Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

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So you think YOU can do the robot?

Via @grandin

Sorry, sweetheart – this is how it’s done.

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I award myself extra points for not making a ‘domo arigato’ joke.

A naked mole rat meets intestine meets Zorg’s elephant thing kind of gadget. I like it!

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Via Next Nature.

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Fantastic bit of suicide food portraiture by an artist who likes the genre. Extra points for autophagy. My previous favorite (via @tikaro, I think, but I can’t find the pic) is the Campfire Marshmallow spokesthing with a campfire (natch) and a flaming head on a stick (aka marshmallow).

Via Super Punch.

IS Parade – feed it a twitter ID or keyword and it generates a silly/fun parade of avatars:

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Dutch Supermarket Albert Heijn is one of the main players in the field of funny orange trumpery. For every 15 euro you spend at the store you receive a ‘Beessie’ mascotte (see photo). But nothing you could do with it till now. Anglers found out it’s very usefull to catch fish. On several websites people are showing their catch with the ‘Beessies’ from the supermarket.

NextNature.net – Exploring the Nature caused by People..

“Here’s an easy thing to say…” * (from one of my hands-down favorite books)

So – there’s Twitter – 140 character messages that bounce around the twitterverse. Within Twitter, there’s the notion of re-tweeting – echoing something someone else tweeted because it’s useful, amusing, etc. Originally, retweets  were a user convention – you’d copy everything, prepend ‘RT’, add pithy comments of your own if you wanted, and send the message. It was so popular that a while ago Twitter formalized retweeting (a bit – you can still force the old style). The twitterverse also has bots – bits of software (running on hardware here, there and everywhere) that watch the global tweetstream for particular strings and retweet any message containing the target phrase. For example, Monsieur Poutine (@Poutine_Bot) will retweet any message he sees that contains a reference to the Quebecois delicacy.

An hour or so ago David Malki emitted “Poutine in Guam is great #experiment” * followed by “ RT @guamtweetbot: RT @Poutine_Bot: RT @malki Poutine in Guam is great #experiment” *. By using two keywords, he got two bots to retweet each other. That’s my kind of fun (sad, isn’t it) and I jumped in. It didn’t take me very long to catch on to something that would have been obvious if I’d thought about for a nanosecond – there’s good potential for the bots to start playing ping-pong with each other.

It appears that whoever coded the BurroughsBot considered the echo problem – he doesn’t resend like Monsieur Poutine will. I do draw the line at spending my evening looking for a romantic match for cheese-curd and gravy covered software, so I jumped in and retweeted to fill up this screen shot:

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Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew.
While these fleas flew, freezy breeze blew.
Freezy breeze made these three trees freeze.
Freezy trees made these trees’ cheese freeze.
That’s what made these three free fleas sneeze. *

My Way – Abstract City Blog – NYTimes.com.

Like LOLCats were, internet centuries ago, 8-bit is everywhere and it’s fun.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Watch original web videos.

After 1:48, all I can think of is ice-nine.

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Much the same as 1st video, but with music!

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rstevens has been having pixelfun since before everything (this strip is esp. for Sy, the ladies and the cassowary).

Tonight – William Shatner Beat Night at the Coat of Arms, Portsmouth NH (alternative title: “The Night We Shat Ourselves”).

The etsy hat – not my fave.

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This one, that illustrated the Regretsy post though – great!

Regretsy – Wing Flapper.

Tensile vs. Shear Strength

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If you / Don’t know / Whose signs / These are / You can’t have / Driven very far

Simultaneously hilarious and mind-expanding (one of my favorite combinations).

Freedom is just another word for nothing! There is no dead weight in my urban spatiality. No clotted semiotics, cajoling me to behave in the stereotyped haute-bourgeois manner that Deirdre once used to stifle me.

Dematerialisation is defined by its interfaces. That which was product will become a service. That which was a service will accelerate at warp speed toward de-monetisation on the Path-to-Free. So this is not so much a post-divorce flat as a vibrant zone of interactive transaction.

Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.