http://broadcastinitiatives.com/groom.php

DO NOT CLICK ON THIS LINK. I did not post it, nor do I know how it was posted.

I will change my password.

Rubik's Magic Solution in 17 Steps!

Following the notoriety of Rubik's Cube and the lesser success of Rubik's Snake, Matchbox released Rubik's Magic, an eight-tile puzzle. While I never succeeded in solving Rubik's Cube (I didn't have the patience to learn the technique, plus I prefered to solve it by myself), I was somewhat adept at the lesser puzzles of the age, such as Pyramix and The Missing Link.

The puzzle consists of eight tiles, joined by filament hinges which run along the diagonal grooves. On the initial side, shown above, one sees three unlinked rings. On the other side, shown on the right, are the tiles which create the solved, linked-ring image.

I think I fiddled around with this puzzle for about a month before I solved it. Some more expirementation followed, and I was able to create a solution in seventeen steps.

Below is my solution, scanned from the original sketch I made back in 1986 or so, when I was in high school.

The actual links may be hard to see, but should be clear enough. If I could find my original Rubik's Magic (I own all three variations), I would simply do a photo montage. Instead, the illustrations might need a bit of decoding themselves. I think you can click on the image to enlarge...

Trespassing While Sitting Still

[Q|
So there I was, commoding with Mother Nature, when I notice the toilet tank is running.

"How would I react if something bit me on the ass while I was on the toilet?" I thought.

Being a New Yorker, I immediately thought: Aligators In The Sewers. Perhaps a small Cayman? And what if it was slightly radioactive? Would I become LEG8R™, superhero?

My Secret Identity

The FantASStic Sphincter Man!

AKA "Perry Neeum"

Unfortunately, my trusted sidekick, Tushie, was tragically murdered by my arch-nemesis, Public Enema #1. He took us by surprise.

Trespassing Through Antarctica

Okay... the Fourth of July is generally considered one of the hottest days of the year in New York City (probably because everyone is out and about, perception is reality, so the legend gets imprinted over the fact).

Thus, I got to wondering one day, what if ice was denser than water? That is, what if ice SANK when if froze, not float?

(And we'll ignore the other FOURTEEN versions of crystalline water, and concentrate on Ice I_h, your typical crystalline ice found all over the planet.)

So, first, a few facts.
Ice has a density of 0.917 g/cm³. As the temperature drops, the density increases. Liquid water has a density of about 0.997 g/cm³ at room temperature. These numbers are for your average everyday existence. Pressure can affect melting and freezing points.

So, as we learn at an early age, ice floats. By floating, it insulates lakes and other bodies of water, and thus allows life to thrive. (Since water is most dense at 4°C, this cold water sinks to the bottom, leaving warmer water above, covered by the much colder frozen water.) If ice sinks, then lakes, ponds, and rivers would "silt up", freezing everything within the water. While this would have a very negative effect upon life, it could be argued that perhaps the organisms within this frozen ecosystem would adapt, just as frogs adapt to dry seasons and the Pompeii Worm adapt to extreme temperatures near hydrothermal vents.

As for oceans, there's a different system involved. Most scuba divers know that the weight of water creates water pressure. The deeper one dives, the greater the mass of water above the diver, which creates a greater pressure. Divers must carefully regulate their bodies to the change in pressure (much like an airline passenger), and the current deep sea diving is 1,010 feet. Regelation, using pressure to change the melting point, might not affect the ice, as this "heavy ice" I postulated might not expand upon freezing. If it does, than each atmosphere of pressure lowers the melting point 0.0072 °C. The deepest depth visited by humans has a pressure about one thousand times that of sea level, so the freezing point would be about -7°C. Of course, the salinity of the water would also lower the freezing point (which is why we salt sidewalks in the winter time). So the ice would sink, then hit the regelation zone, and become liquid. So, there might be a thick layer of frozen ice at the poles, then a zone beneath that ice where the water remains liquid (but under high pressure and low temperature). What type of ecosystem would exist here? Would the boundary of ice pack and open water differ than it does now?

Given the increased density of ice, how much more of Antarctica would be sunk beneath sea level?

A small density increase would be negligible during the winter... electrical wires, tree branches, and roofs would still collapse under the weight, but perhaps a little bit more. (Engineering could mitigate this in man-made structures.)

If glaciers are denser, they would move more quickly via basal sliding. (The pressure of the glacier melts the ice at the bottom, allowing the glacier to slide.)

Okay... enough trespassing for today. Hope this cooled you off!
(If you need more cooling, or just an excuse to stay inside, visit the Official Snowflake Bentley Web Site. Wilson A. "Snowflake" Bentley photographed some 5,000 snowflakes via microscope, and all snowflake images on this post are from that website.)

If I Only Had A Brane...

Okay... I saw this word, "brane", and wondered what it meant.

Eventually, my searching lead me here.

Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of explaining stuff, so when I read this:

In string theory, D-branes are a class of extended objects upon which open strings can end with Dirichlet boundary conditions, after which they are named. D-branes were discovered by Dai, Leigh and Polchinski, and independently by Horava in 1989. In 1995, Polchinski identified D-branes with black p-brane solutions of supergravity, a discovery that triggered the Second Superstring Revolution and led to both holographic and M-theory dualities.

I immediately got the feeling that sometime in the near future, this would make perfect sense to the average citizen. Sort of how the equation "x + 2 = 8" can be simplified into first-grade math as "□+2=8".

But then, the average citizen doesn't even know how to define zero-, one-, and two-dimensional space. (Dot, line, polygon)

And I must admit... this looks pretty darn cool. What if our brain (HA! no pun intended) worked like this?

I wonder how many surfaces this has?

Is this your brain after drinking from a Klein bottle?

Or perhaps the instant explosion from an atomic bomb? Or maybe the instance of the Big Bang?

Or maybe God's bubble gum right after it popped?

Me, I just wonder... if you can extrapolate a circle, line, point, and various other conic sections from a cone (as well as a triangle!), what sort of 4-D shape can a cone be extrapolated from?

ALA Sunday: More Digital Comics?

Did your parents save all your artwork, from when you were very little?

Sophie Crumb's parents did. So this Fall, W.W. Norton will be publishing Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist.

Starting at age 2 1/2, this book showcases her development all the way up to last year. Lots of personal history as well, so this will generate lots of press!

What else... Supposedly OverDrive, one of the leading companies providing digital books to libraries and retailers, has signed an agreement with Marvel and Tokyopop. (I heard this secondhand, that OverDrive announced this at their luncheon today.) Now, I've seen that they've offered ebook versions of some of Marvel's and Tpop's titles since April 2010. Searching the web, I see certain issues available via public libraries. OverDrive requires an account to see the entire selection of titles, so I can't see much beyond the link above. It seems that the content is available, but only for lending, not for direct sale. Perhaps today's announcement will change that. Or maybe this is just a re-iteration of what they are already doing. I see single issues from Marvel, not graphic novels, although Marvel could easily bundle them together. I wonder how much they charge the libraries?

Oh, and the scope? According to OverDrive, they serve TEN THOUSAND libraries.
And they already work with HarperCollins, Hachette, Random House, Simon & Schuster...
Stone Arch Books GNs since November 2008.
Classical Comics
ComicsOne
Capstone

A selection from last summer...

GREAT FARKING ZARQON! The graphic novel of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe! (The Queens Public Library has 151 titles under "Comic and Graphic Books"... including The Ray Bradbury Chronicles (just the modern stuff, not the EC stories)!)

Hmmm... published by childrensElibrary, a division of ibooks, which, if memory serves, was purchased by Simon & Schuster at bankruptcy? Which raises the question... if Overdrive charges a library to carry a digital file of a defunct company, where does the money go? To the original copyright holders? The creators? The copyright still exists, but do the original contract rights still exist? Or does OverDrive restrict access to the actual file? Or does that copy "sold" to the library still continue to exist just like a paper copy does?

210 titles at the Los Angeles Public Library. Faeries' Landing is one of the Tokyopop titles.


Barnes & Noble does have a business relationship with OverDrive, so it is possible that BN.com might start selling titles as they become available. OverDrive's files are in Adobe PDF eBook format, which is readable on the nook, but not the Kindle or iPad (but readable on Macs and PCs).

Of course, if sold on the nook, the image would be in black-and-white. Might the suggested retail price be less than that of the iPad app from ComiXology? Resolution and size might not be a problem, especially if it's a digest-sized book, or if one can enlarge the image. Yes, a bit unwieldy, but Plastic Logic will be selling the larger QUE ProReader e-reader via B&N which will have a larger magazine-size screen and handle more digital formats than the nook.

Developing, as they say.

Not much else in the way of surprises. Of course, OverDrive is a pretty big surprise!