone's work, then you're probably not going to socialise with them much. This incident reminded me that I rarely tell Paul when he succeeds in disturbing me. I'm sorry, Paul! Apologies also to my other arty friends--You Know Who You Are--because I've neglected this important kind of communication in the last year or two (at least). So here's my mid-year resolution: give better feedback to my arty friends by letting them know when they've succeeded in disturbing me and by trying to explain how they did it. 9 June 2004 | top of page Venus de rooftopYesterday, for the first time in more than a century, Venus passed across the face of the Sun (as viewed from Earth). Melbourne had perfect viewing conditions: a mild autumn day with a minimum of haze, a light northerly breeze and clear skies. Volunteers from the Astronomical Society of Victoria set up about a dozen telescopes and other viewing devices and gathered quite the crowd of interested nerds on an inner-city rooftop. Some of the telescopes had hand-made mylar (and other) filters; others had the expensive, commercial variety. Several were set up for viewing shadows cast on a piece of cardboard or on a portable projector screen. All the ASV volunteers were happy to chat and to hold small children up so they could look through eyepieces. The crowd was a broad variety of people, young and old: parents and kids, shop assistants who'd ducked out for a 10-minute smoko, quite a few grey-haired enthusiasts... Queues formed quietly and politely, and people chatted and laughed as they waited their turn. Through some of the telescopes we were able to see sunspots as well as Venus. There were two largeish dark spots at the centre of the Sun, which one of the ASV blokes said were approximately the same diameter as Earth. They looked much smaller than Venus nevertheless--an effect of the relative distances between Earth, Venus and the Sun. As well, through three or four telescopes we could see two much smaller sunspots to the west and south-west of the two larger ones. One ASV member brought not his telescope but the solar filter from it. It was quite large, about 30 cm across, and people took turns holding it up like a mirror. And I mean *mirror*, 'cos it reflected your face and everything behind you. You had to adjust your eyes' focal length to find the tiny Sun glowing golden in the middle of the reflection. And then you could see not only Sun but the little black dot of Venus with your very own almost-unaided eyes. Cool! Historical footnote: One handsome antique (80-odd years) telescope stood on a beautifully crafted wooden tripod with brass feet and shone a lovely clear image onto its bit of cardboard. It had a small electric motor attached so that it could automatically track the Sun's movement. And the ASV member in charge of it said the telescope had belonged to Sir John Monash, who donated it to the society. (There was another, fancier telescope of similar vintage, but we didn't get to hear the story about that one.) Here are some other observers' reports:
Other related stuff:
thanks, Teresa | thanks, Ian and the Science Matters mob | 9 June 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
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subscribe, contribute or comment by e-mailing flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/ |