Portent

Back in a week's time on Tuesday 8th of May.

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There are 71 recorded voices and 600 short clips of speech from people across the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and N. Ireland. Click any one on the zoomable, draggable flash map and you can hear them speak as well as getting a detailed decsription of their accent and history.

This is very well done and shows that there is very wide variation, even just a few miles apart. Fascinating stuff.

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This is a tremendous set of photos on Architecture Portal News. A glass floor
is a transparent section of a floor in a building. Usually made
of a reinforced or toughened glass, they are tourist attractions. Some of these are thousands of feet high. If you are afraid of heights…

I also took a photo five years ago in Blackpool at the top of the Blackpool Tower in 2002. It's only a 400' drop but after the first 50 or so feet it really doesn't make much difference if you fall. They call it the Walk of Faith. Being somewhat heavier than average I thought I'd put it to the test and jumped up and down several times. It was quite fun to watch nearby people move rapidly away from me! My faith was rewarded – well I'm still here today!

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It's not easy being a ragdoll- bit spineless. It's even worse if you being tossed hither and thither to try and avoid being impaled by falling spikes that are very sharp.

A fast and brutal gamewhich always end in ragdoll dismemberment. Not a pretty site as the image above demonstrates! But a diverting game. Just how many spikes can you avoid?

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Remember the portent story about a programming language for artists and designers called processing? This uses that and a 3rd party library to create a simulation of cloth physics and how it behaves when you pull it etc. It is very well done- just grab a point in the cloth, pull and release.

You can pin points by pulling a point, then hit the space bar as you release the mouse button. The pinned cloth then acts as a real cloth would if it were so pinned.

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Take google maps then let people add a paragraph about what they're doing right this instant and every few seconds push this out. Display as a popup on the map, for a few seconds then display another. I just happened to be looking at the UK when one comment popped up.

Its like instant throwaway blogging, very ephemeral. Japan in particulr seems to have a lot of twitterers. Use the links at the foot of the screen to view asa webpage recent twitters and if you're a developer, interact via the API.You could even win $200 and 3 tee-shirts by designing a badge- teh competition runs until May 5th.

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This has an easy aim- just drive your jet really fast in this sideways scroller, trying to catch up with giant trucks. Then fire a missile and blow up the truck. But it's complicated because (a) the view is top down, (b) your shields and missiles are only replenished when you blow up trucks and (c) there are all the other drivers who get in your way. Thankfully there are no traffic cops or speed cameras. 

Jetpeed has a great music track and animation. Simple but fun!

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Two words: Pony Express. As in "Many brave soldiers died to bring you these letters.." er not quite but this is what you get if you take a soldering iron (I guess) to a bunch of plastic soldier figures in the name of art. It's well done and the culprit, I mean artist is a Mr Oliver Munday in Baltimore. 

There are two other pages of close-ups so you can see just how limbs were melted or broken to shape the letters.

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The UK is a well known hot spot for extreme seismic activity. You think I'm joking? Well actually I am. Earthquakes are rare and as for volcanoes…forget it. There is some seismic activity- and the British Geological Survey keeps track of it on this part of their website.

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During my life I've owned at various points three Scalextric sets. This is the UK leading slot car brand. My first set (in 1966) broke on Christmas day- not a good day. But the other two (in 1975 and er 2002) worked fine.

This however is so much easier- no setting up, having to build a layout and then race. You get to build a track from pieces then race on it against a computer controlled car. It has chicanes and you will spin off on corners if going too fast. Excellent.

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This is pretty challenging but fun. It's like a monopoly board where and your human/computer opponents race round. Every time you move forward you are give a puzzle of some sort- perhaps a memory game, logic puzzle, a sliding block puzzle and lots more more. Get it right and you get another move.

It's nicely implemented (in flash of course) with great sounds and music. Puzzles are against the clock and (thankfully for me) you can give up. 

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Now this is pretty good. It's like internet radio where you can access hundreds or thousands of radio stations via the web. Only in this case it's TV stations from many countries round the world. Now whether that is legal or not is not my problem but it does make you think that if high speed broadband was everywhere then it would be feasible to watch TV via the web.

Just click on a country and you get a selection of channels. Click one and eventually it starts playing. I watched news in barbados, listened to some musicfrom goodness knows where. Thereis news, cartoons, documentaries and sport classifications as well.

But you know what? Even if in 20 years time we all have internet TV
with access to millions of channels. There'll still be times with "nothing on"
worth watching!

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These images of very small objects from the natural world are tremendous. You can buy these (and many more) prints from this site as well.

I'm always amazed by just how scary looking some of these bugs are. Thank goodness they are miniscule!

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Wikipedia defines a fractal as "a rough or fragmented
geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at
least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole".

Fractals occur very much in nature and thanks to mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (who discovered them) you can create fractals using mathematical expressions. The contest is named in his honour (it occurs every four years) and he also gets to sit on the panel that selects the winners.

Here is one which I think is stunningly beautiful. Encore by Paul DeCelle.

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Calling this a dolls house almost seems sacriligious. Bag End is of course the home of Bilbo Baggins (in the Hobbit) and later Frodo (in Lord of the Rings). You can see a floor plan here.

I'm not sure how accurately this has been done the model maker has done an excellent job as you can see from the photos.

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