Category: looky

Every episode of “Friends” with Janice in it: (15 episodes)

1. The One with the East German Laundry Detergent (20 October 1994)
   • Janice buys Chandler socks. Chandler breaks up with her with the help of Phoebe
2. The One with the Monkey (15 December 1994)
   • Janice is Chandler’s date at New Year’s Eve
3. The One with the Candy Hearts (9 February 1995)
   • Chandler accidentally sleeps with her on Valentine’s Day
4. The One Where Heckles Dies (5 October 1995)
   • Janice shows up again and she’s pregnant
5. The One with Barry and Mindy’s Wedding (16 May 1996)
   • Side Chandler plot, he’s cybering and it turns out it’s Janice, who leaves her husband
6. The One with the Princess Leia Fantasy (16 September 1996)
   • Janice and Chandler are dating and Joey tries to like her but cannot
7. The One with the Jam (3 October 1996)
   • Janice has a brief cameo with her baby
8. The One with the Metaphorical Tunnel (10 October 1996)
   • Chandler gets too clingy and scares off Janice
9. The One with the Flashback (31 October 1996)
   • Janice asks them how they met, it’s all when they are in their early 20s
10. The One with the Giant Poking Device (14 November 1996)
    • Janice and Chandler break up because Janice reconciles with her husband
11. The One with All the Rugby (26 February 1998)
    • Janice and Chandler meet again and Chandler “moves to Yemen” to escape her
12. The One with Chandler’s Work Laugh (21 January 1999)
    • Ross dates Janice. Chandler and Monica are dating secretly
13. The One with Unagi (24 February 2000)
    • Janice onlyheard in voice over on Chandler’s mix tape
14. The One with Ross’ Library Book (16 November 2000)
    • Janice as master griefer. Janice is a customer at Monica’s restaurant who complains about the chicken… she then invites herself to their wedding. Eventually Monica and Chandler pretend Chandler still loves her, so Janice leaves to preserve their relationship.
15. The One with the Fertility Test (1 May 2003)
    • Janice is at the fertility clinic when Chandler and Monica get tested

Some of my favorite Ghost diagrams:

'4     ', '444 4 '
'A A a ', 'a a A ', 'aa    ', 'A  a  ', 'aA    ', 'a A   '
'A A a ', 'a a   ', 'a   A ', 'a  A  '
'A A a ', 'a  a  ', 'a  A  ', 'A   a '
'  bB1 ', ' b  B ','1  1  ','11    '
'2   ', '11 1','1 2 ','2 3 '

(Source: Logarithmic)

When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science.

The history of Esalen is like a picture of a tiny stream that feeds into the Amazon – what starts as a small trickle of “travellers of the mind” feeds into a rampaging philosophical torrent destined to cut through the passion-depleted monoculture of 1950s America.

“Esalen: American and the Religion of No Relgion” reads like a grocery list of cultural mayhem; its guest list a gang of crazed midwives about to birth the freak-out of the 1960s. You could seriously spend the rest of your life diving into the lives and works of all the people mentioned in this book; it’s like a manual of post-war counterculture.

• “Male Continence” and Oneida
• Prof. Frederic Spiegelberg
• Sri Aurobindo
• Nagarjuna
• Alan Watts
• Jack Kerouac
• Gary Synder
• Joan Baez
• Hunter S Thompson stayed at Esalen as a sort of security guard
• Charles Manson had tried to get into Esalen shortly before the murders, and Sharon Tate was there on her second-to-last night alive

A course in Miracles, Helen Shucman
Psychotherapy East and West, Alan Watts
Abraham Maslow
Ed Maupin
Fritz Perls

Russel Targ
Michael Murphy’s An end to ordinary history
Terrence McKenna

For some reason Zalgo feels to me like a Lovecraft-themed Zombo.com …

• Oh, internet! Zalgo
• Zalgo text generator
• Know your meme: Zalgo
• Zombo.com

Another recent technological development that means engineering has caught up with my visions from high school: the soft robot which comes from George M. Whitesides’ lab at Harvard.

UPDATE: Reading their paper and watching the video, their lab

• printed a master mold in ABS using a 3D printer
• then cast in “EcoFlex” (from Smooth-On). A vacuum chamber is used to pull bubbles out of the EcoFlex before it is poured into the mold.
• The non-expanding backing is a different material.

links:

• paper in PNAS (supplements)
• fabrication video
• From 2010, Harvard student Carina Fish fabricates a tentacle from the EcoFlex, shows operation of a tentacle, operation of a “Hand” with knuckles… video embedding disabled!
• IEEE Spectrum video
• paper about “pneunets” – “Soft Robotics for Chemists”
• Pneumatic Artificial Muscles: actuators for robotics and automation about “McKibben-type actuators

However, after reading up on new techniques with 3D printing, I bet one could get similar results printing directly in the silicone goo! I know some have tried printing in caulking, for example with the Frostruder. Note caulking would probably be too stiff for this application… but maybe could be used as a flexible tube, or the less-flexible side? In a two-goo printer maybe?

See also:

• New Soft Robots Use Electropermanent (EP) Magnet Valves and Hydrogen Peroxide “Pneumatic Battery”
• IRobot Unveils Compliant “Jamming” End Effector (Robot Hand)
• DARPA “chembot” (DARPA page)
• jumping hoop and sphere robots from Japan
• Springer: “Review of manufacturing processes for soft biomimetic robots” in International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing Volume 10, Number 3, 171-181

At last!

The Omni-Crawler robot developed at Osaka University, using “Omni-Ball.”

Another blast from the past – I had been waiting since the 1980s for a smart gel version of this mode of locomotion. I can finally make my killbot tanks.

In 2001 I was visiting Tokyo and met many new friends, one of whom was bubbly voice actress Futamura Kaori. I had a cool idea – what if we made a show starring her which taught Japanese speakers American slang? Somehow we never got around to doing it; my work got in the way and we lacked the funds to put such a thing together.

It’s more than 10 years later, and the whole world has access to YouTube on their phones. Enter bubbly 24-year old Jessica Beinecke (written up here by the Washington Post), a sparkly blonde fluent in Chinese, teaching Chinese speakers American slang. Pretty cool.

The difference (I mean aside from someone actually executed on the idea and invested money into it!) is mostly technology and market – there are now markets available to watch such a show, and easy ways to get it out there.

I have mixed feelings on it. Like everyone, I always feel the twinge of jealousy that accompanies “hey I thought of that!” – even if it’s totally irrational. But OMGmeiyu is definitely slicker than what I would have put together in 2001, and it’s yet another project I can let go, because now someone has already done it, and done it well. Kudos!

Long ago, my brother and I were watching a random cartoon on local television. In it we saw an appalling sequence: a man wanders an alien forest with trees like jellyfish. Suddenly ghoulish babies surround him, dendritic stalks sticking out of their distended heads. They seem about to attack, a sickly grin on each of their faces, their eyesockets empty like a skull.

A willowy girl arrives, an alien since her skin is colored oddly, and she says something to the man. She mocks him as he cowers in panic and confusion.

All of this is in Japanese with no subtitles. We had no idea what it was from. This is in the dark years of television, when even TV Guide couldn’t really tell you what you were watching on some channels, and I think this was on KTSF or conceivably channel 38, which also showed East Asian programming.

I searched for this sequence for years, wondering what it was. I knew it had to be in the Leijiverse, since the woman looked like the women in Star Blazers / Yamato, or Captain Harlock. In vain – Captain Harlock hasn’t really been collected very competently in subtitled or dubbed versions until very recently.

Well, at last I am happy to report that, after years of searching, I’ve finally found where it was from – it’s episode 18 of the original Captain Harlock (alternately Season 2 Ep 4), about 17 minutes in. The girl is Lady Patras, Mazone agent, and the babies are baby Mazone. She laughs at the traumatized man because she was posing as his daughter, and apparently her entire childhood was a ruse.

KIRBY: almost 30 years after that traumatic incident, we can finally begin closure

Captain Harlock spends a lot of time fighting the Mazone, who are each like a cross between a Amedeo Modigliani painting on acid and a fascist broccoli dominatrix. They are alien plant women. This plant woman is Mazone warrior No. 6789, space combat squad commander Patras (occasionally spelled “Patoras”), and she’s been posing as “Midori,” the daughter of Chief Engineer Maji.

ZACH: They’re like broccoli jellyfish trees
BRAIN: yes!
ZACH: With demon children
ZACH: Like, mini pinheads
BRAIN: so imagine seeing this randomly on local TV
BRAIN: with no subtitles
BRAIN: …when you are 8
ZACH: That’s either a recipe for greatness, or disaster
BRAIN: madness!

Looks like Jason Shiga is releasing “Meanwhile” a third time, this time on iPad. It is a cool book – steer the protagonist as he travels in time, gets food poisoning, accidentally kills the world, and reads the minds of corpses. And that is just the tip of the iceberg!

My favorite edition is still the original ghetto “collated at the copy shop” version, but the color hardback is very nice.