Over the last 3 years I have seen the emergence of a new type of fashion disgrace. Yes, these flat vulgar shoes often accompanied with 80’s charity shop clothes and pastel shaded makeup are combined to create some kind of 50’s/80’s mutant. I detest this current trend and find these ‘ballet flats’ extremely offensive. Firstly the colours are generally silver or gold. That in itself is grotesque. Secondly they are a ballet shoe, looking completely impractical and extremely flimsy. This pathetic excuse for a shoe rises to the very heights of the shoe obscenity top ten that includes Espadrille’s and Cork Platforms.

Then there is the fashion style that goes along with these shoes. Often with the ‘common’ wearer they are just in jeans (often ankle length) and other than that a casual top of sorts. However the ‘hardcore’ go for ‘ra ra’ skirts, or 80’s charity wear and for the life of me they look like such sad try hards I can only weep for their lack of originality. These shoes make women look like the fake ‘beatniks’ or 50’s ‘jazz’ girls, an image that lacked any substance or conveyed any articulation at the time, let alone now. Unless you perversely like the overt pretentiousness of these ethnic mixing ‘cool cats’ and the posturing egos that beat poetry drivel shat out of the early sixties I advise you to ‘ditch this kit’ before you become more shit that kitsch. 

 Astronomy Picture of the Day is a fantastic place for finding the latest astronomical images and is updated daily. This particular image is a great example of the weird and wonderful interpretations of cosmic images the mind can make. This looks possibly like two people running away from a monster.

Im sure somewhere out there is a naked Gemma Humphries but I think it might take an eternity for me to find her.

Link to APOD: 2006 October 31 - SH2 136: A Spooky Nebula

 There is something mysterious about strangers homes. Maybe it is because you glimpse a tantalizing and voyeuristic snap of someone else’s life as you briefly look in through a window as you walk by. ‘ People Watching’ is an inherent part of our nature and nothing is more personal than watching people in their homes.

Well after a walk along the mid-promenade between the lift at the Concorde 2 and the shops in Madeira drive I noticed possibly the strangest and slightly disturbing looking home I have seen for some time. (There is worse in London).

While I fiddled with the camera to get a good shot I realised that there was music playing from within. My imagination ran wild as I pictured a den of insalubrious activities. After chatting with friends I think its some kind of art studio, how dull. So look at these pictures but think serial killer, or demented resident its much more fun.

By the way Flatpig are a punk band so I guess this place might be linked to them or have fans living in it. Who knows?

While tapping my way through the usual interpipe sludge I come accross something fresh.. even if it looks old. Well it is old, but it has some extremely fun suggestions and there were a few things I had never seen before which I could do sitting at my desk such as:

Make ’smoke’ with your mouth
Compress the air in your mouth, then let off the pressure, then let the air out slowly. You’ll see fog!

This works! Apparently the site is about discovering your inner child by doing funny and different things that you often just dont bother with as you cruise through life.

Longer Seeing
Modify your perceptions with physics rather than psychopharmacology: put an infrared filter in some welding goggles, then wear them outdoors on a bright, sunny day. (Choose a filter that is in the near-IR, so a bit of light is visible still. Or try theatrical gels, congo blue combined with primary red, several of each.) The world will become EXTREMELY BIZARRE. Wait a couple of minutes until your eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. Then the bright pink clouds drift in the dark sky above the frosty white trees. The world is dusk, yet the sun still shines. Car tail-lights blaze brightly. The houses and roads are dark. But the grass! The trees! They are frosty blazing red, like snow which has been sprayed with cherry Kool-aid powder. Everyone’s clothes are altered. Blue-jeans are almost white. Some black clothing turns light grey. The artwork of T-shirts is almost invisible, and everyone’s hair is grey. (New: see the article.)

I’ve heard that some types of clothing are transparent to the infrared, so stagger on down to the beach and verify if this is so. “Mister, why are you wearing those goggles?”

I think this site has some superb ideas and some rather childish ones but then again I suppose thats the point.

http://amasci.com/~billb/cgi-bin/instr/instr.html

I love facts about Brighton, and there is always something new to find out. I remember talking to a taxi driver who mentioned about an old book called the The Old Ocean Bauble, where he said it is stated that there was at one point an Open House for every five people in Brighton. I think ill try and track down this book and have a look. There was also a Vapour Baths run buy a guy called Sake Dean Mohammed who was a regency ‘Shampooing Surgeon’- fascinating.

One of the things that has held particular interest to me is the old freight railway from Kemptown to Brighton station as it passed directly under our school yard at Elm Grove School. There used to be a great rumour that a worker on the line was killed in an accident and you could still hear him moaning in the now sealed tunnels. Superb!

So I am going to have a little look around as I cannot find any old maps of the route. I have the start and end points and I thought next time its a nice day and I am out and about I will track where this railway line went and put the map on here. So in the mean time I found this great picture of Volks Railway in a storm. The interesting thing to note is that it appears to be at least 10 feet raised above the ground. I wonder if the land was raised or track lowered?

Since the moment I was born until this time now I have never experienced anything that I would class as ‘religious’. When I was a teenager I was quite interested in finding out some kind of truth to our lives. Desperate to find some cohesive meaning to our existence I read various religious texts and explored all kinds of esoteric ideas. Even though some texts have idealistic and interesting takes on our reality the end result was that I was left feeling that there was no evidence or solid truth in anything I read. In fact the majority was confusing, bizarre, esoteric and impossible to apply in any meaningfull way. Some religions, Christianity for example has a fundemental philisophical flaw. I could never understand why God created Satan:

‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.’

If God is meant to be ‘pure’, a perfection, and Satan is his antithesis then how do you explain that Satan is a product of God? God then must be corrupt himself in some way to produce Satan. If Satan reflects absolutely every evil in our world and in human beings and he is a product of God then God himself is worse than Satan as he knowingly unleashes this evil onto the world and corrupts his own creations (Adam and Eve). By default every evil in the world is Gods doing while you could say Satan is a victim of his own creation, God made him evil. This for me is a fundemantal flaw in the Christian philosophy. Using very basic logic the Bible even in its very early stages is flawed and God is nothing more than a selfish thug, killing without mercy and punishing those who love him in an attempt to test their faith. God does not practice what he preaches.

Christianity is not the only religion that has flaws, but I am not writing this to list the many examples of the relationship between religion and the illogical. My simple example is symptomatic of almost all religious texts that I have read, the interesting thing for me in all of these texts is that central to their stories are that beings with supernatural powers entwined with miraculous events play a huge role in defining believers real world. I am not talking metaphore here, lets not let modernisms let religion off by explaining away ridiculous stories as some kind of metaphore or purely as some kind of fable. They were never intended that way, and people have been killed and still are killed over not accepting that religious texts are literally the ‘truth’.

Religion accepts and promotes a form of madness. A fear of nothing except the demons they create. The emphasis rather than on life is actually on death. It is as though death and the ‘afterlife’ have more importance than life itself. I have often considered that religion is a focus for people who refuse to accept the most obvious and self validating reality that life is what you can measure and nothing more. I won’t even entertain a Solopsist argument and David Deutsche sums up the problem of that perspective very well in the Fabric of Reality (a must read). I could rant all day about religion but you would get bored and so would I. I think I have made my point.

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Here we see Thomas teaching Mr Wells to say DADADADADA

One of the most boring things when you are writing a blog is typing. The sounds, the wrist cramps and the dullness of the whole experience makes writing a blog tedious. So I decided to try out some voice recognition software to make the whole process and little bit more enjoyable and a little bit more natural. The process is definitely faster than typing and I must admit, I do like the idea of while I’m speaking the words instantly appearing on the screen.

Because of the process sometimes your grammar can be slightly off, but on the whole it is very satisfying. I first tried Microsoft’s own voice recognition software that I found that to be pretty inaccurate so I tried Dragons NaturallySpeaking which are found to be pretty amazing. The more I dictate to the system the more it seems to pick up on the way I speak. Watching sentences spring out of thin air when you’re speaking is fantastic, particularly if you are reading at quite a pace. I must admit I’m completely sold on the idea mainly because I love technology but also because if it makes life easier it’s good. The only problem means that sometimes you can get quite carried away and if you’re not careful you can miss mistakes made by the voice recognition software.

These mistakes could quite easily make your writing very surreal so it’s good to doublecheck over what you have dictated.You can also control your Windows system and other commands using the voice recognition system. But things certainly could get very difficult if you’re in a roomful of people or you have noisy background sounds. As I am an aspiring author at this moment in time, this system is a godsend. It still makes the odd mistake but the more you train the system the more accurate it becomes. Apparently it has a 99% success rate once it is used to your voice. Although saying this I did have to dictate the last sentence three times to get it correct.

So have I saved time dictating for this blog, well maybe. But I must say it’s a far more enjoyable experience than tapping away and creating a claw out of both of my hands. At least I know when I get RSI, which is inevitable, that there will be a way for me to still interact with the computer.