The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Building the Shack, Part 4

North and south walls will be indentical, so I've framed them together.

Dad had this 12" adjustable T-square with a 45 degree edge and a bubble level. Best tool ever made.

Windows will be on permanent hinges. Think it's best not to set them until the walls are assembled and the roof is on, to make sure the openings have squeezed into their final shape.

Getting the hang of some cross bracing tricks. Getting less picky on others. This is probably progress.

Had to deepen notches on one set of cross-braces after nailing the pieces into the frame. Slow.

Going through a lot of podcasts working down in the shop. Generally better than being being alone with my thoughts. "News Quiz" is back on BBC 4. Ace.

Still studying roofs. May be able to scrounge some old metal roofing, but will have to figure out a way to cut it.

West wall next.

Building the Shack, Part 3

Framed the east wall.

Mediocre joints. Still working too slowly and carefully.

Still haven't decided how to put the roof together.

Using nails here and there, when there shouldn't be sundering pressure. Having to pre-drill oak even to put nails in.

360° Panorama: Lobster Pound, Friendship, ME

Stitched together in Hugin from 32 camera phone pictures. Miller cylindrical projection.

Father and Daughter/From My Hands

This just about made me cry:

The video is 2000 Academy Award-winner "Father and Daughter," by Michaël Dudok de Wit. It's been mashed up with VNV Nation's song "From My Hands."

The Fetish Diary: Bandage Fetish

By now a well-known Japanese fetish, based on the injured Rei Ayanami character from Neon Genesis: Evangelion with a dash of Southeast Asian bird flu chic, I find I can't get behind this one. Perhaps it's meant to inspire sympathy, a desire to care for -- nurse a potential mate back to health and reap the benefits, but I'm always reminded of the line from William Gibson's Neuromancer: "Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he'd seldom seen in Chiba."

Building the Shack, Part 2

Replaced the frame of the picture window.

Removed the old goop and gave the window a preliminary wash. Cut a 1/2" x 1 & 3/4" channel into the new frame edges on the table saw, then removed the excess with a chisel.

Still need to improve at making joints, but started to get the hang of using a combination of bandsaw and hand saw to cut the corner bridles.

Used Silicon II to seal the glass into the channels. Fixed the corners together with screws.

Framing east wall next.

...As We All Must

Darwin Swag

YouTube Captioning: How to Build a Large Family

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CDIfbW0iCuE

You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video.

.oO(That... bitch...)

"...for sex."

It's strangely hard to scrub the bullshit smell from a hyphenated URL.

"...or sobriety, or even the inclination..."

Often?

A) Family planning  C) Rupert Grint        

B) Bacon            D) Their daughters seek
                        to fill the loveless
                   void by getting
                    knocked up at 15

Wait, what? Back up...

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

"Building a warren of tents and shacks, if necessary."

"Somehow."

(Just not one-on-one.)

"...you try to remember their names..."

That is a dangerous twitch.

"Or help them with their homework. Which is good, because most of you probably can neither read nor write."

"Just take it! Take it, bitch! F*CK FOR JESUS! *sob* Daddy, stop hitting Mommy..."

You get a phone call in prison.

"...shepherds them, if you will..."

"Mommy, I have a nail in my head."

"Stop being so needy and demanding, dear."

Unlike your husband, a tool who doesn't work.

"But what do I know? I'm just a woman."

Capped by Space Toast
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Building the Shack, Part 1

Finished framing the floor tonight.

Old boards Dad sawed on the bandsaw mill unreliable -- variable thickness, width and straightness. A lot of it's warped.

Getting better at using long clamps. Trying to use screws as much as possible.

Will have to get better at cross laps and joints -- plan to use a lot to add stability. Need to get better at marking pieces too; wasted a lot of time with a backwards cross brace tonight.

Frame came out diamond-shaped by about an inch. Seems sturdy though.

May box in and seal picture window. Corner of the frame rotted, but building a new one seems beyond my skills. East wall next.

Email to Twitch Film

Reader for about six months. Love the site content, and the hard labor of love work you guys put into it. I've discovered so many great films because of Twitch.

Hate the new layout. Here's why.

The readable 1-3 paragraph intros of the previous format made it possible to browse articles and glean a bit of information about each project. The nice big images were equally browsing-friendly. It was much easier to guage your interest in an article without additional pageloads. The wall of tweet-length teases and postage stamp-sized images in the new format provide almost nothing in comparison. The new layout reads more like a reference site, where individual articles may be teased but most readers are expected to come for the search feature, than a day-to-day news blog.

The Slashdot/BoingBoing-style blog layout was a much better fit for the great content you guys provide. I hate seeing the alchemy of SEO plastinate another great site into a cluttered 2000-era portal.

Intransigent Design

A discussion swirled up this week on 3 Quarks Daily over an item about scientists Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer withdrawing from BloggingHeads.tv after the site began including intelligent design creationists in its Science Saturday segments. The discussion was generally supportive of the scientists' decision not to support a platform that equates science with religion, with the exception of laudably non-anonymous Luke Lea of BornAgainDemocrats.com. My thoughts were as follows:

The scientific method can be applied to the study of anything that can be defined. It can't be applied to concepts whose definitions are constantly shifted around for the purpose of preventing science from examining them. We need to bear in mind the difference between a concept and a word game.

To present Intelligent Design uncritically -- and especially to give it equal time -- does a disservice to the public by equating it with science. I'm reminded of Dara O'Brian's skit about giving equal time to people who don't believe in outer space when NASA launches a satellite. Unless the Intelligent Design hypothesis can evolve into a falsifiable theory, it'll remain what it always has been -- a belief, comforting in its simplicity, but of precisely one cent less real world value than a lucky penny.

Mr. Lea responds, "Space toast: Space is an empirical concept, design isn't."

Luke: "Design" indicates a specific set of actions in 4-dimensional space. When I cut a board to size, I have designed it. When I measure once and cut wrong (sadly common), is the board still designed? What about if I find a use for it later? Indeed what if I find a board on the pile that's just the right size to begin with; is it "designed" for the purpose? While we're at is, how come trees are soft enough to be cut with metal blades, but hard enough to hold up an entire building?

It's a fun word game, but it's meaningless. The appeal of Intelligent Design creationism hinges on the common meaning of the word "design," but its philosophical assertions hinge on an invented cosmic special definition of the same word.

Design is a perfectly empirical concept, when one settles on a specific definition. It's only when ID's assertions come under attack that its proponents get "intelligent" and begin playing a definitional shell game.

And just to sate my own curiosity, is toast an empirical concept too?

YouTube Captioning: Theta Healing

More at YouTubeCapper.Blogspot.com, including TheDiva's continuing riffs on true WTF masterpiece Titanic: The Animated Movie, and KKDW's fun with a brand new skit from "Horrible Histories." Create your own here.

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