| memepool made with only the finest ones and zeros |
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| Saturday Oct 30, 2004 | Technology enables art.
to Art by belford |
| Monday Oct 20, 2003 | Always
read the manual
before
starting your vehicle.
Dinghy stabber included.
to Travel by belford |
| Monday May 12, 2003 | Cats
paint.
Elephants
paint,
but elephants also
play the harmonica.
(And
drums, xylophones, etc.)
See video
in Swedish.
to Music by belford |
| Tuesday Aug 20, 2002 | Fifteen years ago,
John Sculley
of
Apple
begat a vision of the future of personal computing. The dream inspired
successful
products,
unsuccessful
ones, and
sheer fantasies.
Written by
Hugh Dubberly
and
Doris Mitsch:
The original
Knowledge Navigator video.
(15 MB QuickTime movie --
mirror,
mirror,
mirror)
to Computing by belford |
| 110 Stories
in the World Trade Center, that was.
to Poetry by belford |
| Monday Jul 15, 2002 | Eeeagh!
Flying
octopus!
But beware:
God hates kites.
to Toys by belford |
| Sunday Jun 23, 2002 | In the late 80s and early 90s,
Cliff Johnson
released a set of Macintosh puzzle games.
The Fool's Errand
and
3 in Three
became instant classics, and have long been remembered fondly
by puzzle gamers.
Now the author is
offering
these games
(and others)
for free on his
web site.
Playable on
Macintoshes
and
emulated
Macintoshes.
to Games by belford |
| Thursday Jun 6, 2002 | If you
eat enough
carrots
you
turn orange.
This is not
a lie.
to Science by belford |
| Thursday Mar 14, 2002 | Goto statements were
considered harmful.
Csh was
considered harmful.
Reply-to munging was
considered harmful.
<FONT> tags,
the phrase "character set",
recursive Makefiles,
XSL,
WAP,
and some
stuff
I've
never
even
heard of
has all been
considered harmful.
Enough! If you
hate
something,
just say that it
sucks,
already.
to Computing by belford |
| Monday Feb 18, 2002 | Hotels
have been built out of
ice.
Everyone from the
ancient Balinese
to
Frank Lloyd Wright
has built on
water.
But the NY architects
Diller+Scofidio
are the only ones wacko enough to try
creating
a building out of water vapor
(or so it will
seem).
Visit at
Swiss Expo '02,
assuming it
works.
to Art by belford |
| Friday Jan 4, 2002 | Jasmine Watson
has done a great deal of work on
costuming jewelry for Xena and Hercules.
However, right now she's getting more attention
for designing the
Elven jewelry
in
The Lord of the Rings
movies.
(Compare
Tolkien's descriptions
of Elven designs and emblems.)
to Art by belford |
| Friday Nov 16, 2001 | Tales
of Mere Existence.
Monochrome, bitter, and filmed from
underneath.
(Requires quicktime.)
to Comics by belford |
| Wednesday Aug 1, 2001 | "Coca-Cola suggested a tap water reduction program named
H2NO." (google cache: page 1, page 2)
And you thought that
dihydrogen monoxide
warning label was just a stale old joke.
to Economics by belford |
| Friday Jun 29, 2001 | Michael Swanwick
(author of
quite
a lot)
has set himself a
microfiction
challenge:
write one sci-fi short story about
each
element in the Periodic Table.
At the rate of one a week.
New entries appear Fridays.
to Books by belford |
| Monday May 28, 2001 | Don't like
the way your government
runs your country?[*]
Do it yourself!
There are
dozens
of
tiny
independent
nations
living in the cracks between the
official ones.
[* Non-US readers, substitute links as appropriate.]
to Politics by belford |
| Friday May 4, 2001 | Full-color photographs
taken in Russia
a hundred years ago.
Honest.
to Photography by belford |
| Wednesday Mar 21, 2001 | The
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
is about creating the worst possible opening sentence to a novel.
But most of the entries believe that "worst" means
"interminable".
Now,
Nanofiction
proves that
short
is beautiful.
Can we
combine
these concepts?
The
Lyttle Lytton Contest
challenges you to produce the ugly, the brutish, and the short
simultaneously:
the worst possible opening sentence of a novel in
25 words or less.
to Literature by belford |
| Saturday Feb 17, 2001 | Frank Tymon
has written
English
lessons for people who don't know what a letter is.
(Lesson two has examples from the
other
half of the alphabet.)
Also,
lose
weight.
to Wackos by belford |
| Friday Oct 27, 2000 | All right, look. First of all, it's no good
linking
"text adventures"
to a small directory of
shareware games,
when there are
hundreds
of free
text adventures
that
run
on
any
computer,
real
or
imaginary.
And second of all,
this
is the text adventure with the best
name
ever.
to Games by belford |
| Tuesday Oct 24, 2000 | So I was thinking, hey, a
cubic
inch of
gold
would look pretty good on
my shelf. How much would that cost?
Answer:
Gold weighs 19.3 grams/cc.
A
cubic inch is 16.4 cc.
There are
31.1 grams in an ounce
-- those are
troy ounces,
remember.
And, as I write this, the
plain-metal
("spot")
price of gold is
$270.50 per ounce.
(A
bit more
as
coins
or
ingots.)
Multiply it out, and my little paperweight would cost about
$2750.
Which is, weirdly, almost exactly the same price as
another little cubical paperweight...
(with
sexy display).
to Science by belford |
| Friday Oct 13, 2000 | Bucky Fuller lived in a
dome.
Do you want to
live
in a dome?
Live in a
dome,
live in a
dome,
live in a
dome.
You want to live in a damn dome --
you know you do.
to Toys by belford |
| Tuesday Oct 3, 2000 | The
Sixth Annual
Interactive Fiction Competition
has
started. (Yes,
IF
is still my pet subject.) Fifty-three (!) short text
adventures have been entered, and anyone can vote. You have until
November 15th to play and rate as many as you can. (Each game should
take no more than two hours to play.
All but six are playable on Mac/Unix/Windows/anything else.)
Download the games from the
IFComp
download page
(which has links to
mirrors).
Here are
complete
voting rules.
to Games by belford |
| Tuesday Sep 12, 2000 | So your neighbors now have zero-volume single-surface
glass Klein bottles,
eh?
Upstage them with a
knitted Klein bottle.
Or this
wider spectrum
of fibrous topology-wear, including the
knitted
Mobius strip yarmulke
and
Fortunato's Purse.
Remember, knitted surfaces can intersect without cutting a hole
in either one...
to Art by belford |
| Thursday Jun 29, 2000 | Sprogopolis:
Baby-Powered City of the Future.
to Parenting by belford |
| Friday Apr 7, 2000 | "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas..." Who wrote it?
BZZZZT! WRONG!
Hy
Zaret
and Lou Singer, that's who -- already world-famous
for their hit ballad,
"One Meatball".
Back in
1975,
I was already listening to
"Why
Does the Sun Shine?"
and other
Ballads
For The Age Of Science.
The albums were fifteen years old then,
and I played them
on a horrible little record player whose stylus
was probably made of
tin.
And that's why I'm the dot-com millionaire I am today.
to Science by belford |
| Tuesday Mar 7, 2000 | What's tannish, dilatant, and smells funny? (Hint:
dilatant
is the opposite of
thixotropic.)
If you knew, would you want to
win
a five-pound slab of it?
Course you would!
to Gadgets by belford |
| Wednesday Feb 16, 2000 | Green? Peterb, you're a
wuss.
Hold out for the
blue
laser pointers --
and save one eyeball for the
violet
that is to
come.
to Gadgets by belford |
| Tuesday Dec 21, 1999 | "A turbine-powered helicopter is no longer the ultimate accoutrement to a superyacht." What's that, you cry? Yes! Personal luxury submarines! Less than two megabucks gets you a 25-foot sub with a thousand-foot dive range, an all-transparent cockpit, and leather seats! Or, for only two-thirds of a megabuck, the cutest little submersible you ever did see. The high-end models are perhaps a bit ostentatious, I warn you. Go for something incredibly nifty-looking instead. to Gadgets by belford |
| William Strunk: "Vigorous writing is concise." H. W. Fowler: "Now there is something to be said for the change, or the two changes: the old-fashioned period, or long complex sentence, carefully worked out with a view to symmetry, balance, and degrees of subordination, though it has a dignity of its own, is formal, stiff, and sometimes frigid; the modern newspaper vice of long sentences either rambling or involved (far commoner in newspapers than the spot-plague) is inexpressibly wearisome and exasperating." Although Strunk's The Elements of Style appeared only ten years later, Fowler's The King's English is a monument to the old majestic oration -- and a hell of a lot more fun to read. to Linguistics by belford |
| Tuesday Dec 14, 1999 | Last week, I didn't know what Karen Cooper was famed for. Now I know: it's PEZ. PEZ in the wild; PEZ on the market. The science of PEZ, and the legend of PEZ. Evil PEZ, dancing PEZ. It's all about PEZ. to Food by belford |
| Wednesday Dec 8, 1999 | Bruce Schneier (famed cryptography expert) and Karen Cooper (famed but I don't know for what) write a paper on... Minneapolis restaurants. You think I'm nuts? They've got detailed research into airline food, surveys into what the four food groups really are, and speculation on where M&Ms fit into the Food Pyramid. Plus reviews of restaurants. Many of which are in Minneapolis; many of which they've even eaten at. Cameo by Neal Stephenson, explaining mathematical analysis of Vietnamese menus. (PDF file) to Food by belford |
| Thursday Oct 7, 1999 | We live in an age of miracles. I wanted to know whether I-395 in Baltimore was the shortest interstate highway in the US. Well, this is 1999, and this is the Web, and there's someone out there who cares sincerely. (Footnote: for a further miracle, you could use the Web and this Memepool entry to deduce my identity. Please don't send mail. Just look smug.) to Transportation by belford |
| Monday Oct 4, 1999 | The Fifth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has started. (Yes, IF is my pet subject.) Thirty-seven short text adventures have been entered, and anyone can vote. You have until November 15th to play and rate as many as you can. (Each game should take no more than two hours to play. All but two are playable on Mac/Unix/Windows/anything else.) Download the games from the IF Archive, or a mirror site (US, US, UK, Aus). The complete voting rules are in the same directory, or at the Competition web page. to Games by belford |
| Monday Sep 27, 1999 | The Museum of the History of Science in Florence has a roomful of the relics of Galileo Galilei. And I don't just mean lenses and lodestones. I mean genuine relics. to Science by belford |
| Thursday Sep 9, 1999 | Hasbro just bought Wizards of the Coast -- adding them to a harem which already includes Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, Avalon Hill, Microprose, Playskool, and others. This means that a single company now produces Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Dungeons and Dragons, Civilization 2, Pictionary, Scrabble, Clue, Tinkertoys, G. I. Joe, Furby, the Supersoaker, and, um, wait, what's that game about acquiring all the properties on the board? to Games by belford |
| Friday Sep 3, 1999 | Hiding among us, all over the planet, are the players of
Icehouse
-- the ancient
Martian
game of
little
pyramids.
Plus all sorts of
other
little
pyramid
games.
And now, for the first time in years, you can
order
plastic Icehouse sets.
(Cheaper if you order soon.)
to Games by belford |
| Thursday Sep 2, 1999 | No doubt the
GEX Handbook
is intended for serious industrial engineers studying vapor deflagrations
at process plants.
But it's all about
Things
going fooooom, dude.
to Science by belford |
| Monday Aug 23, 1999 | Who
is John Galt, and
what the hell
is he doing in my computer?
to Literature by belford |
| Thursday Jul 29, 1999 | It's a spaceship! And it's
flying!
Only eight feet off the ground, granted. But it flies!
(Sans-frame)
to Transportation by belford |
| Friday Jul 16, 1999 | Want to know what folks will be wearing in
A.D. 1993?
to Fashion by belford |
| Wednesday Jul 7, 1999 | Nifty new games invented by independent small companies and individuals?
Contagious Dreams
is a new on-line game store devoted to just that. And they
playtest and review
the games that they sell. (Sponsored by
Looney Labs,
who have invented a couple of games themselves.)
Contrariwise, if you're looking for nifty old games, check out
Crazy Egor's Game Warehouse,
which stocks all sorts of used, rare, and out-of-print gaming-phernalia.
to Games by belford |
| Monday Jun 14, 1999 | Is Art the province of
rich ironic New York designers
and
dead
French guys?
A thousand times no.
The American Visionary Art Museum
in Baltimore dedicates itself to the creative outpouring of
the eccentric,
the obsessed,
the crackpotted,
the institutionalized,
the incarcerated,
the homeless,
the hopeless,
the nameless,
and people who are
compelled to paint words on everything.
to Art by belford |
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