Monthly Archives: March 2009

Political response..

By | March 21, 2009

Over the last few months, I wrote two letters to NZ members of parliament, one about the proposed review of the science of climate change, the second concerning the s92a amendment to the NZ Copyright Act. On Wednesday, I got responses to both. Here’s my comments: Climate Change The letter concerning climate change was sent… Read More »

Yesterday’s APOD

By | March 20, 2009

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was particularly awesome. I mean, APOD is usually awesome every day, but yesterday’s was particularly awesome, being a photo of Saturn, showing four of its moons in the foreground, all large enough that you could get some idea of their relative size and, in the case of Titan, colour.… Read More »

Word of the Day – Sprezzaturra

By | March 18, 2009

From Baldassare Castiglione‘s Book of the Courtier. Simply, sprezzaturra is the ability to appear to succeed without effort, to have “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them” or to appear ‘artfully artless’. It’s the art of appearing extremely capable, of hiding the effort behind one’s actions… Read More »

Building virtual worlds from the inside – ‘World Builder’

By | March 15, 2009

Check out this rather impressive imagining of virtual world construction in a fully tangible VR / AR environment. The interface used is quite cool and inspirational, but there’s a lot of funky interface videos out there, and the basic idea of creating worlds from within isn’t new; Snow Crash has this sort of thing, and,… Read More »

Game – Neverending Light

By | March 2, 2009

Got 10-20 minutes free? Play “Neverending Light“. The games starts with you and your character taking a tour through a cave system full of stalagtites, stalagmites, and awesome voice acting. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong. Part 1 of an ongoing series.