Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas used 15,000 hand painted Easter eggs to create a mosaic depicting the Virgin Mary on a wall of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev. Now that is some amazing artwork. The traditional Easter eggs are made of wood and painted in the traditional Ukrainian style.
Source: ZuZu Top.
– Suramya
As some of you know, I am not a big fan of modern art. To me most Modern art looks like a five year old’s experiment with paints. To me that’s not art. Painting a blue line on a white canvas and calling it art is just plain silly in my opinion. A lot of people have tried to convince me otherwise but I stand by my statement.
The painting below on the other hand is art. It takes skill to paint like this and this is what I consider art not some random squiggles on canvas. Yes, you read it correctly the image below is actually a painting. Cool right? The artist’s name is Alyssa Monks, check out her site for more paintings by her.
Visit TheToyZone.com for more images that are actually paintings .
– Suramya
This is a site that I have been meaning to write about for a while as its been sitting in my Drafts for a couple of months now. So I finally decided that it was about time I blogged about it.
Basically what this site does is that it uses your browser history to figure out the probability of you being male or female based on the kind of sites you visit. The script basically polls the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited by the user and then applies the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determines a guestimate of your gender.
Seems to work quite well too. I have checked it on a couple of systems and it does seem to get the percentages right. According to this system’s history I have a 98% probability of being a guy.
Check it out: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender
– Suramya
While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.
For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome
Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.
The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.
The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.
Source: blogoscoped.com
– Suramya
How do you know that giving books away for free increases sales? When most major publishers start giving for free samples on their site. Yesterday while going through an author’s site I found a link to Suvudu Free Book Library which is Del Rey’s free book library.
I have told you earlier about Baen Books that has the Baen Free Library for free downloads of books. Even Tor books has its own mailing list where they send out free books once in a while.
So it seems pretty clear to me that book publishers are realizing that making free copies of books available doesn’t necessarily mean lost sales. I think the music industry and the movie industry should take a good look at these sites and try to understand that people who download most are usually people who are huge fans and usually people who end up buying the most.
It takes me about 3 hours to finish a book and I read a lot. The way I discover books and new authors to try is by downloading a book by the author and seeing if I like it. If I do I usually end up buying most of the books by that author. e.g. Mercedes Lackey and David Weber are my favorite authors but the first books I read by them were ebooks I downloaded from the Baen free library. Now I have pretty much every book written by either of them in Hardcopy.
You have to realize that there is a small percentage of people out there who will not buy the book and would rather steal a copy to read, but then again these are mostly people who would not have bought a copy anyway. The advantages and the free publicity you get is phenomenal.
If an author is good people will go out of their way to help out. For example David Freer is moving to Australia from Africa and due to the exchange rate dropping he doesn’t have enough money to pay for the quarantine of his pets. So he put up a story jar where he will to put up a chapter a week of his latest book “Save the Dragons” assuming that he received enough donations to pay for that chapter. Each chapter costs $400 (US) and so far fans have put in $4855. That’s a lot of money put in in a few weeks.
If you like his books and want to help out make sure you visit: Save The Dragons
What I am trying to say is that we are not all thieves out here. So stop treating us like criminals. For a more detailed analysis/discussion of the problem you should read the Introducing the Baen Free Library by Eric Flint. He is an author with a huge list of published books and he does a great job of explaining why people downloading books doesn’t hurt the authors in the long term.
– Suramya
As most of you know, once anything is posted on the web its literally impossible to get rid of. Lets say you post a picture on your blog, it will get archived by any number of sites like the Way Back machine, Google Cache etc etc or anyone can copy it to their system and repost it. So even if you remove it from the blog someone with time and patience can find it again.
To counteract this University of Washington has developed a system called Vanish, which will (according to them) will allow users to create a self-destruct system for information posted online. According to the site:
The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called “churn,†on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.
Ok, so according to them the data at the original source will get deleted. What I don’t get is how they are planning on getting rid of data copies that were made by caching services (Google etc) and archive sites (Wayback machine etc).
Lets say I have encrypted the data and a little later the archive spider runs and creates an image of the post. Now if I access the site image I will see the encrypted data which should expire correct? Nope. These spiders usually function like a normal webbrowser i.e. they will do a normal http call to get the information. So if the creator of the spider adds the code to decrypt the data using whatever logic Vanish uses (keep in mind that this info will be available so as to allow people to create plugin’s etc for regular browsers) they will have a snapshot of the clear text message/image/whatever as long as the spider runs before the message degrades to much.
In all its a pretty cool concept but I wouldn’t be using it for any really secure communications.
Source: A tool to make online personal data vanish
Vanish Details and Paper: http://vanish.cs.washington.edu
– Suramya
A friend emailed this to me a couple of days ago (Thanks Manjari) and I have been meaning to share this since I got it. Finally sharing it now…
This new, beautifully-designed line of bottled water – this time not from the melting Alps, nor from faraway, clean-water-deprived Fiji, but rather from the contaminated ground near the site of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe was launched recently in London.
The unique qualities of this water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world’s largest industrial accident.
Here’s a close-up of the label:
The Bhopal gas tragedy was one of the biggest industrial accidents in history. For those of you who are not aware of the story here’s a brief synopsis:
On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal. Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site.
Till date Dow Chemical – who bought Union Carbide – has refused to clean up and thousands of people are still suffering because of their callousness.
Source: B’eau-pal: Our Story…
Learn more about the Bhopal gas Tragedy
– Suramya
Lego seems to have an attraction that few other materials can match. If it has been made someone out there has created a copy of it in Lego. Lego artists have created Churches, replica’s of paintings, computer cases etc etc.
In that tradition I give you Marco Pece who has recreated famous paintings in lego. Below one of his creations where he has recreated the Famous Mona Lisa in Lego:
Visit the site to see the remaining paintings by him. They have copies of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Jan Vermeer’s Pearl Earring and more. Definitely worth a visit.
Check it out at: 10 Famous Paintings Recreated in LEGO
– Suramya
The artist on this amazing site has taken old photos of a city and merged it with new photo to create some amazing remix photos. The skills required for create something are phenomenal. Here are some of the ones that I especially liked:
Pretty cool eh? Check out the rest of the images here.
– Suramya
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