For exactly 27 more days.
You can listen to clunkyrobot radio.

All the songs that are in my playlist. Brought to you by the people who made audioscrobbler. last.fm, providing UK based completely legal user specific streaming audio. With the service you can listen to my songs, flag the songs you like, adding them to your profile, skip the ones you're not keen on, and even ban the ones you outright hate, so you'll never have to hear that weird Ween song again (although I can't be sure you won't regret how great they are later on). This means you can even customize my custom playist to your even more specific tastes.

That has got to be one of the coolest uses of the internet I've seen so far.

I once wrote a very lame poem about the Universe. The exact wording of the poem I won't go into, because much of what made it so bad lived in it's wording. That, and the simple fact that it was a poem, which in most cases, although not all, instantly dooms any grouping of words.

The poem was about Mathematics as a replacement for God. It was about thinking of those things that are so large in scope as to be incomprehensible to me. The act of thinking about them, that's what gets me closer to God.

Yeah, here is an article I thought was interesting:

Nonstandard Mathematics and a Doctrine of God

Audioscrobbler is a plugin for your mp3 player. It documents all the songs that go through your player, in my case iTunes. It sends that information to the audioscrobbler server where it is listed in deatil. It shows your top rated albums, top rated songs, the last 10 tracks you listened to, and how often you listen to them. Do you want to know more about my musical tastes than is reasonably healthy?

The audioscrobbler profile for clunkyrobot.

As I mentioned earlier, C.A Childers is putting together a new book of poetry titled An Education for Field Mice. I've designed the cover for the book.

cover:

Here also for your total digital experience are matching desktops to take with you on your computational journeys throughout the internet.

And Education for Field Mice @ 1600 pixels wide
And Education for Field Mice @ 1024 pixels wide

Right before The Ben Folds Five broke up, and even before Ben Folds went singular, he put out an experimental solo album called Fear of Pop. Fear of Pop, a cryptic, hard to find, art-school-esque offering that's always been a favorite of thoughful painting and sculpture types everywhere. In fact, there were many times we would listen to tracks featuring William Shatner and laugh and laugh... and laugh, that's three times we would laugh. William Shatner, doing his infamous breathy spoken word readings of the song lyrics. Akin to the much parodied (which is funny considering it's a parody itself) Rocket Man, and to lesser extent the old Priceline.com commcericals. (that also starred Ben Folds on drums)

Well almost 5 years later Willy Shat's and Ben Folds have gone back into the studio. This time they took a third... Joe Jackson. Joe Jackson? No... Joe Jackson.

Here is a sample of their new effort. A cover of Common People by Pulp. (link via Chocolate and Vodka)

July 20th was the 35th anniversary of the first moon walk. Now, for the first time in Fullscreen QTVR. As photographed by Neil Armstrong. Quicktime needed. (link via kobyrama)

This panorama was created by Hans Nyberg, who has also done panoramas of The Royal Wedding of Frederik and Mary, and Wall Painting in Danish Churches.

The familiar audio is that of Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon.

I met David Barnes at a mutual friend's Bachelor party. It was during that Bachelor party that David showed me some of his drawings. And yes, we are so dorky that at a friend's bachelor party we were looking at drawings. That's how we roll.

I really liked his stuff. The drawings have a soft touch to them. I would describe them as "delicate." But the lines are strong and deliberate. There is a carefree feel to them that I sometimes wish I could achieve. I often get too caught up in making my drawings as "tight" as possible, I miss out on the fun of drawing, and that's what comes through in David's drawings. He's having fun drawing. Yeah, ok, enough with the art school crit. Check them out for yourself.

For a very reasonable fee, David will draw a custom portrait for you. A perfect gift for a loved one or pet.

Friend and collaborator C.A. Childers is compiling a new book of poetry, it is titled An Education for Field Mice. It's a follow-up to his critically acclaimed and well received Always Be Closing, which itself was a follow-up to his first collection of poetry Raft.

I'm pleased that he's getting a new collection of poetry out this fast, hot on the heels of Always Be Closing. It's easy to get comfortable, I know because I've gotten lazy, and haven't done any new drawings in a while. That's why this new book is exciting for me also, as C.A. has asked me to design and illustrate the cover for this new book.

I've been wanting to do some more illustrative work. And looking at The Preshaa will always get me itching to draw more. I'll post a preview of the cover art when I get something worth showing. Until then check out The Clearing House on C.A.'s site for his publishing news.

Ok, Apparently the Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan is that he likes to participate in over the top, wholly unbelievable mock-u-mentaries. But, and this is where I largely disagreed with all those in attendance, that is exactly why I loved it.

As I mentioned before, the Sci-Fi channel was given "unprecedented access" to M. Night. But what started as a normal documentary soon became something more. We were told that we would learn something inherently creepy and mysterious about M. Night.

Did we really think we would learn something unbelievable? Like, he's an alien, or he's protected by a ghost... Or, would we simply allow ourselves to be entertained by the thought of learning something unbelievable. Now, and this is not to say that I would sit and allow someone to shovel crap into my brain for 3 hours, (Yes, 3 hours) that is why I welcomed the over-the-topness of the documentary.

Because, for this whole ridiculous thing to be entertaining to me, it would have to be over the top, otherwise what's the point. To really try to convince me? That's probably not going to happen, especially when the film makers wheel out the old "blow up and enhance a specific portion of the video" trick to reveal a mysterious figure in the background. But, when I look at that same trite enhancement scene with a large portion of cynicism, the scene changes. It changes, from being a stupid scene I've seen a million times, to a comment on a scene I've seen a million times. It becomes meta-art. And I love that stuff. (it also helps that most of the acting is perfectly awful) My only hope is that the film makers did intend for the film to be so ridiculous, otherwise, they've just made the same old crap.

Don't ya think?

"I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it."
- Stephen Hawking July 14th, 2004

Strong Sad and The Cheat have directed a music video for a new They Might Be Giants song Experimental Film. The song is to be featured on the new TMBG album The Spine.

The joke of the video is that it's two different "experimental films" intercut together. The first, very much in the style of The Cheat, with bad drawings and traditional cheap The Cheat style flash animations. The other very much in the style of Strong Sad, complete with bad short film clips like Strong Sad shaving his face in a mirror, or dressed like the Grim Reaper looking at himself through bad trick photography. As the video progresses, the two films cross, and become one even weirder film.

as a side note:
While in Michigan the clunkyrobot tried to go see TMBG play in Ann Arbor, the tickets were $35... shew! To rich for our one-income household.

also,
You know you've made it when you get your own wiki website, not a wiki page mind you, a whole site. Although the countless faithful internet fans and t-shirt wearers might have tipped you off first.

Oh, and we were pleased to see this at the office this morning.

The Sealab 2021 Season 1 DVD is rated at #26 on the Amazon.com top sellers list. It looks like we will definitely be getting a Season 2 DVD, and I think I heard some rumors about a semi-confirmed Season 3 DVD. But we are always the last people to hear about that stuff.

We've seen break dancing transformers. Now, these transformers don't dance, but here is a guy who has painstakingly recreated about thirty G1 transformers as detailed 3D models. (that's generation 1 transformers, the ones form the original cartoon, not that abomination Beast Wars)

He has rendered them as both robots and vehicles, or whatever it is they transform into. But he's also animated many of them actually transforming. That, my friend, is no small task. (via boingboing)

I read a story that blew me away.

I recently bought the McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. It had, as one of it's thrilling tales, a story written by Nick Hornby. Hornby wrote High Fidelity, but this isn't that story. This story is called Otherwise Pandemonium. You can read an excerpt from it on the McSweeny's website. It is written in the way that I like to read stories. It's written as if you are being spoken to. I like that, it's a harder way to read a story, it cuts, backtracks, digresses.

Here's a snippet:
"So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don't, and not just because I haven't got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It's not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren't going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real."

You can also get McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales as an audio book from the Apple Music Store.

Fellow robot and multi-talented blogshpere resident Little Toy Robot has been producing a feature on his website that I've been meaning to talk about. It's called Robots I have Known, and the premise is that the Little Toy Robot is a time traveler who zips around space and time, landing himself alongside famous robots of fact and fiction. Complete with source notes.

They are well written and entertaining. In the first Run, Robbie, Run, LTR meets Robbie from Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. I could make a Will Smith joke here, but what's the point right? How about instead of a joke, I break the already disjointed continuity of this post and talk about the latest stupid thing I heard Will Smith say.

While watching the exciting HBO First Look at I, Robot, Will Smith was seen, by me, to say the following.

"You can't just make an action movie anymore, You have to have a story that works first."

This guy is just now realizing this? How many movies has be put us through before he figured this out? I could look it up on IMDB, but why put myself through that kind of agony.

The Preshaa has been updating his website less frequently as of late. As I've said before, he's going to school for his Masters in Illustration. So he may be on some kind of international summer break. Who knows how people in other countries do stuff. I'm not taking the time to learn, god bless merica.

But he has given us this offering, titled Red Ridinghood.

Man that guy can draw.

I want to re-teach myself calculus. Meaning, I want to learn it for the first time, again. I was always good at geometry, but only because I could fool myself into thinking I was drawing. And also because it's all spacial, and I'm keen on spaces. Calculus, and it's bigger meaner brother Trigonometry were often beyond my grasp for a combination of reasons, but mostly because in school I was more concerned with drawing robots. Whole notebooks full of them. In grade school I once filled an entire spiral notebook with drawings of Garbage Pail Kids, painstakingly recreated, one per page, all 100 pages filled. I was known as the kid who could draw Garbage Pail Kids, it didn't make me any cooler, but it gave me an identity. Which, for a guy like me, was weird.

I've been researching different ways to teach myself calculus. I stumbled onto the work of this man, Abraham Robinson. He developed a way of thinking about numbers using Infinitesimals. According to the Math Dept. of the University of Hawaii:

"Infinitesimals are numbers which are smaller in absolute value than every positive real number.  Other than the number 0, it is difficult to imagine that any such object can exist."

Numbers that are smaller than every real number. It seems that for a long time these Infinitesimals were considered "useful fiction" by the mathematical overlords. Only recently have these theoretical numbers been used to teach calculus students.

This is a free online textbook (here in one big PDF file) using Abraham Robinson's controversial infinitesimals to teach college level Calculus.

I'm doing it.

This appeals to the 13 year old G.I. Joe fan in me. I can only hope the pilot's call sign is "Wild Bill."

Mi-24 Hind attack Helecopter