Ecletic interesting links and articles collected by a painter, teacher, writer, and ex-PhD student
Have you ever thought to yourself ‘wouldn’t it be great if I had a transparent frog, so as it grows up from a tadpole to a fully grow frog I’d be able to see the internal organs the whole time’? Well, if you have, then there’s a chap in Japan with your dream come true. If not then you can just hope he invents unicorns next.
Bill Bailey is going trying out as a contestant to be the Eurovision song contest in 2008! If you’re not familiar with Bill Bailey, you can get a taste of his sense of humour from his simply wonderful Cockney Medley. He is one of the funniest comedians in the country, and a he’s good musician too. What could be better for Eurovision than an extra helping of surrealism on top of the, already rather bizarre, event? Also, the contest is usually full of pretty people sashaying gymnastically around the stage, so Bill would make a very nice change in tone!
As it says on his website, he’s only putting himself forward, so this doesn’t mean he’ll get in, but I really hope he does! Why is this happening? It’s all down to the power of the internet. Lovely.
At 11:44am, 25 years ago today, the smiley was invented:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: 
It’s nice to know the smiley is 25, but it’s also interesting that in 1982 Professor Fahlman thought that the internet was becoming clogged with silliness. I wonder what he thinks of it all now.
There’s a brief history of smileys here. My webcomic contributions to the silliness of the internet update twice a week here.
One of their writers has asked a pretty obvious question about mobile phone ringtones:
Three bucks for a 30-second snippet that lasts a year—when you can buy the entire song online for $1 and own it forever?
What am I missing here? How is a 30-second, time-limited excerpt worth three times as much as the full work forever?
He concludes that this is a money making ploy by record-executives, summarising it as ‘the last great digital rip off’. While I agree that it is a rip-off, you’ve got to admire either the optimism or the hyperbole of the writer for thinking that this is the ‘last great’ rip off that we’re going to see related to digital media.
I’d like to make a little prediction – digital TV and movie downloads are going to be among the next great digital rip offs that turn up as soon as the general public becomes au fait enough with computers to start using them.