Michel Vuijlsteke's weblog

corsix-th – Open source clone of Theme Hospital – Google Project Hosting
This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, with the capability of loading assets including graphics and levels from the original game.

Revenge of the Reality-Based Community | The American Conservative
I know that it’s unattractive and bad form to say “I told you so” when one’s advice was ignored yet ultimately proved correct. But in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong.

Looking to the Future: 8 Science Fiction Movies to Watch for | Movie News | Movies.com
Since this is a science fiction column, how about we do a little time traveling? After all, 2012 is just about over — so what awaits us in the years ahead? Although smaller films are surely going to emerge at festivals, here are eight science fiction films coming out within the next year or so that may very well deserve your valuable time and money. Since we're using a time machine (and because this is the Internet), I will also prejudge each movie without having seen a frame from most of them.

A Handsome Atlas: Wildly Awesome Data Visualizations from the Nineteenth Century
Zo mooi.

Stoya™, Not-cool things to do, bro… Part 1
Before you try to tell me that it’s because I take my clothes off for a living, let me tell you that this started way before I was 18. Let me tell you that every single woman I know has at least one truly terrifying story of street harassment and a whole bunch of other stories that are merely insulting or annoying. Let me remind you that in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street.

Evolution of the dune ecosystem in Flanders during the Middle Ages : anthropogenic factors versus sea level change theory
The purpose of the present article is to demonstrate that the disruption process of the
original coastal ecosystem of the so-called Older dunes on the Flemish coast only started
during the Great Reclamation Period as a result of anthropogenic factors, until, with the
exception of a small stretch on the West Coast, it was completely destroyed in the 14th and
the beginning of the 15th century.

Clayton Cubitt
You’ll want to be on headphones for this one.

Undisciplined by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Summer 2012
The feds have reached their conclusions, however, without answering the obvious question: Are black students suspended more often because they misbehave more?

IAmA guy who was kidnapped by my dad at age 5, and didn’t meet my birth mom again till I was 26. AMA : IAmA
Beste AMA in eeuwen.

How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
“You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it’s work, that seems to be largely true.

Letters of Note: This is my son. He speaks Greek.
In 1957, at 18 years of age, future billionaire and founder of CNN, Ted Turner, informed his father that he would be majoring in Classics after being inspired by a professor at Brown University. His father was furious to say the least, and responded to his son's announcement with the following despairing letter — a letter which Ted later sent to the college paper in retaliation, who then reprinted it in full.

Sensational Sappho » Dr Armand D’Angour
Everyone knows the Aphrodite of Melos, the so-called Venus de Milo – an ancient statue, the arms of which have broken off. The statue could perhaps be restored to wholeness with reasonable fidelity if we had evidence from later copies or versions of how the original looked, or by comparing other statues by the same sculptor. So what about Sappho’s equally famous fragment, Poem 31?

LRTimelapse 1.4 – the holy grail – my day-to-night workflow on Vimeo
If you already work with LRTimelapse or are planning to use it, you definitely shouldn't miss this tutorial.

Recipe for Garum or liquamen, the Roman fish sauce
Garum is one of the basic ingredients in the cuisine of Roman antiquity. It is a fish sauce that was used to salt dishes. You can't simply use kitchen salt, because instead of extracting moisture (which is what salt does), garum adds moisture to a dish.

Charles C. Mann, 1491
Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains | Infectious Diseases | DISCOVER Magazine
Parasitic worms leave millions of victims paralyzed, epileptic, or worse. So why isn’t anyone mobilizing to eradicate them?

I’ve been playing the same game of Civilization II for almost 10 years. This is the result. : gaming
I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

Fantastic Sources for Free Soundtrack Music — Life Scoop
Back in the pre-digital days of video creation, directors without the cash to commission original soundtracks to their films had to rely on library music. The folks who put together these massive libraries owned all the rights to the music outright, so it was easy to license recordings for creators to use in their films, TV, and radio pieces. A TV director would flip through his network's sound library records, pick the track, and then pay for the license. (In recent years, some outré 1960s and 1970s library music has become very collectible amongst a certain breed of vintage vinyl addicts.) Physical sound libraries, and their associated licensing fees, are still around, albeit in entirely digital form.

IE 10′s ‘Do-Not-Track’ default dies quick death | Ars Technica
IE 10 with DNT turned on lived for six days before getting its death sentence.

The Devil and John Holmes (by Mike Sager, Los Angeles Times, May 1989)
John Holmes was a porn star. Eddie Nash was a drug lord. Their association ended in one of the most brutal mass murders in the history of Los Angeles.

swissmiss | Two kids in a car
These two kids saw the GOTYE music video SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW and fell in love with it. They started requesting the song every time they’d be riding in the car, singing along, of course. One day, their parents set up a go camera behind their seat and taped them over a few car rides. Awesome.

don kenn gallery
BORN IN DENMARK 1978. I WRITE AND DIRECT TELEVISION SHOWS FOR KIDS. I HAVE A SET OF TWINS AND NOT MUCH TIME FOR ANYTHING. BUT WHEN I HAVE TIME I DRAW MONSTERDRAWINGS ON POST-IT NOTES… IT IS A LITTLE WINDOW INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD, MADE ON OFFICE SUPPLIES.

More Dutch men served in feldgrau than in khaki | MetaFilter
Needless to say, this part of WWII history doesn't quite fit with the image that us Dutch would like to have as ourselves as innocent victims of the Nazi occupation, where after the war everybody had been in the resistance.

I’m Sick Of Pretending: I Don’t "Get" Art | VICE
You know what? I'm sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called "The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi's Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu's Theories of Distinction", have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it, but the other night, after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I'm finally ready to come out and say it: I just don't think I "get" art.

Spectrum Made Me • Articles • Retro • Eurogamer.net
Those other computers were good and they were popular, but – on a national, social and for me, personal level – the Spectrum was a phenomenon. It was a mercurial presence, a flashpoint, and it changed everything. It changed me.

What if realists were in charge of U.S. foreign policy? | Stephen M. Walt
The liberal/neoconservative alliance is responsible for most of America's major military interventions of the past two decades, as well as other key initiatives like NATO expansion. By contrast, realists have been largely absent from the halls of power or the commanding heights of punditry. That situation got me wondering: What would U.S. foreign policy have been like had realists been running the show for the past two decades? It's obviously impossible to know for sure, but here's my Top Ten List of What Would Have Happened if Realists Had Been in Charge.

Elonka’s List of Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers
This is an unofficial list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes. There has also been an attempt to sort this list by "fame", as defined by a loose formula involving the number of times that a particular cipher has been written about, and/or how many hits it pulls up on a moderately sorted web search.

Care and Feeding of Yer Books | MetaFilter
To begin with, if you remember nothing else, remember this: A book is a machine. For all the magic, mystique and awe that may surround it, the bound book is a machine. And like all machines, it will obey the laws of physics that have been built into it, whether or not they were what the binder intended. If a book was bound, rebound or repaired without regard to how all the parts work together to make the machine work, the laws of physics will relentlessly tear it apart, even while it is sitting quietly on a shelf. If a binding structure was made aesthetically pleasing, but too weak to support the textblock, gravity will do its job. If a hinge is not properly made, or repaired, it will not be a hinge and do what hinges do, which is to open and close the book. It will instead be a lever, and it will do what levers do, which is to pry apart the book.

The Distro Interview: Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton — Engadget
Bill Buxton has spent most of his career getting between humans and computers. While his initial focus was on music and digital instruments, that eventually led to an interest in human-computer interaction, and pioneering work with multitouch systems and other user interfaces. He worked with the famed hotbed of innovation Xerox PARC in the late 1980s and early 90s, and was later Chief Scientist for software firm Alias Wavefront before claiming the same title at SGI Inc. when that company acquired the former in 1995. After a time running his own Toronto-based design and consulting firm, he moved on to Microsoft Research in 2005, where he continues to serve as the organization's Principal Researcher. We recently had a chance to pick his brain and get his thoughts on a range of issues, including state of design at Microsoft, the future of natural user interfaces, and whether we're really entering a "post-PC" era.

Immortal ZX Spectrum games
The ZX Spectrum can boast some 15 thousand titles, which is about ten times more than what is currently available for either GBA or NDS alone. This is quite a lot of games to choose from. To put it into perspective, if you try out one title each day, it will keep you occupied for more than forty years. So, where do you start?

Interesting Articles
A curated stream of interesting articles.

Beste MIVB, heb uw personeel en de passagiers lief | Sixlog
Je bent nergens meer veilig, niet in het verkeer, evenmin thuis en zeker niet op een boot. Dat heet toeval of noodlot en hoeveel blauw ook op straat, of hoe streng de straffen: het zal altijd blijven gebeuren. Heden mosselen, morgen gij.

Demoscene – The Art of the Algorithms | MetaFilter

Elaine Pagels on the Book of Revelation : The New Yorker
Millions are annihilated, every major city has been destroyed, but nobody you really like has died. It’s a Hollywood ending in that way, too.

The Grandmaster Experiment
“Girls can learn how to play just as well as boys,” Susan says. “But they often approach the game differently. Girls would rather solve chess puzzles than play against one of their friends,” she says. Boys will always choose to compete.

There is something really wrong with modern programmers. Very wrong indeed.
Increasingly, projects are websites.  You don’t have to be a power programmer; you can cut-n-paste Javascript and run node.js and then you go get mongoDB or Redis as a backend and you’re thinking you’re scalable!  Get with the movement!

2012_SDTVx264r.nfo
The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 (2012-02-22)

Dangerous Minds | Just how beautiful was Karen Carpenter’s voice? Listen to her isolated vocal tracks and find out
Karen Carpenter’s voice takes me to that happy safe place when I was young and everything seemed possible.

"…now I am the Jew here, I am the boss." | MetaFilter
Afghan Jewry may date back 2700 years. Today, there is but one: Zablon Simintov. Zablon, of Turkmen-Afghan descent, is a carpet trader and the caretaker of the only synagogue in Kabul. Zablon had a feud with Ishaq Levin, the second-to-last Jew of Afghanistan.

Least Helpful
Daily Dispatches from the Internet's Worst Reviewers

So klang Bismarck! – einestages
Der Kanzler war begeistert! 1889 wurde Otto von Bismarck ein Phonograph vorgeführt – und der altehrwürdige Staatsmann plauderte munter auf das revolutionäre Gerät. Mehr als ein Jahrhundert galt die wohl einzig jemals gemachte Aufnahme der fürstlichen Stimme als verschollen. Nun ist sie aufgetaucht.

Forgotten.pl Abandoned Places
Stadsarcheologie in Polen.

Rosling’s World – a documentary about Hans Rosling – YouTube
Hans Rosling is a professor in international health, who has made an unlikely global success. His Gapminder presentations on global development evokes laughter, rejoice and reflections. In this SVT (Swedish Television) documentary, film maker Pär Fjällström lets Hans Rosling tell the story about his life and what has shaped his world view.

The Voynich Manuscript [a.k.a. Beinecke MS 408] pt I: the language of plants where the search for meaning is the meaning
:aah:

Jonathan Coulton – Uh oh, he’s blogging. What happened?
Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages via reddit.com
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Cyberlocker Ecosystem Shocked As Big Players Take Drastic Action | TorrentFreak
While the shutdown last week of Megaupload and the arrest of its founder and management team was certainly dramatic, a situation of perhaps even greater gravity is beginning to emerge.

Loper OS » Why Skin-Deep Correctness — Isn’t, and Foundations Matter.
All you will ever get from Apple is a “Worse Is Better“, taxidermic imitation of orthogonal persistence.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer
The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede.

Radiofy – Converteer playlists van op de radio naar Spotify-playlists
Radiofy laat u toe om doorheen de playlists van de VRT-radiozenders te bladeren en de muziek ook meteen te beluisteren via Spotify en/of YouTube.

cliff richard dying inside
As with a lot of pictures of Cliff, at first glance he looks happy. But if you look closely, if you really search his eyes for signs of life, you soon realise that he is dying on the inside.

[Updated] The rise and fall of personal computing | asymco
Note the log scale.

bloodrunsclear’s real trailers for fictional films | MetaFilter
The sci-fi and fantasy trailer edits of bloodrunsclear range from a more diverse recasting of The Last Airbender and a more accurate version of the upcoming live-action Akira film to a moody treatment of The Sandman to the retro-looking adaptation of Neuromancer and the haunting Call of Cthulhu film. Want trailers to video game adaptations? To wargamers he has a live-action Warhammer 40,000 teaser. To LARPers he gives you Vampire: the Masquerade. To video gamers? Well… which kind are you interested in?

Going Cardboard: A Board Game Documentary
Do you have fond childhood memories of gathering around the table with the family for a game of Monopoly, Scrabble, or LIFE?

Cardboard is making a comeback.

In an era of tech-based entertainment, word is spreading about a new breed of board game. Going Cardboard takes you into the designer "German-style" board gaming scene, from its community of enthusiastic fans to the creative passions of the designers and their journeys from concept to reality.

Notes on Ezekiel
The point of all this is to note the fact that none of the elements of Ezekiel's vision are foreign to religious iconography of the times (or before Ezekiel's era).  The cloud / storm element of the vision is very common to the Old Testament, and is chiefly aimed at Baal, the king of the gods at Ugarit (the storm god), which is outside Babylon, both terribly common to Israelite thinking.  Hence the vision of Ezekiel, in many respects, is an amalgam of familiar (early) Israelite theophanic portrayals of Yahweh and Babylonian elements, all designed to put Yahweh "in the picture," ousting the pagan god(s).

The (Real) Definition Of Standard & Poor’s Credit Ratings….. ‘Tom Pride’ (Satire) via reddit.com
A lot of people are talking about credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgrading of several EU countries yesterday but not many people actually understand what the ratings mean.

So here’s a quick guide from S&P itself to help you understand the ratings system.

Testimony of Ms. Soon Ok Lee
The punishment cell is one of the most dreaded punishments for all prisoners. The cells are usually 60 cm wide and 110 cm high. Therefore, the prisoners have no room to stand up, stretch their legs or lie down. They cannot even lean against the walls because they are too jagged. There are twenty such cells for female prisoners and 58 cells for male prisoners. They are usually detained for seven to ten days as punishment for certain offenses, such as leaving an oily mark on clothes, failing to memorize the president's New Year message or repeated failure to meet work quotas.

Scrollsy.com – Scroll Etsy.com

Kurt Andersen: From Fashion to Housewares, Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut? | Style | Vanity Fair
Paging professor Helmut Gaus… Paging professor Helmut Gaus… "Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History."

"Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past. Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms. It’s the rare “new” cultural artifact that doesn’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes."

Real Dan Lyons Web Site » Blog Archive » Enough with the Samsung bashing » Real Dan Lyons Web Site
This is typical snarky Gruber stuff. But it’s so arrogant and patronizing that when I read it was brought up short. Because I realized, this guy isn’t joking. Gruber and people like him really believe that Samsung just sits around making copies of Apple products. In their view, Apple is the fountain from which all creativity flows, and Samsung just follows behind, stealing their ideas.

The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian
He's a boxer, a Buddhist, a hoops junkie, and a kind of Yoda to every funny person born since 1965 (Sandler, Silverman, Apatow, Gervais, Baron Cohen…). Amy Wallace survives a rare sparring session with Garry Shandling, the reclusive master of American comedy

PLoS ONE: The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
The idea that there are only minor differences between the personality profiles of males and females should be rejected as based on inadequate methodology.

Everything you need to know about buying a camera | The Verge
Voor als er nog eens iemand vraagt welk fototoestel ze zouden moeten kopen.

Iconic Images Without Their Subjects: An Artist’s Rendering – NYTimes.com
An empty road during the Vietnam War. A hilltop landscape in Spain. A nondescript motel balcony in Memphis.

These otherwise ordinary settings are the backdrops to photographs that have become icons of history.

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? – NYTimes.com
There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot.

Visoog Google Earth

Pingu’s THE THING – YouTube
Pingu remake of John Carpenter masterpiece THE THING (1982)
This is the 2 minute extended cut.

n+1: Outsourcing Jobs
Jobs seems to have attended the Joseph Stalin Charm School: his world was one of clear good and evil; he was a constant liar, in what came to be known among his underlings as his “reality distortion field”; he was “anti-loyal,” abandoning people he was close to; he used silences and unblinking stares to shame people; he held show trials, bringing employees of a failed project into an auditorium, telling them they should hate each other, and firing the leader on the spot.

The Jawbone UP Fails, But Teaches 3 Golden Rules For Experience Design | Co.Design
The Jawbone UP is a complex case study in what we demand from the gadgets we interact with–and how gadget experiences can be designed to fit into our lives.

JP Houdin – Cheops Revealed (1 of 4)
4500 years after the construction of the great Pyramids, their secret still remains. Jean-Pierre Houdin's very serious ramp theory explains how the Great Pyramids could have possibly been built from the inside. This theory is considered by many egyptologists and amateurs to be the most advanced, sophisticated, and demonstrated theory on how the great pyramids were built.

Raiders of the Lost Archives
Shot-by-shot comparison of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" vs. scenes from 30 different adventure films made between 1919-1973.

scrollorama
The jQuery plugin for doing cool scrolly stuff

How the Hashtag Is Ruining the English Language
The hashtag is a vulgar crutch, a lazy reach for substance in the personal void—written clipart.

Babbage was a true genius
If he'd built a 3-digit AE, his instruction set would have exceeded the computing capabilities of every 8-bit machine in the home microcomputer revoloution of the 1980s. 5 digits and he'd have beaten the 16-bit PDP11, ST, Amiga and 8086 for per-instruction computing power.

Got to Admit, the Brits Have Taste: The Kate Bush Christmas Special – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog
Some 32 years after it was filmed and shown to viewers in the U.K., it is easy to scratch our collective heads at how something as borderline surreal as the Kate Bush Christmas Special had a chance to see the light of day, let alone in 1979.

I, Cthulhu, or, What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9’ S, Longitude 126° 43’ W)? by Neil Gaiman | Tor.com
I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.