Exceive

Yeah, it’s the wrong time of year. But so much else is wrong at this site that it really doesn’t matter:

Going Jesus: Cavalcade of Bad Nativities

Link found at Suburban Guerrilla

This video starts out with a view of the milky way from 100 million light years away, and zooms in by a power of 10 until all you see is quarks. Well, sort of see quarks. Things that small don’t actualy have colors, and I’m not sure they really have shapes either. But I’m not someone to ask about such things, I mostly just look at pictures. And these are kind of nice pictures.

This isn’t a new idea, the cosmic zoom has been done before, several times. But if you haven’t seen one, you should definitely take a look. Gives a bit of perspective. Unfortunately, exponential perspective kind of squashes the subject matter - going from a view where a galaxy is tiny to one where a sub-atomic particle doesn’t fit on the screen in a couple of minutes makes the range feel smaller than it really is. Most people feel in a linear, not exponential, way. But you can’t really do a cosmic zoom on a linear basis.

From looking at science, lots of things seem to be exponential. I wonder if that is because most things are exponential, or because exponential things attract attention.

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Secret Worlds: The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial

What Exponential means

An exponential function is one where the next value is a multiple of the current one. For example, a savings account that you don’t mess with is exponential - how much is in it next year is how much is in it now times some number, probably around 1.02 (the 1 is the money that is in there now, the .02 is 2% interest). And the year after, it will grow a little faster, because a slightly larger number will be multiplied by 1.02. This example is not as much fun as it used to be, because interest rates on savings accounts suck now. But if you carry it foreward a bunch of years, you see it building up steam.

Nothing here but title.

I think I’ll drop a bit of an advertizement:
You can get greeting cards and postcards featuring this inspiring Mike Huber artwork at the Moonwaves Studio CafePress shop. What it is likely to inspire I’m not at all sure…

This is a strange Polish art project, involving stencils of components of city images. The stencils are used in a number of art projects, including painting city scenes on cities.

And you get to play with it. There is a constructor, where you can drag and drop the stencils. The software isn’t complete. You can’t save the image, but in Windows you can hold the Alt key and press the PrtScrn key to copy whatever is on the screen to the clipboard, and then you can paste it into just about anything.

That’s what I did here…

m-city

The short version:
The PAC representing bars in Wisconsin (a fairly powerful political force - we like our beer here) held a party for Wisconsin politicians, who had to pay $5.00 to get in. According to Wisconsin law, the difference between that $5.00 and the $27.00 per politician that the party cost the Tavern League is an illegal gift. They would have gotten away with it, but one of the politicians got busted driving drunk after the party.

The long version: Tavern League fined for reception.

The amusing part: the Tavern League’s latest big campaign was to keep the drunk driving limit at .10, instead of the .08 that the fed’s, in their state’s-rights respecting Republican wisdom insist on. The Tavern League lost. The politician’s blood alcohol content was .09 - would have been legal if he and his colleagues had listened to the Tavern League. I wonder how he voted?

Maybe a full member of the Reality Based Community could see this as an illustration of some political horror, be outraged one way or the other, or something. I’m just amused.

You know those pictures at the top, with the word Exceive on them, that change every time you look at the page?

Those are now all my own pictures. Making real wide pictures out of my more normal aspect pictures is kind of difficult.