The Matazone blog

So, there was a US soldier in Iraq who was annoyed that Hewlett Packard’s customer support didn’t extend to telling him how to fix his scanner/printer (probably because it was beyond warranty, and most likely because it wasn’t designed to function in deserts).

What does a solider with time on his hands do while he’s busy ‘defending freedom’? He makes a video of himself complaining about the printer, then using some very heavy artillery to shoot it.

I’m not really interested in the HP printer side of this video, what makes me link to it is just how damn awful the guy’s aim is. He’s standing from around 5 metres away from the printer and doesn’t manage to hit it for the first twenty shots. Fortunately for him, one of the bullets hits the barrel that the printer is sitting on, knocking it over, which makes it look slightly more like he can shoot straight, but his pattern is clearly leaning to the right of the target. In the next shot he fires another 20-or-so rounds at the printer and it looks like he hits with one or two bullets.

If there was ever a video to give confidence to Iraqi insurgents then it’s this. Not only is the US army allowing their soldiers to use high-calibre weaponry in an enitrely pointless, and moderately dangerous way (no eye protection when firing into a non-organic target five metres away?), but the guy couldn’t hit the side of a barn from arm’s reach. He might as well be handing out pamphlets for all the good his use of military hardware is doing… Oh… Maybe that’s what the printer was for?

See the video here.

Those of you with the marvellously fun Google Earth software might want to check out the map of the site this year.

Click this link to download and open a Google Earth link to the site. It’s actually slightly to the north-east of where that link lands you. People will be adding on the shapes of their camps over the next week-or-so, making for a 3D virtual version of the Burning Man ‘Black Rock City’. Aren’t computers cool?

(You’ll need the Google Earth software to make that link work. If you don’t already have it then you can download it for free here.)

So, if you’re still here and reading this then the chances are that you won’t be going to the Burning Man this year. I’m really missing it, it’s been four years since I last went and I was hoping to keep to a ‘every three years’ pattern. Nonetheless, the joys of broadband, the miracle of decent streaming video (brought to us by the superb new suite of video tools in Macromedia’s Flash 8) mean that we can see updates from the Burning Man all through the next week.

The videos will be going online here over at TV Free Burning Man. I can’t wait to see what people are getting up to, but it’ll be will a little sadness that I’m going to be sitting around in offices and working when I could be out in the glorious desert.

Do you know what the Burning Man is? If not, there’s also a nice little 5 minute documentary on that site about the event… Although, with over 35k citizens of Black Rock City every year, you will tend to find that there are 35k different answers to just what the Burning Man is, and what the Man means.

I really miss it.

If this doesn’t put a glimmer of warmth in your heart then you might as well drive yourself to the morgue right now:

Bunny fun.

I’m working through my footnotes for my Phd at the moment, and I’ve suddenly discovered that I have references to a work by Edmund Burke from the wrong edition: my footnotes refer to the 1967 print, but by bibliography lists the 1889 edition that I’ve got sitting on my shelf (it’s great what you can find in Oxfam bookshops).

So there we have a problem: I’ve got a few page references from one edition but no idea where they appear in the edition that I have in my bibliography. The solution? Google, of course.

So, I wanted to find a couple of quotes:

I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.

When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.

Copy and paste part of the phrase into Google, then use the ‘cached’ link to highlight where the phase appears on the page, like this, and there’s my answer: the phrase appears in section VII, so I just need to find that in my bibliographic copy of the book and I’ve got my new page number.

This still leaves the question ‘What did we do before Google?’. Today, ladies and gentlemen, I present the answer: we worked a lot harder for the same or less results.

The next question would have to be whether we’re now capable of creating better ideas and writing in more knowledgable ways because of Google, and that one is far harder to answer. I suspect the answer might be they we are not; there is only so much knowledge that we can convey and appreciate, and the ‘soundbite’ culture of academia, once an indicator of broad reading, is too easily entered into now without proper understanding of subjects. Google is the cure and the curse for academics, but at times like today I can’t help but marvel at how useful it is.

Here’s another great link from the William Gibson blog: Kevin Kelly’s Streetuse.

Kevin Kelly is a pop/cyberculture writer, and is collecting examples of the way in which ‘the street tries to find its own uses for things’ (a quote from William Gibson’s book Count Zero (UK link US link)). It’s got some interesting things on there, and only takes a minute to look at. Check it out!

The people over at Coolingman have calculated that the Burning Man festival generates around 100 tons of carbon waste, so in the spirit of ‘leave no trace’ they have set up a trust to counteract this impact. They are people after my own hearts, because their target is not only to ‘leave not trace’ but to ‘leave things better’: they are aiming to offset 110 tons of carbon.

There are three ways to do this: planting a tree (cool), donating your business’ offsets (good, but not practical for individuals), and donating to fund the offsets of environmentally friendly carbon projects (the easiest). I’ve gone for the latter, and since I’ve been to the burn twice, flying from the UK each time, I decided to donate $20, which should counter my environmental impact not only for the burn but also for a fair bit of my entire year! If you want to donate through PayPal or via credit card then there are instructions here.

Carbon neutral living is tough in the Western world, so funding groups who are counteracting it is a great way forward. We all have to take responsibility for this.

Yay! StickScene.com has got onto the BBC website!

StickScene.com [...] is a brilliant idea

*glows*

And what does this mean for me? I got 276,647 pageviews on Saturday!

Have you visted lately? There’re now 450 puzzles online, and I’m trying to keep to adding one new puzzle per-day.

StickScene.com

DS, the spam-email poet, has been very quiet lately. Mostly spam email has been quoting occasional lines from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Moby Dick, and Lord Of The Rings when it’s trying to get past my spam filters (and unfortuately it seems to be working). This does occasionally produce some quite entertaining results as two sentences clash to reveal something that the author never intended, but mostly it’s just an irritation; however, I think I’ve found the reason for the lull:

diameter broken
devoured go on a trip a piece
the south. exercise shine

DS has been travelling! I hope to get more postcards soon!

When finishing work with my girlfriend one night we left the building by the back and found a huge box. Obviously, I immediately put it on my head. We then added a face, and arm holes. We then found another one that we put on her and decorated in similar fashion. We then waltzed for a little while.

We left the boxes side by side, with a little matchbox-child next to them and a sign saying ‘Gerald and Lola: boxes in love’.

Yep, the end is nigh. A truly uncanny robot has been created that nimbly walks on four legs. As if making the robots walk wasn’t bad enough, the creators then decide to demonstrate how stable it is by kicking it. This will surely enrage the beast, which will now proceed to destroy us in our sleep, and the only warning will be the sinister hum of the two-stroke engine.

So, you create a beast that can move over almost any terrain, patiently coming to destroy us, then what do you do? You give it guns! Admittedly, the military are only talking about using BigDog (as it’s called) to carry things, but it’s only a matter of time before some bright spark straps live weapons to BigDog’s side.

Truly, the quadropeds shall reclaim the earth. Repent now.

Yes, the French are completely insane, we all know this, but that doesn’t make them bad people. It does make them legendarily bad drivers, or should that be ‘inconsiderate’. Perhaps they are beaten by the Italians for legendarily bad driving, and I’ve been in a coach going around clifftops in Majorca as a child with some quite, quite death-wish laden drivers, but this wins over everything I’ve seen so far.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had … all » a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

Highlights are the Arc Du Triomphe at 1min 20sec, into oncoming traffic at 4mins 15secs, and on cobbles from 7mins 35secs onwards.

I’m not sure whether ‘enjoy’ is the phrase, more likely ‘fear’.

Have you seen better online? Let me know!

(Thanks to my friends at Ladybird’s for the link.)