This site created by Nancy (orangenarwhals) in Feb 2015 order to have fun creating things. The focus is on quantity over quality: practice, practice, practice.
Monday Music
A new piece of music, speech, or podcast every Monday. As flash fiction is to writing, so monday music is to music-making. or something.
Tuesday Terrible Startup Ideas
A new terrible startup idea every Tuesday. From concept, to user interviews, to wireframes. An exercise in product design and idea iteration.
Wednesday Writings
A new piece of writing every Wednesday. Flash fiction, poetry, generative text, ascii art, whatever involves text is suitable for Wednesdays.
Thursday Robots
A new robot every Thursday. Loosely, any electromechanical object is suitable (no, twitterbots do not count).
Friday Fotovideos
A new photograph or video every Friday. Street photography, tutorial videos, timelapse videos, those all belong to Fridays.
Saturday Scribbles
A new scribble every Saturday. Whether it is webcomics (An Incoherent World), typography, propaganda posters for the Hexapod Revolution, or random scribblings, it belongs to Saturdays.
Sunday Silly Papers
A new silly academic paper idea every Sunday. We show how everyone in the world, including people on the internet, can be a scientist by addressing the silly everyday questions with scientific rigor.
i developed this conspiracy theory that all crackpot websites shared the same visual language.
In general, a twisted visual style to match the twisted intellectual content. —timeblimp.com
Sadly my conspiracy theory has been dis-proven, which just goes to show how poor a crackpot I make 🙁
Thought: what do crackpot websites in other languages look like? Surely there must be crackpot Chinese physicists. do they make classical ugly websites along the lines of timecube.com? or is the more recent widespread internet usage in China than in US contribute to visual differences in crackpot websites there? What about Arabic or any other language?
Thought2: I should make a crackpot-CSS-styled website that actually gives very useful technical information, for instance serves up digikey datasheets.
Thought3: The complement to that is the take the trending-startup-webdesign or facebook design or hip bootstrap styles and make a slick looking website utterly filled with crackpottery. may encounter difficulty distinguishing it from your generic Industry Changing Startup website though. hmm.
anyway, you tell me which of the below websites are crackpot websites:
answer: all crackpots, probably, except weatherishappening (for sure) and hexnet (probably, he seems like a pretty chill dude. he showed up at hexacon2013.mit.edu, and really, if we don’t judge people who collect stamps (they even have a name, philatelics), why should we judge people who collect hexagons?)
NB: You can read this essay as science fiction or science fact. It’s up to you.
First Some Theory
One of the most elegant forms of ZPE devices is the Dirac Current Positron Generator. Once you can finesse the low energy generation of positrons from the quantum vacuum, letting nature supply the bulk of the energy requirement for the task, you then can release large amounts of usable “free energy” by simply letting the positrons annihilate with electrons under controlled conditions. …
What is nifty about our process, though, is that we can “freeze” the sc condensate into a permanent steady state much like the frozen positrons that are stuck inside the protons or like concubines sequestered in a harem. The sexless quark eunuchs insulate the sexy positrons so the poor horny bachelor electrons nearby just can’t get in close enough to mate with them and go out in the orgasmic glory they desire. So the charged up electrons do the next best thing and go into “mental” fantasies and complex ritual patterns. That generates EM fluxes and molecular structures that weave a complex web around the protons. A kind of “civilization” emerges with a wonderful variety of long-lasting sublimation rites.
wat. what did i just read.
watttttt.
yours truly in wasting time on crackpot websites,
~ orangenarwhals
The TimeBlimp Universal Theory of Crackpot Websites:
1. Horrendous grammar, spelling, and general use of language
2. Declaration that some pillar of science is completely wrong
3. Unprofessional, irritated, emotional tone to the explanations.
4. They usually have websites (what better way to publish to the masses), and their websites are almost always one gigantic continuous long stream of text and figures in one page. The site design is awful, with clashing colors, abuse of blinking text, terrible font sizes and colors. Oh, and they often use ALL CAPS TO EMPHASIZE POINTS, and embellish important sentences with lots of exclamation points!!!! In general, a twisted visual style to match the twisted intellectual content.
5. Invention of their own definitions
Head over to timeblimp.com to read in-depth reviews of each crackpot website, as well as the reveal of the winning crackpottiest crackpot website!
if I have been blogging a lot, it is because I redirected facebook to localhost on my computer via /etc/hosts, so here we go
1) THEY TYPE IN ALL CAPS…EVEN THOUGHT IT IS 2014… Their forecasts are often broadcast on radio for seafolks or airfolks using voice synthesizers. The ellipses are equivalent to a comma, but in the super early days they only had periods and ALL CAPS. The NWS keeps it this way to comply with global standards which include countries with old equipment. Their are proposals to adopt crazy new features like mixed caps and more punctuation signs.
