| Another round of links.... |
[13 Nov 2009|11:25pm] |
Another in the series of posts of random links to interesting things I've come across....
An article about Penrose patterns showing up in Arabic decorative tilework, with lots of details about the mathematical knowledge implied thereby, and about how the tilings were worked out.
The OKCupid blog, which is a chronicle of interesting things that they've found by mining through their data. Recently there were some articles on things like how race shows up in dating patterns (and how we're rather more racist than we'd like to be there), and lots of other things.
A similar sort of post from FaceBook, tracking happiness indicators in status messages and correlating them to events. The FaceBook blog as a whole is full of a range of things, most of which seem fairly FaceBook-specific, and so it as a whole isn't as interesting as the OKCupid one.
A very cute stop-action-ish movie of what a "notebook computer" ought to mean. Deeply cute, and also shows off a number of the filmmaker's other similar short movies.
The Word-O-Matic. Programmatically, it's a trivial Markov-chain generator. The niftiness comes in the source selections -- things like a set of names of Greek heroes, or of States. The result are things in the range between plausible and silly, like Yorkansas and Illiforniana and Texaska, and Pandaristor and Protionestus and Alas. (And I have to mention Valheidilla, from the Norse Gods set.)
The Kashiwa Mystery Cafe in Japan, where you never get what you ordered, but you can leave gifts for future diners. It's one of the looking-at-the-world-sideways sort of experiences, it sounds like.
In other Japanese cultural things, some very cute concepts for fruit-juice-box packaging. It's all concepts, and thus not really concerned with cost or recyclability, but the ideas are still neat and could probably be carried over into something usable in the real world.
A newly-discovered ring around Saturn, about a hundred times farther out than the main visible rings, which (among other things) appears to explain the strange coloration on Iapetus.
Chili Con Carnage, a well-told recipe for chili.
A quite unusual design for a wall clock. This one is priced as a piece of art and thus not something I could afford, but I quite like the design and may have to make something inspired by it someday.
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| Shiny pendants! |
[05 Nov 2009|10:29pm] |
As she does every so often, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) elisem is having a sale on the bead-and-bent-wire jewelry that she makes. (And gives names to. The names are an important part.) And, as usual, she's encouraging people to spread the word, so I'm writing this post. If you're not familiar with her work, go and look -- it's really quite gorgeous work. And if you are familiar with her work, you've probably already stopped reading and followed the sale link! Here, I'll pick out a few examples I like that show the range of her things:
- Idle Thoughts while Watching a Faun. A selection of beads that do something interesting together, on a small amount of silver wirework.
- Dragon Temple. The same genre of earring, but with a quite remarkable pair of stone beads.
- Back Door to Faeryland. Sometimes the wire gets a bit wiggly on these.
- Paradise in Watercolors. More of the bead-groupings and gorgeous lampwork beads.
- Hydrologists Keep a Book of Splashes. Elise also does more sculptural things with the wire, like these.
- The Fortune-Teller Makes Her Will. Or these, where the wire is wrapping around an encompassing things. I really like the wirework in this pair.
- Promise of Return. She also does pendants, which are often more of the sculptural wirework around a single bead or stone or a pairing. Again, this one is one of my favorites with how the wire tangles around the key, and the colors of the wire and key and stone and its inclusions all work together.
- The Pine has its Sorrows, Too. Another pendant, this time with slightly more typical wirework and a single stone.
- Tinkerbelle Explains Gravity. There are simpler pendants, too, that are more just about the beads. This one's quite pretty, and I like the name.
- Tigers of the Deep. I can't resist including this one as well. It's another pendant with wirework, but with "gold-filled" wire this time.
- My Tidepool Beloved. In a different genre, there are necklaces, which are much larger collections of beads on silver-wire links.
- Unnamed (blue and silver). And then there are the "necklace/crowns", which are all sculptural wire making a ring and designed to be worn as necklaces, but many of them also work well as circlets on top of the head too.
And that's just a selection and leaving out some of the other whole categories of things that aren't up yet. I am, as can probably be guessed from the length of this entry, quite fond of her stuff.
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| Pasta with meat sauce (recipe) |
[30 Oct 2009|08:28pm] |
Tonight's dinner was a very simple pasta with sauce thrown together around some ground beef from the freezer, but it seems to have come out really quite well (suzimoses made comments about "best she'd had in a very long time"), so I decided to record the recipe. (Well, as best I can estimate it from what I remember when cooking it; nothing here was actually measured.)
1 lb ground beef (80% lean)
3 T olive oil
ground pepper
salt
1/4 t crushed red pepper
1 medium onion, diced
1 t whole fennel seed
1/2 t ground cumin seed
1/2 24-oz jar Classico "sun-dried tomato" pasta sauce
12-oz can plain tomato sauce
1/4 cup merlot
2 t cocoa powder
Heat olive oil in bottom of large saucepan. Add ground beef, red pepper, and pepper and salt as appropriate. Stir, break beef apart. Once beef has separated and begins to cook, add onion, fennel seed, and cumin seed. Cook until browned. Add tomato sauces, wine, and cocoa powder, and simmer about 10 minutes. Serve over thin whole-wheat spaghetti, with a salad. Makes about 4 large servings.
I'm guessing that the combination of fennel, cumin, cocoa, and red wine was probably the critical part of the recipe flavor here. I usually put fennel in just about any pasta sauce I make (particularly the meat-based ones), but the cumin is a rarity, as is the wine because I usually don't think of it, and the cocoa powder was a completely new experiment.
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| LJ security bug |
[22 Sep 2009|08:01pm] |
Reposting from epi_lj:Some of you may have noticed that weird flash objects rendering as a big hunk of whitespace are showing up on some of your recent posts. I don't know for sure what's going on, but I *suspect* it's something busted with their new, "Your Journal - Your Money" feature. I'm hoping they fix it soon. (I have not opted in to that feature. It seems to be happening on lots of journals that are eligible for the feature, even though the people have not opted in, so, to be clear, this could happen to your posts even if you do not use that feature.)
I'm just posting about it because eeyorerin noticed that when it adds the objects, it also makes your post public. This could be a pretty big concern if you posted anything that you thought was going to be filtered or that you really didn't want public. I just tried this out myself, and it did indeed change the security from friends-only to public. It also resets the usericon, tags, and mood when it does this.
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| Ow. |
[18 Sep 2009|03:54pm] |
Chopping jalepeno + chapped hands == VERY PERSISTENT OW.
This public service message brought to you by The Voice Of Experience.
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| Signal Boost |
[14 Sep 2009|10:36pm] |
Letting vulnerability be radical
"Have you noticed who suffers when we build a movement premised on never admitting that we can hurt each other, on never admitting that we’re tired and limited and human and just aren’t up for it today? Who stops making blog posts, who stops showing up to meetings and town halls and community projects, stops putting their work out there and speaking openly and honestly? Who stops making friends? Who stops taking risks? Have you noticed what happens in a world where we do this? Where we never talk about what we need, let alone what we want, all while we’re told all day what we should buy instead?"
It's not just social movements either. It's life.
(Comments off here; it's not my post. Go, comment there.)
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| Bookcases! |
[07 Sep 2009|11:01pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 happy |
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We have new bookcases!
So, quite some months ago, I had an idea of putting bookcases in our hallway. Narrow bookcases, sized for paperbacks, since hallways are not so very wide -- and besides which, it's useful to have paperback-sized bookcases for one's paperbacks, since they don't pack very efficiently on bookcases sized for hardbacks.
The original plan was just to get some cheap lumber and build something that was quick and simple. But it turned out that really cheap pine has knots which leak rosin, and less-cheap pine is still not all that cheap in quantities suitable for a hallway-full of bookcases, and poplar is rather nicer to work with than pine and only slightly more expensive. And, if I was spending that much on them, I wanted to do a good job, with beveling the edges and so forth. Also, I might as well paint them, since we'd been wanting something that we could paint bright and colorful colors. Thus, the project took a bit longer than I'd anticipated -- but it's now, as of about an hour ago, completely finished. And I'm quite pleased with them, too; they're a very pleasant bright glossy purple, and they hold books, and they're something I'll still be pleased with years from now.
( Pictures! )
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| This is just to say |
[06 Aug 2009|01:12pm] |
...that I have taken some of the plum jam from the fridge and put it in my oatmeal?
Something like that. In any case, cooking oatmeal with 1 cup water, 3/4 cup milk, 2T homemade plum jam, cardamom, cinnamon, galangal, and almond extract is very yummy indeed.
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| Play-reading bug report: Ideas? |
[19 Jun 2009|11:01pm] |
So, in the play-reading Thursday night, there was an awkward moment where I, playing Demetrius, discovered (or, more accurately, we discovered and I was informed) that the online version of the play (http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/full.html) was missing half of one of Demetrius's lines, coming after "These things seem small and undistinguishable" in Act IV scene I.
Does anyone have an idea what an appropriate place to write to to provide a bug report might be? I don't see anything immediately obvious on the site.
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| Another thought on Prop 8. |
[26 May 2009|05:24pm] |
zwol says about what I wish I could have said on the subject, and more.
A key quote: "As you might expect, appellate judges are masters of hair-splitting — they have to be — what you might not expect is that they’re also very, very good at subtext. One of the subtexts that you see fairly often boils down to 'We looked under every stone for an excuse to rule otherwise and could not find one.' This decision is dripping with it." He then goes on to point out some examples.
Meanwhile, if the state goes bankrupt because of the stupid proposition system we've got (and the related inability to pass budgets by simple majority), can we reboot and do away with it?
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| Hey, wait a minute.... |
[26 May 2009|11:09am] |
From the Prop 8 ruling (which, in case you hadn't heard, upheld the amendment):Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Does this mean that we will now -- well, as soon as someone files the right lawsuit -- have constitutionally-required civil unions in California, with all the state-mandated rights and protection of marriage? I can't see how it can mean anything else.
Edit to clarify: In particular, I read this as pretty clearly saying that the "equal protection" parts of the State constitution that they used last year in saying that existing domestic partnerships were insufficient are still just as valid as they were then, and explicitly laying down precedent that Prop 8 does not invalidate those parts. The obvious conclusion seems to me to be that, since the State now can't satisfy the requirements of that ruling by allowing same-sex marriage, it must now satisfy it by instituting same-sex civil unions that are legally equivalent.
It's not marriage, but at least it's still something.
(And, honestly, it strikes me as a bit of reasonably clever legal hair-splitting; they avoid a ruling invalidating the amendment that they presumably felt that they couldn't honestly uphold while adhering to their promise to uphold the constitution in all its imperfections, and yet in the process interpreted the amendment to mean, in a strictly legal sense, almost nothing.)
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| Argh. Stupid email and antivirus programs. |
[25 May 2009|05:49pm] |
So. Apparently there's a race condition wherein my antivirus program will detect viruses in the Inbox of my email program and swipe it out from under the email program before the email program has a chance to move the attachment out into a separate file. The proximate result is that the email program then tries to do something to the Inbox that causes the antivirus program to be unable to restore it back, and the ultimate result is that my Inbox goes "poof".
So, I've just spent the last 45 minutes restoring it from backup (a month old), and going through my secondary email account and finding all the lost emails since then and bouncing them back to my primary email account. Twice, because the first time I did that, I bounced them to my main address (which goes to both accounts), and the mailer decided that was a mail loop and rejected them all. Unfortunately, my secondary email account is packed full of spam because I don't have filters set up on it, so this took a while.
I am now making a more recent backup of my email, and also told my antivirus program to ignore my Inbox.
Sigh.
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| So this "more antioxidants are better for you" theory? May have holes. |
[19 May 2009|08:40pm] |
I recently came across this interesting blog post on a medical-chemistry blog I read ("In the Pipeline", by Derek Lowe), which is reporting on a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Antioxidants prevent health-promoting effects of physical exercise in humans (full-text freely available online).
In short, half the test subjects in a four-week exercise program took 1000mg of Vitamin C (that is, one typical large vitamin C pill, though it's about 1200%-1700% of the daily RDA depending on which numbers one uses), and 400 IU of Vitamin E (again, one large supplement pill, 1333% of the daily RDA) per day. The results of comparing the two groups indicated that the "antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise". In particular, it appears that the oxidants released in the bloodstream by exercise are a key part of the pathway by which exercise affects glucose uptake and insulin sensitivity, and dietary antioxidants block that pathway. This is particularly important with regards to type-II diabetes; those effects of exercise are important to preventing it and can in mild cases even reverse it if it occurs.
Moreover, the blog post references another paper in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which "showed that vitamin C supplementation seemed to decrease the development of endurance capacity during an exercise program."
As Derek says, "there's enough evidence to go ahead and say it: exercise and antioxidants work against each other. The whole take-antioxidants-for-better-health idea, which has been taking some hits in recent years, has just taken another big one."
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| Apple Airport bafflement |
[18 May 2009|08:19pm] |
So, our Airport base station (Airport Extreme with 802.11n, running software version 7.4.1) is having some troubles. Or people are having troubles with it. Or something.
One of the troubles is that my Dell laptop has trouble getting a network address from it, nearly all of the time; it takes so long that usually the little pop-up box for "Network has limited connectivity" pops up, and then a few seconds later it actually gets an address. (Once it's connected, though, it generally works quite well, without any further issues.) This seems to happen to a lot of other people, too. But it's been doing that since I brought it home; that's not really the baffling thing -- though, if there were a way to fix that, I'd be happy.
The baffling thing, though, is that in the past couple of weeks or so, suzimoses's Macbook has been having trouble connecting to it. This isn't just the network-address issue; once her computer has connected, it says the signal strength is something like 3 out of 10, with the base station 15 feet away and transmitting at 100% power. (Contrast this to the Airport at her office, which it apparently gets excellent signal strength from despite much farther distances. Also contrast this to my Dell, which says the signal strength is "Excellent".)
I am not sure if this timing is correlated with when I did a firmware update on the Airport or not; I think it may have been. I did another update a few days ago, which appears to have fixed some issues that I was having with flaky connectivity (dropped packets, etc.) in my laptop, but Suzi's is still having problems.
Any ideas? Perhaps some new setting that I ought to set differently, or something like that?
Edit: rosefox suggested that I had the wireless mode set wrong (it wasn't doing the "802.11b/g compatible" bits), and that fixed suzimoses's problems. It's still taking ages to get a network address on my Dell laptop, though, so I'm leaving this up in hopes of ideas for that....
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| Yes, Google's still better (at least at the basics) |
[16 May 2009|02:54pm] |
So, Webcrawler has a Google ad up, which says: "Wolfram Alpha Search Engine: Search multiple engines for wolfram alpha search engine". Putting aside the nonsensicality of the ad, what do you expect it to return?
Here's the result. Yup, www.wolframalpha.com is in there, but most of the way down the page.
Google, by contrast, has it as the first result, exactly as one would expect.
Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha itself isn't sure what to do with "wolfram alpha search engine" as a query, and suggests I try "wolfram alpha". And then tells me it's too busy. (This isn't part of what I'm referring to in my subject line; I know it's not trying to do the same thing as Google. Nonetheless, if this were Google, it would (a) have given me actual snippets of information about the possibilities it came up with, not just suggestions for things to try, even if it didn't recognize that "search engine" was an extraneous modifier on "wolfram alpha", and (b) would not have been too busy.)
Meanwhile, for your amusement (and where I came across that Google ad in the first place): The Wolfram's Beta computizzled knowledge engine.
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| Traditions |
[12 May 2009|11:43pm] |
There is something really quite satisfying about being able to boot up a brand-new just-assembled computer using the IBM Model M keyboard that came with the first PC I ever owned. Teaches the computer a proper respect for the way the world ought to work, it does.
(And I still vaguely remember standing in line with all the other engineering students to get our memory upgrades, because they'd shipped the systems with half the memory that we'd ordered. 4MB seemed like a lot back then; this one came with 4GB.)
I'm not sure if it needs a new name or not. Everything's new but the case and some drives I'll be carrying over with all my data; on the other hand, the name I gave it was partly associated with the case, and I quite liked it. (It was "Mindolluin", which was the large white mountain peak that Minas Tirith was built on; the case is large, white, and sturdy, and I was hoping for the computer to be solid and reliable -- which it was.)
Hmm. I can post a poll. Thus: Poll! For help in coming up with name suggestions, the new computer is built around a relatively inexpensive motherboard and dual-core AMD processor, with bits selected to be quiet more than fast. It will probably have lots of disks and store a copy of most of my stuff in RAID arrays, and will live under my desk and probably at least some of the time be used as a secondary work computer.
Poll #1399104
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15Does this computer need a new name? Suggestions for a new name?
If you come up with interesting ideas for names, explain them in comments.
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| Why I'm looking forward to the next site after DreamWidth |
[02 May 2009|09:48pm] |
There's one important-to-me feature that's currently missing from the DreamWidth journal-site implementation, and it's missing because it's something that DreamWidth can't add until the next journaling site after them happens.
(Actually, there's one really important-to-me meta-feature of DreamWidth that can't happen until the next journaling site happens, of which this is a manifestation.)
A big thing that's important about LiveJournal is the friendspage. One page, and I can see everything my friends post, including things that they've friendslocked in ways that allow me access to read them.
Well, everything my friends post on LiveJournal. Which, up until just lately, was close enough to "everything" as to not make much difference -- but only because most everything was on LiveJournal.
Similarly, my DreamWidth friendslist will include everything friendslocked on DreamWidth, but it can't contain stuff friendslocked to my LiveJournal account. People can crosspost, but crossposting is messy and not really the right solution.
But look what happens when another journal site comes along that uses the DreamWidth code. Let's call it SleepGradient (which has a hidden meaning I'll explain in a bit). If I've got an account on SleepGradient, that gives me an OpenID, and my friends on DreamWidth can put that OpenID in their friendslist. And then SleepGradient, when I'm logged in, has all the access information it needs to go to DreamWidth and ask for posts that are friendslocked to me -- and it is a simple matter of coding for it to do that and include those posts in the friendspage that it shows me along with the SleepGradient posts. All in one page, just as if they were all part of the same overall community.
Not only is it a simple matter of coding (as opposed to a complicated matter of policy and design), but it's something that I would expect to be entirely in line with the DreamWidth vision, and something I would expect them to implement as soon as it becomes relevant.
And that makes the circle complete. With that, with a SleepGradient account, I could put people on DreamWidth in my "circle" and let them read my posts (even locked ones) and vice versa, and I could subscribe to their journals and see them in my friendspage -- even the locked posts, if they've given me access. It would no longer matter that we had accounts on separate sites.
That's the meta-feature that matters to me here. It's my hope that this exodus from LiveJournal to DreamWidth will be the last exodus that matters in this community-shuffling way for quite some time; that from DreamWidth we go into a broader cross-site journalspace where it's no longer confined to a single provider, and a friend moving from DreamWidth to SleepGradient would merely mean that I might have to update their name in my access lists, but otherwise it wouldn't affect me any more than them changing an email address would.
(And that's where the SleepGradient name comes in. Mostly it's just a riff off of DreamWidth, like a lot of the LiveJournal clone sites used. But there's a bit more, too -- see, the name of my personal website, dpdx.net, is mathematics for a pressure gradient, and "sleep" means that it's not woken up yet. So "SleepGradient" might as well refer to a hypothetical DreamWidth-codebase site that I'm running on my own computer, just for me. I really don't want to try to install and run something with this big a codebase -- but the idea that, y'know, I could if I needed to, and could still be part of the same community, is something that I think is a very big deal.)
A year ago, when the last round of serious discussons of leaving LiveJournal went around, this was what I'd envisioned as the right next step, but I had nowhere near the time to work on making it happen (save for that post). I'm really deeply pleased that I wasn't the only person with that vision, and that other people are actually making real progress towards making it happen.
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| Random links, part 3? of an ongoing series. |
[27 Apr 2009|11:12pm] |
Another batch of links that I found interesting and entertaining over the past month or two....
An auction of modern furniture, including a number of George Nakashima pieces. I was previously familiar with his work that's very much about taking a large outstanding slab of wood and showing it off, as in this coffee table (Lot 1), this dining table (Lot 5), and this coffee table (Lot 20A), but his more-traditional pieces such as this maple-topped dining table (Lot 27) and this storage headboard (Lot 29A) are also very nice, and show off the wood in their own way. I was particularly interested in the pieces that are a combination of the two styles, such as this desk (Lot 329) and this very understated wall shelf (Lot 336). Also in the same auction, I am quite taken by the naturalistic shapes of this desk by Wharton Esherick (Lot 134).
A collection of surreal photomanipulations by Erik Johannson. They're full of subtle and not-so-subtle visual humor (and occasionally a bit creepy). I particularly liked this one for the absolutely perfect joke, and this one, this one, and quite especially this one as art.
This was an interesting take on the standard Windows XP "bright green hill" wallpaper image. See also this page (where I got that link from), which compares it to the original. The artist also uploaded the image to Wikimedia Commons as a high-resolution creative-commons-licensed image.
An interesting example of abstract art of the "simple painting and complex manifesto" style. What I found particularly interesting about this piece was the contrast between Malevich's Black Square and his superficially very similar Red Square. In particular, Black Square was first piece, with a solemn and deep manifesto and symbolic meaning likening it to the face of God. The Red Square, painted two years later, has instead of a manifesto a subtitle, and one which I take as indicating that the painting is at least on its surface simply a macabre joke (with a sound effect, perhaps, of "squish"). If that was the intent, it seems a thing very characteristic of much art of the era (c.f. Dadaism, a year later) -- create something, and then deconstruct and reject it.
An entertaining little teahouse, and an interesting outlook of the architect and culture that it came from.
Bicycles are not something where I normally think about design a lot, but this bicycle (MOOF, by Sjoerd Smit) particularly caught my eye. I really like the purist simplicity of its lines, and the way the lights are incorporated into it. Actually, now that I look, all three of the bicycles sold by that company are very eye-catchingly interesting, but the MOOF is particularly interesting in being so perfectly classical that it comes out the other side into modern ultra-clean-lines design.
These corkboard tacks are cute. For some reason, I think keshwyn needs some.
Some cute little lamps, that would fit perfectly into the spacious sparse loft style of interior decorating that is so very much not what my house is. I still think they're delightful.
In the completely different category of things that it's bizarre to realize we didn't know until recently, this essay with illustrations (scroll down below the webcomic) about the depiction of Earth from space from a 1969 Star Trek episode. It's really cheesy and obviously fake -- but, as David points out, it was not until three years later, in 1972, that we actually had a photograph of what the Earth looked like from space. And it was only a little before that that anyone had any idea what it looked like other than guesses from first principles.
A review of Kenneth Branagh's rendition of Shakespeare's Robin of Sherwood, which is not at all hampered by the lack of existence of either the movie or the original play. And many of the commenters continue the playing.
A very nifty idea: Portraits of people done by painting a picture of their books, rather than of their face.
Photographs of Dutch tulip fields. These are quite remarkable colors for entire fields to be.
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