Wow.
The textures generated by this systematic art creation are really cool, in-and-of-themselves, but really, isn't the thematic idea behind it all a bit of a pretentious wank?
Looking at the images as a set of four [what's a triptych of four called?], one gets no comparison or comment on the way the Playboy Idealized Female Form™ has changed in the last fifty years: From the busty girl-next-door with the hour-glass-figure of the Fifties and early Sixties, being a little naughty; to the bored and gauzy-looking Seventies; through to the ultra-poseable (though racially and culturally more varied) plastic dollies of the late Eighties and beyond. That'd be a more significant revelation in and of itself: much more revealing than the fact that all Playboy centerfolds are - surprise! - composed with the model standing or reclining right down the center of the image, and how the "naughty bits" are pretty much aligned at the 1/3 (top-to-bottom) and 2/3 positions.

(wow, that came out kinda harsh, but I really did like the textures, and I'm in no way adverse to looking at naked or nearly naked females! Hell, nearly everything on my site is built out of "rehabilitated porn," stolen from Usenet and assayed for colours and textures to use in my image-making.)

That's a really good point about the changing nature of the Playmates. You could pretty much read the general shift of the pornographied male mind by flipping through each decade. I, for example, would be intrigued to find out precisely when the war on pubic hair began -- i.e. when the playmates began trimming their hair back further and further until it assumed the "landing strip" format of today.

BTW, that art you're doing rocks the house, sir!

[*blush* thanks, I appreciate that.]

"Trimming" is another factor, I'm sure, in the changing Ideal™. I imagine its some sort of oscillating wave:
1. Hef publishes a literate and cool magazine for self-styled "playboys" and wannabes that makes "nudie pics" a little more respectable, hence more likely to be consumed and discussed.
2. As it gets more openly discussed and commented on, Playboy gets feedback about how they're doing when it comes to featuring women. Some stylist somewhere, somewhen gets the idea to just "neaten up" some woman's pubic hair, or some woman who's a little radical herself styles her pubic hair that way.
3. This image makes it into Playboy, and men everywhere start thinking about how much of the Truly Naughty Bits they're getting to see, perhaps mentioning to their female partners, or their want-to-be-partners,
4. Women, reacting to the subtle and not-so-subtle impressions given them by men who consume these images start taking up trimming themselves.
5. ...And the serpent eats it's tail...

Interesting to note, too, in the last few years how piercing (and not just in fetish circles), and tattooing, both considered pretty hard-core just a decade ago, are now moving toward more mainstream visibility. Playboy's still holding out on that, for now, as I bet Hef still thinks of the Playmates as "the girl next door" on some level...

...And I confess: the first time I was in a relationship with a woman for an extended period of time, I was a bit amazed at how far the natural coverage "down there" could extend (you can see I'm trying to tip-toe around being crass: forgive me, she reads your site!). My adolescent experience with porn and relative inexperience with real women had lead me to conclude that there just wasn't that much pubic hair, really.

I really like your description of it as "landing strip."

peace.

Heh. I've been hearing "landing strip" for a few years now. It's weirdly evocative, yes!

Nice site. thx.

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

A variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.

Since the Heap has no definite rules as to where it will create space for you, there must be some way of figuring out where your new space is. And the answer is, simply enough, addressing. When you create new space in the heap to hold your data, you get back an address that tells you where your new space is, so your bits can move in. This address is called a Pointer, and it's really just a hexadecimal number that points to a location in the heap. Since it's really just a number, it can be stored quite nicely into a variable.

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.