Since I rebuilt my web site, I've been using some interesting statistics tools that show information about visitors to my web site. Back in the day, pretty much the only traffic you'd see was real people using web browsers to actually look at your site. These days, the amount of traffic coming from spiders (automated "bots" that crawl the web indexing its pages) is phenomenal. Sadly, these days I get about as much traffic from spiders as I do from actual people. In addition to the spider-bots, there's also a lot of traffic from other kinds of malicious bots whose only job is to crawl the web looking...

I saw this in the paper today. It tells us that Australia's own Gina Reinhart is now officially the world's richest woman. Hooray! Her fortune now stands at almost 30 billion dollars. For people like this, how much is enough? And what does she personally do that makes her worth this sort of money? Does she dig holes? Carry ore around? Serve customers? Do the books? Does she do anything useful? I know some will argue that she generates wealth for others by being an astute operator, and thus providing jobs and paying taxes. That may be so, but does that really make her worth $30 billion? That's...

Light and sound both travel in waves. As the frequency of the sound waves change, so does their pitch. As the frequency of light waves change, so does their colour. The frequencies we hear in modern music are typically oriented around a frequency we refer to as "concert pitch" - typically this is 440Hz and the note is the A above middle C. 440Hz is an arbitrary number though, and different people have different reasons for preferring other values. There are people who strongly believe that 432Hz is "deeply connected with nature" and that 440Hz is bad for us. Throw into this mix the idea that...

From this article in The Age, we learn that the Australian public has an "insatiable appetite for narcotics". Of course we do. Humans have been using mind-altering drugs since pre-historic times. A significant factor in our rapid evolution as a species has been our willingness to experiment with substances we find that have an affect on us - this is how we found both medicines (like aspirin) and hallucinogens (like psilocybin mushrooms). Increasingly, as human consciousness has evolved we have become more complex, to the degree that we now have entire branches of science dedicated to improving...

In the Style of Me is a project intended to provide an art challenge to any and all artists, crafters, photographers, sculptors and other creatives. To participate all you have to do is submit a photo, scan or digital illustration of a piece of art you have done that is your interpretation of another famous work of art – but in your own style. For instance, you could collage the Venus Di Milo, sketch your version of a Rousseau, or sculpt “The Scream”. For those that need a little more prodding or inspiration, each week an artist will be chosen for participants to ‘Style’. The season...

Alchemy gets a bad rap these days, seen only as a primitive version of chemistry - its practitioners greedy fools thinking they could turn lead into gold. The truth is that Alchemy was an early attempt to understand how the world worked, and it blended ideas from religion and science. Some Alchemists believed that if they understood enough about the elemental forces in nature, they would be able to create the philosopher's stone, which would be able to turn base matter into gold. Other Alchemists were driven more by the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and saw their proto-chemistry experiments...

Religious people often claim that atheists can't possibly have a moral compass that will guide us to behave well, since we have no God to tell us what is right and what's wrong. I find it ironic, therefore, to read in today's Age an article about a Rabbi at a Jewish college here in Melbourne who "has changed his evidence about his knowledge of alleged paedophilia and conceded he was aware in the early 2000s of rumours that a former security guard had molested children". Suffice it to say that the subject of the rumours was not immediately reported to the police. What would you do if there were...

I've been developing for the web since 1994, and in that time I've seen technologies come and go. Some have been truly bad ideas from the start (like the blink tag). Others filled a genuine need (like Flash). Back in the mid-nineties, I dabbled a lot with Macromedia Director. I spent countless hours building a thing I called the ColourZoomer, which loaded an image and then let you interactively change the colours, zoom and crop it. I learned a lot about OO programming doing that. I also built an application called "The Alchemist", which was like a ColourZoomer on steroids. It let you load images...

Welcome to the new Alchemy site. The last version of this site was designed in 1997, so this new one is a total reset - 15 years in the making. When this site started in 1995, if you wanted an image gallery you built it yourself. So I did. Now, there are nice ones that you can have for free and that look much nicer than what I was able to build back then. Back in 1995, I decided to run this site as a communal gallery so I built the capability to allow other people to upload their own artwork for display. At the time this was a novel idea (I was doing it before DeviantArt came along, and all the others...