Into the Void

The Hindu Goddess Sita made her animated film debut in a wonderful movie called Sita Sings the Blues. Sita premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival a few days ago.

“Pushpakha”
by Nina Paley

Sita Sings the Blues was created by animator Nina Paley, who you might remember from her animated IMAX feature, Pandorama. All I’ve seen of Sita is the preview on archive.org, embedded later in this post, and it really captured my imagination.

Sita is great, like those wild Bollywood movies they show on Namaste America. Singing, dancing, love lost, singing and dancing, love regained, and more singing and dancing. It’s delightfully melodramatic. The Goddess’ story is interspersed with an autobiographical storyline from Ms. Paley’s own life. The movie is narrated by three sock puppets. Errr, that should say shadow puppets.

The music in the preview sounds like a cross between Timothy Leary’s White Birds Sing (Beyond Life) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin IV), however Sita Sings the Blues uses the music of Roaring 20’s era songstress Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s (and Nina’s) feelings.

Edit:
That didn’t sound quite right. I like White Birds Sing and Four Sticks, but I realized later that other folks might not. The music was raucous and fun. Unlike the Indian engineers and professors I’ve met… What, do they only let the boring people come here? Maybe the US is a kind of exile.

Here’s the trailer from archive.org.

By way of Idol Chatter.

Another edit:
When I wrote this article WikiPedia had nothing about the movie Sita Sings the Blues. After I added an item to the Sita disabiguation page, an article on Sita Sings the Blues showed up. Magically. How did we live without the interNets?

Sharp Deutschland: 108 Zoll: Sharp präsentiert den größten LCD-TV der Welt

Say no More.

I think I’ll name my next dog
“Hash: b2e189abf85e809a51522cdb0e53083a”

I found Don Park’s site (see below, Identicons) while searching for 2D barcodes such as ShotCode and QRCode. Once I get everything tagged, life is going to be much simpler.

:-)

Ok, so Don had links to some other fun icon sites, and I’d like to share them.

This one, created in php by Charles Dark of Visual Consumption, uses the same concept but a different implementation to build a colorful 9-code “Visiglyph” of your IP address.

This avatar, also based on IP address, can be found at planetOzh. I like mine. It’s purple.

And here’s your identicon:

Technorati: Visiglyph Identicon security tech

Don Parks Daily Habit - Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification

An interesting site I came across a few weeks ago, lost, then found again.

Look, I’m beautiful! Uh, well, at work anyway. My identicon at home looks like one of the bugs from the movie “Starship Troopers.”

Update: Since you wondered…

“Baseball bats are now the preferred weapon for many drug gangs and others who have a business need to administer behavioral reminders. They’re cheap, lethal, legal, untraceable, and hey! it’s the national pastime.”
— George Carlin

The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years…. That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. … When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. … Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.
G Gaia, AOL Member
Quoted on Wisdomquotes.com

Anosognosia for Hemiplegia: A Window into Self-Awareness

…Anosognosia brings questions of the origin of self-awareness to the forefront. How can someone lose the ability to know when she is or is not moving? Is this some type of elaborate Freudian defense mechanism, or is this person entirely unaware of her illness? How is self-awareness represented in the brain, and is this representation isolated from or attached to awareness of others? Though none of these questions are fully answerable at this time, research into anosognosia has provided scientists and philosophers with insight into some of these ancient questions of human consciousness.

Ok, so they’re not flowers, they’re lemniscates.

If you are using IE 5.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later and the Microsoft Office 2003 Web Components, you can play with this interactively by clicking on the flower. IE may give you a security warning. Apparently IE doesn’t trust Excel.

The equation is
ampl + PM * SIN(petals * theta) ^ exp

Where
Petals is the number of petals in the lemniscate,
PM is +1 or -1,
ampl is a unit to add to the SIN function
and exp is an exponent
theta is the angle - you can’t change this.

Try the following data:

Have fun!

Inside the Hotdog Factory: 39 Years Ago Today: Anniversary of the Death of Lenny Bruce

An insight into neurolinguistics from an unexpected source. Lenny Bruce had died over 10 years before I first heard this on a vinyl LP back in the late ’70s.

“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else. Then I must just take, ding ding ding, somewhere.”
– Lenny Bruce

neurolinguistics Lenny Bruce