Birthday, subways

Well, it was my birthday yesterday, and I am now, frighteningly enough, a 20-year-old.  I always used to justify my more reckless activities by saying, "I'm a teenager, I'm invincible!"  or justify my sex drive by saying, "I'm a healthy teenage guy!"  Now what will I say?

Incidentally, nobody knew that it was my birthday.  Why is this?  Because I didn't tell anyone.  ( Read more... )

Also, Boing Boing linked to this wonderful page, Subway systems of the world presented on the same scale.  I wonder if we can tell anything about the differences in psychology and philosophy of the different countries by studying their subway systems?  Moscow certainly represents an obvious example of Soviet central planning, it is the most orderly of the subways.  Paris looks like the streetmap of an old, organically grown town, and like New York its subway pattern no doubt resembles the layout of its streets.  Check it out, and tell me if you can see ways in which the subway systems reveal the psychology of the people who built them!  This is kind of a Rorschach test, I suppose...

Creepy kids

This was too good not to blog... also from Boing Boing, there is an art gallery of really creepy Photoshopped kids, somewhat reminiscent of IBM's Linux boy, except more artsy.  Some of them look like they just stepped right out of Ender's Game... they look like super-intelligent cold-blooded killers.

Incidentally, this also made me think of Steve "the Cyborg Professor" Mann and his "filtered reality"... since he has a videocamera digitally recording everything he sees, he can take what he is seeing and change how it looks in realtime, so that the world he sees becomes living art.  He has some interesting pictures on his site from recordings of sessions like this, but his site seems to be down now, unfortunately.