Plurp: Spongiform advice for the perpetually distracted

Bigger!

2002.04.28 : 2002.05.04

Saturday, May 4, 2002
Yow. Looking more closely at that Flash site from yesterday's generous reader, we are even more impressed. Not only is the art really lovely, but the concepts behind the games, the animations, and all the other little goodies, are dear and sweet and clever and wonderful. We like this Ferry Halim guy. Even if he does live in Fresno.

Zoom. How to Speak Miata.

Tanning Salon

Plurp. Philadelphia scavenger hunt.

A truck with peeling green paint, from which Lonnie sells barbecued ribs to a long line of people

An apron that says, Your Name Here

Tuvan throat singers

A green button with the image of a griffin

Things that are sharp, or torn

A void made of darkness or light

A dividing line between things that are the same

A vertical scratch in an old documentary film of Barnett Newman

A handful of afternoon

A domed ceiling with a depiction of angels having green wings, the paint on which is peeling

A cloth banner on which 201 handprints have been made with green paint

Plurp.
This is the yogurt truck
A different flavor in each tank
Tulips in July
And only tundra beyond here

Friday, May 3, 2002
Blab. This reader has time to notice subtle and ominous correlations amongst apparently random events.
You and Ian blogged the same meeting phrase today. Dave's entry for the day isn't up yet. Will he complete the trifecta?
The Magic 8 Ball says ...
Very doubtful
... which seems to be correct.

Blab. An expert on why Flash games suck writes:
Flash games aren't very good because there are very few programmers who *only know* Flash. Most people get tired of making web games after a while because they are just as hard as real games but more tedious to program.
I wrote Tube the Salt River in five hours and it won a "cool site" award but I was never motivated to improve it or write more.
There are some nice Flash games including a cow milking game.
We like Tube the Salt River. It's kinda like Frogger but without the logs.
While the cow milking game is not our favorite, we are impressed with the lovely art in the games you reference. And Pocketful of Stars has by far the sweetest concept we've seen in a Flash game. Awww.

Blab. A reader makes an interesting claim.
I can estimate anything to within an order of magnitude.
Cool. What number are we thinking of?

Blab. A reader explains why the number 65360 is so lazy.
The problem with 65360 is that it's the ZIP code for Windsor, MO, population 2,760. As you know, nothing much ever happens in Missouri, and whatever does happen certainly doesn't happen in Windsor.
So, there's the problem right there.
L.
There is so little going on in Windsor, MO that we weren't able to find anything going on there. So it's not that 65360 is lazy, per se. Rather, there's just not much opportunity for it to have an exciting life which might appear more often on the Web.
In fact, we appear in more places on the Web than the entire town of Windsor, MO does. That's pretty scary. Fortunately, New York, NY appears more times than we do. So we still have a ways to go before the entire world is ours. Still, passing Windsor, MO is some kind of milestone, don't you think?

Blab. Plurp's own Ph.D. of Feline Poopology checks in with this.
I was very impressed with your reader's insightful and detailed work on the total daily weight of dog feces in Manhattan. This work nicely complements my own recent study of urban cat feces, recently published as Statistical Analysis of Urban Feline Fecal Composition and Distribution: Diurnal and Annual Series, in the Journal of Urban Studies.
I would appreciate it if you could inform your reader of my interest in collaborative work.
- Dr. Poopsalata Kitifecus
Sadly, that Big Blab Box anonymizes all reader contributions, so we don't actually know which of our excretory geniuses authored that particular work. We can only hope that he, she or it will read of your interest here and take appropriate action.

Blab. A reader who is not nearly as lazy as we are (and certainly not as lazy as 65360) writes:
Deep linking law analysis
Aha! A lawyerly treatment of the deviant practice of linking to Web pages other than the "front" page of a site. The bottom line: There is now some case law but (big surprise coming) lawyers are still debating the legality of the practice.
We suspect we could report that same news in the next century.

Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[link]
... to an amazingly right-wing magazine site containing an article that starts off like this:
LIBERALS HAVE FINALLY found a people even more worthy of their admiration than the adulterous French: synagogue-burning, genital-mutilating, terrorist-cheering Muslims.
Let's review. The author vilifies (and probably even slanders) liberals, the French, and Muslims, all in one opening sentence. That's got to be a record. (She does get around to the New York Times and polygamists, but not for several more paragraphs.) None of this is racism or anything like it, though, as the author makes clear later in the article.
In addition to mutilating girls and burning synagogues, another popular Muslim pastime in France is to steal cars, set them on fire and push them off cliffs.
Isn't the Web educational?

Yow. Will wonders never cease?
Portugal [...] has decriminalized all drug use.
Spain, Italy and Luxembourg have also decriminalized possession and use of most drugs, and several other countries have effectively done the same by waiving criminal penalties for addicts who are not found to be dealing.
Is it possible that folks are realizing that the primary cause of crime in countries that practice prohibition is prohibition? That would be nice.

Yo. Everybody seems to love the new Spiderman movie. Gotta get us summa dat.
Why is it, though, that getting bit by a genetically altered (or, originally, radioactive) spider imbues Peter Parker (the pickle picker, we seem to recall) with powers like great strength (a misunderstanding of scaling) and the ability to cling to walls? What a lucky guy to get those particular spider characteristics.
With our luck, we would have gotten a primitive brain and the inability to eat solid food.

Plurp. Somebody recently found their way to our Web site by searching in Google (or some such) for the following string.
preassigns OR smash OR reassure OR cursive OR banishing
Actually, they found their way here twice this way. What could it mean?

Plop. Please, god, make it stop!

Yo. Really cool work suggesting that the uneven distribution of wealth in society (most of the wealth is owned by a minority of people) is not due to evil laws or an uneven distribution of talent, but may instead be a natural consequence of network effects. If so, it would be universal, under almost any conditions (as, indeed, it is observed to be). (rebecca)

Yo. Hey, all you narcoleptics out there - now you can become druggies.

Plurp.
The blue dog
couldn't get the hang of that
Pocketful of Stars
game

Thursday, May 2, 2002
Blab. A reader examines the head of a recent correspondent.
Jill has a point. Well, actually, I don't know if she has a point on the legal front -- is it a copyright violation to link directly to an image or an article in someone else's website (so-called 'deep linking')? Actually, with images, it's particularly insidious, as you (the website author) can make the image appear inline, in the middle of your text, and the reader is not aware that the image came from a different site.
Jill's point should really have been 'please don't do this, it costs me money'. And if you pay by bit, a sudden linking from a popular site can really screw up your budget :-).
On the other hand, I have little sympathy for Jill. It's trivial to set up your webserver to not permit images to be loaded 'inline' into web pages other than your own -- in Jill's case, she could, without difficulty, make it so that only her own pages could include her images. She could, with even less difficulty, get someone else to do that for her.
Because this is going to happen again. And again. And again. And pretty soon, sending annoyed emails to everyone who links to an image is going to get pretty darn boring.
Use the tech, Jill!
Absolutely. Had Jill exercised simple civility, and asked us to remove our image reference for whatever random reason, we would have gladly done so. But Jill thought it would be great sport to threaten us with a lawsuit over an image (and a page) that carried no copyright attribution, and in an area of the law that is, at best, emerging. And, as our Treasured Reader points out, Jill didn't even bother to use the available technology, as many sites already do, to prevent image references.
Our humble blog is in exactly this situation. One of the most popular pages to reference our site is that of a woman who, um, greatly appreciates our image of Charlize Theron. (Plus she obsesses over Angelia Jolie, so we're on her side.) And links to it on her Web site. So, you know, good for her.
But let's do the math. Last month, when we linked to pitiful Jill's silly image, we had maybe 3k hits on our main blog page. That's 750 in the week that we linked to her grainy image, which was a mere 8k. So the total bandwidth consumed was 750kB/week, or an average of 1.2 Bytes/sec. Her ISP must charge her a pretty penny for bandwidth if an extra 1.2 Bytes/sec is worth her time to compose a snotty letter.
We wonder, however, if Jill will become bored with these repetitive threats. We wonder if they are, in fact, the high points of her repetitive, threatening existence.

Blab. And speaking of excretions, a reader sends an incredible response to our challenge to estimate the weight of doggie doo-doo plopped every day in Manhattan, and in which we asked you to show your work.
Off the cuff, 50000 dogs times 100 grams per day is 10000 pounds per day. i.e. isn't not the quantity, it's how it's distributed. Or one can abuse Google and come up with a similar number.
Google: manhattan "licensed dogs" New York
120 000 licensed in New York City.
(An estimate derived from ASPCA figures is that 1 in 15 is licensed).
www.nyc.gov
click on search
search term population.
2000 census population:
1,537,195 manhattan
8,008,278 all new york
Google: "fecal weight".
In "Raisin News", in the abstract
EFFECT OF SUN-DRIED RAISINS ON BILE ACID EXCRETION, INTESTINAL TRANSIT TIME AND FECAL WEIGHT? A DOSE-RESPONSE STUDY, (human?) fecal weight is "167 g/day without raisins".
Assume Manhattan dogs have 1/4 the poop mass of humans.
(1.5/8)*120000*(.167/4)
would be about 1000 kilograms per day, 15000 if the unlicensed/licensed ratio is 15. And if one is weighing, not massing, that would be about 2000-30000 pounds per day.
We are deeply, deeply impressed by the scientific and Googlific acumen represented by our Treasured Reader. Walking to our garage on Wednesday, we estimated 10,000 pounds a day, but that was just the usual off-the-cuff estimate. We had no idea our readers would demonstrate such dedication to doo-doo.

Blab. One of our numerophiliac readers writes:
"65360 12426 12379" on google obtains only 2 hits (although I suspect that will become 3 before too long.)
I was suprised at this low number, and it mainly seems to be the fault of 65360, which occurs only 3000-some-odd times. Why can't it be more like 65535 and 65536, which each occur hundreds of thousands of times. Why is this number such an appaling under-achiever?
Get with it, 65360!
-pTang
Yeah! Yeah! What's with these lazy numbers, anyhow?

Blab. One of our many obsessive-compulsive readers drops the other shoe.
nine
Thank you.

Blab. A reader wonders about that.
nine? I take it your reader is a true random number generator. Only a truly random sequence could contain so many nines in sequence. That's the thing with randomness, you can never be sure
-A(I stole that last bit from dilbert)JL
We can never be sure. That's for sure.

Blab. A reader sends us an oddly periodic image.

[F]our giant cranes sailed effortlessly under the Bay Bridge on a freighter this morning ...
The cranes passed with an ample 5 feet to spare -- last time it was a mere 25 inches ...
The cranes were manufactured in Japan and shipped to San Francisco via freighter. (At least) two things are amazing here. (1) They got here at all. Why didn't the freighter tip over? (2) The whole thing was engineered so incredibly carefully that they made it under the Bay Bridge with a mere five feet (two feet, last time) to spare.
We are very impressed.

Blab. A reader who seems quite incapable of getting the point writes:
So.......who would you have as the female star in a remake of "One Million, BC"?
Michael Jackson. Are you happy now?

Blab. A reader asks for help.
When LegoDeath finishes loading, will someone let me know? I have things to do........
A perfectly reasonable request. Could someone without anything to do please let our Treasured Reader know when LegoDeath finishes loading? Thanks very.

Blab. A reader warns us of an impending assault of do-gooders.
I thought the skies were pretty dark myself.
What do they want us to do? Go without ANY light?
Yes, these folks are interested in returning the world to its historical, natural condition of pitch black at night. We expect heating to be their next target. Very unnatural, heating.

Plurp. ~~Captain Queeg~~ Bernie Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, has resigned. No word yet on the strawberries.

Yow. David L. Smith, that grinning idiot who created and unleashed the Melissa virus, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison. We anticipate that his roommate will be a large guy named Bubba.

Enjoy!

Plurp. People like us should not be allowed to have a Weblog. Or should be required to. We're not sure which.

Rant. Why are Flash games so awful? Can anyone explain this to us? Take this little helicopter game, which /usr/bin/girl extolls, for instance. It's the kind of trivial game that we would have found in the arcades circa 1977. That's a quarter century ago, for those of you keeping track.
Why is it that now, in 2002, many many Moore doublings later, we have the same old dreck? Really - we want to know.
It can't be just that no one makes money writing Flash games. There are lots of PC games that people develop and distribute for free, and they are much better.
Is it that Flash is an inherently disgusting language, in which it's hard to do anything at all, so the mere possibility of a 25 year old game is quite impressive? Is it that Flash programmers are basically stupid, and can't code up any interesting games? Did they fry their brains disco dancing? What?

Yak. In a meeting today about the future of client computing.
It's their view that everything in the next generation will be in a game environment. You'll move through business environments like in a game, communicate like in a game, shop like in a game
So that would be a first person shopper?
Uh, yeah.

Plurp.
The blue dog
thought that that was
a lot of
doo-doo

Wednesday, May 1, 2002
Blab. A reader, following the strict kata of the past few days, writes:
The only surrealist blog left? Shirley? Well, I did like (we did like, they did like, she did, like) the lips, the lips with the eye between them. The eye, the I, between the lips? Entirely too.
We do appreciate the appreciation, Shirley. It is part of the ongoing problem with our self-appreciating personality that we kinda like our "four images" artistic genre. Finally, a good use for Google image search!

Blab. That meme-mixing, haiku-variant reader is back.
Asterixed to death
he found no mirth in
the prosthetic devices
on waking he found
the blue dogs concerns
not in the least excessive
Very nice! We wash our measuring cups in your general direction.

Blab. A reader who must be in a different "here" than we are, and certainly has a very different impression of Kansas than do we, writes:
From here to central Kansas is not actually all that far, and I know for a fact that it is not particularly surreal. Ask any Spaniard: surrealismo requires elevation.
Are there any Spaniards amongst the readership who can verify this?

Blab. Peeking at an old issue of Plurp, a reader of Iranian descent writes:
abolfazlz@yahoo.com
We don't know who this is, or even if it is anyone. But we're sure the spammists will find out for us.
It does, however, lead us to reread our wonderful solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in that same issue. Why are they still fiddling around over there when we've given them such a clear blueprint? We don't know.

Blab. A reader asks the question that's on all our minds.
How many times can you wash the measuring cups?
Us personally, or the generic "you"? Actually, never mind, since we don't know in either case. It does sound like an interesting, and maybe ancient, ritual, possibly bordering on an obsessive-compulsive disorder. And, of course, we like that.
Perhaps our other readers know the answer?

Blab. An officious reader gets all lathered up.
Hello. My name is Jill, I run ***********.com... obviously you know the website since you linked to my scary clown photograph. It is NOT cool to do that. All images on my website are legally copyrighted. I could sue you right now if I wanted to, but I don't. I'm shelling out hundreds of dollars a month from excess bandwidth charges, because people like YOU steal my images and my webspace illegally. Moral of the story? I'm asking that you remove the picture immediately.
Jill
Goodness! We're happy to not link to sites run by people who threaten us needlessly. We have removed the link to your image. For that matter, we removed the entire Plurp entry that directed people to your Web site. (And we asterixed-out the name of your Web site above for the same reason.) We wouldn't want you to think that, by directing people to your site, we were trying to violate your copyrights.
Instead of getting all huffy with us, Jill, we'd suggest you go threaten Google, which prominently links to your copyrighted clown image. They have more money than we do. You might also want to put a copyright notice on the page to which we (formerly) linked, so that telepathic powers are not needed to divine your intent in the future.
But this does make us wonder: Is there any case law that says it violates copyright law to link to someone's image from your site? Or even linking per se? We seem to recall rumblings about this a while ago, and arguments on both sides, but no actual legal resolution. Yes, we know that lots of sites have officious legalese on them trying to convince you that you can't link to their content in various ways. But is there actually case law on this? Do our readers know? (But in responding, please don't link to anything, anywhere, or we'll surely hear from our dear friend Jill again.)

Blab. A reader, filled with hate, contradicts us.
As much as I hate to contradict you (hahahaha!) the movie you are refering to in regard to the coffee bags is not "Mister Roberts" but "The Caine Mutiny". That was the one with the strawberries. "Mister Roberts" had the palm tree. Close but no dessert.
As always, our Treasured Readers are exactly correct. Funny that we convolved the officious captain with the palm tree and the officious captain with the strawberries. It's our day to deal with officiousness, it seems. Karmic blogging.
Anyhow, right! 'Twas Bogie of which Bernie Ebbers, besieged CEO of fading WorldCom, reminded us. Not, Who did it? Rather, Ah, but the strawberries! That's where I had them.
Good stuff!

Blab. An obsessive-compulsive reader writes:
nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine
Don't you need one more?

Plurp. Do you like the way Afghan war is going? Are you pleased with how moral the U.S. has been? Good. Don't read this.
Oh. And, by the way, that unconstitutional arrest of a California student last year as a material witness for something related to terrorism was, um, unconstitutional. In case you thought it wasn't.
[S]ince 1789, no Congress has granted the government the authority to imprison an innocent person in order to guarantee that he will testify before a grand jury conducting a criminal investigation.
Looks like Señor Ashcroft, will have to wait a few more years to establish a banana republic in North America. Sorry.

Plop. Don't worry, though. Señor Ashcroft is busy in other venues.
Saying the Supreme Court's ruling striking down parts of an anti-child pornography law enables child molesters to escape prosecution, Attorney General John Ashcroft on Wednesday praised House legislation that would close a loophole on computer-generated images of children engaged in sex acts.
"In a world in which virtual images are increasingly indistinguishable from reality, prosecutors are now forced to prove that sexually explicit images involving children were, in fact, produced through the abuse of children, an extremely difficult task in today's worldwide Internet child pornography market," Ashcroft said in an afternoon press conference.
"The legislation tightens the definition of child pornography and assures that child pornography prosecutions will not be barred merely because of the theoretical possibility that the material is created through computer imaging," he said.
That "loophole", you'll recall, was that computer generated images don't actually involve having children engage in any acts at all, pornographic or otherwise, and hence can't be child molestation. That is, making a computer generated image of kids doing naughty stuff no more violates the rights of kids than making a painting does. Or writing a story. Or talking about it. Or thinking about it.
Again, we applaud this advanced legal thinking, and renew our request to see it applied to other crimes, such as murder or even speeding, though this will put a serious damper on Arnold Schwarzenegger's career.

Plop. From an email today.
Your corporation in this is gratefully appreciated.

Yow. The Webby Award nominees have been announced. Yeah, BFD. But they do point to LegoDeath, which is both new to us and very funny. And the Mind Control Forum. (We must be slipping up if this information is publicly available.) We also learn that Freck has still not amputated his feet, which causes us to question the integrity of the human race. ("Race".)

Yo. Speaking of mind control (which you can't, of course, but we can), deviant scientists are now able to control the behavior of rats remotely via brain implants. They're implicitly denying that they can do so from orbit.
Kate Rears, a policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said technological advances mean human-control technology can no longer be dismissed as far-fetched.
We made her say that.

Yow. Turns out those bad dinosaur movies were right after all. Primates, it seems, evolved during the reign of the dinosaurs, so there really were cave men (well, in the very broad sense that also includes lemurs and such) being chased around by vicious dinosaurs.
No need to remake One Million Years B.C.
So take note. We don't want any accidental remakes of dreck like that. Not when we have all new dreck already in the pipeline. OK?

Plurp. Today's Graduate Physics Qualifying Exam question.
Estimate the total weight of all of the doggy doo-doo excreted daily in Manhattan. Show your work.
Yes, readers, this one's for you.

Plurp. From a conversation between Helen and an unidentified entity, and via mysterious channels:
Taken for a loop

Taken by surprise

Knocked for a loop

Yow. Speaking of Helen (which you can't, but we can), more fun with her New Toy.

Plurp. Who or what is Captain Howdy? We're tempted to think it's just the name of the spirit that little Pea Soup Regan in The Exorcist contacts via her Ouija board. But then there's stuff like this. Or this. Or, gawd save us, this.
So, see, it's all very confusing and you must now explain it to us. And please use small words, 'cause, you know.

Plurp. Curiously, and in an example of social mode locking, the new most popular search this week on our very own search facility is for virtual helen naked pictures. Curiously, the fourth most popular search is for 65360 12426 12379.
What could it mean?

Plurp. For those of you wondering if the praying mantis has a cocoon, and you know who you are, it does. Well, more of an egg sac than a cocoon, as it's not really used for metamorphosis. But whatever.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was quite concerned about that whole copyright
thing

Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Blab. A disturbed reader writes:
I keep seeing the woman with the light. Not straight up, no. Out of the corner of my eye, just barely, but when I turn to see her (or, of course, turn away, to not) she is gone. But not.
I feel her closest, then, when I turn away. Her breath is warm, though not her skin -- warm and moist and acrid like ash.
"Bring me seven," I hear her say -- or perhaps I don't. "Bring me seven and I'll leave you alone."
I cover my ears and fail to hear nothing, nothing but the wind in the trees.
L.
If that is the wind at all ...

Blab. A reader from Oregon writes:
OR, "Oh right."
Is that the new state motto? We like it much better than She Flies With Her Own Wings, which was adopted in 1987, or the amazingly boring The Union, with which the state was saddled before that.
Oregon, Oh Right. Very catchy.

Blab. That reader who has planted tiny spy devices wherever we go writes:
Steve, about Omaha being a major city, you never said, "oh, yeah..."
The reader is correct. As we related yesterday, we said:
Oh. Right.

Blab. A reader who likes show tunes but, unfortunately, bought WorldCom stock, writes:
Hey Bernie! Here, have some little baggies of coffee on the way out the door. (Sung to the tune "Goodnite and Thank You" from the musical "Evita")
While the cast is singing, the following appears on the reader boards above the stage.
It was billed as the strategy meeting not to miss. WorldCom Inc. senior executives from around the globe gathered two months ago at the telecom giant's headquarters in Clinton, Miss. They had come to hear CEO Bernard J. Ebbers reveal his grand vision for rescuing a company mired in debt, sluggish growth, and rising controversy about its accounting practices. What executives heard instead was their boss thundering about the theft of coffee in the company's break room.
How did Ebbers know? Because he had matched brewing filters with bags, and at the end of the month, filters outnumbered bags. Henceforth, Ebbers commanded, his executives would follow a checklist of priorities now referred to as "Bernie's seven points of light." They would count coffee bags, make sure no lights were left on at the end of the day, and save cooling costs in the summer by turning the thermostat up four degrees, say three former and two current executives. "Bernie is running a $40 billion company as if it were still his own mom-and-pop business," says one WorldCom exec who attended the meeting. "He doesn't know how to grow the company, just shave pennies."
Hmm. We seem to recall James Cagny in that role.

Blab. A Treasured Reader's contributions to art and society are recognized.
I won one of those local awards for driving style yesterday. There must have been extra credit available in the scoring system, as I scored 70 out of 55!
Congratulations! We are always pleased to see our readers doing well. You can, no doubt, expect a large prize as a result. We, for instance, got many "points" on our license. We're not sure how to redeem them yet, but we're sure they'll let us know.

Plurp. With the apparent (and sad, ever so sad) demise of Bovine Inversus, are we the only surrealist blog left? Are we a surrealist blog? Are we left? Is anyone really left? Left what? The left kidneys of surrealist bloggers, splayed end to end across the landscape from here to central Kansas, which surely must be the most surrealistic place on the face of the planet. On the face of Shirley. Planet Shirley. That face, amongst the corn. And the kidneys. Don't forget the kidneys. Don't leave them, as you leave. Not that you would. Not that any would. Knot that N.E. wood. As you leave. Surely.

Yak. From TV spam (formerly called commercials):
Ten years ago, I might not have been here today.

Plurp. We are still giggling about Frigits. And rearranging them. We were unable to figure out how to build a latch. This disturbs us greatly. Several configurations we built stored state, in wodgy and unpredictable ways - a marble getting stuck in the funnel, the two tippy-things catching each other just right so they stuck together, a marble balancing at the top of the Ferris wheel - but none in a way that was either reliable or with which we could figure out how to do anything. Fhn!
So our current goal is to build a configuration that maximizes the duration that the marble is in play.
Isn't technology wonderful?

Plurp.
The blue dog
felt compelled to
obey the woman with the
light

Monday, April 29, 2002
Blab. A disturbed reader writes:
I, too, am disturbed by that picture last Friday.
We're pleased to hear it. Our goal is to interrupt the sleep of all of our readers. Here is a subtly different, and perhaps subtly more disturbing, image.
Blab. A reader experiments with dangerous new forms of psychic powers.
Steve is really bored. I can tell.
In this case, they are also unreliable. We are having more fun than humans should be allowed. A thought-provoking play (The Goat) followed by a thought-provoking movie (Changing Lanes) on Saturday, a day of indulgent sloth (well, and some real work) on Sunday, and then a whole Monday of Inventing the Future and Playing with Toys.
Who could be bored?

Blab. That reader with the microscopic spy cameras mounted wherever we go makes a more reliable claim.
Steve has a new toy
Indeed. A few weeks ago, Helen bought us Frigits, a high-end yuppie version of the Marble Machines we built out of toilet paper tubes and creased cardboard and Scotch tape when we were eight years old.
We finally brought it into work. Now it's up on the whiteboard in our office at the IBM Watson Research Center, the envy of everyone who pokes their head into our office upon hearing the clack-clacking of marbles falling between the various chutes. The adoring crowd gave the recalcitrant Ferris wheel a little lubrication today, and a prestigious award was given for the first working example of controlled nondeterministic flow.
We are eight years old again. And we love it!
(Hey. It could be worse.)

Yak.
See my new toy?
A marble machine? Cool!
Yeah! Let's make a computer!
Uh, before we try to make a computer, we should make a NAND gate.
We're going to have a tough time making a NAND gate unless we can make a latch.
Well, maybe we didn't say exactly that. But we could have!
Anyhow, for this week's Plurp Challenge, describe how to make a latch out of the parts in the above picture that work pretty much in the obvious way:

Various straight channels, along which the marbles accelerate

Various curvy channels, along which the marbles travel at a fixed, fairly slow speed

A funnel, inside of which the marbles spin, delaying their fall and (in most cases) spacing out several marbles that entered it in rapid succession

Tippy-over things in which the marbles land, causing them to tip over slowly (in a preferred direction) and ultimately dump the marble out again

A mechanically unworthy Ferris wheel goodie into which you can dump a marble and (depending on where and how you dump it) have it come out the near side or the far side, with pretty much no horizontal velocity.

And, of course, there's good old gravity. You are allowed to use some finite number of sets of these plastic dingies. We're even willing to allow the use of additional fixed obstacles, as we have a bunch of old magnets hanging around gathering dust which could be recycled for just this purpose. No homemade stuff with moving parts, though, and absolutely nothing electrical.
OK, brilliant readers. Go to it!

Plop.
Executives back away from 'zero tolerance' stance
OMAHA, NE (CNN) -- Less than a week after discussing the company's sexual abuse scandal with CEO J. Fred Shirley-Harold, U.S. executives of MegaCorp, Inc., Sunday backed away from supporting a sweeping "zero tolerance" policy against executives accused of abusing minors.
At the close of the company meeting Tuesday, MegaCorp executives issued a memo that condemned such abuse. But the statement fell short of instituting a policy to remove men from executive positions for a single instance of sexual abuse involving a minor.
"'Zero tolerance' is not our term; it's a term that's been given us, and, therefore, if you don't meet it, somehow you've failed," Sam Q. Buggerman, Senior Partner of MegaCorp, told NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. "Zero tolerance in the sense that ... any possible kind of offense of this nature means ... you're ejected from executive office? There has to be some discussion."
Patrick Muckleflugga, another Senior Partner, said distinctions should be made on a case-by-case basis, citing an example of an executive who was infatuated with a 17-year-old girl 30 years ago.
"It becomes public, and the people say, 'Gee, we've known this man for 30 years, he's been fine,'" Muckleflugga said. "There I think I'd want to think about it. I'd want to talk to the other people in the office and really get advice."
Muckleflugga said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that the corporation has successfully monitored and treated abusive executives in the past, while keeping them in the company.
"They live carefully, they really are sorry," he said. "We know where they are, they're not a threat to children."

Yak.
Name a major city in Omaha.
Uh, Omaha is a city.
Oh. Right.

Plurp.
The blue dog had
determined how to make a
latch
from a dream about moths and a
tattoo of forbidden acts

Sunday, April 28, 2002
Plurp. Too busy playing stupid Flash games and doing real work to Plurp much today. Go fish.

Yo. Are you a fat geek? Lucky you. Now there's The Official Homepage for Hotties Who LOVE FatGeeks.
That is so sad.

Plop. What must it be like to be told that your job is to write cool games, and then be told you have to do it in Flash, which must be almost the world's worst game language. We imagine this is what life is like on one of the lower rings of Hell. Like being forced to write games in Cobol.
Is that why Flash games today are about as sophisticated as PC games were twenty years ago?

Yow. But there's always time for movies with nyotaimori scenes.

Yo. It was so foggy today that it was hard to see the street below, and buildings just two blocks away had vanished completely. It was like being in a first person shooter on a slow processor.

Plurp.

Plurp.

Plurp.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was deeply
concerned
about too much

Top

Earlier entries Later entries