Tetherd Cow Ahead

Sun 26 Aug 2007

Iotas Surfs the Astral Waves

Posted by anaglyph under Hmmm..., Signs, Silly
[12] Comments

The Tetherd Cow Ahead Horoscope of Infinite Detail™
with Iotas Scrivener
Week Commencing August 27, 2007

Aries ~ The Ram

Well Aries – the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars in no uncertain terms this coming week. You know your office mate that stole the pencil sharpener last Thursday? The one with the cheeky smile? Well consider yourself in like Flynn! Yep, before the week is out you two are going to be under the covers and going at it like rabbits. To cap off the week, when you eventually turn on your phone after three days of hot sex, you will discover that you have inherited nearly a hundred million dollars from a fond uncle. You will also receive an erroneously calculated gas bill and find termites in the east corner of your house. Your lucky number is 17 – why not buy a lottery ticket – you’ve siphoned all the luck out of some other poor bastard’s universe, may as well go for broke!

Taurus ~ The Bull

Few weeks of your life will be quite as boring as this one. When you accidentally kick over a cartoon of orange juice on Flinders St on Tuesday, it will seem like an earth-shattering event to you. None of your friends will think so, however, especially Aries. Other than that, you will watch a re-run of House on tv, pick your nose twice and notice that all the cars in your street have number plates ending in 3 or 7. On Thursday you will get out of bed on the opposite side to the one you normally do.

Gemini ~ The Twins

With your sign under the influence of Uranus, this will be a real arse of a week for Geminis. An electrical fault in your car ignition system tomorrow will cause you to break down in the middle of commuter traffic. When you get out of your car to lift the bonnet so you can pretend that you actually have a clue what goes on under there, a passing motorist will call you a ‘pugnacious lemon-brained froth-sucker’. At least that’s what it will sound like as they speed past. After you have trudged to work in a relentless drizzle you will remember that it was your day off anyway. The rest of the week is a little better, with a nice warm day on Tuesday and a particularly tasty chicken salad sandwich for lunch on Wednesday. Your lucky colour is off-white and your lucky fruit is cumquat.

Cancer ~ The Crab

There’s no business like show business Cancer, and that’s no business for you to contemplate for even a second. Monday evening brings the temptation to go centre stage at an after-work karaoke escapade, a temptation to which you will quickly wish you hadn’t succumbed. The video clip taken by a workmate will be posted on YouTube and will receive 172,980 viewings. Most of those viewers will be laughing at you, not with you. You will not go into work on Tuesday, which will turn out to be a wise decision. On Wednesday you will receive news of a distant relative’s win on the lottery. You will eat a mediocre pasta dish on Thursday evening and drink a little too much red wine. On the weekend you will see a bizarre accident involving a person dressed in a bear costume and a clothes rack. Your sleep will be disturbed by dreams of escaped bees.

Leo ~ The Lion

On Monday you will be crushed to death by an unsecured piano falling out the back of a furniture truck.

Virgo ~ The Virgin

With Neptune high in the sky and Mercury on the ascendant, the next few days bring many exciting small things for Virgos. Early on there will be a letter in your name with a ten dollar voucher at K-Mart. On Tuesday a man in Liederhosen will goose you on the bus. Wednesday morning sees the commencement of a subscription to National Geographic and the afternoon brings an offer of scones and jam. Thursday you will be given a small parcel by a Middle Eastern man. It will contain Turkish Delight, a packet of cardamom pods and some spools of maroon thread. Over the weekend there will be some nice weather. You will see something funny on the tv that will cause you to snort Coca Cola over a clean shirt.

Libra ~ The Scales

After last week, you’ll be wanting to sit down and take it easy you Librans! Which is what you’ll attempt to do, and fail. You face a week of constant interruptions, aggravations and stomach ailments. You will try to avoid being contacted by switching off your mobile phone, but that won’t work – news of a relative’s recent windfall (an inheritance due to the death of a wealthy uncle) will reach you by singing telegram. A car will break down in front of you in peak-hour traffic and you will uncharacteristically shout obscenities at the poor sod looking under the uplifted hood. You will witness an horrific accident in which a person is crushed to death by a piano.

Scorpio ~ The Scorpion

Scorpio! What a week you have ahead! You know how you’ve always wanted to parachute out of plane at 3000 feet? No? Well that’s what you find yourself doing anyway. It’s not at all fun. Later in the week you will hit your head very hard on the sharp under-edge of a cabinet. There will be a lot of blood. But fear not! Romance is in the air! A tall dark mysterious stranger wearing a cape will give you flowers (an attractive selection of gerberas, daisies and lilies) at the bus stop. Unfortunately they will trigger your hayfever and you will spend the rest of the week in bed. An email sent to you by Bill Gates, offering you a million dollars, turns out to be spam. Your lucky number this week is 1.232 and your lucky woodworking tool is an awl.

Ophiucus ~ The Serpent Bearer

As usual, people will fail to take any notice of you this week, and you will feel transparent and insignificant.

Sagittarius ~ The Archer

A trip to deep thermal vents in a submersible is on the cards for lucky Sagittarius this week. You probably don’t think that’s likely, but it is a damn site more likely than the discovery of the alien civilization at the bottom of the ocean which follows. You find yourself front-page news along with the other 500 million Sagittarians who were down there. Your lucky colour is taupe and your lucky grain is barley.

Capricorn ~ The Sea-goat

Remarkably, this week for Capricorns is exacty the same in every detail as last week.

Aquarius ~ The Water Carrier

Aquarius can look forward to a letter in the post this week. It will contain some news from Peter Popoff, with a lot of writing and a piece of The True Cross. Later in the week brings a visit from a Greenpeace representative wanting you to join up. She will give you a leaflet and a sticker. You will have a very spicy curry on Wednesday night, and some garlic naan bread. A noisy neighbour will keep you awake on Thursday by playing seemingly endless repetitions of ‘My Sharona’ on their hi-fi. Your lucky vegetable is a swede, as is your lucky National representative.

Pisces ~ The Fishes

As the week commences Pisceans might start to think that they’re going insane. As, in fact, they are. By Wednesday the hallucinations will have well and truly set in, and you’ll all be completely bonkers by 3pm Thursday. Your lucky colour is paisley and your lucky medication is Valium.

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As mentioned last week, Iotas Scrivener, The Cow’s resident astrologer, claims that the accuracy of these predictions is better than 99.72%. Iotas uses state-of-the-art quantum processors to compute simultaneous outcomes in an infinite number of parallel universes. Whilst the precision of the results is guaranteed, the TCA Horoscope of Infinite Detail™ cannot be held responsible if the outcome of the prediction is not applicable to the universe in which you reside.

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Mon 20 Aug 2007

Mystic Crystal Revelations

Posted by anaglyph under Skeptical Thinking, Spooky, Technology
[16] Comments

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting pretty tired of the standard vague, equivocal horoscope in the daily paper astrology section.

Here’s what it says for me today:

Libra ~

Change your thinking and you can change the way you see the world. You cannot change others; but by planting positive thoughts instead of focussing on the negatives you will soon find that you view things very differently. You have the power within you to make this sweeping change, so don’t wait, do it now.

Talk about lame. It couldn’t be much more wishy washy if it said:

Libra ~

Today, some things might happen and some other things might not.

It’s pretty obvious to me that horoscopes are lagging behind the times. While the rest of the world surges forward on the digital wave of the 21st century, astrology seems stuck in a Medieval morass of mediocre mumblings. We’re watching The Present in high definiton widescreen with 5.1 surround sound but Athena Starwoman is still drawing our Future in stick figures with charcoal on a piece of vellum!

The time for the crystal ball gazers to ditch the goat’s blood and tea-leaves is long past due! Someone needs to turn the mighty power of modern technology toward Astrological ends, and far be it from me to shirk such a worthy duty! Yes folks, I’m announcing a New Age in Astrological Augury here on The Cow: The TCA Horoscope of Infinite Detail™. Starting today our specially appointed Tetherd Cow seer, Iotas Scrivener, will periodically bring you a horoscope that says it like it means it. None of this ambivalent pettifogging and indecisive hedging-of-bets for Iotas. Using only the latest Beyond-The-Veil connectivity and our lightning fast Psychomantic data loggers, Iotas plugs into the Ethereal Ethernet and brings back your weekly prediction in crisp clear digital detail.

Iotas fired up the mainframe for a special preview this morning and is overjoyed to hand down the current forecast for Libra:

Libra ~

This week brings two suprises. The first will come tomorrow, as you stick a fork into your toaster to dislodge a piece of burning cinnamon loaf that you unwisely cut too thick for the slot. The second surprise will occur on Wednesday after you have been discharged from the hospital, when a man in a green felt hat gives you five dollars in the mistaken belief that you are a pan-handler. On Friday you will buy a lottery ticket with the money which will have a number only two digits different to the eventual million dollar prize-winner. On Saturday you will see a duck eat a snail. Friends will buy you a beer on Sunday night but it will have a slight taste of mould. Beware of a woman with a lisp – she wants to sell you an expensive insurance plan.

Iotas claims that not only is the detail enhanced in these predictions, but that the accuracy is better than 99.72%*

I’ve had a special preview of some of the other Star Signs for this week, and all I can say is Aries, you are one lucky son-of-a-gun!

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*The state-of-the-art quantum processors that Iotas uses compute simultaneous outcomes in an infinite number of parallel universes. Whilst the accuracy of the results is guaranteed, the TCA Horoscope of Infinite Detail cannot be held responsible if the outcome of the prediction is not applicable in the universe in which you reside.

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Sun 12 Aug 2007

Smoke & Mirrors

Posted by anaglyph under Grumpy Old Man, Hokum, Science, Skeptical Thinking, Technology
[10] Comments

Not a Hologram

Trendhunter is carrying a story about a fashion show that was recently staged by Diesel for their 2008 Spring/Summer Collection. They lead with the headline Holographic Fashion Show – Diesel’s Fashion Show Adds New Dimension and breathlessly claim (undoubtedly cribbing from the Diesel press release) that this it ‘the first time that holograms have been projected along a traditional catwalk’.

Dear oh dear. It looks like the Reverend is obliged once more to step into the fray with his Big Stick of Reason and bash a few heads with it.

The Claim: That this runway show is using some fancy-schmancy system to make holograms of digitally created underwater creatures swirl around and ‘interact’ with the models.

The Implication: That you will see fully realised holographic 3D images floating in ‘thin air’.

The Actuality: The system being used is a simple theatrical trick more than a century old, even if it does use some clever hi-tech riffs. It is not holography.

For starters, this isn’t even the first time that a fashion show has used this particular technique on the catwalk, so Diesel’s trumpeting of this great new idea is a tad overblown. Last year in August, an Alexander McQueen show conjured a ‘holographic’ Kate Moss as the finale to their fashion spectacular. It was done pretty much the same way as this effort, although on a smaller scale.

Here’s a vid of the Diesel presentation from YouTube. You only need to watch a bit of it to get the idea.

Now, I want to say at the outset that I don’t aim to diminish the achievements of the clever technical people and artists behind this show. The effect they have created is pretty cool, for what it actually is. Which is not anything to do with holograms.

The trick they are using here is a variation of an old stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost. If you have been to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion you have seen this effect in the Ghostly Ballroom.

There’s a very comprehensive explanation of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion at Wikipedia, but it’s an easy enough idea to understand. Have you ever stood in front of a window at night, and looked outside into the lit street and seen your reflection superimposed over the view? That’s how Pepper’s Ghost works.

In the classic method the audience in a theatre is looking through an angled piece of glass at a dimly-lit stage. The glass is unlit, and therefore completely invisible. In the wings of the stage is a blacked out area with lights that can be dimmed. An actor dressed in light-coloured clothing stands here waiting in the dark, and when the lights come up, the audience sees a full-sized transparent ghostly apparition in front of their eyes, apparently right on the stage (it is a reflection, in the glass, of the now illuminated off-stage actor). The actor can move within the confines of the off-stage black set, and even interact with onstage characters with some minimal preparatory choreography. If you don’t know what you’re seeing, it’s a pretty neat effect.*

The Diesel show isn’t using exactly this technique. My guess is that it exploits a combination of the Pepper’s Ghost principle and the use of a synchronised video projection system on screens below and right along each side of the stage.

This is how I think it works: look closely at the runway in the Diesel show. You can just see a hazy barrier that runs all the way along the stage between the audience and the models. I’m guessing that it’s some kind of glass, or perspex or possibly plastic film. Something clear and reflective. It would have been humungously expensive and a real bitch to set up. It’s angled from the floor at the side of the runway over the heads of the audience. The makers of the illusion boast that it’s the first time that this kind of illusion could be seen from both sides of the catwalk at once – that would be impossible using the conventional Pepper’s Ghost with just one piece of glass. I think therefore, that there are probably two reflection panes, and if you look even more carefully at the YouTube vid you can see a thin line at the top of the heads of the models that is probably the edge of the pane on the other side of the catwalk, conducting a little bit of internal reflection inside the glass. Note that this thin blue line is behind the models, and all the other images are in front of them. Having two panes of reflection would require two synchronous video projections, one on either side of the runway†. Because of the properties of this kind of reflection, the audience only sees an image on their own side, and not the one on the opposite side. Optically, the projected images would appear to be the same distance from the glass pane as the pane is from the projection screen. Probably in this case, the floating creatures would seem to occupy centre stage with the models.

The projection equipment and the screens are lower than the audience (maybe some of it is under the runway) and hidden by barriers that run all the way along the sides of the stage. The models can ‘interact’ with the images because they can in all likelihood see the projection screens down the right and left of the catwalk at their feet.

Here – I made a little animation that shows how it could be achieved:

The projected image is mostly likely corrected for the distortion of the slanted screens (unlike my example) and despite the claims of viZoo, who invented the technology‡, I don’t for a moment buy the idea that the image you are seeing is 3D. It might be a 2D projection of a rendered 3D object, but it is not 3 dimensional looking in the way that a real projected moving hologram would be (if you could actually do such a thing, which you can’t).

It’s a really, really clever piece of wizardry, for sure, but it isn’t done with holograms. And it reminds us that some of the best ideas are the very simplest.

Oh, and the clothes? No, I didn’t notice them either.

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*I once saw the technique used in a Star Trek show at Universal Studios where members of the audience were dematerialized in the Enterprise ‘transporter room’. It was a marvellous effect and I was so unprepared for it that I was completely flummoxed for a second or two.

†Or, perhaps, some kind of prismatic image splitter on each projector to make two identical images, one for each side.

‡And who, incidentally, never once claim on their site that their system creates holograms.

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Fri 10 Aug 2007

The Science Behind The Cow

Posted by anaglyph under Cow Matters, Hokum, Science, Skeptical Thinking
[8] Comments

I was browsing over at Nurse Myra’s this morning and on following one of her links discovered a sterling example of one of my all-time pet peeves: The Meaningless Scientific Diagram.

I’m sure you know the kind of thing – you’ve almost certainly seen it in those TV commercials for washing powder where a personage in white coat is telling you all about the ‘scientific’ basis for how the stuff gets your shirts whiter than white. Sooner or later, up comes a graphical ‘explanation’ of the virtues of the product. It usually involves arrows, a dumb, proprietary, vaguely scientific name like HydroLux or OxyFizz, and a formula.

And it always means absolutely nothing.

In this particular case it was a website for a product from ‘St Herb’ called Nano Breast Cream. Don’t panic ladies – it’s not a cream for causing your endowments to shrink to sub-molecular size, but in fact uses the miracle of nanoparticles to do exactly the opposite! Aside from ‘protecting your breasts from free radicals and visible cleavage*’ it enhances your bust from 1 to 3 cup sizes! Marvellous!

And this is how it works:

I don’t know about you, but one look at that diagram and I’m entirely ~~confused~~ convinced!

Elsewhere on the wonderful St Herb‡ site there is some explanation of the difference between liposomes and nanosomes with further visual aids:

I like this kind of diagram much better than the earlier one. I don’t know what the heck it’s saying about lipo or nano anything, but it is a striking endorsement of visible cleavage.

For a particularly good laugh, take a look at the instructions for how to apply Nano Breast Cream. Pay special attention to Frame 1 – I think she has a volunteer to help with the experiment!

Girls, I’m willing to wager that once you find yourself in the situation of having a friend towel your breasts dry, the issue of size is merely academic. I probably don’t need to draw you a diagram.

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*These are very puzzling claims. I don’t know of any research that indicates that free radicals are a detriment to breasts. Maybe they mean the kind of radicals that you get in university pubs? They can be a bit free and grabby after a few drinks. And then there’s the visible cleavage problem. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that some girls actually go out of their way to create visible cleavage.

‡St Herb. Ahhhh. Doesn’t that name just fill you with reassuring friendly naturalness! Either that or it conjures up an image of dirty old man called Herbert who is thinking anything but saintly thoughts about massaging women’s chests.

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Sun 5 Aug 2007

On Reflection IV

Posted by anaglyph under 7 Famous Mirrors
[4] Comments

7 Famous Mirrors (cont)

â€¢5: The Hubble Space Telescope Mirror

The mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope

Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey is credited with the invention of the telescope. Or at the very least, he is acknowledged to be the first person to try to put a patent on one. I read about Lipperhey a few years ago and was quite surprised to hear about him – like many people of my age I was taught in school that the first telescope was invented by Galileo Galilei. It was Galileo who made the first extensive annotated observations with a telescope, of that there is no doubt, but he must take his place in the queue when it comes to credit for the invention of that most marvellous of humankind’s augmentations.

Even Lipperhey was standing on the shoulders of giants. By now, it will not surprise you at all when I tell you that it was Leonardo da Vinci who, among his cornucopia of other spectacular ideas, first speculated on the possibility of magnifying the heavens, not with lenses, but with mirrors. Leonardo can wear the mantle of genius without any dispute.

In his notebooks, Leonardo writes about:

…making glasses to see the Moon enlarged… and advises would-be astronomers that …in order to observe the nature of the planets, open the roof and bring the image of a single planet onto the base of a concave mirror. The image of the planet reflected by the base will show the surface of the planet much magnified.

He has in fact outlined a principle that we would today find familiar as a reflecting telescope. Lipperhey and Galileo were viewing the night sky with refracting telescopes. Mirrors vs lenses, in other words.

Leonardo’s idea for magnifying the heavens is in spirit pretty much exactly like our miroir du jour – the six foot reflector installed at the heart of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The HST sits in Earth orbit far above the atmospheric haze that is our atmosphere and returns to us the most extraordinary images of the universe that we have ever seen. The Hubble Telescope optics consist of a fairly simple arrangement of mirrors called a Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain system. Basically, a curved mirror not unlike the one Leonardo described, is reflected by a flatter convex mirror into the telescope’s electronic detectors.

For the crispest, most efficient management of the faint light of distant stars and galaxies, it is crucial that these two mirrors are made to the most exacting specifications. Specifically, the technical requirements for the main mirror are that it should not deviate from a perfect curve by 1/800,000th of an inch.

One can only imagine the swear words that resounded in the NASA control rooms when it was discovered, shortly after its deployment in 1990, that the Hubble Telescope had a significant fault in its main mirror. The mirror’s manufacturer, the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, had made some critical errors during the 10 year process of grinding and polishing the mirror, which resulted in serious degradation of the images returned from the telescope. The problem was eventually rectified, first by using computer algorithms to compensate for the distortion added by the mirror, and then by applying corrective optics in front of the mirrors.

All screw-ups notwithstanding, the mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope can definitely take its place among the most famous of humankind’s mirrors. The Hubble now approaches the end of its useful life, as NASA prepares for the installation of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2013. The JWST boasts a mirror more than three times the size of the Hubble mirror, and there is no doubt at all that it will show us sights of which we have never even dreamed.

And most amazingly of all, it will still use the very same principle outlined by Leonardo so many centuries ago.

Thu 2 Aug 2007

Grok It Man!

Posted by anaglyph under In The News, Stupidity, Technology, Tragedy
[15] Comments

Fashion Statement

Sir Elton John, international pop icon and fashion maven, has called for the internet to be shut down.

The ~~Oddball~~ Pinball Wizard bemoans the fact that the internet “stops people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff” and instead might allow them to make their own music at home. This is, apparently, a bad thing because it “doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision”.

Elton John joins a growing list of people who think that the internet is some kind of intellectual property communist plot and will ruin the arts, the media and just about everything else in which they have vested interest. Foremost among these is the laughable Andrew Keen. Keen, who has described the net as a “grand utopian movement” like “communist society” and recently penned the whining Cult of the Amateur, is, however, very happy to use the net to promote his views through his blog and his podcasts.*

Elton sobs out his fear that there will be no more great art if that intertube thingy is allowed to continue unhampered:

“We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet.”

So there you have it you lazy bunch of no-hopers! What are you doing sitting around reading this. Go out an create a pre-internet work of genius!

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*You will note that in contrast to my usual method here on The Cow, I have not hot-linked any of Keen’s net presence instances or works, other than an information link to Wikipedia (a site which Keen detests, predictably enough). I consider him to be a major hypocrite, an elitist and worst of all in my opinion, an old-fashioned bore.

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