BMdotcom doesn’t do video very often, but this actually immobile piece of graphics does a fair amount of apparent moving around, especially if you do any scrolling up and down:
Says Akiyoshi Kitaoki:
Each row appears to move. Each row is horizontally aligned but appears to tilt.
I made it slightly smaller than it was, but that hasn’t changed anything.
This Friday’s Other Creature is this:
Found it here. Thank you Clarissa for telling me about this.
It’s all in connection with Australian Ball Tampering.
My favourite factual discovery re this rumpus: Cricket Australia has a Head of Integrity. Reminds me of this guy.
In other face recognition news, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Big Prawn is having its face blurred out of photos on Google Maps.
The problem Google faced was that recognisable people with recognisable faces were showing up on Google Maps, owing to the accident of where they happened to be when the Google Maps photos happened to be taken. So, they introduced a face recognition programme with a difference. Every time a face was recognised to be a face, that face was blurred into unrecognisability in the final Google Maps photos.
And this also got done to the Big Prawn.
The Big Prawn is a giant sculpture, presumably an advert for a place where you can eat regular sized prawns. No, not according to Wikipedia. It’s just a big prawn.
In Australia, it would seem that Big Thing means something different to what I mean by this phrase.
A cow also got its face blurred over.
Confining Cats and Other Creatures postings to Friday is becoming difficult. These days, as on this day, I often don’t bother.
One of the photos illustrating this report:
Can we please have a Lego London?
I just typed “lego london” into google, not expecting anything helpful. A Lego cow in London. Lego shops in London. General Legonic activity of all kinds, in London. I did not expect to be told, right at the top of the list, about making London in miniature, out of Lego. But, I was immediately shown this:
Cancel my request for Lego London. It already exists, and it is very bad. Indeed, I would say that using Lego to mimic a very particular looking thing on a tiny scale is the very essence of what Lego is bad at doing, and the fact that Lego seems to spend so much of its time and trouble and focus and resources doing this exact thing spells its long-term doom. The whole point of Lego, surely, is that you can make everything – everything, that is to say, that you can make out of it – with a few generic shaped objects. Just like the Meccano of my youth, in other words, but architectural rather than mechanical. A big Tower Bridge, yes, good idea. A big Big Ben, not bad. But tiny versions of these, stupid and totally unrealistic? See above. Stupid.
For that, what you need is a 3D printer. And the smaller you make your small buildings, the more of them you can have in one spread.
A subset of them could be made to be exactly the right size for making buildings to attach to miniature railway layouts. So, do railway modellers use 3D printers, to make, not trains, but train layout appendages? It would make sense.
I just image googled railway modelling 3d printer, and got mostly 3D printed trains and train bits, rather than architecture.
Could making such models be the domestically owned 3D printer killer app? Because so far, a domestically owned 3D printer killer app has been conspicuous by its total absence, and any company which has tried to make its fortune making domestically owned 3D printers has gone bust. Such modelling – trains and houses and mountains and stuff – was all the rage when I was a kid, but all that has since been replaced by computer games. But might not those computer games in their turn come to seem rather dated? As is not the making of things now returning to the rich countries again, now that the computer guys are applying their wizardry to stuff-making? Conceivably, toys may some time soon become three dimensional and material again, with swarms of robot cars and lorries replacing the trains.
Probably not, because things seldom just come back into style like that, any more than dance bands ever did or ever will. More likely, the kid’s games of the future will involve some variation on virtual reality, which is to say they’ll be computer games only more so. If so, we might see a further reduction in the crime rate (see below).
The internet never forgets:
That the Corbynistas are on the side of the crazies in the Middle East is of no direct relevance to British voters. Who cares what they think about that outdoor lunatic asylum, provided only that they keep us out of it? That’s probably what most voters think. But Venezuela is relevant to Britain’s voters, because it is what Corbyn and his followers will start doing to Britain, if they ever get the chance. Venezuela used to be a reasonably well functioning country. Now it is: … Venezuela.
My friends Perry and Adriana now live a short walk away from South Kensington tube. I can now get to them in about half an hour, compared to over an hour when they lived way along and just off Kings Road, and a solid bus ride away from any tube station.
And just as good, every time I now visit them to collect the Amazon purchases that they receive for me, as I did today, I get to see one of my favourite statues in London, the one of Bela Bartok. When I walk past that, I know I’m going the right way.
Trouble is, when I go past Bartok, the sunlight usually arrives on his back, and I get a photo like this:
Nice windows. Shame about the face.
So, inspired by the example of 6k (see below), I cranked up my photoshopclone and redid the photo so that I could see what the face consisted of:
Nice face. Shame about the windows.
You could probably combine the two, and make it: nice face, nice windows. You. Not me. That kind of thing just does not interest me enough to want to know how to do it. I wanted to see the face and I did. Mission accomplished.
I like my photo:
But I also like what 6k has done with it:
So, which is better? There’s only one way to find out!
Compare the two by looking first at one, then the other, and back again, and so, until you are able to decide.
Did you think I was going to say they should fight each other? That would be ridiculous. Photos can’t fight other photos. (Nor is it wise to fight fire with fire. Just found out about that one.)
I think I prefer the 6k version. Which is why I shamelessly stole borrowed it for here. That big 2, bottom right, is much clearer. But, not sure about the greeny-yellowy colour. You decide.
Ain’t the internet amazing?
All this stressing about having to have a new blog is, well, stressful. So, thank goodness for all the lovely photos I took that day. They have been a great comfort. I have nearly finished bragging about them, but not quite.
This is one is one of my particular favourites from that day:
Remember I said that Windows Photo Viewer is turning everything a bit yellow? Well yes, it is, although a more accurate description would be: cream. And the odd thing is that the above photo actually looks prettier to me in its creamy manifestation than it does here, as taken. But, I still like it a lot. I suppose I could squirt some cream into it with my photoshopclone, but I don’t hold with that sort of thing, which has created another barrier, which is that I don’t know how to do that.
Once more, we see: trees without leaves, and behind them cranes, and behind them, the top of 240 Blackfriars. We are looking along Lower Marsh in a north-easterly direction, towards 240 Blackfriars, and behind that, the City of London and its bigger Big Things.
Yeah, another. (See also: this one.) This time it was brief, and to the point, whatever point that was:
PHP has encountered an Access Violation at 7C8108EB
I don’t know how long that was the solitary message being sent out by this blog, but that was it.
It has become a priority for me to set up a new blog, powered by WordPress, and I need someone who knows WordPress to help me do that. In exchange for money. Anyone interested? Anyone know anyone who might be interested?
This blog being this blog, I am pretty confident that the answer, here, will be: Comments (0). This posting is more in the way of a memo to self. This is the thing I now need to be cracking on with.
By which I mean that the content is what it is, but that the loading up is either very slow or, from time to time, non-existent.
If you had been trying to view this blog today, this is what you would have seen:
I cranked up BMdotcom on my mobile, just to make sure it wasn’t my computer that was in some mysterious way causing this. It wasn’t.
And yes, I cheated with the timing of this posting. I actually stuck this up in the small hours of Monday morning, and backdated the date. If this bothers you, have your lawyers call my lawyers.
Conversations are now ongoing about not only how to get fewer such collapses, but also about how to speed up the loading, to the point where a decent number of people might consider reading it, again, or even for the first time. What I am thinking I will do is set up a new WordPress blog, and leave this as Classic Brian, or some such thing.