How do you get to sleep at night, when your brain is still working in overdrive, digesting the stress from the previous work day ? Some people use ambient music, composed from samples and recordings of naturally occurring sounds, like wind, water or birds, or music like new age.

I like dark ambient. It's the darker, creepier opponent of the 'regular' ambient music. The king of dark ambient is Lustmord, and the album 'The Place Where the Black Stars Hang' has been my favourite for years. I recently searched for some other dark ambient recordings, and this is what I found :

* 'Celestial Geometries' from Oophoi & Tau Ceti, an enigmatic and deep album of slow dynamics, ceremonial intensity and methodical pacing. Synth pads grow, thicken and gentley shift, a creature calls from the distance through a mist of reverb and echo, harmonics alternately become dense then fall away to a shiny smooth ribbon of sound. This album does not lead, but stays right with us as we navigate a way through whatever scenario the composition brings out: exploring the surface of some distant dead planet, or as the title implies, traversing some great distance in the vacum of space.

* 'The Magnificent Void' by Steve Roach is truely deep space music : a sonic journey to the true depths of inner space and beyond that flows through you,making you not a passive listener but part of the music.

* 'Nostromo' by Sleep Research Facility : by far the best album, ultra deep ambience, based on the first 8 minutes of the movie `ALIEN` which depicts the deep space haulage vessel slowly moving through the void. The disc takes you through a slow trip into the ship via tracks DECK A through E, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the `NOSTROMO`. Colossal dark ambience from the abyss, with beautiful artwork that evokes the sinister atmosphere of the ship.

This site has listed everyone's PIN code number. It even contains the pincodes of my mobile, and my bank card. Shocking ;)

If you use the 'Search' option on your browser to look for articles on Neural Networks or "Connectionism" (which is another name for the same subject), you will find a great many sites explaining what they are and how they work. Unfortunately, they all seem to be written by mathematicians, all of whom speak Double Dutch. This is fine, providing you speak fluent higher mathematics, but when I wanted to find out how they worked, I looked from a programmer's point of view. What if I really wanted to find program source code, would I find any? Here, the idiots guide to neural networks comes to aid.

There's nothing more startling than rising from your lazy couch at evening dusk, and seeing a hot air balloon landing in the field behind your garden. This baby, marked with advertisement from a technology education center in Mechelen (100m from my work !), dumped itself in a corn meadow. 5 minutes later, the companion car arrived and the great folding could begin.
Mark the dark spot above the ballon in the picture. Even at higher resolution, I have no idea if this is a bird (maybe a bit large, no ?), a blow of hot air, or a piece of venting sail from the balloon.

Hot women and magic swords
Because you'll never have either.

Inspirational posters for gamers.