Angela J. Hill

Protect yourselves, for you may die of cuteness upon viewing these dogs at the Yoyogi dog park in Harajuku.

Many, many more adorable dogs in ridiculous outfits after the jump…

…meet, in this shining example of marketing:

YES, WE DO!

But wait, there’s SO MUCH MORE!

Look what turned up while I was uploading my photos from Tokyo!

I’ve been traveling for so long, I’m way behind on the outfit photos! But, I got a new camera (a Canon XTi) before the Tokyo trip, plus a tripod for Christmas and even a remote shutter control. Weeeee! So at least we’ve got this:

Included here:

• Grey boots from OIOIJAM in Shibuya (I’m pronouncing it “Oy, Oy, Jam!”)
• Fancy leather-embellished jeans from Apple Blossom in Noe Valley
• T-shirt with a picture of a samurai on it from just outside the giant Buddha statue in Kamakura
• Arm-warmers from a street vendor in Shibuya (I left the ones I made somewhere in Tokyo…whoops)
• Ring which appears to be made of soldered wire and beads from a boutique in Harajuku
• Necklace I made from Czech coins
• Japanese hair product chosen based on the color of its container (as a good a reason as any since I couldn’t read the description)

Katie is more industrious than I (and still stuck in Tokyo to boot) so has posted a few photos of our trip!

Wheeeeeeee! Katie and I are off to Japan in the morning for a week of sake-and-sushi-filled fun. Well, Katie has to work, but it’s all fun for me.

For New Year’s we showed up in these ridiculously similar outfits. Without discussing it, we both showed up with glittery things on our heads (my bird, her disco balls). Plus, we were wearing coats until we got to the party–imagine the dramatic reveal. Ha!

Taking things in a new direction, I started modulating pitch based on daily visits. (Well, technically, average hourly visits by day.) When I showed it to Gabe, his response was, “Are you talking to aliens or something?”

This one modulates the pitch based *changes* in visits per day. When you hear a blip of a high note, it means that day had a big jump in visits.

This one modulates the pitch based on the raw number of visits per day. This data spans a few years, so as the site gets more and more visitors over time, the pitch goes steadily up, with some seasonal regressions.

LOTS more to be done, but I am SO into the sound.

It is, indeed, done!

…and, the Glamour Shots:

This was more of a study with of the forms and media…I’m actually completely unhappy with the color, but wanted to experiment with flourescents a bit. The numbers are coated in two different media–a “lava” texture (the 1) and a glass bead gel (the 4). Look for a do-over with the “real” colors soon.

From xkcd:

I’ve actually just finished it, but I need to varnish and photograph it tomorrow. It’s amazing how a painting can come alive in the final details. Final pics up tomorrow!

I’m well aware that this will only be funny to family members and close family friends, but it’s such a miscellaneous moment from our little family Christmas trip, and plus Aaron is just so adorable. I think it’s the blinking.

This is what I’ve been been painting for the last several days…and this is what it’s looked like at various stages. It’s 36″ x 48″ and the texture is made with a variety of threads, strings, and other fibers, along with many, MANY layers of paint and mediums including a lava texture and glass beads. In the end the overall look will be similar to 14078. It (like the other) started as a small sketch–I spent a lovely morning at Kinko’s massively enlarging it to get to this point. I was surely beloved by all of my fellow customers as I taped and re-enlarged whilst monopolizing a copier. Surely.

The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea, by John Craven, deserves a place on the shelf right next to Blind Man’s Bluff. That is, if you can put it down. John Craven, who pioneered the use of Bayesian Search Theory to find lost objects at sea, recounts some of his adventures as an integral civilian working with the Navy throughout the Cold War. This is science in action; it’s critical thinking under life-and-death circumstances; AND, it’s SUBMARINES.

Finito.

…and a detail:

The Predictors: How a Band of Maverick Physicists Used Chaos Theory to Trade Their Way to a Fortune on Wall Street, by Thomas Bass, managed to combine my excitement about two recent books I’ve read, Chaos and The Black Swan.

Two things: One, I was really glad to realize that several of the predictive models I built for a recent analytics client followed some of the same methods of looking for patterns and of building models that would evolve automatically over time. Two, how can I invest with these guys? Because this is my style.