00001001 11111001 00010001 00000010 10011101 01110100 11100011 01011011 11011000 01000001 01010110 11000101 01100011 01010110 10001000 11000000 in base 2.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 in base 16.

1 in base 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640.

Numbers are big business. Threats of lawsuits are being used in attempt to censor a cracked HD-DVD key, in a naive attempt to censor the Internet under the American DMCA legislation by the MPAA.

See : http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/01/1935250

Maybe I shouldn’t join in the fun. But it’s hard to resist giving a friendly gesture to the suits in the industry. Too hard.

[Edit : forgot the obligatory link to the image source -> http://xkcd.com/ ]

Or, maybe I would have understood it loosely before, yet now it has a deeper significance.

Kind of like when you buy a car. You know that cars of make M and model , with color #abcdef (letters are variable here, not hex… otherwise it would be a sky blue car. Just so you know.) exist, yet you never truly notice them or attach any significance to them until you have a car that is very similar to it.

Our perceptional reality is thus heavily influenced by our hierarchy of significance.

Think about the blockiest thing you know. Ok, skip lego and its knockoffs – I talking about something you can use to build houses out of. Ok, skip brick and concrete blocks, they’re not big enough. Skip straw bales, they’re mostly used for insulation when used for construction – architects don’t want to think about sensible things like that. Ok, I’ll give you a hint :

“Hey!”, you say to yourself, “That’s really blocky!”

Yes, my friend, that is really blocky. And as a general rule, out of blocky stuff one can make bigger blocky stuff. And yes, you can quote me on that.

Take a look! Bigger blocky stuff :

(http://www.noticiasarquitectura.info/especiales/chk-lot-ek.htm)

At least we can console ourselves with the fact that this is a fad, right? No one is about to make a major construction project that looks that blocky! People wouldn’t stand for it.

(If you believe that, don’t look at the next picture…)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67)

What fun!

I wonder where my Lego went…

(Seriously though, I had a blast as a kid. Everyone should grow up on a farm with multiple siblings. If there was enough farmland to accomodate all the families in the world, maybe we’d be happier. This quasi-ridiculous comment brought to you by the letter ‘Z’. ‘Z’ needs some attention since he lives at the end of the alphabet and is constantly harrassed and abused by cheap marketers and by the illiterate. ["That wuz EZ!", "Cloz fer Kidz".. gah!] )

Life in Canada has many rules. One rule is that you may never take the last of anything. Despite protests by greenpeace and sierra club activists over the large number of cookies, muffins, and baked squares that go to waste, this protocol has remained one of the key social skills for broad cultural acceptance.

To give credit where credit is due, this comic is the result of a conversation between me and Pedro some years ago while working on the farm.

“Cannot implicitly convert type ‘type1′ to ‘type2′. An explicit conversion exists (are you missing a cast?)”

you instead got

“Only landlubbers be implicitly converting ‘type1′ to ‘type2′. Thar be an explicit conversion (be ye missing a cast?)”.

Wouldn’t that make bug testing much more enjoyable? I think everyone would become programmers if piratey talk was the norm.

Now, Pete will be able to read and understand this. Maybe some others will understand too. But to me, this is (geek) poetry. Or something like that.

On a social note, it might be worth considering how much of the pie is split between North America and Europe. IPv6 is the answer to this techno-neo-colonialism.

Oh, and on a technological note : find 192. That’s a very common private network number… no addresses begin with that on the Internet. There’s your trivia for the day.

A response in picture to both Kristofer Straub ( http://www.starslipcrisis.com , http://www.halfpixel.com ) and to the work of Randall Munroe ( http://xkcd.com/ ).

Straub recently started the second website listed under the philosophy that he should be creating something new every day. I’m not sure how well the philosophy works with creative minds, and whether “creativity block” is ever a problem but it sounds like an interesting idea. Although I am not of an exceptionally creative bent, I like the concept when restated as such : “Everyone should strive to not only consume but also to produce.” Consumption and production here refers to the creation / assembly and use / enjoyment of music, art, food, technology, anything and everything… I guess I’m thinking mostly along the lines of cultural and technological grounds, although the concept does extend to some degree to include physical resources such as the food farmers produce for us, etc. Consumption is, of course, necessary and unavoidable in any society. Then again, maybe that restatement doesn’t cover it – it puts creativity as a social obligation. If you were alone on an island where no one would ever find you or your artifacts, would it matter what you created and devised? I think it would.
The idea also suggests the topic of the laughable comic strip I drew up (artistic style was heavily influenced by Munroe). I think the basic idea presented in the strip is clear, and something that we often forget in the monotony of job, family, school, sleep. Part of the idea is also expressed the following XFCD comics :

Permission to copy these pictures was given at http://xkcd.com/about/. If my tenuous leaps of logic between these comic strips is to much, let me know.

December 8 : Redeemer University College Concert Choir Christmas Concert (ok, that title’s a bit long, I’m sure their marketing department has come up with a more catchy way of saying that) This event is being held at Redeemer University College.

December 11 : Strings, Etc! Homeschool Choir. This event is being held at Meadowlands Fellowship CRC in Ancaster (right by Redeemer)

December 15 : Messiah, I forget who’s singing but it’s being held in St. John’s Anglican Church in Ancaster

December 16 : Singalong Messiah, hosted by the Pro Musica Choir. C’mon, you get to sing along?!?! Great stuff!!
(looks like I’ll be driving to pick up a long lost sibling instead… fair trade)
December 22 : Orpheus Choir / Hamilton Youth Orchestra, held at Hamilton Place.

There you have it. Five choral events… choose your poison…

Case in point : the other day, working on some aluminum parts in a workshop at an undisclosed location, I saw a small package of parts – a typical package of N parts enclosed within a clear cover with a cardboard backing giving the relevant name / description. The package backing proudly declared that these parts were butt connectors. I don’t think I have a particularly dirty mind, but the accompanying mental image was unavoidable. Maybe Ryan can hand these out when playing huckle-buckle…

The incident reminded me of some years back, when at a supper for intelligent university students (read : the computer science students), this book was found in the hosts bookshelves :

Some may not understand. A second look would then be in order.

Why do we sell this stuff to kids?