Whatever random crap I feel like posting. Typically left-leaning. Occasionally vulgar. Not always serious. Sometimes annoying.

Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

False shadows

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Here's a small gallery of 4 pictures of an artwork from MassMoCA that I saw on a recent trip there. The artist painted the floor and wall to make it look just as if there were a complex shadow falling on the wall. The pictures evoke it decently, ...

Cuomo and Time-Warner put an end to child pornography!

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

Being an old-school kind of guy who remembers when the internets were made of tin cans and string, I still like my usenet binary newsgroups. So I was a bit bugged when NYS Attorney General Andrew "pre-whore Spitzer" Cuomo made threats about shutting down the newsgroups by threatening to prosecute ISPs ...

Where am I now?

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

If you're seeing this, you're seeing the blog in its new home. Which is still ron.ozrock.net/blog, of course. So did it move, or didn't it? It's like, a philosophical question, or something.

That’s a good dog

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Totally awesome video of a big walking "dog" robot with some serious balance and recovery abilities; the Boston Dynamics "Big Dog". UPDATE: Here's the Big Dog home page.

Oz sides with Byrne against Tufte

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Edward Tufte, god of information display, has famously claimed that "PowerPoint makes you stupid" (The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint). David (Talking Heads) Byrne has disagreed (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information), with "I ♥ PowerPoint"". Oz has sided with David Byrne, and has discovered the, um, joy, I guess, of PowerPoint. After doing ...

Big Think — the highbrow YouTube

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Big Think is kind of interesting -- YouTube with 30 extra IQ points. Lots of bite sized video morsels of intellectual content; from Steven Pinker on Human Nature to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer on this and that. Seems like a good place to point an intellectually curious ...

Political geography

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Here's a shocker: On Electoral Compass USA, which plots your views and compares them to the presidential candidates, I'm where the little pencil is pointing. That's right. The top left corner. Imagine that.

Synaesthesia Machine

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

This is why I read io9 -- to keep up on cool and cheesy sci-fi-ish stuff like this: A Fully-Functioning Synaesthesia Machine that translates visual stimuli into tactile sensations.

Mom needs one of these

Friday, December 28th, 2007

I love my mom, but she so totally needs one of these. Even better if somebody could think up the equivalent for her computer -- three buttons: "Read Email", "Books at Amazon", and "Look up on WikiPedia".

New whirled order, or brave new whirled, or something

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

OK, new server (same old URL), new plugins, perhaps a slightly new look sometime soon.  And a new pattern of posts I'm going to try. I've posted little to the main blog this past year, but much more to the "tidbits" lists -- both the "commented news links" you see ...