October 2009 Archives

Ishtar and Zombies

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I shall bring up the dead to consume the living, I shall make the dead outnumber the living.
(Andrew George, Gilgamesh, vvs 99-100)
Apparently Ishtar(neé Innana) has a way with the dead and the undead, a power usually thought of in connection with her sister, Erishkigal.  Jim Getz has more and even more on the topic of Ishtar/Innana and zombies.

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I must admit, I would have not thought him this clever.  This is a rejection letter to a bill passed by the State Legislature from Gov. Schwarzenegger

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(Image from the Register)

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Fake Chuck Westfall

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"I'm sorry to hear that the truth insults you" 

Chuck Westfall is Canon's spokesperson for Canon camera in the USA.  Fake Chuck Westfall is a blogger who gives a more unvarnished opinion of things that Canon USA is doing, particularly their stupidity in the marketing department...
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Lagerfeld Attacks Mummies

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"Fat mummies sit there in front of the television with their chip packets and say skinny models are ugly."   -- Karl Lagerfeld
(from, via)
Now I know he was probably using the British term for mother, but I am much more amused by the vision of overweight mummies sitting there, getting chip-crumbs in their wrappings and complaining how their neighbor has a nicer sarcophagus....

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Taken Thursday evening, 10-22-2009 A

(Via)

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A well reasoned article on the topic from Wired, of all places.  Brings some of the discussion to the present day, where once the Themiserol was removed the target for the anti-vaccination crowd had to become much vaguer
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From the recent Paris Fashion Week, which showcased RTW fashions for spring 2010 comes a perfect example of the importance of angle.  Viktor and Rolf exhibited a collection including heavily chopped tulle.  The first 2 pieces are amusing, but unremarkable
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The third, however, at the right angle achieves what must have been its intent
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A more direct view of it makes it far less interesting
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(Three large pictures from style.com, smaller one from Jacques Brinon/Associated Press, VIA)
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Kinetic Type Foundry (Really) produced this fantastic little bit of animated type for AICP's recent conference in Minnesota, featuring all the sponsors.

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Panerai Jupiterium, part 3

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A followup to part 1 and part 2, with the last of the pictures

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and that's the last of them
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Panerai Jupiterium, part 2

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A followup to part 1, with more pictures
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one more post of pictures will follow
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Panerai Jupiterium, part 1

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A one-off clock was built by Panerai to be displayed with the Galileo telescope at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.  It features a hand-wound, 40 day movement and a model of the universe, supposidly built from drawings by Galileo.  Following are all the pictures I could find of it, original source is Panerai, pulled from Timezone and La Cote de Montre

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More pictures to come
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Plinth Art

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"Charity and nudity are two things that appear to obsess modern Britan" -- Lawrence Pollard from the BBC NewsHour report on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

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VC & A Day

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  • From the NYTimes' fashion blog, The Moment, a preview of Van Cleef and Arpels' forthcoming collection California Rêverie, celebrating 70 years of business in the USA.  The following piece is one small part of the Ananas Collier (Pineapple necklace)
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(photo by: Stuart D. Phillips)
  • On a more traditional note, VC and A has also announced a collection celebrating the great pre-Versailles French Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte as part of their French segment of their "Jardins" line.  Including such pieces as a necklace inspired by the fountains

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"The Vicomte necklace is made of 370 carats of sapphires shaped in three rows of sapphire balls and pear-shaped sapphire drops that suggest
water flowing from a fountain. Each fountain is composed of diamonds
and a center sapphire that weigh 3.53 carats and 4.87 carats,
respectively."

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Hard to dispute

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I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I'm repelled. To them, I'm a sheep. And they're right. I'm a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I'm also a masochist. And that's why I continue to use Windows - horrible Windows - even though I hate every second of it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

(from The Guardian )
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My Avatar

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If ever I needed one.  He was etched into the die of a PA-7100LC.  Apparently as a pun on the Rolex clock unit on the better PA7100, the cheaper model was called the Lorex, and that's also the reason for the missing point on the Rolex crown.  From the Silicon Zoo at FSU
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Cuneiform Revealed - An excellent online introduction to Akkadian language and cuneiform scripts.  It includes links and instructions for installing both Neo-Akkadian and Old Babylonian sign fonts, which are usable through unicode.  Much easier than the old way, with undocumented LaTeX.
If you had the fonts installed, you'd be able to read the following:
.....[redacted*]....
And for those without: tippi bit.png
That would be transliterated into "tippi bit perin" or "the tablet of the home of the person called Erin", roughly "Aaron's Homepage"
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* apparently MT is not as unicode safe as they say it is, including the actual UTF-8 encodings broke something inside the engine, so they have been removed

Sewer Sillyness

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Diderot

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In celebration of the birthday of Denis Diderot, the first encyclopediest, this title was assembled from the large capitols that adorned the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers his opus. Diderot was born on October 5, 1713 and published the first edition of his Encyclopedia, with the help of Jean d'Alembert beginning in  1751.

The letter M is from the start of the article on stone masons (Maçon) and the A is from the article on Astronomy

Images from Art Dico.

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National Jeweler awarded Shaill Jhaveri their "Best of..." award for gold this summer.   The actual award winning piece was a large cuff bracelet from their "Couture" collection, done in 18k gold, a slightly warmer hue than common 18kt yellow gold, diamonds and champleve enamel.  As is his custom, part of the design is a word, Ankurit -- Sanskrit for "a spiritual awakening". 

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To my taste, I find another piece in the same collection, a more traditionally shaped eastern bangle, more interesting

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All photos from his website 

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