The current featured artist at the Society for Human Sexuality is Glen Johnson , who has some nice environmental nudes in outdoor settings .
Adherents.com is a growing collection of over 30,000 adherent statistics and religious geography citations -- references to published membership/adherent statistics and congregation statistics for over 2,500 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, movements, ultimate concerns, etc.
What's a Szlassi polyhedron ? It's a toroidal heptahedron, an example of the smallest number of faces (7) with which one can construct a topological toroid. It also shows that with a map on a toroid you need at least 7 colors. Grab the cardboard and scissors and impress your friends.
Crumpling paper (the author says it better than me):
A while back I spent a great deal of time crumpling paper. Why, you might ask? Well, it turns out that many of the systems that physicists are interested in emit pulses of energy that vary broadly in energy with a power law distribution: a few examples are earthquakes, magnets and noise pulses emitted by materials under stress. Crumpling paper puts a world of interesting physics between your hands.
Spy Letters of the American Revolution
I'll remember which web log caused me to pop up this in a spare browser window tomorrow, but Xerox PARC (warning, lots of images for text and requires JavaScript) presents forums on Thursdays from 4-5 that look like they could be interesting. The next Xerox PARC forum is on the future of automated highway.
Next time you're looking for some light SciFi escape reading, consider shareware: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi is a fun quick read about friendly, but somewhat repulsive, aliens who decide that the right way to go about opening a relationship with earth is through Hollywood. A fun, quick read, if you like it he asks you to send a couple of bucks (he asks for $1, but once you slap a $.33 stamp on that puppy it seems like sending a little more isn't that much of a stretch).
Another negative population growth organization, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement .
Free software to create panoramic images , for GIMP/Linux and assorted Win/Mac editors.
One one of the many Linux mailing lists I inhabit, Chugalug , we've been talking about the ridiculous levels of modern computing technology. This morning on /. there was mention of MOSIX :
MOSIX is a software tool for supporting cluster computing. The core of MOSIX are kernel-level, adaptive load-balancing and memory ushering algorithms that are geared for maximal performance, overhead-free scalability and ease-of-use of a scalable computing cluster. These algorithms are designed to respond to variations in the resource usage among the nodes by migrating processes from one node to another, preemptively and transparently. MOSIX provides some SMP/NUMA functionalities in order to allow a cluster of PCs (workstations and servers) to work cooperatively as if part of a single system.
Should have looked a little further, the clean interface to those notes on video, audio and such is at the Consumer Electronics Education Project pages.
It's not pretty, but there's some great notes on audio, video and manufacturing technology if you're willing to dig a bit.
The Cleverest Band in the World , Columbia University's Marching Band. For instance, from http://www.cumb.org/scripts/yale98.txt
Judas: [pause] Hey, sucks about Peter.
Jesus: What?
Judas: I totally thought you were gonna hook up with him. All that about, "on this rock." That was smooth, man, smooth.
Jesus: Oh yeah.
Oh, and how could I forget about Jessamyn's naked librarians page ?
Jessamyn West (no, the other one, not that I'd heard of either before) has some neat pages to get lost in, personal pages taken that extra bit. Her book lists are quite interesting and have a couple of directions I think I should take.
Wear A Leatherman is a parody of "Wear Sunscreen" for the BOFH.
New at the Society for Human Sexuality , an illustrated article on Ithyphallic Imagery and Sex in Ancient Athens and The Original Whore with the Heart of Gold , or How the Sacred Prostitute Fell from Grace, and How She May Return.
How did the sale of sex go from paying to enter paradise to paying for something vile? If we can make ourselves one with the gods by intake of food and drink - an idea that far predates Christian communion - how much more so through sex, in its full regalia of joy, pleasure and emotional healing. And what exactly is wrong with money changing hands for it? We pay even for sacred food and drink, for ritual wine and bread have to come from somewhere. Why did the archetype of the sacred whore fall from grace?
Via Debra , Mark Twain's Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism (ftp://ftp.books.com/eBooks/Fiction/Authors/T/TWAIN/ONANISM.TXT).
I think I've posted this before, but Banned Width has some great Shel Silverstein pages, including the Greatest Smokeoff , which you Bay Area folks should appreciate:
In the laid back California town of sunny San Raphael
Lived a girl named Pearly Sweetcake, you prob'ly knew her well.
She'd been stoned fifteen of her eighteen years and the story was widely told
That she could smoke 'em faster than anyone could roll.
SETI would like to use your spare computing cycles to analyze radio telescope data while looking for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Another page on Tantra and tantric ritual
"If people could get liberated by smearing themselves with dust and ashes, are all the country folk, who live amidst dust and ashes liberated?"
A page from Black Moon Japanese Culture is one of my links further down, but they've also got some notes on Japanese food that look worth a read.
On the shunga theme, an interesting essay on sex in manga .
An essay on shunga , images cropped to leave out the naughty bits, but some background and a reprint book for sale.
I ran across "Shunga" today. being a typical westerner, pretty much ignorant of all but the history of the conquering culture, I did a net search. Shunga is a woodcut style of erotic art that came from Japan from the mid 1600s to the mid 1800s, what I think of as typical Japanese art except that the genitals are enlarged and clearly drawn, heterosexual and homosexual content. After looking at a few of these it's clear where the pornographic manga comes from, and it's interesting to see how the restrictions on how sexuality in the latter half of the 20th century have changed the depictions.
Unfortunately few images came up in a web search. The R. M. Degener gallery for Japanese woodblock prints in Germany has a bunch of shunga prints for sale . And Timeless Treasures has a number of prints too , along with Chinese and Indian erotic art. I prefer to help living artists with my higher end art buys, but it seems like at least some coffee table books are in order.
It's Dork After Dark , the Dommest Dom that ever Dommed, including the Seor Wences School of Fisting. Lots of D/s parody, funny even if you're vanilla.
One of the absurdities of modern life is that sometime it's easier to bounce a message from Richmond California to Fairfax California to Chattanooga Tennessee and back to Richmond by way of Chicago and San Jose or somesuch rather than try to copy a complex URL across the room. This is one such case: The Microsoft Active Directory Programmer's Guide
That aforementioned Lawrence Lee suggestion, Relisoft's MFC considered harmful to programmers paper .
Marylaine passes along Links from the Intersections of Art, Technology, Science & Culture . From Survival Research Labs to Brenda Laurel.
A Critique of the Windows Application Programming Interface
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com