Yusuf Islam - In The End

I like this song... wonderful music...

clipped from www.youtube.com Yusuf Islam - In The End

SEM Snow Pictures (36000x zoom)

clipped from www.2loop.com Low temperature SEM magnification series for a snow crystal.  8 images of a snow crystal continually zoomed in until 36000x

Cool 3D Animation: Esc - Animatior Vs Animation In 3D

clipped from postarelibero.blogspot.com clipped from www.metacafe.com nside a 3D program a mouse cursor creates a 3-dimensional character that comes to life after an unknown error in the program and gets into a journey across the computer d... More»esktop Esc is my student film completed in 8 months at Emily Carr Institute

Interesting Times :: Natural Selection

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like "What is my purpose in life?" very quickly lacked both.
Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

Once and for all, as a reminder for myself: How to convert an integer into a string in C++ (Visual C++ 2005 to be more precise):

char stnum[10];
sprintf_s(stnum,"%d",123); //stnum = "123"

If someone stumbles upon this page incidentally and knows a better way: please leave a comment.

"Once I realized that those morning trash piles were nearly half paper – were once forests – I was determined to find out where they were going. So I took a trip to the infamous Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Coving 4.6 square miles (12 square km), Fresh kills, is one of the largest dumps in the world. When it was officially closed in 2001, some say its volume was greater than that of the Great Wall of China; it’s peaks 25 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty. I had never seen anything like it. I stood at its edge in absolute awe. As far as I could see in every direction were couches, refrigerators, boxes, apple cores, used clothes, stuff. You know how a gory car crash scene makes us want to turn away and stare at the same time? That is what it was like. I just couldn’t comprehend this massive mountain of materials, reduced to muck, by some system obviously out of control. I knew this was terribly wrong. I didn’t understand it back then, 20 years ago, but I vowed to figure it out. And I did. It’s the Story of Stuff."
Annie Leonard
Visit "http://www.storyofstuff.com" and watch the 20-minutes-movie, it is worth seeing.

Blue Moon...

clipped from www.avertedimagination.com An image of the waning gibbous moon in the morning sky, captured while waiting to record a daytime transit of the Internation Space Station.

Binary Sudoku

BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype

clipped from www.youtube.com

Going Postal :: Table d'hote or nothing

"All right, all right, I really didn't want to go into this, but it's against my religion," said Moist, who'd had time to think. "We're forbidden to have any image made of us. It removes part of our soul, you know."
"And you believe that?" said Sacharissa. "Really?"
"Er, no. No. Of course not. Not as such. But you can't treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can't say yes please, Ill have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. It's table d'hote or nothing, otherwise... well, it would be silly."
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (p.166)

Going Postal :: Cut cubes out of the air

"The hub or nerve centre of the coach business was a big shed next the stable. It smelled - no, it stank - no, it fugged of horses, leather, veterinary medicine, bad coal, brandy and cheap cigars. That's what a fug was. You could have cut cubes out of the air and sold it for cheap building material."
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (p.206)

Zero and One

clipped from www.youtube.com

A Feegle Glossary :: Ships

"Ships:Woolly things that eat grass and go baa. Easily confused with the other kind."
Terry Pratchett, A Feegle Glossary

Going Postal :: On Freedom and the need of filing boxes which are not so flimsy

"In his Thoughts, which I have always considered fare badly in translation, Bouffant says that intervening in order to prevent a murder is curtail the freedom of the murderer and yet that freedom, by definition, is natural and universal, without condition." said Vetinari. "You may recall his famous dictum:'If any man is not free, then I too am a small pie made of chicken', which has led to a considerable amount of debate. Thus we might consider, for example, that taking a bottle from a man killing himself with drink is a charitable, nay, praiseworthy act, and yet freedom is curtailed once more. Mr. Gilt has studied his Bouffant but, I fear, failed to understand it. Freedom may be mankind's natural state, but so is sitting in a tree eating your dinner while it is still wriggling. On the other hand, Freidegger, in Modal Contextities, claims that all freedom is limited, artificial and therefore illusory, a shared hallucination at best. No sane mortal is truly free, because true freedom is so terrible that only the mad or the divine can face it with open eyes. It overwhelms the soul, very much like the state he elsewhere describes as Vonallesvollkommenunverstandlichdasdaskeit. What position would you take here, Drumknott?'
"I've always thought, my lord, that what the world really needs are filing boxes which are not so flimsy," said Drumknott, after a moment's pause.
"Hmm," said Lord Vetinari. "A point to think about, certainly."
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (p.78)

Going Postal :: Being an Absolute Ruler

"Being an absolute ruler today was not as simple as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off the dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing lacked style and anyway was bad for business, habit-forming and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least they could tell the people he was their fault."
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (p.68)

Going Postal :: Either the government or a hero

"There was a stir when they climbed up into the chilly morning air, followed by a few boos and even some applause. People were strange like that. Steal a five dollars and you were a petty thief. Steal thousands of dollars and you were either the government or a hero"
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (p.15)

Wintersmith :: You, the white kitten, as in "You! Stop that!"

"The white kitten watched the snowflakes. That's all it did. It didn't bat them with a paw, it just watched, very intently, each flake spiral down until it landed. Then the kitten would watch it some more, until it was sure the entertainment was over, before it looked up and selected another flake.
It was called You, as in "You! Stop that!" and "You! Get off there!". When it came to names, Granny Weatherwax didn't do fancy."
Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith (p.113),