The Maudlin Press

My god.. watch the drummer. Quote from the original Esquire article,

“You could be wheelbarreling a supermodel offstage right while watching the Super Bowl and this guy would still be having more fun than you.”

Michael Soreman has developed an entire animated eco system of a world called Theme Planet. There are shorts and pics galore. The basic premise is an entire world turned into a theme park.. Like Coruscant from star wars, but more fun. He has apparently developed all this on his own. Amazing stuff.

From the article:”This simple relationship between the colors used to create the illusion and the perception of the illusion has helped Shapiro come up with a model of how we perceive it. We see the illusion because our visual system relies not just on color information, but also on contrast information to make judgments about what we are seeing. When color values are plugged into Shapiro’s mathematical model, when the difference between the color angle of the surround and center equals 90 degrees, then the plot of contrast for the left (red) and the right (blue) disk becomes identical, so the centers are seen changing together, while for all other values we see them changing out of phase.”

and I wish I wish we were able to embed flash better… Have to visit the site.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/02/what_illusions_tell_us_about_t.php

Another passionate subject of mine is the current war on the consumer by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). They persist in believing hat the best way to make money is to keep suing people that download music from file sharing services. While I have no problem with people protecting this intelectuial property, the tactics used in this case are sketchy to say the least. In both their conception and execution, the methods used are not legally effective and overly invasive. One technique they have used id to hire a company called MediaSentry to do thier dirty work. This dirty work includes poisoning file sharing services with corrupt versions of media, creating their own file sharing service as a honey pot to entrap people and actively hacking consumers PC’s to illegally gather evidence. Even with all that effort, the RIAA has routinely sued the wrong people or sued with little to no evidence.

Now, MediaSentrys role in the lawsuits is under scrutiny and people are starting to call foul. Oh yeah.. and the hacker community has pretty much Pw00ned them. . So yeah. All that realy makes me want to go out and buy the latest CD…. douches.

The LEGo brick turned 50 this week. Being the geek that I am, I have a certain affinity for LEGOs in all forms, especialy the Harry Potter and Star Wars sets..I especially crave the Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon..

If your interested, I found a link to the LEGO Brick Timeline: 50 Years of Building Frenzy and Curiosities