Molly Ivins has died of breast cancer. While the U.S. and its positions in the world got larger and larger, she managed to bring it back to one brush-clearing megalomaniac.

Check it out — the California Institute of Technology has been working on something called discrete differential geometry that, among other things, will allow for more strikingly accurate representation of fluid motion in computer-generated graphics. There are some great examples in the left sidebar of the linked article (under “multimedia”) — take a look.

Two things struck me about this. First, this kind of math is apparently designed specifically to be solved by computers and not by people. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds pretty cool — I’ll have to do more reading on that. Secondly and more immediately interestingly, the math breaks down after a while — I would have thought that liquid dynamics would be something you could calculate out to infinity, given enough processing power and enough data about the environment and the fluid you’re rendering. But apparently it bogs down after a while — the example in the article is that a whirlpool builds artificial viscosity after a while and may even begin to move in (presumably) the opposite direction.

So after all the processing we can throw at something like this now, it still seems that there’s some organic factor that we can’t calculate. That seems deeply neat to me.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/29/eagle.power.ap/index.html

Who throws out a deer head?

Per Megan’s request, a couple of pictures of our cats. Jenny Linsky is named for a cat from Esther Averill’s Cat Club books (a series of books for children that my dad used to sell for Harper and Row, so I had the whole collection), and Lovecraft is named for H.P. Lovecraft, a particularly demented gothic horror writer.

I just wish Lovecraft would learn to relax in our house … actually, if I keep taking flash pictures of him while he lies like that, he won’t relax anymore. Jenny Linsky spent the first two months of her life at our house under the dresser — she’s a bit on the skittish side. She’s coming around, though — she now sleeps on my belly every night, and follows Lovecraft around barking orders at him. That’s fine — he needs the direction to stay on point. And awake.

Michael “Brownie” Brown, former FEMA director, just can’t keep his mouth shut. He’s now appearing in the media again to say that the White House was playing politics with federal relief in the first days after Katrina. I don’t doubt that, but I just can’t believe the amazing stupidity of a man who, in light of his own colorful record of poor judgment, can’t resist the urge to go whining to the media a little more.

It’s like a compulsion or something. All I know is that if I had been largely responsible for the deaths of 1800+ people and the complete mismanagement of the rescue effort of countless others, I’d do my best to minimize my further appearances on TV. Or at the grocery. Amazing.

Three robbers in Lindenhurst, NY, were arrested easily after stealing 14 GPS devices from public works vehicles. This one ranks up there with the guy who tried to rob the gun shop full of cops on break.

So you may have heard me talk about Humanized, a company here in Chicago that is continuing and building on the legacy of Jef Raskin, one of the main UI designers for the Mac. His book, The Humane Interface, builds an interesting approach to pure user/computer interaction. Humanized, founded by Aza Raskin (his son) and three others, is beginning to build real-world applications using the ideas from The Humane Interface to bridge gaps between programs, creating a more unified user experience.

Enso is their latest offering — it’s not out yet, but it’s in beta and there is a demo film on their site. Take a peek, and read their site if you haven’t already. Good stuff.

Also, in their blog area, another designer named Braydon Fuller has posted a link to a video presentation of a UI project he did based on Jef Raskin’s theories. It’s quite compelling, and there are aspects of the new Apple iPhone interface that mirror some of the zoom techniques Raskin presented and that this Braydon Fuller person has implemented.

Anyhow, it’s fun stuff to read on a cold Tuesday afternoon. Take a look!

So I hadn’t thought to look at the Akismet stuff on my admin area for about week (actually, about five days), and when I did I found that it had quietly grabbed about 27 spam comments. It’s pretty keen — it holds them there and you can unmark them if you like, but you don’t get the usual e-mail about each comment awaiting moderation. It just puts them in my little digital Guantanamo where I can come view them at my convenience and decide their fate. So this is what it feels like …

Some weirdo has posted a site for Freedom of Measurement. He makes some good points and some bad ones, but overall comes off like a real loony tune due to his unfortunate tone. Check it out — the rabid frothing he’s doing about defending our right to measure using the English system is pretty funny. And all the animated GIFs of American flags are fun, too.

Personally, I think it would be great to convert to metric. We all start out with ten fingers and toes (okay, MOST of us), after all — our minds are already kind of used to base-10. But Great Britain seems to have kept its vernacular measurements while switching to metric for precision applications. But then we’d have to do math in our heads, something that Americans seem reticent to do. For me personally, it would make my drives seem a lot shorter (see #4).

The Daily Show is showing clips tonight of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room accidentally putting a “Where’s Obama?” caption on a story about Osama bin Laden. Further silliness has come from Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein. Wolf Blitzer said on the air that he would later call Obama and apologize.

What bugs me is this — one consonant seems to actually make a difference. CNN is now falling into this. I don’t know if this says anything about CNN and their position, but it says one hell of a lot about America and its lack of interest in BASIC LITERACY. Read, people. By this logic, Kim Novak would be equivalent to Kim Jong Il. If you’ve seen Vertigo, you may feel that this is a likely comparison of evil, conniving people. But really, it’s not. Although both had a love-hate relationship with Jimmy Stewart.

That’s a joke.

Anyhow, I kind of wonder how PBS or NPR would deal with this. The answer is, they would not. If they did, it would only be coverage of the other media outlets. Because it doesn’t matter. But this kind of stuff really does create an insidious, slow-moving idea in many people’s heads that Osama is somehow equivalent to Obama. And that Saddam Hussein is somehow equivalent to Barack Hussein Obama.

I chose not to bring up Kim Basinger, Kim Possible, Byung-yun Kim, or Kim Young-Sam, the president of South Korea until 1998. I thought this would weaken my argument about the clearly more militant Kims.

You’ll note that I chose NOT to exclude Kimberly from Diff’rent Strokes. She’s still on my watchlist, Dana Plato’s untimely death notwithstanding.