I fancy myself a bit of a JavaScript wiz, but this thing is humbling.

Some things that made me smile today, not including any out-of-work librarians:

• Spacebloom: a real book about fictitious space-faring flora, including some rather attractive images and just-kooky-enough faux history. I think I may purchase the book, if Tyla consents. (The actual construction of the book looks amazing, too.)
• Leo Villareal’s light-architecture-art projects: I dunno what it is about these, but I found them quite pleasing to mine eyes.

In other news, Sandia is building a scene from Half Life or something. (The link to the large Z machine picture is nice, but since it’s a 1.8MB image your browser may become petulant.)

There are no easy buckets on this court.

I’d vote Greenspan in a second, I tell ya.

I don’t have much to add beyond what Hoye mentioned, but yes, this is pretty disturbing. I’m guessing that Canada’s position on next year’s press freedom ranking won’t be quite so high. Not that the Citizen’s/Southam’s press-freedom record is all that fantastic itself, but I guess this is worse.

I wonder if I’d like any of Jamie’s music. I bet iTMS can’t help me very much with this problem, but maybe I’ll poke around tomorrow and see if they have any relevant samples.

The boys at Penny Arcade make, in my opinion, some pretty decent comics, and I’ve always been a fan of Tycho’s writing. I’m not alone in my approval, of course, and they regularly terrify their advertisers the click-through rates they can provide. There’s a good reason that the advertising they run works so very well: they’ve built up a lot of credibility with their community over the last 5 years, and they play stingy with that social capital by only accepting ads for things that they think their readers will be interested in, rather than just things whose vendors want to get in front of PA’s relatively-massive audience.

This year they’ve outdone themselves, IMO, by spending some of that capital on a toy drive for a local children’s hospital. Just as the advertisers are blown away the success of campaigns running on the site, I think the hospital in question is probably reeling a little from the incredible quantity of toys. As of this writing, none of the Lego on the wish list is available for purchase from Amazon, and I can’t help but think that it’s not coincidence.

If you were thinking of getting me something for Christmas, you have your orders. They’re going to branch out and do drives for more hospitals next year, so I should lean on my friends at CHEO and Sick Kids’ and see if I can’t get them involved. I get misty whenever I think about kids in hospitals, and I’m so far past misty right now that it’s not funny. Even in the way that a grown man crying is usually funny.

The City of Moncton thinks that showing up drunk at work toting a loaded, sawed-off shotgun in search of the boss is a firing offence. The city’s union disagrees.

I was going to go to NYC this weekend, to visit George and hang out at the GNOME conference, relax a little, you know. Earlier this week, though, I decided that I’m not really sufficiently back to my usual self to engage in high-density travel, so I cancelled those plans. I was looking forward to seeing all those crazy folks, but I think this was the right decision. There’s always the new year, and suchlike.

Apropos nothing whatsoever, I think Madhava and Beltzner will appreciate this visualization of election results. Don’t you?

What’s more fun than the Pope? The pope with a giant kitten. (Or, honestly, even a small one, on a stick.) There are more. So, so many more.

(Via Scattershot.)

(Edit: direct links to the images didn’t work, bah.)

Apparently Fox has seen something resembling the light, and they’re now considering bringing back Family Guy. 35 frickin’ episodes!

As if that weren’t sweet enough, it looks like these guys are remaking Stunts.

Dell both sucks and rules. Discuss.

I subscribe to a game-development algorithms list, the messages of which typically bounce right off my minimal mathematical skills. An example, if you will permit:

A linear transformation T, from a vector-space to itself, need not have a non-zero null-space (ie, it is not injective), or it might not be onto (it, it is not surjective; the range of T does not equal the codomain itself).

Yes, exactly so. Sometimes there are discussions on topics other than computational geometry and the sorts of manipulations to which a gentleman does not subject a matrix, and when that happens I’m glad to contribute what little I can.

Anyway, this week a message floated by which drew my attention to a great page about the perception of colour, and I thought I’d share it with you. I haven’t had time to read it all, but what I did get through I found to be fascinating. Perhaps you will also find it fascinating, which would be a sweet reward indeed for reading another handful of paragraphs of my questionable prose.

Chelsea, dear, if I’m “grounded in the realities of today’s world”, we are all so very doomed. But I don’t think you’re unnecessarily evil, for whatever record these sorts of things are for.

(Game over, man! Game over!)

I’m pleased to read that Chelsea was entertained by quislibet’s translation, and further pleased that she located a second verse. I live to serve.

She was also kind enough to return the diversionary favour, in a rather more high-brow manner, with a link to this political compass questionnaire.

While Chelsea wasn’t surprised by her results, I was a little surprised at mine, which seems to place me somewhere along a linear interpolation between Jean Chrétien and the Dalai Lama. I’d thought that I’d come out a little farther right, though much of that might be because the political circles I travel in have a significant leftwards lean to them, and so I just feel like some sort of cryptoconservative in their presence.

I also suspect that some of the questions painted me slightly differently than the test’s authors had intended. Some examples:

“Multinational companies are unethically exploiting the plant genetic resources of developing countries.”

I answered “agree” there, because I think it’s quite likely that some of the practices by some of the companies involved are unethical. I also did my utmost to take “exploiting” in the least leading sense possible.

“First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country.”

I have no idea what it means to be “fully integrated” into a new country, perhaps because I haven’t had such an immigration experience. So I chose “strongly disagree”, based on my belief that a first-generation immigrant can be as much a “representative” Canadian as someone born here.

“Marijuana should be legalised.”

I think marijuana should be treated basically like tobacco and alcohol, which can both be consumed legally in many contexts, but are not utterly free of legal restriction (age, location, etc.) I figured that’s what they meant, so I marked “strongly agree” and moved on.

“Protectionism is sometimes necessary in trade.”

I come down pretty completely against long-term protectionism for the purpose of propping up domestic industry — and that includes my own, which is apparently in grave danger of disappearing entirely on this continent, thereby forcing me to choose between dragging Tyla to a run-down shack in Asia and the even more unlikely option of finding another job that I can actually do half as well — but I think that trade sanctions are a useful mechanism for projecting economic force in support of social change (human rights, environmental protection, mandatory cheering of the Leafs). “Agree”.

“Corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily respect the environment.”

“Agree”, because corporations are collections of people, and I don’t think people can generally be trusted to voluntarily avoid tragedies of commonses. If the question is meant to call out corporations specially, as distinct from other groups of people, then I think my answer is “disagree”. (And I also don’t know if they mean “all corporations”, “most corporations”, “at least one corporation”, “can never be trusted”, “can not usually be trusted”, “cannot always be trusted”, etc.) I suspect now that the question is “marked” on the basis of a different interpretation, and that answering it more “appropriately” would move me a bit to the right (and perhaps up).

I could go on, it now occurs to me, but the point is clear. I wonder if these sorts of tests — and other opinion-response endeavours — would be more or less effective if they were written more clearly. I don’t wonder if I’m just not the sort of person that these things are aimed at, because I’ve become slowly certain over my quarter-century-plus of Earth-dwelling that my brain is a little wrong. But I’m told it’s part of my charm!

In other news, I’m greatly looking forward to Chelsea’s next visit!

This is mainly for Aven and Mark, but also for George and Alasdair and Tyla and Jack (wherever he might be).

Don’t get me wrong, now: I’m a big fan of automation, especially when it comes to error-prone, tedious and mechanical tasks. I just wonder if and when this admittedly-cool self-parking car will show up alongside other classic examples of misguided electric vehicles.