Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, 1920

Frog base crease-pattern.

Now what if we want to make a more complicated frog, perhaps with fingers and toes? We need extra paper! To get the full description, you need to read it in Robert J Lang’s book Origami Design Secrets, but suffice it to say, we can graft extra paper into the base as follows:

Frog base crease-pattern with grafts.

You can fold a frog as usual from the separated components of the frog base, and use the extra paper for fingers and toes. As a happy accident, the grafts also add paper at the head of the model, which we can use to model eyes.

Tree Frog. Designed by Robert J Lang, folded by me. (24cm kami, finished model ~9cm long).

The full instructions are in Origami Design Secrets as mentioned above.

1: Fold the four shorter points up inside. 2: Narrow the four longer points with mountain-folds. 3: Reverse-fold the first two points to form the front legs. 4: Reverse-fold the other two points to form the back legs.

I also mountain-folded the “nose” under in the model shown below.

Frog (traditional design) folded from 8cm kami, model approx. 3cm long.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of origami bases, start with the origami terms page here.)

Starting with the water bomb base:

Flap one:

1: Squash fold the flap. 2: Petal fold. 3: Fold the flap back down. 4: Book-fold in half.

Flap two

Double-rabbit-ear the flap.

Turn the model over (not shown).

Flap three

1 Rabbit-ear the flap. 2 Open unsink one layer from inside the rabbit-ear. 3 Book-fold in half.

Flap four

1 Reverse-fold the flap downward. 2 Reverse-fold the front and back layers of this flap.

The final result for each flap is the same; we have constructed the frog base from the water bomb base.

“Hose them out of there!” – James Wale. lol in reference to the London ‘Occupy’ camping trip. Brill

My reply on @markfiend:

@HollyS_ yeah because brutal police suopression of lawful protest is a right laugh!

(Typo in the original lol)Now I willingly admit that the snark-level was a bit high there but hey, it’s twitter, and there’s not a whole lot of room for nuance in 140 characters. But having said that, I stand by the tweet.

• Brutal: using water cannon on peaceful protesters is a disproportionate response.
• Lawful: The United States constitution explicitly provides for “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” in the First Amendment. Similar provisions exist in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 20) and the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 11).

Rights which are not respected when the government of the day disagrees with you may as well not exist at all.

Holly’s follow-up tweet:

@markfiend Also, these people don’t even have jobs! While most of us are out there busting our arses. I can debate -> bit.ly/rE7CIK

Frankly this strikes me as a bit of a red herring. (Technically it’s an ad hominem argument.) Whether or not protesters have jobs has nothing at all to do with whether or not they are right.

Now I happen to think that the protesters are right. Billions in tax money are going to prop up failing banks because they fucked up while our hospitals, schools, colleges, libraries, all kinds of public services, are being cut to the bone in the name of austerity.

The democratic ideal was meant to be “government of the people, by the people, for the people” but we seem to have moved into “government of the people, by the corporations, for their profits”. Is it any wonder that people are angry?

Now, having been a ZX Spectrum owner in my younger days, I knew what could be accomplished in 72×14 pixels with a little imagination, so I applied, stuck in a CV, a few illustrative designs, and crossed my fingers, thinking “I hope I get it; it’s a job that will tide me over the summer, at least.”

A couple of days later, my phone rang. “Hi, this is James, it’s about the logos job, would you like to come in for interview tomorrow?” So roll on the next day and I arrived at the offices to meet Tim, the owner and CEO of the company.

The entire interview: “Hi Mark, it says here on your CV that you’re interested in Bigfoot and UFOs?” (Well, you have to put something in the “personal interests” section don’t you? just to look like a “rounded human being”.) “Erm, yes, I read Fortean Times and they come at things from quite a sceptical angle…” “That’s great, when can you start?” “Oh… Er… well I guess I can start next week, once I finish college.” “Great. How does (generous salary) sound?” “Wow! Er… I mean…” “Great, see you Monday!” and with that, Tim breezed out, leaving James (his PA) to tell me the working hours, introduce me to the other staff and so on.

The logos I was asked to do were basically 72x14px rip-offs of the logos for designer sportswear, performance cars, Ibiza nightclubs, basically things that would appeal to the young aspirational market that Tim saw as the ideal mobile phone user. Also, a large proportion of the existing catalog of logos wasn’t working properly and needed to be converted to the correct bitmap file-format.

While I was slogging away at this not exactly taxing task, I was allowed to design a few of my own ideas as well, just to keep the catalogue a bit varied. One I was most proud of was of the Timmy character from South Park, with TIMMY! in big bold text next to him.

Once I’d been there three or four weeks, as well as designing the logos I started getting some training in how to draw up and submit the copy for the company’s print ads. After I proved capable, I was allowed to submit a couple unsupervised, I started slipping in a few of my own logos, including the Timmy logo.

Once the ads hit the news-stands, we looked through the sales stats. “Hmmm,” said Tim, “this logo number 2752 is selling well, what’s that one?” Of course, it was Timmy.

Fortunately despite (or perhaps because of) the coincidence of names, Tim thought it was absolutely hilarious. Eventually, over the next couple of years, the Timmy logo went on to sell about 40,000 copies at £4.50 a pop. This worked out to about £150k after the telecoms and middle-men got their share, and naturally South Park Studios got not a penny of royalties. (And incidentally, nor did any of the musicians whose songs were mercilessly turned into tinny little bleeps by our ringtone composer.) I just wish I’d been on commission not just salary!

To be continued…

1. Kindle definition & tree. Presumably commissioned by Amazon?
   
2. I’m guessing that the Finches are probably from Audubon’s The Birds Of America but I can’t find the actual image elsewhere online.
   
3. Virginia Woolf. From a photograph by George Charles Beresford.
   
4. Jules Verne. I can find similar images online, but not credited to the photographer.
   
5. First page of John’s Gospel from the Lindisfarne Gospel.
   
6. Jane Austen. As with Verne, above, I can find similar images online but with no accreditation.
   
7. Ralph Ellison. Unknown source.
   
8. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Unknown source.
   
9. Emily Dickinson. Again, I can find similar pictures…
   
10. Opiuchus and Serpens from Atlas Coelestis by John Flamsteed (1646-1716). Presumably the Kindle authors used a colourised version.
    
11. Johannes and Elisabetha Hevelius using a sextant to collaborate on astronomical research from The Heavenly Machine by Johannes Hevelius
    
12. Mark Twain. Unknown source.
    
13. I have absolutely no idea about this one…
    
14. The Fish look to me like it could be from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur but like Audubon’s Finches I can’t find the exact image online. Correction: as Sasha points out in the comments, it’s from Le Larousse du XXe siècle.
    
15. John Steinbeck. Again, I can find similar images but don’t know who they’re by.
    
16. Erasmus of Rotterdam by Hans Holbein, 1523
    
17. St Jerome in his Study by Albrecht Durer.
    
18. Albert of Mainz by Albrecht Durer.
    
19. Charlotte Brontë. Painted by Evert A. Duyckinick, based on a drawing by George Richmond. See wikipedia.
    
20. Palladio’s plan of Villa La Rotonda, in I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura 1570. See the wikipedia entry for the building.
    
21. Agatha Christie. Again, I can find similar, but uncredited, images online.
    
22. Alexandre Dumas. Unknown source.
    
23. “We’d love to hear your thoughts…” Unknown source.
    

Any help identifying the remaining images will be most gratefully received.

I don’t remember precisely when I first picked up Lord Foul’s Bane but it must have been back when I was in my early teens. I fell in love with The Land almost immediately, and I completely failed to understand Covenant’s Unbelief. It’s perhaps embarrassing to admit, but I had fantasies of striding The Land, wielding the white wild magic gold, and being proclaimed the saviour. In this I suppose I was much like Hile Troy in The Illearth War…

What I failed to realise is that in the First Chronicles the question of The Land’s reality is central to Covenant’s eventual victory; his Unbelief means that he is not too afraid of Foul to combat him, yet his love for The Land motivates that combat. There is no way that Hile Troy could ever have defeated Foul; Covenant’s Unbelief is the only way to win.

In the First Chronicles, Donaldson is careful not to make explicit whether the Land is truly real, notwithstanding the hints that the mysterious beggar from the beginning of Lord Foul’s Bane is actually The Land’s Creator. (It is equally possible that Covenant, in his delirium, has imagined this along with the whole of his experiences in The Land.) The paradox of the white gold seems to rely on the paradox of the reality (or otherwise) of The Land.

And yet, in the Second Chronicles, this perfectly balanced paradox is completely set aside. Lord Foul is able to reach out from The Land to possess Joan Covenant, to influence religious cultists, and of course Linden is taken to The Land as well. (This is even more so in the Final Chronicles, where Jeremiah has built replicas of Revelstone and of Gavin Threndor in Linden’s house from building blocks.) The question of the Land’s reality is seemingly settled. How then can Foul be defeated?

The Ravers

The Ravers’ names interest me; each of their “native” names (turiya, samadhi, moksha) are Sanskrit terms from Hinduism and Buddhism. All three words could be interpreted as meaning “pure consciousness”. Their more commonly used names (Herem, Sheol, Jehannum) are based on Hebrew words and mean approximately “accursed, outcast”, “the grave, the afterlife”, and “hell”.

Richard Dawkins posted on the Pharyngula comment thread about the incident… well, read it yourself.

I’m horrified by this. Does Dawkins seriously mean to tell Watson, in effect, to stop complaining because other women have it worse? Hey, Richard, apostates can be executed in Saudi Arabia, so you can shut up about creeping creationism in the UK and USA. The argument doesn’t work that way around, does it? So why should it work the way round you did it?

Worse still are the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of comments on three comment threads on Pharyngula actually defending creepy elevator guy, the vast majority of which are privileged clueless males defending male privilege (go figure).

For the terminally clue-impaired, here’s a link about why women have to treat all interactions with men with suspicion. And while you’re there, check out this guide to ignoring your privilege in online discussions.

Sometimes I despair of my fellow men.

Update: Phil Plait has weighed in on the issue here, saying the same as what I think, but in a much more eloquent fashion. Go Phil!

And kind old King George
Sent Mother a note
When he heard that father was gone.
It was, I recall,
In the form of a scroll,
With gold leaf and all.
And I found it one day
In a drawer of old photographs, hidden away.
And my eyes still grow damp to remember
His Majesty signed
With his own rubber stamp.

It was dark all around.
There was frost in the ground
When the tigers broke free.
And no one survived
From the Royal Fusiliers Company C.
They were all left behind,
Most of them dead,
The rest of them dying.
And that’s how the High Command
Took my daddy from me.

Roger Waters, 1979