Angela Brett
Mathematician and linguist by training, programmer by trade, physicist by association, writer by neglecting everything else.
Homepage: http://angelastic.com
Comic: Control Systems Explained
Posted in The Afterlife on September 25, 2011
I’ve been involved in control systems for various amazing things for the last six and a half years, and the other day I finally hit upon a way to explain what that is.
In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler.
Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few other things:
In reality, of course, it’s a little more complicated, the safety systems work, and I haven’t seen graph paper for far too long. This was just for fun. The big red button picture is a public domain image from wikipedia and the graph paper was from SciRep. All other art is by me, which is why it’s so terrible.
Video: Séjours linguistiques
Posted in Holiday Highlights, video on August 21, 2011
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, if only because it was an excuse to make a fort out of language books. Here is a video of my reading my poem Séjours linguistiques (originally titled ‘Discours inférieur’ in order to have a tenuous link to the playing card of the week.)
If I Made Adverts for Hair Gel
Posted in Holiday Highlights on July 8, 2011
They’d look something like this, only with a real model, a real hairdresser, a real photographer, a real graphic designer, perhaps a makeup artist, and some mention of a brand.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somebody else had already done this. I didn’t search, because I wanted to do it anyway. I had planned to wear a red bra over the top of the Superman T-shirt, but I forgot about it until a few hours after I posted this. Oh well; I remember Supergirl puts a bra on over the top of her clothes at one point in the movie, so it wouldn’t be so original for me to do it. Also, it probably would have looked terrible.
Completely unrelated, but important: don’t forget to watch the last ever space shuttle launch on NASA TV if you aren’t able to hold your breath for 20 minutes and fly alongside it, or can’t get to Florida in time.
Comic: Da Six-Fingered Mon
Posted in Culture, The Afterlife on February 20, 2011
Based on my experiences and those of many other people during the Jamaican stop of JoCo Cruise Crazy, this is what I imagine might happen if Count Rugen (the six-fingered man) from The Princess Bride were Jamaican. No offense to any people, real or fictitious, is intended.
If you’re not familiar with The Princess Bride, or you weren’t on JoCo Cruise Crazy and have never been to Ocho Rios, never fear. I’ve included a humour-crushing explanation of all the jokes and who they were stolen from below the comic.
For the bewildered:
Read the rest of this entry »
Stochastic induction of epizeuxis is my bird feeder made out of a coconut
Posted in News, The Afterlife on February 13, 2011
The following video is not an example of creative output on my part, for by giving Secretary of Geek Affairs Wil Wheaton the CERN T-shirt featured, I simply did what clearly needed to be done. I am nonetheless pleased to have induced what I believe to be an example of my favourite word, ‘epizeuxis‘:
Here is a picture of the card that comes with the T-shirt, which has an explanation of the equation (click for the text of the card and a higher-resolution version of the photo):
I have written an ‘origin story’ in the style of Peter Sagal’s, explaining the improbable series of events that led to my being on a boat in a position to give Wil Wheaton a CERN T-shirt, and drawing a parallel between the above video and Peter Sagal‘s bird feeder made out of a coconut. However, it ended up somewhat long (1000 words) and show-offish, and I have been too busy watching concert videos to edit it properly (indeed, I arbitrarily stopped editing it when I noticed the word count was exactly 1000), so I’ll put it below the ‘more’ thingy for you to ignore. I’m not sure whether all of the events are in the right order, but the story is 1000 words long so it’s too late to edit them now. It looks like I’ll even have to include the superfluous second introduction, since I accidentally included that in the word count.
It’s a shame, really, because I promised somebody I’d include the word ‘shanty’, and now I can’t edit it in. But you can’t argue with integer powers of the number of digits most humans have on their hands.
Valentine Day Massacre chapbook
Posted in News, Publishing on February 10, 2011
Just in time to arrive late for Valentine’s Day, Červená Barva Press have released a chapbook of poems mentioning the word ‘heart’, which were posted on Fictionaut in response to a Valentine’s Day challenge. I’m going to assume they removed the customary apostrophe and ensuing S in order to avoid any unintentional SQL injection. Anyhow, this book includes my scientific love poem, Chemistry, which you can see me reading while wearing two fake moustaches here:
The words and explanations of the science behind it can be found on a few previous blog posts, so I’ll just link to one of them.
Feel free to buy a copy of the chapbook for yourself or your valentine. I don’t get any money from it, and neither does anyone else except for the publisher, because apparently we did it for love, but if you buy it, you’ll get to read quite a varied set of poems, which will make you happy. Alternatively, you could read the poems on Fictionaut by searching the site for ‘Valentine’s Day Massacre’.
On the subject of fake moustaches, I recently went on a cruise with Jonathan Coulton and many of his famous friends and fans. The cruise featured a moustache formal, so if you would like to see how my moustache has changed over time, here’s a picture of me at the formal. I’ll probably post more about the cruise later, if I can come up with a sufficiently creative way of describing it. In the mean time, you could enjoy the many videos I took of the cruise.
Video: Return of the Pants
Posted in The Afterlife on February 6, 2011
You remember those red pants I wore in the ‘A Laptop Like You‘ and ‘Love Letters‘ videos? They weren’t mine. My sister gave them to me years and years ago, and after seeing how much they improved those videos, she wanted them back. So when I went back to New Zealand in May 2010, I took the pants with me. This is how it went down:
Since then, I’ve thrown the weird underwear I’m wearing in the beginning at Paul and Storm, because that’s what I do with weird underwear.
Here are the words to the ‘poem’ part, minus the oattakes:
YouTubers, I have a confession.
Two tubes in my possession,
once used to belong to my sister.
From before she was fat,
and she’s no longer that,
so in keeping them, I think I’ve pissed her.
While I wasn’t at fault just to wear them,
when their owner was not even near them,
to not give her credit was rude.
While they’ve not made me famous,
They’ve saved me from shame, as
They certainly made me less nude.
So it’s time to put things right.
I’ve suitcase and pants and a flight,
some chocolate to sweeten the deal and,
with a smile and a wave,
if the volcano behaves, (this was just after flights resumed after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption)
I’m off to see Liz in New Zealand.
Liz: I’m sure glad she’s coming;
the lack of pants is numbing.
I had to grow pubic hair to cope. (Note: this was originally ‘leg hair’ but she only had pubic hair handy)
After many a year
in just underwear
I’d just about given up hope!
Me: Here you go, sis, have your trousers;
their stardom is greater than ours is,
so go in the bathroom and strip.
Liz: I got my big bum in,
and my gruts hold my tum in
though I can’t quite do up the zip.
The rimshot-like thing and the word ‘pants’ which you hear after that come from Christian Davis’s recording of Jonathan Coulton playing ‘Mr. Fancy Pants’ at Park West on 28 February 2009.
You might have noticed I changed the theme of my blog. This was because there was at last a new variable-width theme with a customisable header, and I thought it might suit my ‘Creative Output‘ picture better. Unfortunately, the title of the blog covers most of the picture, so it didn’t really work.
E-cards of Yore
Posted in Old Stuff, The Afterlife on December 16, 2010
While you’re sending electronic cards to hundreds of your barely-remembered ones with a single click this holiday season, spare a thought for your parents and grandparents, who had to walk a long way uphill (both ways) in the snow to post their e-cards. They were so lucky; I love walking in snow.
I recreated an e-card from the pre-internet age so that young whippersnappers of today could see what they’re missing out on:
Old-fashioned e-card
It’s so hard to find a good card punch these days, but people back then were resourceful, so I had to be too.
Swiss soldiers could even write e-cards to their loved ones from the front
I made this in 2007 from one of the punch cards I rescued when a man I shared my office with retired, but it only just occurred to me that it was sufficiently creative to put on my blog. I didn’t have a real blog in 2007, so it’s fair enough.
There were real Swiss stamps commemorating 50 years of CERN, but I didn’t happen to have any on the day that I decided to do this, so I printed a fake one. I wrote the card in ASCII according to this. If I did it wrong, it’s because I’m not old enough to remember those days. If you know better, please share your wisdom.
Comic: How to get help with the command line
Posted in The Afterlife on December 15, 2010
The other day, I made a comment on a Spiked Math comic. I thought about modifying said comic to make one which would match my comment, but before I even had a chance to, Mike from Spiked Math had made one. Excellent, less ‘work’ for me! Here it is:
Well, I still felt like making my own comic based on the comment, so I extended this storyline to its logical conclusion:
So there you go. Don’t mess with the man.
I’d feel horribly unfunny explaining the jokes, which might not be very funny in the first place, so I’m just going to leave a few links here for those of you who are not familiar with all the subjects:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 