You're Becoming A What?: The Story of An American Buddhist Nun
by Ven. Thubten Chodron

You're Becoming A What?: The Story of an American Buddhist Nun

If you are near to this picture, Mr Angry is on the left and Mrs Calm is on the right. If you view it from a distance, they switch places.

Optical Illusion: Mr Angry and Mrs Calm

"Four-dimensional models are useful for thinking about and finding new relationships and phenomena," said Ocneanu. "The process is actually quite simple -- think in one dimension less." To explain this concept, he points to a map. While the Earth is a three-dimensional object, its surface can be represented on a flat two-dimensional map.

Ocneanu's sculpture similarly maps the four-dimensional solid into a space perceptible to the human observer. His process, radial stereography, presents a new way of making this projection. He explained the process by analogy to mapping a globe of the Earth onto a flat surface.

"We place a light bulb at the north pole of the Earth and we project onto a sheet of paper placed underneath it," he said. "The southern hemisphere, away from the north pole, will remain quite small, while the northern hemisphere, near the projection pole, will become very big and north pole itself will be sent toward infinity."

The technique can be used to make a two-dimensional projection of a cube by first mapping the cube radially onto the surface of a globe. Ocneanu explained, "The edges of our cube become circles on the map, just like straight highways are slightly curved on maps of the Earth. Its angles, however, remain true in this projection, so the map retains the key aspects of the symmetry of the original cube, unlike a photograph of a cube."

When the same technique is applied to project a four-dimensional solid into three dimensions, the inner part of the projection -- equivalent to the south pole on the map -- has smaller, undistorted faces, while the outer part extends toward infinity. Linear edges of the solid become circles in the projection.

3D sculpture depicts 'shadow' of a 4D object

Rattle wrote:
Decius and Rattle will be representing Industrial Memetics at PhreakNIC this year by giving a talk entitled "Information Warfare for The People". Everyone is encouraged to attend. The talk will be at 3pm on Saturday. Please refer to the speakers page and schedule for more information. We look forward to seeing you all.

In addition to this, Decius will be delivering his yearly rant at 10pm Saturday night.

Industrial Memetics is also sponsoring the hotel's contention TV channel. During the day, the TV channel will be showing the talks. At night, it will be showing whatever content we can put up without licensing concerns cued by [adult swim] style bumps. In an effort to make the channel as open as possible, we are encouraging convention attendees to bring with them any content they would like to see on the station in file format that VLC will play, burned to either CDs or DVDs. Make sure its something that does not require a license for us to use. Find Rattle at the convention on Friday and give him whatever you have.

... and that's far from being all the content at the convention from MemeStreams related people.

Fellow MemeStreamer and Industrial Memetics Resident Engineer Acidus will be giving a talk entitled "Layer 7 Fun: Extending Web Apps in Interesting Ways" on Friday at 6pm. This talk encompasses using web applications such as Google Mail for uses they were not intended for.

Virgil will be giving an updated version of his talk on "Artificial Intelligence". MaxieZ will be giving a talk entitled "Web Security 101". Dolemite, who is also running the con, is going to be talking about "MythTV". And much, much, much more..

Sounds like a fun program! Sorry I can't be there this year -- I'm preparing for my NSA talk next week. But I look forward to the pictures!

Elonka :)

RE: 'Information Warfare for The People' | Decius and Rattle to speak at PhreakNIC 2005

San Francisco - A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.
The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

Secret Service... Okay, so I can see a reasonable use for this in terms of money-counterfeiting efforts. But all the other possible uses (like being able to track the creators of political flyers and whatnot) do raise a concern.

I have to wonder now, if I make a color copy of something that I color printed, does that nullify the dots? Hmmm.

Many Color Laser Printers Embed Code in Every Page

Are you looking for some help with a science fair project? If so, then you have come to the right place. The IPL will guide you to a variety of web site resources, leading you through the necessary steps to successfully complete a science experiment. If you have never done a science fair project before, it has been a while, or you just want to be sure you do a really great job be sure and look at the following websites for tips on what makes a good project before doing anything else. This way you will know ahead of time what will be expected of you.

I was helping a young friend come up with an idea for a science fair project, and this site looks like a great resource.

Internet Public Library: Science Fair Project Resource Guide

Take each letter of the alphabet, rotate it in 3D space, and then take the resulting blob and use *it* as the letter. One way of doing a substitution cipher, I guess . . .

3D Alphabet

The 7/2005 letter from al-Zawahiri (Osama bin Laden's #2 in Al Qaeda), to Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq. Amongst the religious rhetoric, it lays out goals, strategy, and suggestions for PR (like "slaughtering hostages in public is probably not going to bring the public to your side").

Interesting reading.

Letter from Zawahari to Zarqawi

Three targets cited were in the United States, including plans to use hijacked airplanes to attack the West Coast in mid-2002 and the East Coast in mid-2003.
 . . .
The third was the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and allegedly plotted with top al-Qaida commanders to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city.
 . . .
the other seven attacks included plans to:
• Bomb several sites in Britain in mid-2004.
• Attack Westerners at several places in Karachi, Pakistan, in spring 2003.
• Attack Heathrow Airport using hijacked commercial airliners in 2003.
• Carry out a large-scale bombing in Britain in spring 2004.
• Attack ships in the Arabian Gulf in late 2002/2003.
• Attack ships in the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow part of the Persian Gulf where it opens into the Arabian Sea, in 2002.
• Attack a tourist site outside the United States in 2003.

And then there's a letter from Osama's #2, al-Zawahiri, to the Iraqi Al Qaeda chief, Zarqawi:

In the letter al-Zawahri urges Zarqawi — who has declared war on Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority — to avoid bombing mosques and slaughtering hostages to avoid alienating the masses, Whitman said. He also said that al-Zawahri asked Zarqawi for some financial support.

Zawahiri is asking *Zarqawi* for money? Interesting.

Bush: U.S. Foiled at Least 10 Terror Plots

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199 http://www.elvistazo.com.ar/
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45 http://www.elvistazo.com.ar
38 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kryptos
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25 http://elonka.com/kryptos/
24 http://www.attu.blogspot.com/
20 http://www.google.com/search?h...n&q=kryptos&btnG=Google Search
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13 http://www.elonka.com/kryptos/
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12 http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Kryptos&meta=
11 http://attu.blogspot.com
10 blockedReferrer

My web traffic quintupled over the last couple days. The above is a capture of the top referrers from the last 1000 visitors (courtesy of sitemeter.com).

Most of the traffic seems to be coming from a couple blog sites -- one is "attu.blogspot.com", which probably due to its emphasis on sex-related blogs has a *lot* of traffic. The other, interestingly enough, is an Argentinian site, elvistazo.com.ar, which also seems to draw traffic with pics of pretty girls. They're both featuring the same pic of a girl in a blue thong, so there's obviously a lot of back and forth.

I wonder which site swiped the link from which. ;)

Oh, and my elonka.com site passed the 1.3 million mark in page views:

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elonka.com traffic