My God, it's full of floor wax

Glide Path,
originally uploaded by The Devil in the Detail.

Acid colors are so '60s. Here in the real 21st century we know the value of a palette of earth tones.

The Norse Gods and the Calculus

The Wrath of the Norse Gods,
originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs.

Compare and contrast

Stay out

Archaeologists reveal signs that the builders of Stonehenge fenced the common people out.

I am eager to find out exactly how this worked. To get in to see what was going on, could a person go to a 3000 BC ticket counter (bearing a kid goat, perhaps)? Or was there a stone-axe wielding bouncer at the main entrance with a list? If one of the masses caught a glimpse of the Megalithic structure, could he or she sell the story to the mass media in order to satisfy the popular curiosity? Or would that be suicidal?

In a more practical sense, it raises the question as to whether the ancient palisade structure ought to be recreated. It could be done privately, supported by advertising space, thus leaving the great stones untouched by commerce.

More crane fun

Here is a list of some other things that a household bridge crane could bring within reach of the ordinary kook like me.

• A visual artist could use it to paint canvases many meters across in the paint-drip style of Jackson Pollock, ones too wide to reach across normally without having to step onto them. You could either come up with some arrangement with paint pots and servo motors mounted on the hoist, or else a harness to lift the artist up to apply the paint by hand.
• Along the same lines, the kids could put on a production of Peter Pan. Test those wires before flying too high, though.
• It seems to that the main room cleaning chore remaining once you have a robotic vacuum cleaner is the need to shift the furniture both to spare the carpeting from getting those pits where the legs dig in and to give the robot a chance to hit those areas underneath. A judicious application of hoisting points on your sofa, coffee table, TV, etc., would allow you to whisk them away (perhaps just as the Roomba is heading in their direction) and to redo the room layout every single time a cleaning pass is done.
• You could have one of the world's largest games of pick up sticks using a pile of aluminum trusses.
• At the end of a dinner party, tie all the corners of the tablecloth to the hook and lift the mess out of the way in one dramatic gesture. Or if your gearing is up to it, tie only the corners at one end of the cloth and execute the classic tablecloth trick.

Really, it's surprising that more people aren't already clamoring for the personal bridge crane already.

Rubikations

I read this story about a world-class Rubik's Cube solver and was befuddled in two places.

1. "This weekend he will try to regain the title of world blindfold Rubik's Cube champion" Blindfold Rubik's Cube? How can that be? I did a little searching around and found that the idea is that one receives a scrambled cube, studies it, then dons a blindfold and unscrambles it. Silly me, I thought that they would first put on the blindfold, then receive a scrambled cube where the colored faces are replaced with tactile cues (sandpaper, grease, Braille dots, thumbtacks) and then solve it just by touch. It might actually be easier than what the fellow's doing. Ah well, not a completely original idea after all, though I didn't know it at the time.
   
   I think I thought this because of my other idea for a Braille condom. But that's for another time.


2. "'That was also a lot of fun,' said Mao, who is now working for a constancy firm." Pardon me, a what? I Googled around and found hits for web constancy firm, management constancy company, and that kind of thing, but no clue as to what the definition of this (apparently Commonwealth country) entity is.

I've never figured out Rubik's cubes myself. For me, the most fascinating thing is taking them apart to see how they work anyway. I think some architect should adopt this scheme to build a Rubik's apartment building (not an office building, for God's sake), so everybody could have a different view every day. Or a Rubik's fridge, to make it easier to rotate out those things which usually get stuck at the back for far too long.