Regruntled.com

CET suggested the palette for this pattern, based on my rainbow sudoku. The problem is that it is hard to find nine shades of blue that are easy to tell apart.

I think this pattern would be good on the bottom of a swimming pool. It could be manufactured as a puzzle, where the 20 or so clue tiles are glued to a mesh, and the other tiles are loose. The tile layer would have to solve the sudoku as he laid the tile.

I’ll do the same for anyone who sends me the hex values for nine colors. See colr.org for some tools.

Trend or coincidence? Recently I’ve come across two examples of deceptive censorship in computer forums. If the San Francisco Chronicle deletes your comment, the comment is invisible to other readers, but it remains visible to YOU, presumably so you don’t realize you’ve been censored and start complaining. (Thanks to TTB for the link.)

Prosper, the online lending platform, censors their forum. The lender community responded by setting up an alternate, uncensored forum at Prospers.org. (If you’re thinking about lending at Prosper, you REALLY need to read what the other lenders are saying in the uncensored forum.)

Well, OK, but how do people at Prosper.com find out about Prospers.org? It used to be possible to post at Prosper.com and mention Prospers.org. Now Prosper’s forum software automatically changes “prospers.org” to “prosper.com”. If you mention the competition, it’s turned into a mention of Prosper.

Both the Chronicle and Prosper are private businesses, and I really don’t have a problem with a bit of censorship to remove spam and maintain a civil atmosphere. However, I think they ought to be honest about their policies. Post the rules and provide a referee to enforce the rules, but don’t have secret rules that you enforce when no one is looking.

Here’s another experiment, for no particular reason.  The box below displays random paragraphs from Secret Ballet:

You can reload the page to get a new fragment.  I seem to be pushing the limits of Blogger.  When I do something like this, some things will work, and some things won’t.  I can publish this post, but I can’t edit it on Blogger, I have to delete it, edit it on my computer, and repost it.

For some reason I find Secret Ballet fascinating.  I keep wanting to read just a little bit more, even though I know the book was assembled from sample sentences in  a dictionary.  There’s nothing really there.

Is television news any different?  News is a business.  The stories are composed, packaged, teased and delivered by professional news readers.  There is a pretense of substance, the idea that something important actually happened, but on a slow news day, the news business fills the same amount of air time with no substance at all.

Maybe the fascination is that Secret Ballet doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.

This is a proof-of-concept project that combines still frames into a video. I took a digital photo and modified it programmatically to make 3,888 different frames. I ran the frames through Windows Media Encoder to make a video and edited the video with Windows Movie Maker.

Computer colors are combinations of red, green and blue. A photographic color negative inverts all three colors at the same time. However, if you’re messing with the bits and bytes, it’s just as easy to invert one color at a time. First I inverted red, then green, then blue, then red again, green again and blue again. At the end, all three colors have been inverted twice. Everything cancels out, and we have the original image again.

I took a solved sudoku, replaced the numbers with colors, and generated this image. I added a black background to separate the colors and make it easier to see the 3-by-3 blocks.

Sudokus are tileable. If you take the three blocks from the left of a sudoku and move them around to the right, you still have a sudoku. Similarly, you can move blocks from the top to the bottom. Consequently, if you repeat the pattern, you can pick out any 3-by-3 block and the 8 surrounding blocks, and you have a sudoku.

Unlike the plaids, this pattern is not weavable from horizontal and vertical threads. However, it could be made from little ceramic tiles (and black grout).

A feral cat stalks a bird. Either the cat is fast enough to catch the bird, or the bird is fast enough to get away from the cat. Very simple. Evolution in action.

Or is it? The bird is an endangered species, and an ornithologist with a gun has the cat in his sights. He fires. One less feral cat in the world. Very simple.

Or is it? Depends on what ‘feral” means. This is a true story, and the cat lived under a toll bridge near Galveston, Texas. Ornithologist and birder Jim Stevenson shot the cat as it was stalking endangered birds. Under Texas law, it is illegal to kill a cat belonging to another person, and the maximum penalty is two years in prison. Tollbooth employee John Newland placed food under the bridge for feral cats, including the one killed by Stevenson. Does accepting food qualify as “belonging to”?

Believe it or not, this case went to trial, and the jury deliberated for two days before becoming deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial, and the prosecution dropped the case.

(Thanks to Mr. Bill for the story.)

Here is one of those “I wonder if I can do it” projects. I’m reading about background images and I see that the position can be adjusted pixel by pixel. If I can do that, I can make the image move. Already, I’m so focused on the technical details that I’m not even considering whether this is a good idea or not.

Of course, the Blogger platform doesn’t co-operate. But I’m also reading about inline frames, which is a way to display a piece of one web page on another. So I put the crawling image on another server, and display it in an inline frame in this post. Maybe I can use the same techniques for something useful.

In a comment to my post on Payday Loans, CET eloquently argues that “it is more expensive to be poor”. This got me to thinking, because one of the premises of Voluntary Simplicity is that it is LESS expensive to live simply.

The difference between Voluntary Simplicity and Involuntary Simplicity (otherwise known as poverty) is that the Voluntary Simpleton can make choices. He can make choices because he has accumulated capital. He can buy a six-month supply of spaghetti sauce when it is on sale, because he has the money to take advantage of the sale. Not only does he have the capital, he has the values that led him to accumulate the capital.

Voluntary Simplicity, while rejecting consumerism, is still very much a middle-class, Protestant-ethic way of looking at things. Sometimes this is very explicit, as when the authors of Your Money or Your Life urge their readers to save money, buy Treasury bonds and live off the interest. In other cases it is implicit, as when Thoreau, a Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory, decided to camp out on land owned by his friend Emerson.

As I have argued elsewhere, the essence of Voluntary Simplicity is not simplicity, but deliberateness, and deliberateness is the antithesis of the consumerist, immediate-gratification mindset that puts people into situations where a payday loan is even a plausible solution. In a Voluntarily Simple world, the payday loan shops would all go out of business.

There are 138,510 versions of this page. The background is randomized, as is the image to the right. Although Blogger, the platform, hosts zillions of people spewing mindless drivel, randomizing the images was surprisingly hard to do. I had to put the randomness on a different server and link to it.

Can I randomize the text of a blog post? Again, this is easy enough on another server, but not so easy on Blogger. But maybe there is a way.

In the literary world, the cut-up technique can be traced back to the Surrealists, but is mostly associated with Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in the 50s. The name comes from cutting up newspapers with razor blades and physically juxtaposing pieces of paper.

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart, is a novel about randomness. The protagonist makes life decisions by rolling dice. On the other hand, Secret Ballet, by Detlev Fischer, is a randomized novel. It is composed of example sentences from a dictionary, arranged with some assistance from the author. The resulting text is quite readable, and the effect is more aimlessness than randomness.