String Notes

That was helpful, not that I give myself any credit for it. Although it’s likely that some of the five hundred or so people who visited one of my sites yesterday didn’t know much about SOPA/PIPA, and maybe they clicked on the EFF link and learned something.

But you know industry’s concerns about the internet aren’t going to go away. This is something to keep a careful eye on, if you’d like to be able to use Wikipedia and YouTube and Flickr and Twitter and Facebook and Google, and this site, all of which are in jeopardy.

If this site, in its entirety, is down tomorrow.

SOPA and PIPA are utterly appalling pieces of potential US legislation, and would likely destroy the internet as a community.

Not that I expect my tiny participation in tomorrow’s blackout campaign to have any effect, but I want to add my support. The internet has been crucial to my life in many ways, and all of them could go away. All of the sites I maintain will be down, including the business pages, joining many much more influential sites. Like, oh, Wikipedia, and Reddit, and Boing Boing. (Note: this won’t affect the LJ feed; I have no control over their servers.)

Here’s one way to join in if you maintain a website of your own.

And on second thought, be very alarmed.

Edit: All rumors to the contrary, SOPA is not dead, just tabled until February.

Also, irony is not dead.

Administrative tasks expand to fill the available space. Despite the long weekend, I’ve neither written nor woven. Many other things are done, though, or at least well-begun.

[Oh look... the upgrade mucked up the categories. Hm. Will fix that at some point, I suppose.]

I thought you all might like this article on crocheted clouds.

Though there are many types of cumulus cloud, they are all united by their fractal nature, which prompted Najle to turn to crochet to capture their complex, cauliflower-like topology. Najle says crochet is the perfect medium for representing fractal structures because its surfaces can be subdivided again and again by varying the length of neighbouring crochet lines. This can create the necessary curvature for cumulus clouds, in much the same way that crochet has been used to represent the hyperbolic surfaces of corals.

So I spent the afternoon working on the website. Nothing should have changed from the outside, but the serverguts are all pretty and shiny and clean: updated, backed up, tweaked and twiddled.

I don’t think I broke anything, but I trust you to let me know if I did.

The main part of this side (the non-blog part) desperately needs to be brought into the 21st century, but that’s a bigger task than one afternoon.

Edit: ah, it broke my widgets. I think I’ve got everything back except the blogroll, which requires curation anyway. A previous update broke tagging on older posts; that’s still to do as well. Behind as usual…

It’s Elvis Presley’s birthday, and R.L. Stein’s. Stephen Hawking turns a rather remarkable 70.

David Bowie turns 65.

While collecting links for the paper art post, I ran across Debbie Smyth’s thread art. Not the 1970s geometrics, but something entirely different.

My mother sent me some information about paper artist Calvin Nicholls. His sculptures are too lovely not to share.

These sculptures are constructed from carefully cut, shredded, folded and glued paper.

Aren’t they amazing? And prints are quite reasonably priced.

I’ve spent the day organizing things both physical and virtual, in support of my goal for the year: read good things, write good things, make good things.

The bread’s in the oven, the soup’s on the stove, a dyepot is simmering, and I have a moment to blog before they all need attention.

Nick and I went down to the State College First Night celebration last night. We admired the ice sculptures, pleased for once it wasn’t raining (though it did today).

A real fire-breathing dragon!

We watched the parade.

And rang in the New Year.

I wish for you and yours a strong, solid year, full of things that please you, and only a few minor things that don’t.

Taken this morning. Those are snowdrops. It would be nice if it had, oh, snowed. Or if it weren’t the winter solstice.

Free music from Performance Today through the end of December: songs from Calmus, New York Polyphony and Chanticleer. Some of my favorite traditional/medieval Christmas songs, plus some I was unfamiliar with.

The next Textilforum is officially announced: Metals for Textile Crafts, in Germany in September 2012. That would be a first-rate topic for Nick and I to participate in, but I’m already scheduled to teach at Complex Weavers during that time. Drats!

Via Eric: