lundi 15 septembre 2003

Noisy place, outer space! It's been known for a while that there's a darned great hole in the middle of the Milky Way. But now, it seems there's quite a song and dance about it too: "For the first time, astronomers have detected the infrared cries of hot plasma falling toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The observations show that the plasma is not going down peacefully but is putting up a boisterous fight, dispatching a desperate and erratic barrage of infrared signals into space." Almost as hot off the sky-watching press is the revelation that black holes sing. In B-flat: "Well, 'bellow' might be a better term. The tune sounded by a supermassive black hole 250 million light-years away is actually a steady bass note like that of a cosmic fog horn warning surrounding material of the dangers of coming too close" (both from my occasional look-in at Astronomy.com). Not that this is much use to mere mortals. We can't hear a note 57 octaves below middle C. 11:43:59 PM  link   your views? [] Last pre-Apple Expo post Wicked it may be, but just this once I'm stealing today's cartoon (©2003 Geek Culture ®) from the Joy of Tech. After today's exertions, I reluctantly shelved the plan to meet up with Rainer tonight, while tomorrow will be a day to take it easy, but we'll get it together on Wednesday. It would be stupid to miss the Expo altogether, when it's really just down the road. The man from South America is among several developers who've sent mail my way ahead of the event, and this might be the first year I could get to such a thing and know just what I'm seeing... For those who care, there's a new round-up of tomorrow's possible news at MacRumors, while those who really care get a whole batch of pics of what's under guard tonight at 99mac. I won't repeat a certain forecast I risked, since I'd prefer to have to eat my words of August 10 only the once. I'd still put odds on the hot young cat in being somewhere in the "secret" crates pictured on the Swedish site. Harv, at TS, has started what he calls a 'Panther factoids' thread with a list of what he's determined will be in the new OS X and what won't (that odd word "factoid" seems trendy these days in some trans-Atlantic circles). Regardless of whether Steve unveils it, this time round I won't be rushing into an upgrade. The new cat may well outpace the Jaguar, but I've been bitten too many times to be among the first to write up what might go wrong with it. The new system will certainly also require undoing some of the hacks I've been enjoying of late. Whatever, my prediction may be wrong, as MacRumors suggests, but I'll be disappointed -- and surprised -- if Apple doesn't pull something really new out of the bag this week. 11:19:45 PM  link   your views? [] High time for a fresh foray into design Heavens, the long morning of medical exams was arduous! It beat my record to date for the number of tubes filled with blood. But they left me plenty to be able to write about a far more challenging test which took place this year and to return to the long-neglected subject of great graphic artists and animation wizards. Back in May, in a suburb of Paris, France saw its first day-long contest among a small host of designers, in a match sponsored by a web-design community site, Praktica (Fr). Together with Adobe and Iiyama, who offered some highly desirable prizes, and NEO agence, an agency for professionals. Almost 200 competitors took part in the event, which led at around 11:00 in the evening to the final, won by the work illustrated here by freelance Stéphane Tartelin, to be found at the 'boz (BOMB) gallery'. A much better and bigger picture of Stéphane's design, along with the others, all well worth a look, is at the finalists' page on Praktica. The text is in French, far too detailed to translate, but the competition had two particularly interesting features. Jurists for each round included a random one, selected to join the expert team from the public watching the event, while a part of the challenge was for participants to interact -- each using similar machines and tools -- on the basis of designs produced by their fellow competitors. Five other outstanding French sites I've come across in the summer's reading and subsequent browsing are: | | | DQ | | |, a rich online magazine (two issues so far and no problem with language -- there's scarcely no text!); several of the movies featured in the International Animated Film Festival at Annecy. There are links from the home page; the staggering, occasionally enjoyably disturbing, metal outlook -- man and machine -- of David Vinéis at :: sub88 :: (Flash, remarkable site); the wide-ranging work of the independent entertainment UZIK agency (Flash again; warning: noisy gateway); the mainly musical, but again varied, output of self-professed "web alchemists" at the SOLEIL NOIR studio. This is only scratching the surface of discoveries I've made via the design magazines I devour and link to here sometimes and I've focussed, this time, on home ground. If, like me, you're into absurdity and some occasionally pretty black humour, you could do worse than spend an hour jumping off from the Night of Numeric Arts. 1:46:04 PM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.