Ask Blue_Nose

Can't they hire somebody to shell pistachios? For Christ's sake, my thumb nails can't take much more of this.

I'd pay $1.20 more per pound.

Everyone has seen the old Sesame Street cartoons of a crazy pinball machine with funky Pointer Sisters music playing in the background. Well, it's been a little project mine to find clips of every single one of them online - I've learned that they only every produced up to 12 (of course, following along with the song), but mysteriously left out the number 1.

Anyway, I'd left it alone a few months ago (as cool as it is, you can in fact get sick of that riff) but for some random reason, picked it up again tonight and managed to find as many as I figure I'm going to get. As many as I'm going to get, for the record, is all of them except #8, which annoys the hell out of me, but so it goes.

Other notes: one of them has crappy audio quality and some idiot added pinball bell noises to #12, but otherwise they all should work. I used to be under the impression that they each had a different instrumental solo section, but apparently that's not the case.

For your viewing pleasure, the Pointer Sisters and the Pinball Number Count!

(first one is shown here, the rest are given as links)

#2
[youtube width=400 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJWjZM3TH28[/youtube]


#3


#4

#5

#6

#7

#8 (missing )

#9

#10 ...

[ Continued ]

I ran across a poster outside my office today encouraging me to 'Celebrate Buy Nothing Day', in what I would learn from the "Adbusters" website is an attempt to raise awareness of North America's rampant consumerism. I guess I've heard about this other years without much consideration, but I had no idea how seriously this endeavour is pursued around the world.

If you didn't know, "Buy Nothing Day" is this Friday, and is held every year to draw attention to the consumerism that's going to destroy the world, one Nike shoe at a time.

If you haven't guessed from the title, I'm skeptical of its effectiveness.

There are two types of people that will buy nothing this Friday:

1) people with no money
2) people with enough money to stock up on everything they need the day before

Those in the first group aren't likely willing participants, but those from the second aren't exactly making a huge sacrifice, either. The people engaged in this ridiculous exercise are fools to think they've proven anything by planning a single day of no purchases months in advance. I've probably been engaged in dozens of "buy nothing" days this year by chance, so what's the point of planning another?

"Ah, but Daniel, the point is only to raise awareness of the real issues" Okay, fine - but why aren't these supposedly enlightened consumer activists telling people the real story, and treating consumers like adults? Why resort to stupid campaigns and publicity stunts in addressing a serious issue?

I had to laugh when I read that their television advertisement was rejected by MTV. Apparently the hypocrisy of asking corporate media to support a campaign that openly promotes the rejection of corporate media wasn't lost on the folks at MTV, who've since been labelled "corporate censors" by the "culture jamming" Adbusters.

If only it were a simple and individual activity, I wouldn't mind it so much. However, not only do activists...

[ Continued ]

Thought I'd post a quick update on the recent Can-struction fundraiser/competition in which I again participated for the third year. For those who missed it, you can see our team's sculpture from two years ago and my topic on last year's build.

This year's design ever evolving, right up the the day of the build. The initial design idea was a Klein bottle, inspired by an amazing entry in the US from last year's build of a Mobius strip. Since it's not as well known, though, and doesn't look like much as a solid structure, we decided upon a similar-looking structure based on photo of a sculpture one of our teammates found online.

The sculpture's shape - an abstract curled shape - lead us to out final design, which was a spiral or spring, laying horizontally. During our first 'practice build', we attempted to create this spiral shape from scratch, but visualizing a three dimensional curved surface in two dimensional sllices proved to be difficult, and we didn't really get the results we'd hoped for.

It was my suggestion that day that we attempt to get some sort of formal design established before we attempt the build again. Without going into extreme detail (and thusly removing any shadow of a doubt the extent of my geekness), I was able to find an implicit 3D mathematical funtion for a helical surface, which I modelled in Maple, a math software developed in Waterloo. By inputting 'y' values in the equation shown below, I was given a 2D equation representing the contour of the surface at that 'y' value.

In the end, I had a collection of 'slices'...

[ Continued ]

I ate an Oreo cookie today on which one of the chocolate wafers was attached upside-down, such that the 'OREO' logo was facing inward.

I'm pretty sure this is a rare occurence (a Wikipedia search revealed nothing on the matter), and felt is deserved some form of internet documentation.

I would have saved it or at least taken a picture, but in my haste I'd already taken a bite. After some sort of subconscious realization that something was out of place, an investigation revealed the inverted cookie.