Hooray for cheese!

(just testing a youtube plugin for wordpress)

Bozo and Brownie have developed a new template for the MakeSweet Blender. Here’s the example they showed me:

The template gives you control of the appearance of the surface of a planet, and constructs a “mountain range” from words of your choosing. Nifty!

Looks like Terry Pratchett has a new book out, Making Money. The previous book with the same cast, Going Postal, was wonderful. I still frequently enjoy a bacon sandwich of regret. This time, the conman Moist von Lipwig is moved from reforming the post office to reforming the central bank. Lord Vetinari does enjoy his little joke. Terry Pratchett writes fantasy, but not the dragon-and-damsel kind. His stories retell aspects of our own world in a clearer, compressed form that just happens to be consistently hilarious. They are the best modern moral tales I know of.

Count to 31 on one hand? No problem, if you know binary. Watch the video.

Or you could count to 1023 on two hands. Or 1048575 with hands and feet. That would be a rather boring video though…

Basically, the trick is to decide on an order of your fingers/thumb. Then move the first one up/down every count, the second one up/down every second count, the third one up/down every fourth count, the fourth one up/down every eighth count, etc.

There’s a detailed explanation of slightly different methods at Mr Speaker and intuitor. Wikipedia calls it “finger binary.” The oldest known web source for this seems to be lyzrdstomp.

Last note on this subject - Brownie posted a page explaining the math of binaversaries. He makes a good case for it I think. Basically, counting your age in logarithms makes the passing of the years a lot less stressful. The major drawback I see is that it makes for a lot less cake and presents…

For those not ready to switch from celebrating regular birthdays every year to celebrating binaversaries every power-of-two years, you can still save on candles by basing them on binary code. There seem to be some variants out there, but the one I like best is that suggested at halfbakery or used by a touch of grey, which is to put in a candle for each binary digit you want, and then just light those that correspond to binary one.

For binaversaries, you just use regular candles. Running out of space for candles is not likely to happen to you in your lifetime, unless you live to something like 65536 years (16 byears). So that’s one less problem…

As you get older, birthdays seem to matter less. In fact, their significance seems to fall off at a roughly logarithmic rate. I think it makes sense to celebrate binary birthdays for each year that is a power of two: years 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and (if you are very lucky) 128. That feels about right. And then we could quote our age as 0 byears (1+ years), 1 byear (2+ years), 2 byears (4+ years), 3 byears (8+ years), 4 byears (16+ years), 5 byears (32+ years), or 6 byears (64+ years), and celebrate those binary birthdays or “binaversaries.”

It makes life seem a little more orderly somehow. We are children through age 3 byears, generally settle down during our fourth byear, work to retirement in our fifth byear, then often die at the age of 6 byears. If we’re not so lucky, we have a few byears less, but somehow the variation seems less drastic.

I’m happy to have lived 4 full and joyful byears, and so far byear 5 is pretty nifty too.

Via boingboing, a knitting pattern for daleks. Given my first name, I’ve always had a strong fellow-feeling for these little rascals. Who doesn’t, from time to time, feel the urge to exterminate, exterminate, conquer the galaxy, crush the lesser races, obtain unimaginable power, unlimited rice pudding, etc etc? Every young infant should have a fuzzy robotic killer to cuddle and chew on.

Brownie and Bozo resurrected an old parody they made some time ago of free web-hosts. Back then they offered “50 MBs free” - the catch being that this was literally true, you had to make your website out of the letters M and B (and at most 50 of them). Since then of course things have moved on and now we offer 500 GBs. Enjoy!

The September 1st edition of the Economist magazine has a wonderful cover. It is a version of the Google front page that at first glance looks perfectly normal, but on closer inspection has some not-so-subtle modifications. My favorite part is the “I’m feeling wary” button.

No offense meant, dear Google.