- For salome_st_john and other panda fanatics, the Knorr food people in England have a bizarre meat sauce-loving Brit panda as their spokespanda. (Put “panda”) in the search field at the site he links you to, or “knorr”.
- The next generation of cars may well use the Flexray network protocol to manage their real-time electronics like suspension damping and stability control, etc. Autoblog reports that BMW is using it on their next X series. Do any network wonks here know about Flexray? Is it a good standard? Will the cars keep getting problems in their switching protocols and forgetting to brake? I’m suspicious.
- Epod has an incredible photo of a mirage today. I didn’t know you could capture that kind of thing properly on film at all.
- Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day, to commemorate the end of the War to End All Wars, also known as the Worst Thing Ever in Europe. The Aftermath of World War One is devoted to the time after that war. Europe lost an entire generation and no one was untouched; it’s something we in the U.S. haven’t experienced and should learn more of.
- changeng toy piano alert: 3hive has mp3 downloads of Twink‘s toypianomania.
cause I gotta misdirection
Published
Be My Blog 
it is impossible to stimulate me to a higher level than this for this is the highest level of stimulation conceiveable.
and now we dance.
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re #1: people still think putting a computer in anything automatically makes Thing better? who still falls for that?
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wait 2. i meant 2. shit, why didn’t my computer fix that for me.
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Mirages
Mack here. Yeah, mirages are capturable. Witness any sensible road movie, with the heat shimmering off the road. Not as groovy as your total eschaton-time thing.
I can’t think of another one right now, but there’s lots of things you can see that surprisingly register on film. I know the bats flying around my head do not, and this fact is distracting me from thinking of examples.
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Mirage photos are kickass. But yeah, they’re photographable because the illusion isn’t the photons, it’s the way we interpret them to be reflecting off of something real there. Check out these ship mirages in Finland!
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Does anyone else remember the panda ad campaign for Snickers a few years back? “Pretty, pretty panda…” I loved those ads.
Now if only my alien infested computer would let me watch these Knorr ads without stopping and starting a bazillion times, I could fall in love with them too.
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Dammit all my favourite songs were done by either Pere Ubu or T.Rex first.
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About FlexRay™…
I had never heard of it before now.
The technical page suggests that it has some features at the MAC layer that aren’t really implemented all in one place by the IEEE 802 and 1394 network protocols. It claims to offer both synchronous communications and fault tolerance by redundant physical paths. That, I’m guessing, is the reason Daimler and BMW are going with it. On the other hand, it seems a little slow, i.e. 10 Mbps gross. I’m expecting a FlexRay™ 2.0 with higher data rates and a pressing need to upgrade all the expensive network controller, if not all the nodes on the network.
It’s not a standard. They’d really like it to become a standard, but at the moment it’s merely a specification. At some point, it might become a “de facto” standard, but the players involved are unlikely to be able to get FlexRay™ through a standards body without having to break compatibility. They may not even want to push FlexRay™ into a standard— that would probably mean complying with an intellectual property statement and publishing the specification and licensing the patents on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. The “motivations and goals” page doesn’t lead me to believe that’s on their menu.
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