justdrew

Like, I’m totally not into numerology, but omigawd it’s just so neat when things like this happen… y’know?

Gizmodo Post on the subject

I really could care less, but it does tickle me the way some folks attach significance to very old superstitions. I’m sure this week we’ll see and hear a bit from some nut-jobs who take this stuff seriously (stuff == whatever they believe the numbers and the dates signify).

Trust me, as a person whose birthday has more than once fallen on a Friday the 13th, there’s very little that can go wrong on such a day that can’t happen any other day- and hey, you might get a new skateboard like the bad-ass one I got back in ’76!

Like any real American (by birth, at least) red-blooded man, I’m a big fan of performance art. I also like robots and spiders. Brewing up the perfect storm is this French group called La Machine who last year staged an expensive but interesting work in the (with apologies to all my Scouser friends) dreary city of Liverpool.

Here’s a photo-journal of the event, which is quite good.

I wanted to see video of it in action and of course, there’s some on Youtube, but suprisingly, the photos are better. The video is quite tiresome and dull. You get a feel for how nimble (or not) the machine is from just a few seconds of vid.

Now, put a decent controller on this thing and program in some walk routines; speed up groups of motion processes and make the thing friggin scurry! Now that would be entertaining… though highly dangerous. Wouldn’t want all those people standing around, but the effect would be chilling. Things that big normally don’t move as fast as a spider can. Scaling that up would be goosebump-inducing, to be sure.

Cute, if somewhat awkward interview by a Wired writer who’s obviously more comfortable penning articles than interviewing, but this show is one of my guilty pleasures, so I’m always interested in behind-the-scenes things about it:

Jeopardy Technology Interview

When I first started getting into the show in the early 80′s, I was astounded at how much (what was to me, at least) obscure stuff people knew with such confidence. I had a long way to go, since I didn’t really start learning useless (and some, not-so-useless) trivia until I got a bit older.

What amazed me even more as I started watching the show regularly is the discovery that it is the most watched gameshow in history. Really? With all those esoteric facts and references to art, literature and world history (notwithstanding the occasional factoid gleaned from People magazine or the E! channel). If most Americans are so stupid (I find evidence to contradict this harder and harder to find), why are they all watching this show? Do they like to be reminded of how dull and ignorant they are?

Maybe someday I’ll find the answer to this puzzler. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy this great quiz-show (second in my book only to the old British program Mastermind with the late, great Magnus Magnusson).

For me, though, the one critical piece of technology that enables me to truly enjoy Jeopardy: the DVR (I loathe the commercials and the insipid interviews with the contestants, let’s get on with it already!!)

Which is no doubt one of the awesome strengths of Mastermind. No dallying about pretending to care about the contestant whose aunt knits sweaters out of cat hair. It’s a quiz show, you ask questions and the contestants try to answer them. Simple as that.