Mission Statement of the Day

Venus Rising From The Sea by Gustave Moreau, 1866

PROACTIVELY “FROM THE SEA”; AN AGENT OF CHANGE LEVERAGING THE LITTORAL BEST PRACTICES FOR A PARADIGM BREAKING SIX-SIGMA BEST BUSINESS CASE TO SYNERGIZE A CONSISTENT DESIGN IN THE GLOBAL COMMONS, RIGHTSIZING THE CORE VALUES SUPPORTING OUR MISSION STATEMENT VIA THE 5-VECTOR MODEL THROUGH CULTURAL DIVERSITY. - CDR SALAMANDER

Via Comrade Misfit.

Albedo100

Albedo100 Reflective Spray
I have a dark brown, fake suede jacket. I was out walking around the other night and I realized that this is exactly the sort of thing I was complaining about earlier: people walking around at night wearing black clothes, which means they are virtually invisible. That's fine if you are a Ninja or a cat burglar, but not so good if you don't want to get hit by a car.
     A few days ago I came across an announcement that somebody had come up with a replacement for the bar code system. It uses microscopic particles, so you just spray it on your package like paint.
     Which led to me wondering if you could do the same thing with reflective stuff, like make it microscopic and spray it on your clothes so it would normally be invisible, but would reflect direct light, and lo and behold, someone has done just that.
    The stuff is only temporary, and kind of expensive. It is wicked cool though. You can buy it from Amazon.

The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You

The Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You
Just heard this on KINK radio on the way to the gas station and I liked it so I thought I'd share. The video is fun / bizarre / a realistic portrayal of kid's life in Portland fifteen years ago? The Dandy Warhols are from Portland. I've know of them for years but I've never been to see them.

KINK has a playlist which is how I figured out just what I was listening to.

We're goin' to da mattresses

Casper American

What is it with mattresses? Back in the day, it didn't seem like they were such a big deal. People had them, there were always plenty to go 'round, didn't seem like they were all that important. Nowadays it seems like everytime I turn around I'm shelling out a big wad of cash for another friggin' mattress. Maybe that's one of the little details about fatherhood they neglect to mention when you become a man. It's just one of the those things you're supposed to know and accept without complaint. Kind of like women and birthin' babies. Guess I should shut up now.

     Anyway, older son just bought another one. This one is memory foam and latex, not like the innerspring mattresses we've been using since forever. I did have a foam mattress in college and a waterbed for about ten years. They worked well enough at the time, but the foam eventually collapsed and the waterbed got to be a nuisance. So, back to innersprings, until today.

Wooden Slat, Metal Frame Queen Mattress Platform

    He needed a frame as well, but all the bed frames you see in stores seem to be designed to look pretty, not to actually hold a mattress, and when your quarters are tight, you don't want a lot of extraneous stuff taking up space just to look pretty. Found this one at Sears and I thought, cool, we can just go by and pick it up. Not so fast bucky, it's "not available in any stores", you have to order it and it gets shipped to you from some anonymous warehouse in lower slobovia. I think this is an indicator of the way things are going in this country, retailwise. The only stuff you are going to find in actual stores is 

• stuff people want right now, or
• stuff people want to actually to experience (see, touch, smell) before they buy it.

Stuff that is purely functional is going to come via a truck, or a drone. If you need it right now, it's because you failed to plan ahead, a common American trait.

P.S. Casper has promised me $50 for every mattress this blog post sells. Plus they gave me a picture of a pretty girl.

P.P.S. Title source.

Update February 2016. Replace missing picture because stupid Blogger lost it.

Broad Ripple, Part 2

Yesterday's Jumble

Somehow I skipped my ritual solving of the Jumble yesterday morning, or I could have included this is in yesterday's post. Reading the text in the cartoon, I decide to look up Mr. Wakefield on the chance that context might help me solve the puzzle and this jumped out at me:

Dan Wakefield was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, where his family lived in the Broad Ripple Village area.

I had never heard of Mr. Wakefield before and the solution was fairly simple, looking him up didn't help. I can only surmise the Jumble writers were giving him a plug for their own reasons.

Awesome Public Datasets

CNR-ITB bioinformatics, Milan, Italy

Detroit Steve sends us a link to a list of Awesome Public Datasets. I have no idea what to do with it, but I thought it was worth mentioning on account of computers are taking over the world and I kinda figure I should try and keep tabs on what's going on.

Then I went looking for a picture to go with this post and I find this Bioinformatics research project in Italy that describes their server thusly:

CNR-ITB bioinformatics computational resources present at ITB-Milano consist of more than 700 CPU-cores, more than 270 TB of disk space and more than 1700GBs of total memory, in a dual and quadri infiniband interconnected computational clusters.

That description is from 2012. The machine is probably already obsolete. Then they I found this bloviated blob of densely packed buzzwords:

At the Bioinformatics Group of CNR-ITB we count more than 25 virtualized servers hosting the various bioinformatics projects we have running, exposing services to the outside world through the Internet. The linux-standard server-oriented KVM hypervisor was used as virtualization engine. Virtual machines are running on an experimental cloud-like architecture consisting of distributed virtualization on centralized redundant storage. This architecture provides provides redundant storage together with the possibility of migrating virtual machines on less loaded hardware nodes (which is user-initiated, for now).

It sounds technical so it might impress some people, but I'm pretty sure there is no real useful information in there. Either they have set up the machine so other people can make use of it, or they haven't. I pretty sure the people who are doing bioinformatics research don't care one whit about the buzzwords, and for the people who are actually setting up the machine, this description is next to useless.

I suspect bioinformatics is the business of identifying people from machine recognizable features: fingerprints, retina patterns, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you move your head. So when they send a drone out to kill you it doesn't mistakenly kill somebody who just happens to look like you.

In other news Dennis's better half bought a 2 terabyte external hard drive for $60.

Update February 2, 2016. Edited to better reflect my opinion of the description of the software.

Broad Ripple

Midtown area of Indianapolis, Indiana

Indiana Thomas has an announcement about Indy Midtown Magazine:

At long last am getting the magazine's site prepared for 2/1/16 soft launch. Still a bunch of content to upload from the archives as well as current material that needs to be prepared but I felt there's enough that I can share the link.
Would welcome feedback on look and feel as well as how it loads, any busted links, etc.
I used a great template from MH Themes,
Couldn't have done it w/o help from WhiteHot Marketing.

Kinda weird that I know more denizens of the net with an attachment to Broad Ripple than I do here in Silicon Forest.