ross goes to canada

It might look complex, but it is just a normal drawer turned inside-out. Easy to make and practical.

A while ago I was talking with a friend about some preposterous idea that I was thinking about.  He said that I would make a good engineer if all my ideas weren’t junk.  I’d like to agree.

A few sketches from the most recent sketchbook: people who mill around outside coffee shops.

• today’s Cul De Sac is excellent
• A useful list of emotions
• A TED Talk on bacteria communication systems
• “inevitable minds” over at The Technium

Check out these artists:

• Patch of Orange
• Erwin Madrid

My arm is really sore from drawing, so I figured that today would be perfect to take a break from sketching and to tell everyone about an idea that I’m very excited about– Weather Chatter: the Online Weather Discussion Board.

I know what you’re thinking– it’s a terrible pointless idea.

But wait!  Imagine this:  You find yourself in an elevator with a stranger.  You both mutter “hi”s but then, unable to think of anything else, both sets of eyes zip to far apart spots of the lift  in one beautiful synchronized movement.  You find interest in the current-floor sign ( I wonder what number is going to come up next?! ) while the stranger’s eyes rove the elevator looking for things to read ( hmmm… lift carrying-capacity is 3000 lbs.  I wonder how much that guy weighs? ).  Suddenly you realize that you have 20 floors to go!  You’re going to have a long while together.  You have to do something before things get awkward!  You decide to talk– what to talk about? what to talk about?  ah!  You decide to talk about the weather!  Soon you and your moving-towards-friend-zone stranger are having an animated discussion:

“Did you hear that it’s raining outside?”

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“I think it sucks too!”

It turns out that you and Mr. Stranger aren’t so different after all!

Another example:  A recent study done by famous aught Onym Ousan, showed that 94% of conversations between strangers centered around weather. ( Ousan examined these results and is now touring the USA with a message:  For the most gripping weather conversations, both sides must have bitterly strong opinions on every aspect of modern meteorology– a middling opinion on something as important as snow can be a social disaster. )

Two sure things can be taken away from the above examples:

• Strangers often talk about the weather.
• ( Why talk about the weather?  There are so many other things to talk about. ) Strangers must love talking about the weather.

So why an online weather discussion board?  Every country on every continent has vast storages of strangers.  Strangers love to talk about weather.  Why not let strangers connect over the Internet to discuss local weather? ( please accept this as rhetorical ).

The above statement looks a lot like first-order or second-order logic.  Logic.

Through use of  Weather Chatter soon you will be able to commiserate with people half-way across the world about how much ( Onym Ousan recommends: a lot ) you hate sleet.  And the world, someday, will run out of strangers.

On a side note– I just noticed that TED has a program for “world changing innovators.”  How interesting.

I made a short animated-comic sort of thing last night just for fun.

Also, here’s another cat:

some educational info about cats ( color coded: red– great reasons to not have a pet cat)

( courtesy Wikipedia)

A skilled predator, the cat is known to hunt over 1,000 species for food. It can be trained to obey simple commands. Individual cats have also been known to learn on their own to manipulate simple mechanisms, such as doorknobs. Cats use a variety of vocalizations and types of body language for communication, including meowing, purring, hissing, growling, squeaking, chirping, clicking, and grunting.

Cats may be the most popular pet in the world, with over 600 million in homes all over the world.

A few sketches from tonight.  bonus points if you can work all the above images into a coherent story: and not a story about kung-fu animals– there are too many already.

Now it’s time to sleep… or have some delicious strawberry yogurt.  decisions.

anyways, thanks for visiting!

A really cool and significant step toward the future of videogames– provided by OnLive.

I figured that this would happen at some point, but it’s happening awhile earlier than I thought.

neat stuff

• zoologic
• an episode of Pic Pic ( Belgian )
• another episode of Pic Pic

here and here and here

you can pick one, two, or three of the above!

This Songsmith thing is actually really impressive no matter what can be said about the quality of the music ( a fair bit).