Tuesday 7/31/01
If you want to hear what AT&T's Natural Voices technology sounds like (see previous entry), try their demo. It ain't perfect, but it's eerily good. (Props to Slate)
The New York Times reports on new speech synthesis technology from AT&T that promises to drive computer-generated voices to an unprecedented level of realism. A large volume of real speech from a human speaker is broken down to its fundamental parts and stored in a database; these individual sounds are then reassembled to produce natural-sounding speech from text. (The same basic technique is used by some of Apple's MacinTalk voices; the AT&T system sounds like it differs mainly by the amount of real voice samples being used.) While the improved realism would be welcome in many legitimate computer applications, the technology does raise the specter of bringing dead celebrities back to life yet again, this time by "voice cloning." (The original speech sample can come from archival tapes for such applications.) "Voice cloning" could also be used to fabricate recordings for far more nefarious purposes -- would Nixon's eight-minute gap have been so damning if he'd been able to synthesize some innocuous chatter to fill it? Will you be able to trust that the voice of a family member asking for your credit card number for an emergency really belongs to the person you think it does? Welcome to technology. (Props to MacNN)
I have now officially seen my first strange search request in my site logs. If you want to know where to find the world's longest penis, this search may help. This very site is #4 on the list of results. Of course I'm repeating the words "world's longest penis" on this page several times so the site remains high on the results for that search. After all, what man wouldn't want everyone to think they had the world's longest penis? Or at least the world's fourth-longest penis, if the results rankings mean anything.
The Talking Moose (no, not that Talking Moose) offers some words of wisdom for businesses large and small in Moose's Marketing Manifesto. (Props to Xplane's bBlog)
Salon has an interesting interview with Dr. Jonathan Pincus, chief of neurology at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Washington, D.C. in which he discusses the pathology of mass homicide. (The occasion of the interview is the publication of Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill?, Pincus's just-published book on the topic.) According to Pincus, damage to the frontal lobes often results in a decline in impulse control. The mental distance between thought and action is shortened, and impulses that once would have been quashed are acted out. The censor (or conscience) that normally keeps us from doing anything that happens to pop into our heads is gone.
This squares with what acquaintances in the medical profession have told me. The results of frontal lobe injury can range from homocidal behavior to pedophilia to exhibitionism to a foul mouth -- the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad construction foreman who survived a tamping iron passing completely through his head, is famous in the medical literature as the first well-documented example of the personality changes caused by this sort of damage. After his injury in 1848 he became fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vaccilating. He was no longer able to work in the position of foreman again and spent the rest of his life working at menial jobs. Eventually he developed epileptic seizures and died in 1860.
One thing does bother me about the Salon interview, and that's the way Pincus jumps to conclusions about people he's never examined. For example, he "guesses" that Timothy McVeigh was abused and he "imagines" that Mafia hit men come from abusive families. Of course, these suppositions just happen to support Pincus's theory that the murderous personality is a combination of mental illness, neurological damage, and childhood abuse. According to him, two-thirds of the murderers he's examined have all three of these factors; the rest have two. Pincus's book undoubtedly provides more support for his view, (I've put it on my Amazon wish list), but it seems to me that it's still a pretty big leap to diagnose someone you've not even examined.
Unfortunately, the doctors and nurses I know agree with Pincus in the final analysis: once your frontal lobes have been damaged (whether by psychological trauma, injury, or disease), modern medicine cannot help you. It is simply not possible to repair such injuries, nor even to retrain people to be civilized in their wake. These people are broken and they cannot be rehabilitated. They do not respond to threats or punishment, no matter how dire. Pincus's conclusion would help explain the relative ineffectiveness of the death penalty in deterring violent crime. The only question is: what do you do with a criminal who can't be rehabilitated? And how do you stop the next generation of violent criminals from growing up damaged?
Monday 7/30/01
Susan Kare, who designed the icons and fonts for the original Macintosh and has also worked on graphic elements for OS/2, Windows, and Nautilus (from the now-defunct Eazel), among others, offers shirts and other items with her bitmappy art -- basically the gamut of garments CafePress offers, plus mouse pads, but not, inexplicably, mugs. Unfortunately, the nature of the work she does means that Kare's clients own the copyrights on her most recognizable art, so these shirts contain icons nobody will recognize, which takes some of the fun out of the concept. Now, if she offered to design a custom icon that only your shirt would have, that would be cooler.
Jerry's Finder Patch got linked on VersionTracker, and in the last two days I've seen close to 600 hits on this site as a direct result. That's not counting the over 2500 downloads of the file from VersionTracker's direct link, which doesn't show any page of the site. It looks like most visitors are grabbing the file and then leaving, but if you came to get the Finder Patch and stayed around to explore for a bit, I thank you and welcome you!
Once I wrote a user manual for a computer system used in a large shipping facility. Trucks would come in from one part of the country, and individual pallets would be unloaded from them and taken to other trucks bound for the delivery destination, or at least to another facility closer to the destination. Workers would unload each pallet with a forklift and scan its manifest with a barcode scanner, whereupon the computer system would tell them which gate to move it to. When it was loaded onto a truck, it was scanned again so as to verify that it was being loaded onto the right truck. The goal, of course, was to never have freight sitting in the warehouse. As much freight as possible would be moved from the truck it arrived on directly to the one it would leave on.
The client told me that most of the men who worked on the loading dock had at most an eighth grade education, and I did my best to write accordingly. Still, he managed to surprise me by sending back an early draft of the manual with a note: "Don't use big words like 'verify.' Say 'check' or 'make sure' instead." It never would have occurred to me that "verify" was a big word to some people.
This anecdote bubbled to the surface of my mind today because of Phil Agre's excellent piece, How To Help Someone Use a Computer. It's all about checking your assumptions and putting yourself in what Zen adherents call "beginner's mind." Except in Zen, "beginner's mind" means you're ready to learn. In technical writing and training, "beginner's mind" means you're ready to teach. (Props to Boing Boing)
Evolution in action. (Props to Follow Me Here)
CNN has a decent interview with Neil Gaiman, although they don't seem to understand what a Venn diagram is (they report Gaiman saying "Zen diagram" when it's obvious from context he must have said "Venn"). Since I recently reviewed American Gods here, thought I'd point to it anyway. (Props to Cheesedip.com)
Robert Cringely thinks there's a real possibility that Microsoft would move its operations out of the United States before bowing to the Justice Department. I've long thought the same thing (and even ventured it as a possibility on Usenet, though I can't find the message on Google at the moment). While I thought Gates might take the company to some Asian or Eastern European country which would welcome his economic heft, Cringely claims that for $2 billion, he could just buy a small country (Belize, in his example) and move the whole company there, lock stock and barrel. Thus, Cringely reasons, if a DOJ settlement would cost the company more than $2 billion, there's a strong likelihood that they'll at least threaten to take their ball and go away. I can just imagine Bill Gates cackling the whole time. (Props to Also Not Found In Nature)
Sunday 7/29/01
Took a day mostly off from posting on this site (hey, I've been doing it every day since the end of June) to work a bit on my new novel. Five years ago, I more or less gave up writing fiction because I could tell I wasn't as good at it as I wanted to be. But I've done a lot of reading in the time since, and story ideas have been percolating in my head. The result was that last weekend I sat down and wrote a ten-page opening chapter for one of my novel-sized ideas in about four hours. If I can keep up that pace, by the end of the year I might have a novel. Or at least a draft of one. It went more slowly this weekend; I spent some time working on outlines and other notes. But it's definitely going and I'm happy with the results so far.
Saturday 7/28/01
I finally got things sorted out with the good folks at MindVision, and I'm pleased to announce the long-awaited release of Jerry's Finder 9 Patch 1.3 for Mac OS 9.1 (it also works with the 9.1.1 maintenance update that comes with Apple's Disc Burner). You can snag it from the Download page.
Pic of the day. I'm not even going to bother making a snarky remark. (Props to Cheesdip.com)
A visitor to this page wrote to confirm that in this picture, the University of Arizona's Jerry Kindall is indeed the one in the middle of the picture. Coach Kindall actually retired from coaching several years ago; this article from 1998 tells you some of what he's been up to in the years since and also has a better picture.
When I was about five, my family lived in Arizona for a little under a year. So it's only coincidence that there aren't two Jerry Kindalls living in that area today. (Thanks, John Banks)
Friday 7/27/01
In the Aortal tradition, I give you Telesis, a very funny blog I ran across today via Weblogs.com. The July 24 posting won't make much sense unless you read the ones from the 12th and the 16th first (in that order), but once you have, it's pure comedy gold. Just call me Fancy Jerry Kindall, for I am aware of my volatile oils and have come from the place that I've come from.
The Blogathon starts tomorrow at noon PST. Good luck to all those participating. If you can't participate, consider pledging to support one of the more than 100 participating blogs and/or their associated charities.
I'm not participating in the 'thon itself, as I'm new to this blog thing and am not at all confident of my ability to post something new every half-hour for 24 hours straight, but I'm looking at the list to find someone to sponsor before this kicks off. I meant to do that a long time ago but never got around to it -- somehow, I found myself spending all my spare time fiddling with JavaScript. Sad, isn't it? But I've still got time to find someone and pledge, and so do you.
As promised, the "open links in new windows" menu has become a checkbox. I also took away the "Save" button, because when wouldn't you want to save your choice? It's always saved to long-term cookie storage now, without any user action.
And so we've come full-circle. The feature now looks just like the same feature on randomWalks, although the script is completely different. This improved version remembers its state, and it is compatible with pages that use a mix of targets instead of expecting all links to use one target. Also, you'll notice you can click on the text next to the checkbox to toggle the state of the checkbox -- an HTML 4 feature that's woefully underused on the Web. It makes it lots easier to manipulate the control.
Hope you have enjoyed this evolution of a Web page feature. I'm done with this one for now.
Brazilian Mac users have all the fun. (Props to Zeldman)
Julius Caesar has a weblog: Bloggus Caesari. (Props to BrainLog, yet again)
New Scientist reports on a shirt made with nitinol threads which rolls up its own sleeves when it gets too hot and can be "ironed" to wrinkle-free perfection with a hair dryer. it works because nitinol (a nickel-titanium alloy) is a "memory metal," which means it returns to a pre-defined "resting" shape when heated. The shirt is about 20% nitinol fiber; the other 80% is nylon. It costs about £2500 and is available only in a metallic gray color. (Props to Boing Boing)
Ambigrams "are words or phrases that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, most commonly right-side-up and upside-down." The term was coined by a friend of Douglas Hofstadter and were featured in his book Metamagical Themas. Until now, ambigrams had to be drawn by hand, but now you can make simple ones automatically on the Web. (The site lets you create an ambigram that reads the same right-side-up and upside-down by filling in just the first field, or you can create an ambigram that reads differently depending on which way you read it by filling in both fields with equal-length words.) It's a simple trick -- the site has pre-drawn single-letter ambigrams for all possible combinations of upside-down and right-side-up letters. (For example, if you ambigram my first name, the first letter must look like a J right-side-up and a Y upside-down.) But it's still fun. The site also has a small gallery of hand-drawn ambigrams in various categories, including company logos. (Oddly, this one, which I mentioned a couple weeks ago, isn't there, though I've e-mailed a pointer to the site admin and if he's at all on the ball, it'll probably appear there soon.) (Props to BrainLog)
Thursday 7/26/01
More tweaks to the target menu. I've moved some of the script to the end of the page so it's executed much sooner, thus eliminating the lag inherent in the onLoad handler. Also, since nobody wants on-site links opening in a new window anyway, I've simpliflied the menu back to two choices: yes, open offsite links in a new window -- or no. This will probably become a checkbox next time I play with the script.
A temporary cookie is now used any time the menu is changed, so that if you visit other pages on the site the menu retains its setting. This cookie is made permanent when you click Save Setting, which is now a real button rather than a hyperlink. (The cookie is set by the same routine regardless; it's just that one invocation passes an expiration date.)
Anyone finding this stuff at all interesting or useful?
Not an ambitious concept, but as well-executed as the concept could ever really hope to be: I give you Star Trek on Ice. (Thanks, Warren)
I've added a link under the target pop-up menu (added yesterday) that lets you make your choice the default for future visits. This uses a cookie that expires in 2009, so it's not completely permanent -- if this site is still around in 2010, and you're still using the same browser, you might need to make your selection again. Currently I'm using a client-side script to restore the pop-up menu to your preferred state after the page loads, but I might switch to using a server-side script for it, since now there's a brief lag after the page loads before the menu updates. Still, if you'd like to see how to set and read cookies in JavaScript, this script is certainly an example of doing just that.
I also had to change the script that runs on page load so it forces a link's onClick handler to point to my onClick handler only if the link doesn't already have an onClick handler of its own. Otherwise my onLoad handler was wiping out the cookie-setting handler.
Mindvision has rejected my application for a shareware Installer VISE license for my Finder patch because, basically, they can't read. Or something. To receive a free license for shareware or freeware, a product must include a credit for Installer VISE and contact information for Mindvision. No problem. The distribution package for this patch includes this information in not one place, nor in two places, but in THREE places. Nevertheless, they were unable to find it and requested I send a new version with the necessary information included. I sent them not one but two messages telling them exactly where they could find their credit information in the version I already sent them, and today they closed my application because, apparently, they still couldn't find it.
It must be tough to find good help these days in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I'll be looking at StuffIt InstallerMaker tonight. Yay.
I share my name with a former Chicago Cubs baseball player who currently coaches for the University of Arizona. (I'm probably related to the man in some way -- the Kindall variation of Kendall is fairly rare -- but I know hardly anything about him.) I plugged my name into Google Image Search and found this image, which is according to the link a picture of "Jerry Kindall talking with media." I'm going to hazard a guess that he's the one facing in the general direction of the camera.
It's kind of spooky looking at a picture of a guy with your name, especially when he's published more books than you have.
Wednesday 7/25/01
On August 21, 1986, the carbon dioxide gas under Lake Nyos in Cameroon escaped and flowed down into the surrounding valleys, asphyxiating 1,700 people. Seriously. Man, what a weird world we live in. Who would have guessed that volcanoes could be so dangerous -- I mean, aside from spewing lava all over the place. (Props to Mighty Girl)
Noah Grey, whose Greymatter powers a lot of Weblogs, has a new "photolog" entitled Depth of Field. Simply beautiful. (Props to Abuddhas Memes)
I've added some JavaScript to this site to allow you to choose whether clicking a link opens a new window or not, using a pop-up menu to the left. If you choose Auto, you'll get the behavior I think is best for each link (usually, this means links to pages on this site open in the same window, but offsite links open in new windows). If you choose Same, all links appear in the same browser window. If you choose New, all links open new windows.
I swiped the basic idea from Follow Me Here, but the implementation is completely different. The FMH script (originally from randomWalks) actually rewrites the target of each link; my script, on the other hand, attaches an onClick handler to each link and checks the state of the pop-up menu when you click. This is necessary because I want you to be able to switch back to Auto mode at any time, but if I rewrote the targets, the information about each link's target would be lost and you couldn't go back to Auto. The randomWalks script really only works well if all your links have the same target to begin with.
View source to see the script. Note the onLoad handler in the <BODY> tag -- this is a sneaky way to avoid having to add an onClick handler to every link on the page by hand. Instead, the onClick handlers are added by the script when the page loads. There's one limitation -- this handler doesn't run until the page has completely loaded, including all graphics, so if you change the popup menu before the pages are done loading, it won't have any effect. Still, IMHO a modestly pleasing piece of JavaScript, if I do say so myself!
You know, it's a good thing Google Groups exists. Otherwise, how would anyone ever stumble across the messages we've posted we'd all rather forget? (What the hell was I thinking?) (Thanks, Jackie)
Yeah, the site was down for a wee bit. Don't look at me, I had nothing to do with it.
Some really nice Flash work on the Web graphic novel, Broken Saints. I didn't go too far into it; for all I know the story's crap. But the artwork sure is purty. I'll give it another look this evening, when I'm not working. (Props to Memepool)
Tuesday 7/24/01
This is not a CD player. The briQ is a PowerPC G3 or G4 server running Yellow Dog Linux, with a 2 X 20 vacuum fluorescent display on the front for status messages. briQs can be run standalone, or 4 or 8 briQs can be mounted in a tower for clustering with Black Lab Linux. My friend and co-worker Warren says it looks like the machine is using a Motorola UNIX-spec motherboard. (Props to MacMinute)
And speaking of Kuro5hin, a dude with the nick of localroger has posted a series of four excellent articles there on his experiences as a high-rolling gambler. This guy could easily get this published professionally somewhere; it's that good. Start with Part 1 of "A Casino Odyssey."
Adequacy.org is a lovely community site based on the Slashdot or Kuro5hin model. At this writing, the front page articles include "Beating children saves lives," "Conscription: The return of American values", "There was not enough violence in Genoa," and "Sexism: Nature or nurture?" A glance at the site's utterly self-contradictory mission statement should help clue you in if you're not getting the joke. I'm not sure what's funnier: the reasonable-seeming manner in which participants attempt to justify the most outlandish positions, or the people in the message forums who have to ask if it's a joke. Under the joke, the site does often provide an interesting viewpoint for thinking about issues -- often a completely stupid one, once you think it through, but occasionally modestly thought-provoking. For example, Tax the Childless, Double Votes for Parents got me thinking. While those without children are not contributing to the planet's growing population (generally considered a good thing), the author's premise is that those who have children are, rationally speaking, more likely to care about the future of the Earth because their children will live there. Upon reflection, the only real flaw I can find in that line of thinking can be found in the words "rationally speaking" -- anytime you come up with an idea involving human beings that makes perfect logical sense, you can be 99% certain that the reality is something completely different.
Definitely worth a chuckle. The joke probably gets old after a while, but it's far more subtle a satire than The Onion, and hell, I'm still reading that. So you never know.
"On June 28, Mortimer J. Adler, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world's highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight." Adler blew a million of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's dollars writing a nonsensical conceptual index to the Encyclopaedia. On the plus side, he's also largely responsible for the Great Books curriculum. This is a worthwhile article about a fascinating, if flawed, man. It caught my eye because Adler and the University of Chicago are mentioned in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace, which I reread last month. (Props to Boing Boing)
Monday 7/23/01
Randy Cassingham, publisher of This Is True, has the full SMS translation of the Lord's Prayer which was reported by the London Times. (SMS is the Short Message Service for sending brief text notes on cellular phones; the service is extremely popular in Europe.) "The entire prayer," says Cassingham, "fits the SMS limit of 160 characters -- with 3 to spare." dad@hvn, urspshl... just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
R.I.P. Eudora. No, not that Eudora. This Eudora.
"Being a freelance writer is not really a good thing for people who don't enjoy a permanent sense of panic." And other tidbits from the witty John Michael Scalzi (not to be confused with J. Michael Straczynski) on the writing life.
The MDJ Power 25 list seeks to gauge who has the most power and influence in the Macintosh community. It does this by surveying people in a position to know. The results sometimes aren't what you think they might be. (This actually came out last week, and I intended to link to it then, but it slipped my mind.)
Notable Mac software updates of the past week: ZipIt 2.0 (full-featured Zip tool now for Mac OS X, with better AppleScript support and more), ArtMatic Pro 2.5 (new shaders and animation capability), Opera 5.0b2 (substantial progress on alternative Mac browser), Joke Ridge 0.93b (allows Macs to see long filenames on Joliet and Rock Ridge CDs), Baton Mail 0.9.7.1b (private SMTP relay that lets you change the SMTP port and add authentication for clients that don't support it), MP3 Rage 3.6 (support for stripping diacriticals and for ID3v2.4 tags), Apple II Font 1.1 (all Apple II characters including MouseText -- ahh nostalgia).
Sunday 7/22/01
Last Thursday the 12th, I mentioned a problem I was having with my HP LaserJet 4M+ and a $40 self-repair kit that claimed to fix it. I'm here to report that the kit arrived in only two days, that the video (while not professional quality) was certainly clear enough to do the job, and that my laser printer is now working perfectly. If you are not completely mechanically hopeless and are having some kind of problem with a laser printer, I highly recommend fixyourownprinter.com. (And if you are completely mechanically hopeless, just get a friend who isn't to help you. I suggest watching the video all the way through at least once before beginning the repair.)
If you run a network at home, or even a single machine, and want to learn more about your security risks, CERT's Home Network Security page is an excellent starting point. Especially with Mac OS X's UNIX innards, this topic is more important than ever. (Thanks, Patrick)
American Movie Classics, a cable TV channel which has for sixteen years been showing classic movies without commercial interruptions, is considering adding commercial breaks to movies as early as this year. (The channel already shows commercials before and after movies and in its documentaries, but until now has kept the movies themselves intact.) If you're a movie buff and are distressed by this possibility, let AMC know about it.
Saturday 7/21/01
I wrote an article for ThemeStream on digital photography basics. I thought I'd put it up on this site, but it appears I don't have a copy anymore. Of course ThemeStream is now defunct and the Google cache of the article is long gone. If you happen to have a copy of this article, you would become my hero if you sent it to me.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is proof positive that movies based on video games need not suck. Not that the film is particularly true to the game -- I've never even played any of the Final Fantasy games, but from what I've heard they're all rather different from each other anyway, and the movie has no more in common with any one of them than any of the games do with each other.
This film is not for everyone. If you are expecting a sci-fi thriller in the vein of Aliens, as some of the previews might lead you to expect, you'll be disappointed. Final Fantasy is basically a computer-animated, big-budget, highly realistic anime (or Japanese animated film). If you've seen two or three anime films (the best-known in the United States are probably Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Princess Mononoke), you'll understand where this film is coming from. If you aren't at least passingly familiar with Japanese animation and the storytelling conventions and themes thereof, you'll probably think it's pretty dumb. At first glance, the film does seem to be science fiction, employing numerous conventions of that genre, but then the characters suddenly start talking about ghosts and spirits, and it's easy to start thinking that the film is suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. In Western culture, science fiction and fantasy are usually considered two different genres, with only enough in common to be placed on shelves next to each other at bookstores; the conventions of the two rarely cross over. (A notable exception is Star Wars, with its Force -- but in Episode I, Lucas took the time to rationalize his universe's primary mystical element, thus making his stories a bit more rigorously sci-fi.) I'm hardly an expert on Japanese culture, but from what I can tell, the membrane between sci-fi and fantasy is considerably more permeable there than it is here. Mentally substitute "alien entity" or "energy creature" every time you hear "spirit" or "phantom" in Final Fantasy and you'll end up with something much resembling a Star Trek episode. Rather than rationalizing the mysterious with plausible-sounding but completely bogus technobabble, as Trek does, the creators of Final Fantasy are playing it as honestly as they can: the characters have no idea what the creatures they're dealing with really are, so they may as well call them spirits and ghosts. If you can accept that decidedly non-Western storytelling convention, you'll find yourself a lot closer to enjoying the film.
A recurring theme in Japanese art (and anime is no exception) is nature and man's relationship with it. This relationship is at the heart of the excellent Princess Mononoke, and also of Final Fantasy, which imagines that each world is literally a living organism with its own spirit. This idea is not completely unfamiliar to Westerners, but most of us take it metaphorically. The military has a plan for destroying the aliens who have invaded the Earth, driving humanity into domed Barrier Cities, but a pair of scientists have developed a theory about the Earth's spirit and warn that the military's solution might kill Gaia itself. (The idea that scientists could or would develop a theory of the spirit is, of course, a completely foreign one to Western culture. This is another thing you'll just have to accept about Final Fantasy if you want to enjoy it.) Aki, one of the scientists, has been infected by alien particles and is having dreams that may hold a key to the solution. The scientists beg to have a chance to collect the eight spirits they need to create an energy wave which will repel the alien invasion.
At this point you might start groaning -- the quest plot is practically a fantasy cliché, driving the story by forcing the hero to collect various items that have no other purpose than saving the day. (See "plot coupons" in The Turkey City Lexicon for a succinct summation.) Fortunately, the story is not really about the quest -- the scientists already have six of the eight spirits they need by the time the quest is revealed. The story is really about the conflict between secular materialism (represented by the General) and Eastern spirituality (represented by Aki and by Dr. Sid, her mentor). Naturally, spirituality wins the day -- but even if you're a hardline materialist, like myself, you can still enjoy the film. Really, you can. It may sound a little weird, but it's not even difficult.
Technically, the film is stunning. It's the most detailed computer-generated film yet, and while the digital actors aren't perfect by any means, they are certainly successful enough to allow you to suspend your disbelief most of the time. Often, they're maybe too human. The alien creatures are both frightening and beautiful, and some of the scenery and "sets" are just astonishing. All of the technology used by the characters seems to have been completely thought out -- you get the distinct feeling that some of the gadgets might actually work in the real world. Obviously, a lot of thought and work went into this film, and it shows. It's really a quite ambitious piece of work -- more so than you'd expect for a movie based on a video game -- and it succeeds in a lot more ways than I thought it would. I nearly smacked my forehead when I saw the first scene after Aki's opening dream: it's an obvious thing to do when all the limitations of real actors (such as, oh, weight) no longer apply. -- And if you can't figure it out from that hint, I won't spoil it for you.
If you're bored with what Hollywood has to offer this summer, maybe you'll find it refreshing to explore distinctly non-Hollywood offerings. You could certainly do much worse than to start with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within -- in my opinion, it's worth full theatrical price to see, even with the popcorn.
Friday 7/20/01
Yeah, I know everything I've posted today has been swiped from another Weblog. But they were good! In fact, there were three or four links on Follow Me Here I wouldn't mind swiping. Go check 'em out. Tomorrow I have a large-ish movie review I'll be posting, so the original content will be coming back.
I still have not received licensing information from Mindvision for the installer for my Finder Patch; last I heard, they wanted a credit statement in my documentation, but it's already there -- told them that and heard nothing more. Hopefully it's just that they're all in New York for Macworld Expo this week. (Thank you, Apple, for not releasing Mac OS 9.2 yet and making my patch obsolete before I even managed to release it.)
As spacetime comes to an end, the old gods get together for a wake. (Props to Abuddhas Memes)
The hallucinogenic drug ibogaine is reported to completely eliminate opiate addiction with a single dose and to also encourage introspection and resulting life changes in a trip that can last up to thirty-six hours. i first saw the drug mentioned in Bruce Sterling's novel Heavy Weather and thought it was something he'd made up (it is, after all, a science fiction novel -- a very good one). But it's real, and Creative Loafing Atlanta has a fascinating article on it. (Props to Follow Me Here)
Michael Darnell has a list of everyday objects that are poorly designed with suggestions for improvement. Anyone with an interest in usability should look over this list; there are bound to be things you never thought were "hard to use" that nonetheless are harder to use than they need to be. (He's right about the tuna.) (Props to Boing Boing)
Thursday 7/19/01
It seems to be possible to make holograms in polished surfaces by hand, without any lasers or any other complicated apparatus -- nothing more sophisticated, in fact, than a compass. Bill Beaty explains how he first noticed the effect (as a side effect of accidental fine scratches in a polished car hood) and then set out to duplicate it himself. There are do-it-yourself instructions if you'd like to try it.
Neil Gaiman is perhaps best known as the creator of the Sandman comic books and graphic novels. I loved Sandman, but have been a little disappointed in his prose fiction to date. Neverwhere, which is a sort of extended fantasy in-joke about London's subway system, seems to be a fan favorite, but it left little impression on me. Stardust I remember better, though I found it light and, worse, mostly predictable. Good Omens is a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, of Discworld fame, and this one I liked a good bit, though I don't think it's nearly as funny as everyone else seems to. But none of them had the awe-inspiring scope of Sandman.
Until now. American Gods is Gaiman's latest novel, and his first to stand on its own as a complete artistic statement by its author. (Neverwhere was originally a British TV series; Stardust is more a novella than a full novel; Good Omens was written with Pratchett.) To save you the suspense, it's a deeply satisfying read -- easily as fulfilling as the best Sandman story arcs.
The premise is, it happens, one that in fantasy circles verges on cliché: Every god that humanity has ever believed in actually exists and is created and sustained by human belief; gods don't die naturally, of course, but they can be weakened as people stop believing in them, eventually being reduced to survive on the crumbs of faith modern man deigns to offer them -- and in some versions of this trope, they can be killed. Off the top of my head I can think of two other novels with the same premise: Douglas Adams's The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. And there are, undoubtedly, many more. But it continues to be used because it's a good hook, and Adams, Pratchett, and now Gaiman have given us three very different and enjoyable takes on the matter.
Gaiman's twist on the idea is that immigrants to America brought their gods with them, carrying them in their minds. But now modern beliefs -- not gods, quite, but objects of faith such as computers and finance, incarnated as flesh -- have arisen, and the old gods are planning a battle for their survival. The first god we meet in American Gods is from the Norse pantheon -- and unless you're paying very close attention (or have been forewarned), you might well miss this god's appearance until near the end of the book, where his identity is revealed. The primary god, though, is Odin, or Mr. Wednesday as he's known now, and he recruits an ex-con named Shadow as his assistant in assembling the other gods for the final battle. Shadow has nothing left to lose, having already lost his wife and his job prospects mere days before being released from prison, so he reluctantly accepts Mr. Wednesday's offer. Later we meet gods or (at least mythic figures) from Irish, Slavic, Egyptian, and Indian pantheons -- and of course Gaiman doesn't neglect Native American belief systems, either. The only conspicuous absences are from the Greco-Roman hierarchy and of course the Judeo-Christian religions; probably a wise move on Gaiman's part, as there are surely no simple ways of dealing with, say, Jesus Christ as just another mythic character without descending into parody or causing widespread offense. The intimate, life-long familiarity of these figures to most readers prevents even writers as talented as Gaiman from taking very many liberties with them. (Jesus is, however, mentioned in passing.)
Everyone in American Gods seems to have at least one secret, although we know most of Shadow's, since he's the viewpoint character. It's easy to empathize with him; while he's brooding and depressed, it's for good reason, and although he's in over his head, he's trying, and eventually he figures out what's really going on and brings it to a climax. The novel a tour de force of narrative prowess, with numerous twists, inevitable in retrospect, that repeatedly cast previous events in a new light. The dialogue crackles with life; you quickly know these people so well that you believe you could identify characters from just a line of dialog, without being told who's speaking. And be sure you save room for dessert: the novel gives us an epilogue that actually resolves a couple of plot points (one major, one minor) that you might have forgotten about in the climax. Gaiman didn't, and it's a welcome change from the slapdash plotting of a lot of other writers.
There are many dark delights in this novel, but listing them would spoil them for you. So i won't. Suffice it to say that this novel is worth every penny of its hardcover price. It resonated deeply with me; perhaps it will with you, too.
Wednesday 7/18/01
I've added a new section to this site for longer pieces I've written. You'll see it at in the menu at right under the At Length header. To kick things off, I've posted (with minor polishing) a few things I wrote for Manual Transmission, my original attempt at a Webzine, back in 2000. More longer stuff will follow, to be sure, along with better organization and a fresher look.
Hugh Peebles ran across some predictions in old issues of Macworld and Wired while moving, and evaluates their accuracy in this article. (Props to Scripting News)
The Alvin Fernald books, by Clifford B. Hicks, were one of my favorite childhood pleasures. Maybe you read them too. Now you, like me, can go on a little nostalgia trip via the Web. I discovered that Mr. Hicks graciously answers appreciative e-mail from grown-up fanboys.
Today must be News of the Weird day at MetaFilter. First we find that Batman is 80 miles from the Iraqi border. Then we discover that Dennis Normandy wants to build a replica of the severed arm of the Statue of Liberty in San Francisco to commemorate and welcome immigrants to the West coast. Last but not least, we learn that small infants have volume control knobs.
Macworld Expo keynote coverage is all over the Mac sites, so I won't go into it too much, but it's nice to see evidence that Mac OS X will be useful by the end of the year with the release of a 10.1 update in September to bring performance and usability improvements, more "digital hub" functionality, with Office in the same general time frame and several Adobe applications currently in development for X. That new G4 enclosure is sharp; if they offered a retrofit kit for the older machines to put the new front on them, I might just buy it.
Tuesday 7/17/01
I'm much impressed with some of the photo galleries of Dr. Donald L. Cohen, especially since they were taken with a digital camera. A very nice $3000 digital camera (the Canon EOS D30) with, undoubtedly, some high-grade glass hanging off the front, but it shows just what today's best digitals are capable of in the hands of someone with a good eye and technical savvy. The Antelope Canyon and Grand Canyon galleries have some breathtaking images.
If you often find yourself typing with one hand (if you know what I mean, and I think you do), then you might look into the Half Keyboard X2 from Matias Corp. The original Half Keyboard was literally half as wide as a normal keyboard; it allowed you to type one-handed at nearly full speed by holding down the space bar while you typed a letter on the "missing" half of the keyboard, which is mapped to the keys you do have in a mirror-image layout. The way your muscle memory works, this is fairly easy to get used to: after all, you already use the same finger to type F or J, just on different hands. The new X2 model is a full-size keyboard that supports normal two-handed typing or one-handed typing with either hand. It's $99 and available for Mac and PC (that might just mean it's USB).
Matias notes that the half-keyboard is useful for "CAD, desktop publishing, animation, image manipulation, spreadsheets, or even gaming." I think they missed one, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more...
Just by the way, with Macworld Expo starting tomorrow in Noo Yawk Sitty, you can probably expect me to post additional blurbs about interesting new products here throughout the rest of the week.
The End of Free is a Web site dedicated to providing news about new revenue models for the Web. Contributors include Tara Calishain of ResearchBuzz and Evan Williams of Blogger fame, among others. Worth following if you're in the content business.
There's an extensive, thought-provoking and emotionally-affecting piece in the Washington Post about David Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber's brother. It's long, and it's not the sort of thing I usually link here, but I don't think you'll regret taking the time to read it. (Props to Obscure Store)
Monday 7/16/01
Moving? The United States Postal Service has some good advice on packing, including how best to move your hippos.
Did you know the Mormons invented their own alphabet for English back in the 19th century? Did you know there's a Mac language kit for this alphabet, including text encodings and fonts?
Now you do.
I bought Unbreakable ($19.99 at Target now!) Friday evening, sight unseen. I'd heard enough about this movie to know the general direction it would take -- it's basically the origin story of a comic book superhero, and one of the more plausible ones I've had the pleasure of witnessing -- but M. Night Shyamalan is a sufficiently tricky filmmaker that I knew I'd enjoy it anyway. I found the pacing rather slow at first, but about a third of the way into the film it "grabbed" me and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen. I found the ending creepy as hell (won't spoil it for readers, though). The music, by James Newton Howard, who has always been one of my favorite film composers, is excellent; I may have to buy it on CD. The two-DVD package has a second disc with some deleted scenes, a "making of" featurette, and a second featurette featuring interviews with prominent comic artists, historians, and critics (including Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and Frank Miller) about the evolution of the comics hero.
It's pretty odd the number of DVDs I have on my shelf that have Bruce Willis in them. The Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys, The Fifth Element, and now this one. (Most of those have numbers in their title, too. Another odd coincidence.) This is not because I think the man's a fantastic actor or follow his work. He's a competent, solid actor, but I wouldn't quite say I'm a Bruce Willis fan. He just happens to turn up in a lot of movies I like.
Sunday 7/15/01
Heh. I've just sent Cat a little something I know she'll enjoy. Won't she be surprised!
Found an interesting little AppleScript buglet today. string1 contains string2 will always evaluate to false if string2 is longer than 32,767 characters, even if string1 appears within the first 32,767 characters of string2. This was causing each post since Monday on the July archives page to have its own date header, even when there was more than one post on the same date (the intended behavior was for one date header to appear per day, with multiple posts on the same day appearing below the date header). My posting script checks to see if the current day's header already exists, and if so, posts new items below it. The check was failing when the July archive became larger than 32K, so it never found the existing header and always added a new one.
There were a couple of ways I could have worked around this. The bug doesn't affect the main index page for the site, because it rolls off older items before the page reaches 32K in size. The script updates the main index page before it updates the current month's archive, so I could have used a variable to store the result of that test and re-use it when processing the archive page, since when I add a new date header to the main page I must always add a new date header to the corresponding archive page as well.
Another thing I could have done was to simply read the first 32,000 characters or so of the archive file into the string variable before performing the test, then read the remainder of the file later. This seemed inelegant to me, however.
A third way, and the way I chose, was to use AppleScript's text item delimiters. This little-known global variable lets you break up long strings at any arbitrary delimiter, and I was already using the feature extensively in my posting script. You can rewrite string1 contains string2 by first doing set AppleScript's text item delimiters to string2 then evaluating number of text items of string1. If it's greater than 1, string1 contains string2. (Subtract 1 from the result if you need to know the actual number of times it string2 exists in string1.) This technique works fine with strings longer than 32K characters.
The text item delimiters variable is very handy for doing a large number of kinds of text manipulations in AppleScript. I've used it for case conversion, counting occurrences of a string, and search-and-replace, and am now using it to figure out where to insert new items in Web pages on this site. At some point I'll write a longish piece showing you how to do these things with it.
Mac software updates of note this past week: MP3 Strip 1.2.2 (control-strip based MP3 player gets WorkStrip compatibility and bug fixes), Smart Window 2.0 (drag-and-drop assistant automatically collapses and expands windows for you), Audion 2.5 (MP3 player/encoder gets playlist-based toolbar, support for transferring files to portable MP3 players, improved CD playback, WMA playback, FreeDB CD data submission), Discribe 4.5 (CD burner gets background burning and iTunes/Disc Burner compatibility), Bryce 5 (network rendering, depth of field, blurred reflections, soft shadows, tree lab, spicy metaballs, light lab), Liberty 1.0B (peer-to-peer file sharing), Lemon 1.0 (seamless tile generator).
Saturday 7/14/01
I was rather disappointed by Laura J. Mixon's Proxies, despite the fact that it has several strong points. I'm not sure if it's just because I read it after being whacked on the head by the nigh-flawless Metaplanetary, or if its defects would seem as serious to anyone who picked it up.
In the near-future world of Proxies, an advance in robotics allows people to remotely control human-looking robot bodies ("proxies"). This technology is still experimental and only a few people have access to it, although the use of radio-controlled non-human "waldos" to visit remote locations, such as the moon, is fairly common, though expensive. Although there are signal-lag problems to deal with for a visit that distant -- though faster-than-light communication is possible in the story's universe via a device called the "omni," the technology is new, expensive, limited, and space-consuming.
Carli D'Auber is the inventor of the omni (bitter because her invention was wrested from her by a large corporation), and she's also a target. A group of renegade scientists working on proxy technologies has decided to hijack mankind's first interstellar vessel, and to accomplish this without killing everyone on board, they must have D'Auber, as only she can extend the range of the omni enough to allow them to seize control of the ship remotely. Unfortunately, D'Auber has just quit her job and gone into relative seclusion for some R&R. So they send one of their own after D'Auber -- but an unknown element has also seized control of a proxy and is racing toward D'Auber to kill her before the rogue group can find her. There's also a Waldos, Inc. operative, alarmed at the sudden disappearance of one of its inventory of proxies, trying to get to her in time to protect her from both elements. Who will find her first, and what will happen when she's found?
This has the makings of a successful thriller. I found Mixon's first book, Glass Houses, sufficiently compelling to give this one a try, after all, so clearly she has the skill to pull it off. (Glass Houses seems to take place in the same universe as Proxies, although the former seems to take place later in the timeline.) Unfortunately, she sabotages herself by revealing several things early in the story that could have been shocking if they had been saved for later. (Spoiler warning: the renegades' proxy operators are children who have been connected to proxies from birth, and one of them has a multiple personality disorder -- one of his personalities, unknown to him, is the one trying to kill D'Auber. The latter tidbit is held back for quite a while, but it's not difficult to guess, and it would have been far more effective had it been concealed better and held back longer.) Many of the characters are cardboard, and too many of those who aren't are straight out of central casting. Daniel, the Waldos, Inc. operative, has little personality outside of going where the winds of the plot direct him. (Thankfully, he and Carli don't end up in a romance.) Paint, a colorful bisexual "muscle-dancer" who happens to be Carli's nephew, is the standard self-indulgent-narcissist-who-suddenly-grows-up-under-pressure; his activities, despite being more interesting than most of the rest of what's happening in the novel, are completely superfluous to the plot. Carli's father is a powerful senator with secrets he hasn't shared with his daughter (he knows about the child proxy operators). What's more, the opening scene of Proxies reminded me very strongly of the opening scene of Steven Gould's Helm -- not to much of a surprise, considering the two writers are married, but Mixon's earlier novel had, it seemed to me, a much more distinctive voice.
Overall, an enjoyable read, but really only average when compared to the best SF being written today. If you give it a pass, you won't be missing much.
Friday 7/13/01
If you've heard of semiotics but don't know what it's all about, Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners is for you. From what I can gather, semiotics is the study of "signs," where "signs" has a special meaning in which basically anything that conveys, or can convey, meaning is considered a sign and can be analyzed semiotically. The discipline touches on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, literature, sociology, and philosophy and offers a novel angle from which to analyze culture, political rhetoric, and advertising, among other things. I plan on spending some quality time at this site over the weekend.
What's most interesting is that the site's content will be released in book form this winter by a British publisher. Often, previous publication on the Web dooms material to being passed over by traditional publishers, but there are an increasing number of exceptions. Eric S. Raymond's Hacker's Dictionary is an early and well-known example; it began life (and still exists) in electronic form as The Jargon File before being picked up MIT Press. (Another of Raymond's works has also made this jump.) I can't think of any others off the top of my head, although I know they do exist. I'm not talking here about writers who cunningly exploited the Web as a strategy for getting published, but rather people mho created content for the Web for its own sake, out of passion, without any thought of traditional publication. Content that existed only electronically until it became prominent enough that a publisher happened to stumble across it. Given Google's popularity-based ranking strategy, the top results for any topic in a Google search are often authoritative and well-maintained -- a site gets to the top because a lot of people linked to it, and usually, people link to it because it's the best. (If you do a Google search for "semiotics," Chandler's site is the third result.) It's easy enough to find quality content with this strategy that I suspect you'll probably see a lot more Web experts breaking into print, thanks to more publishers looking for Web experts using Google and similar tools.
C. Ronald Kube at the University of Alberta is working on collective robotic systems, i.e., groups of autonomous robots that collaborate to solve a problem. Some interesting MPEG videos on this page demonstrate how simple programming in individual machines can combine to create complex, cooperative emergent behavior. (Props to Boing Boing.)
Ah, the Internet. Once again I have found reasons to love it.
One time, while briefly attending Ohio State, I was sitting in the reading room at the student union when they put this excellent album on the stereo there. To me, it sounded a little like a Talking Heads album with more synth, or at least, the singer sounded somewhat like David Byrne, except a little less nasal. It was similar enough that, although I enjoyed the album a lot, I didn't bother to get up and ask the DJ who it was. In the end, I bought a couple of Talking Heads albums that had song titles that were vaguely reminiscent of the ones I'd heard, didn't find it, and basically gave up.
But last night I happened to remember that album, and a single line from one of the songs: "I am standing on the edge of my mind."
Here's the Google search. The very first result is this page, which contain lyrics from four albums by The Call. The song looks like it might be "The Morning" and it's on the album Reconciled. Pop over to Amazon, they have a RealAudio clip of the song. Yeah, that's the one.
It turns out, of course, that it doesn't really sound very much like Talking Heads at all. Blame my nascent musical sense -- I really hadn't heard all that much music back then and it sounded more like Talking Heads than anything else, I guess. I also got the lyric partly wrong: it's "at the edge of my mind," not "on the edge of my mind." It didn't really seem to matter, though -- Google found it anyway.
Did I mention how much I love the Internet? The only thing that could possibly make the story even better would be if Napster were still useful, so I could enjoy the song while waiting for the CD to show up.
Thursday 7/12/01
I have an HP LaserJet 4M+, a fine workhorse of a printer that has developed a regular exit jam. This page has an exact description of the problem -- and a reasonably-priced repair kit that'll ostensibly let me fix it myself. This Web site and the guy who runs it, Moe, have received lots of positive feedback on Usenet, so I took a chance and ordered. Fingers crossed...
Here's a handy tip: don't stack your DSL modem on top of your new Netgear RT314 router. At least, not if you're me. If you're me, and you do this, the connection will go down every few minutes for no easily-determined reason, and you will spend a lot of frustrating time trying to figure out what the problem is.
If you're somebody else, you might not run into this.
The U.S. Mint offers gorgeous hi-res coin photos, including all 50 state quarters and the new golden dollar (plus many others I didn't even know about), in TIFF format. Adds new meaning to the term "money shot." (Thanks, Matt.)
Need a CD-RW? Got one I'm unloading.
I like the way Amazon.co.uk says "This title is usually dispatched within 2-3 days" rather than the Amazon.com wording of the same notice, "This title usually ships within 2-3 days." Even though the US version would probably be understood perfectly well by UK shoppers, Amazon probably found that "dispatched" feels more comfortable to local buyers. It's my understanding that most US-to-UK localization jobs aren't nearly so thorough; Apple, for instance, foists off just one "International English" version of the Mac OS (and other software) on the entire non-US English-speaking world. Just another way Amazon is almost fanatical in their attention to detail in the Web shopping experience. I continue to believe they will end up ruling the online retail world...
(I posted a message very similar to this on MetaFilter. It really belonged here, though.)
Wednesday 7/11/01
Some of y'all might be getting here because you went to Texturations.com or Ractor.com. The Texturations (full-page non-repeating synthetic textures) will eventually make a reappearance here, but Ractor Group, my Web design firm, is gone for now, since I now have a day job. Just in case you were wondering why you ended up here.
Another logo I like is Sun Microsystems'. Clever use of typography -- how could I ever have forgotten it? Anyone else?
Want a lot of Macintosh server power in a tiny space? Justin D'Onofrio (Dog Street Technology) has turned his G4 Cube on its side, added fans and extra heat sinks, and, inexplicably, painted it beige to turn it into a server. Why on its side? First, so the cabling all comes out the back instead of the bottom. Also, for stacking -- it's not feasible to stack them standing upright. It's of questionable utility and pretty ugly, but you can stack four of these babies in about same space as a single G4 minitower would need. (Props to MacNN)
I dug out some of my favorite CDs from my library recently and have been listening to Whatever and Ever Amen by Ben Folds Five during the commute the past few days. The first song on this album is "One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces," the story of a kid who tells his schoolyard tormentors "you'll be sorry when I'm big" -- and then follows up on it later. The irony, of course, is that his grown-up tormentors don't even remember him.
Back in 1997, when this album came out, I was rooting for the little guy. As a kid, I'd been faced with similar tormentors (what misfit hasn't?) and made equally impotent threats, and it was liberating to hear a story about someone actually following up on it, even if it was made-up, because I sure never did. Now, though, I feel pity for him. Here he's spent his life obsessed with something that happened to him in second grade, never quite managing to grow up, never realizing that kids are cruel for basically no reason (other than that they're kids) and that it didn't really mean anything. Now that he's achieved some sort of power, nobody even remembers who he is. It's as if some guy you accidentally cut off in traffic five years ago spent all his spare time figuring out who you are and working out at the gym in order to challenge you to a fistfight. It's pathetic.
So I'm left wondering... when exactly did I change?
Tuesday 7/10/01
Salon has a mildly interesting article on how people are reacting to the fall of dot-coms like Kozmo and Webvan. As is becoming typical for Salon, the article manages to provide new insights while simultaneously demonstrating the cluelessness of the authors (Ruth Shalit and Robin Danielson of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, an advertising agency). There are some truly astonishing comments from Kozmo addicts. The best is probably "It's like living in a Third World country," said by one woman of -- renting movies at Blockbuster now that she's been spoiled by having Kozmo home-deliver her videos. While this woman needs a healthy dose of perspective, it does drive home how much consumers enjoyed the convenience Kozmo once provided. People are apparently lying awake at night worrying that Amazon will go out of business. This is nothing new, as any AMZN stockholder knows, but now the sleepless masses include customers who prefer the new ways of shopping to such an extent that they dread going back to the old-fashioned way. They actually feel guilt when accepting a "too-good-to-be-true" deal, because they're afraid it will hasten the demise of their favorite service. This fanatical loyalty is a clear sign that the dot-coms really are onto something, even the failed ones -- the Internet can help companies provide superior services and can in some cases lead to what can only be described as customer addiction. More realistic business plans may eventually allow new companies to prosper while providing similar services. (HomeGrocer, some have speculated, might have survived had they not sold out to Webvan, because HomeGrocer's business model turned out to be much more in line with reality.)
While delivering these nutritious tidbits, though, the authors consistently refer to companies as "brands." Shalit and Danielson ask, "Will the death of all these brands be a momentary blip, or will it affect the way people approach relationships with brands in the future?" as if the question is supposed to make some kind of sense phrased in this manner. (If this is really the way advertising agencies are approaching dot-com marketing, no wonder their clients are having trouble.) In reality, the brand is merely a convenient shortcut for the service. When people heard about Kozmo, they may have said "I want Kozmo in my city," but what they really wanted was someone to bring them stuff -- for free, of course. Kozmo itself was incidental; if another company had provided a similar service in their own city, they would have been perfectly happy to use it instead. What this should tell companies is that quick and affordable home delivery is an extremely desirable service with the potential to literally change how people live, and that once you get people hooked on it they may well be willing to pay for it. But I see no reason to believe consumers feel any loyalty to the brands themselves, or the companies behind them. People mourn the demise of Kozmo not because they had become attached to Kozmo's logo or those guys in their distinctive uniforms, but because there are no other companies like it.
Still, worth reading. As a related Salon article points out, at least these companies were trying to please their customers, even though their business plans were overly optimistic. Compared to Digital Convergence, they were geniuses. Maybe they could have been profitable with better strategies, and maybe sometime in the next couple of years we'll get a chance to see more realistic takes on these ideas.
The "e-" prefix, as in "e-business" and "e-mail," has officially gone too far. Actually, it probably went too far a long time ago, so this is way over the top. Ladies and gentlemen, i give you: e-hairremoval.com. Note that the page is titled "Hair Online Removal," which doesn't make any sense at all, unless the site itself can actually remove hair somehow.
"Kirk vowed, as he stared at the solid blue image filling the main view screen, that never again would he allow a Microsoft operating system to control his ship."
Yes, this means what you hope it means -- the results from the 2001 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest are in. (Props to MobyLives, via MetaFilter.)
Tuesday 7/10/01
There sure are some clever graphic designers working in the logo field. This one is the same right-side-up and upside-down. They're a printing company, or something of that nature, though their name to me seems to cry out for more vowels.
I've always liked Northwest Airlines' logo as well. It can be seen either as an italicized N with a tailfin, or as a W a slash through the left arm of the W -- both initials of the company's name, with a reference to aviation thrown in to boot, all in a single letter. The letter's positioning with respect to the circle behind it lends it a feeling of motion (being above and to the right of center) and of being "larger than life" since it breaks the circle's boundary slightly. A clever little design.
Last but not least is this, a true classic of logo design. It was iconic before there were icons, and it has, with various color treatments, served its owner well for more than twenty years.
What's your favorite logo?
In Rainier Square, we have several interactive kiosks from a company called Civia. These things have gorgeous 42" plasma displays and are constantly displaying news headlines, stock quotes, weather forecasts, traffic reports, and the like. I don't know how many of them there are (I've passed three or four but haven't exactly gone out of my way to look for them) -- but given the plasma display they probably cost at least ten grand apiece. The ones I've seen basically sit there and burn electricity; hardly anyone ever uses them. Occasionally one will blue-screen (yes, they run Windows), which is always amusing -- next time it happens, I'll try to get a picture.
Their business model appears to be based partly on selling advertising and partly on pitching it as a "value add" to property owners, whose tenants will supposedly pay extra to have these valuable kiosks in their building. Ironically, the places where such a kiosk might actually be useful to tenants -- for example, at the main entrance to the Rainier Tower, where visitors might want to, say, find out what floor a particular company's office is on -- are completely bereft of Civia Media Terminals.
According to the company's megabuck Web site (with obligatory wanky Flash intro), Civia's vision is to create nothing less than a "new social medium." (The r-word -- "revolution," of course -- is used.) Apparently the terminals are intended to draw groups of people, who will then stand around the terminal chatting about the news stories or the weather or whatever information they have retrieved from the terminal. Complete strangers will suddenly meld themselves into communities, thanks to the miracle of the Civia Media Terminal! "The size of displays and layout of content," they say, "encourages a number of people to view and interact at the same time." At this point, though, they'd be doing well to get people to be interested in their terminals one at a time, and then move onto groups. I give them a year at most.
Monday 7/9/01
Ars Technica has a rather extensive comparison of the architectures of Motorola's PowerPC 7450 (G4e) processor, used in the latest Power Macintosh minitower configurations, and Intel's new Pentium 4. The article's focus is on the Pentium, with the PPC used for contrast, but there's plenty of meaty information on modern processor design for geeks of both loyalties. The article's fairly technical, but not so much that you need to actually be an engineer to understand its gist. Worth a read.
Some recent Mac goodies: Mailsmith 1.1.7 (bug fixes and minor new features), MathMagic Personal Edition 2.2.2 (now free), MP3 Title Converter 1.0 (renames MP3s so their filenames are more useful on CD players with 8.3 displays), Player Pro 5.9 (QuickTime 5 DLS2 support, bug fixes), FreeMIDI 1.46 (many new patchlists and expansion boards for MIDI OS), MacRPM 1.0 (utility to look inside Red Hat Linux packages), RuMPsucker 1.0.2 (included just for its incredibly disgusting name), Hard Disk SpeedTools 3.3 (improved sleep support, support ATAPI and Firewire Orb), AppleWorks 6.1.2 (Word and Excel file import, improved networking), Mariner 5.0 (non-Microsoft spreadsheet now for Mac OS X).
Media critic Douglas Rushkoff argues that that the bursting of the dot-com bubble does not represent the failure of the Internet, but rather its resistance to being commercialized, in this thought-provoking piece in Yahoo! Internet Life. In fact, he says, it's healthier and more people-oriented than ever. A small glimmer of hope for those who care about the potential of the Internet in all its many facets. (This article appeared in a recent print edition of YIL, and has apparently become available online just recently.) (Props to Follow Me Here)
Sunday 7/8/01
I had the opportunity to go see Moulin Rouge last Friday night, and did so. I found Luhrmann's makeover of Romeo and Juliet to be audacious and more compelling than not, on balance, so I was looking forward to this latest anachronism-laden extravaganza as well. Unfortunately, for me, Moulin Rouge definitely landed in the "audacious faliure" zone. Lots of spectacle, oft-gorgeous cinematography, and well-placed comic relief were the high points. The low points included a cliche-ridden storyline (wow! two gorgeous people fall in love! never saw that coming) and song choices that threw me completely out of the story. Particularly disastrous was the use of the line "here we are now, entertain us" (from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit") -- stripped of its dripping irony, the line is used in a thuddingly literal sense. In Cobain's song, it's a description of a generation that's so used to being entertained that they demand it when it's never even been promised. On the other hand, the Moulin Rouge is exactly the sort of place people went to be entertained, so the demand is perfectly appropriate there.
I frankly think the film would have worked much, much better with all original songs. The film does contain several, including the David Baerwald-penned "Come What May." Baerwald is a genuine pop craftsman, and I'd go see a movie full of his songs in a heartbeat. The music used for the flim's climactic production, a play-within-a-movie set in India, was also enthralling, but there was far too little of it.
Another problem, perhaps, is that the story (and the dialog) just weren't as strong as Shakespeare's. The Bard is a tough act to follow. Also, since the film is rated PG-13, what you see is naturally a very toned-down version of what the Moulin Rouge must have really been like, and at times I felt very much like I was watching "Disney's Moulin Rouge."
One thing I did find interesting was how the songs are used to further the narrative. I haven't seen many musicals recently, so it was refreshing to see these conventions refreshed and renewed. When Christian is trying to convince Satine that love is worth chancing, it's not that he is literally, in the story's universe, singing to her -- it's that he is making an argument from emotion, and that Luhrmann decided that it was more important to communicate the emotion than the actual words, and and chose the avenue of music to convey that emotion to the audience. When he sings snatches from various songs at her, and she answers him with slightly revised lyrics from the same song to counter him, it means he's trying every emotional appeal he can think of, and she's resisting them by flinging his words back at him slightly twisted, until finally he reaches her and she succumbs. This same technique is used in the scenes where the Duke is persuaded to finance Toulouse's production and where Zigler convinces the Duke to give Satine another chance to come to him (using, by the way, "Like a Virgin").
Despite this technique, though, I found Moulin Rouge interesting but ultimately not that involving. In fact, twice I came close to getting up and walking out -- not because the film was so bad, but because I could easily see where it was going and didn't really think I needed to watch it go there, having seen similar plots unwind dozens of times before. I'm glad I stayed for the whole film, and I would recommend it as a rental, but would not suggest spending the $25 or more it'll cost you and a date to see it, assuming you can still find it in a nearby theater.
My mom came out to visit last month (before I started this site), and we ran around doing all the touristy things people do in Seattle, which I hadn't bothered to do since I moved here. One of these things was a pilgrimage to Mt. Rainier. Naturally, I took pictures. Here's one. There are lots more; I'll work on getting them up this week.
Saturday 7/7/01
If you're running AOL Instant Messenger (or AOL), send a message to screen name "SmarterChild" and say hello. Trust me, it's good. Here's a handy link to do it in AIM: Say hello to SmarterChild. (Try conversing with it. The old AOL standby "a/s/l?" is a good icebreaker...)
Thursday's Web tip went over so well, I thought I'd do it again. You might have noticed that the title at the top of this site's main page changes every day. One day it's "Jerry Kindall: Irreducible Complexity" and the next, "Jerry Kindall: Sod-Off Shotgun." This is accomplished with a really, really simple server-side script. The Web host I use for this site supports Microsoft's Active Server Pages, so the script is written in VBScript. Here it is (it goes before any HTML in the page you want the rotating title to appear on):
<%
titles = Array ("Why, that's Calvinism!", "Alphabetical by Author", "Irreducible Complexity", "Sod-Off Shotgun", "Much Ado about Toffee", "Vicious Circular", "Bomb Dot Com", "Your Message Here for $100", "Quelle Frommage", "In A Nut's Hell", "A House of Many Rooms", "Accept No Substitutes", "A Spacetime Oddity")
pagetitle = titles(Date Mod (Ubound(titles) + 1))
%>
VBScript is our able accomplice in this little trick. It's loosely based on the BASIC programming language, but unlike the BASIC I used to use on the Apple II, it doesn't make you specify how many elements are in an array before you start assigning values to it. So we can just assign all the desired pieces of snappy repartee to an array called "titles" without worrying about how many there are, then later have VBScript figure that out.
We start with the current date (in VBScript, a date is actually stored as the number of days elapsed since the year 100), divide it by the number of bons mots (that's the Ubound(titles) + 1 part), and throw away the actual result and use the remainder instead, which will be from 0 to 12 in our case, since we have 13 text snippets. Coincidentally, the items in the array are numbered 0 through 12 too, so we have a number which will let us pick a different tagline every day. This is done and assigned to the variable pagetitle.
Then, to add our message to the page, we just put this in our HTML:
<TITLE>Jerry Kindall: <%= pagetitle %></TITLE>
This convinces VBScript to kindly insert the selected tagline right into our page's title. Mission accomplished!
Friday 7/6/01
According to this Reuters report, Alan Kay, formerly of Apple and of Xerox PARC, is leaving Disney. Kay is best known as the originator of the concept of the Dynabook and for once having said that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. You didn't know he was working at Disney? He was hired by the Mouse at the height of the company's push into the Internet, and brought along his open-source programming language for education, dubbed Squeak. (Just as LOGO -- another "educational" programming language -- is based on Lisp, Squeak is based on SmallTalk.) Kay and his team will continue to work on Squeak on their own time, once they part ways with Disney this September.
The Totem Pig I posted a picture of yesterday is part of Seattle's Pigs On Parade public art project, modeled after similar projects in Zurich, New York, and Chicago that used cows. Basically, each pig (modeled after Rachel, the life-size bronze piggy bank at Pike Place Market) is decorated by a local artist. The pigs are sponsored by local companies, displayed during the summer, and then auctioned off to benefit the Pike Place Market Foundation, a charity connected with the market. The New York and Chicago cow projects were very successful (well, maybe not) fund-raisers and have spawned moose in Toronto and other cow "parades" this summer in Kansas City and Houston.
While it's all for a worthy cause, only about 10% of Seattle's new porcine residents are, IMHO, interesting, clever, or artistic. Sturgeon's Law holds.
The poems and stories on this page might seem eerily familiar, yet strange. "A Raven" by Poe? William Shakespeare's "King Claudius"? What Bizarro World do these come from?
Simple. They come from a world in which, when you count the number of letters in each word on the page, and string them together, you get the first three thousand digits (and then some) of π. This is Mike Keith's "Cadaeic Cadenza," the world's longest π mnemonic. He has other "constrained" English compositions as well. (Props to Memepool)
Thursday 7/5/01
Mindpixel's GAC (pronounced "Jack"), or General Artificial Consciousness, will be given the MMPI-2, a standard psychological test, over the next several months. GAC is actually a "composite personality" based on the nearly 40,000 Internet users who have interacted with the software through the Mindpixel Web site. The test will be administered and "interpreted" by one Dr. Robert Epstein, claimed to be a leading expert on human and machine behavior. Google found us a lot of Dr. Robert Epsteins on the Web, but I think it might well be this one -- although his expertise on machine behavior is given short shrift in that bio. Obviously a publicity stunt (can't have Cyc getting all the attention, can we?) but an interesting step nonetheless. (Props to Follow Me Here)
I found out today that somehow, I've accumulated a $75 credit with my apartment complex, which I may deduct from my next rent payment. Is there anything sweeter than found money? By sheerest coincidence, the amount of the credit exactly equals the five months I've been in my current lease times the $15 they raised my rent when I last renewed, which means they almost certainly forgot to tell the computer about my rent increase. Sometimes you just gotta love the faith people place in their electronic servants.
What to spend it on? Well, actually, I spent it last week on a 128MB flash memory card for my digital camera, before I even knew I had it.
Totem Pig!
The menu on the right side of this page (and on every page at JerryKindall.com) is inserted from a server-side include file, which means the HTML for that part of the page is exactly the same for every page on this site. Yet you may have noticed that, when you're on the home page, the word Home isn't a link, but when you go to another page, Home becomes a link again and the link you followed loses its linkishness. This navigational cue makes it easier to keep track of where you are. Yet, I say again, the HTML for the menu is always exactly the same, no matter what page you're on. If you don't believe me, compare it yourself. How is this possible?
The secret: style sheets. Let's take a look at one of the links:
<A HREF="/" TARGET="_self" onClick="window.focus(); return (this.href != location.href)" ID=home>Home</A>
The key to the technique is the ID attribute. This link has an ID of "home," and this in turn allows me to write a CSS style definition that applies only to this exact link, like so:
#home {font-weight: bold; color: #FFF; background-color: #600; cursor: text;}
What this style definition does is make the "home" link look just like the rest of the bold text on the page (right down to the mouse pointer turning into a text cursor when it's over the link, as if it were normal text). Look at the source for a few of the pages: you'll notice that each page has this single style definition in it, except with a different name. The name used for this style in a particular page corresponds to the ID of the sidebar link I want to de-link-ify. For example, on the archives page, the style is given to the #archives link, so the Archives link doesn't look like a link anymore. My main style sheet, which applies to all pages, doesn't have any ID-specific styles, so any link with an ID that's not specifically assigned a style by a supplementary style at the top of a given page looks like a regular link.
But even though it doesn't look like a link, it still acts like one -- or at least it would if the style trick was the only one I had up my sleeve. That's where the JavaScript in the onClick handler comes in. First, window.focus() removes the dotted box that Windows browsers draw around a link when clicked. The second part, return (this.href != location.href), causes the browser to not follow the link if it's already displaying the page the link points to. So the link that doesn't look like a link stops acting like one, too. This code is the same for every link because it only stops the link from activating when you're viewing the appropriate page.
Using this particular collection of tricks gives me the best of both worlds. Thanks to server side includes, I get easier site maintenance because there's only one file to edit when I want to change the menu. Yet I don't lose the ability to provide navigational cues to help the reader find his or her way around the site. The navigation is admittedly simple right now, but I'm trying to keep it flexible as possible since I don't know how the site will grow in the future.
As an aside, the page-specific styles on this site actually employ another server-side include, so I can change the "de-link-ify" style as easily as I can change the rest of my styles. I did this because I do plan some (major!) tweaks to the design. But the technique works fine if you just embed the extra styles right in your pages.
Wednesday 7/4/01
All right, people. I'm all for celebrating Independence Day. But it is time to shut the hell up with the fireworks already. Actually, it was time to shut the hell up this morning at 1 AM, when the neighbors were letting off bottle rockets. It is time and past now. An hour ago some moron burned through what sounded like a hundred-dollar string of firecrackers: rat-a-tat-a-tat, one after the other, for what must have been half an hour. As if that weren't enough, some other doofus decided to join in with his string about halfway through, so we got it in stereo. And then there were the M80s in the parking lot, sufficient to rattle the apartment windows. You felt them more than heard them.
There was no escape. I spent the afternoon at Warren's, in a significantly nicer neighborhood than the one I live in, and it was just as bad if not worse over there. Apparently, having more disposable income just means you can spend more on pyrotechnics. We were sitting out on the deck eating and chatting and there were times we literally could not hear each other and had to stop until a string of firecrackers had finished.
So we fought a war for our independence. I get it already. No need to drive the point home by recreating the ambience of the war zone. Next year, I think I'll plan a trip out of town for July 4th. Preferably somewhere fireworks are verboten.
Oh yeah. Almost forgot. Happy 4th of July. Even if you're outside the United States and don't celebrate our Independence Day, have a great day anyway. I'm planning to eat vast quantities of grilled meats today at my friend Warren's cookout. Mmmm, prions!
I've got the Finder patch almost ready to go, but it turns out my free Installer VISE license expired. I've applied for another one but I'm certain MindVision isn't working on the holiday, so there may be another short delay before the patch is ready for release. In the meanwhile, if you're handy with ResEdit and comfortable with installing the patch manually, e-mail me and I'll send you the resources for pasting into your copy of the Finder.
Tuesday 7/3/01
Lucid Confusion (the official Weblog of Internet Brothers) picked this site for its current Aortal link. Thanks, Jeff. Anyone who loves Rundgren is okay by me.
How easy is it to get Microsoft to cancel a random stranger's Hotmail account? Apparently this easy.
If you enjoyed Memento, please don't tell me; I haven't seen it yet. (It sounds enough like my kind of movie that I'll probably buy the DVD when it comes out, so I'm trying to avoid finding out too much about it in the meanwhile. I'm still smarting from the time a friend blabbed the ending of The Usual Suspects before I saw it.) But you might like Andy Klein's in-depth analysis of the film at Salon, along with the reader responses to that analysis. They looked thought-provoking in a brief skim.
Tony Daniel's Metaplanetary is the most enjoyable science fiction read I've experienced this year. It's also the most frustrating.
It is, as the cover notes, the story of an interplanetary civil war, set against a background that makes the universes of many other writers look small. A revolution in quantum theory has led to a breakthrough in nanotechnology, which has spawned faster-than-light communication and cheap computation, which in turn led to virtual reality and true artificial intelligence. And nanotech ("grist") also led to the Met: a network of enormous cables that literally connects the planets of the inner solar system to each other. The Met is used not only for travel among these worlds and their moons, but also serves as the home for billions, who live in habitats connected to the cables. The Met can't reach beyond the asteroid belt, but humans have colonized the rest of the solar system too, even set up a gigantic windmill in Neptune's Great Blue Spot.
But when I say "humans" have done these things, I don't necesarily mean people like you and me. Genetically-modified humans are commonplace: there are people who are adapted for high-gravity worlds, for life in total vacuum, and more. Many other characters are human intelligences with multiple bodies (which can live independent lives lightyears apart, yet still be part of a single individual), completely artificial constructs, and virtually all possible combinations thereof. There are vast interstellar starships who are themselves conscious entities -- and they can have sex with each other and reproduce. One flesh-and-blood character is married to a woman who exists entirely in virtual reality. They have children. Another character is a snippet of sentient copyright protection code which lived for a while in the body of a ferret and then found itself in a more humanoid body, but has lost none of its killer instincts. Yet another has enmeshed himself so thoroughly with spacetime at the quantum level that not only can he see the future, in some ways he is the future. Part of him is still looking for his lost love.
These are the good guys. The principal villain is a sadistic psychopath named Ames, a renowned composer who became a dictator. Clearly the conception of Ames owes quite a bit to the reality of Hitler (who was a painter before leading Germany into mass insanity), but Ames is, if such a thing is conceivable, even more evil. It would, I think, be a mistake to view the novel as a World War II allegory, although Ames's persecution of the sentient programs (by imprisoning them in virtual concentration camps and forcing them to do calculations, and by performing cruel experiments on their memories) certainly has an obvious parallel. The war, at its heart, is about more than power or territory: it's about what it means to be truly human, and who thus deserves to inherit the bounty of our Solar System and beyond.
Metaplanetary has the epic, big-canvas feel of the best work of Daniel Keys Moran, Vernor Vinge, David Zindell, John Varley, Iain M. Banks, or Dan Simmons. There's enough hard science exposition to satisfy the count-the-rivets crowd, yet not so much that the story bogs down or gets boxed in. There are even light moments, such as when one character finds himself in the graveyard of the old World Wide Web and is puzzled by some logos he finds there. While there's a definite everything-including-the-kitchen-sink feel to the story, as if Daniel threw in every idea he could think of and then some, he manages to keep all the knives he's juggling in the air without severing anything he didn't mean to. Although some of the ideas are outlandish, their implications are rigorously worked out, and the writing always sparkles with clarity -- even scenes involving a mix of fleshly, synthetic, and virtual characters never leave you feeling confused about who is who and what's happening. There's some of the exuberance of Neal Stephenson, too, although Daniel never never struck me as self-consciously clever, as Stephenson sometimes does. This is a book I will be studying in an attempt to improve my own writing.
Sounds like a treat, doesn't it? Indeed it is. So why did I call it "frustrating?" Simple -- it's the first book of a series, but this fact is not revealed anywhere on (or for that matter in) the book. Metaplanetary gets all the major players onto the stage, then comes to an abrupt halt, without even a "To Be Continued." I was relieved to find that a sequel was planned, because as a standalone novel, Metaplanetary is not at all a success, lacking as it does a proper climax and denouement. As the first volume in a series, though, it fares better. If this is merely the prelude to the storm, then the storm itself is going to be a world-beater, and I for one can use a little bit of an intermission before the sequel sweeps me away.
Tony Daniel, by the way, has a Web site of his own, which includes not only a hyperlinked notebook explaining the concepts behind the novel, but also a journal in which he reveals more about his creative process. It's worth poking around in.
Monday 7/2/01
To those of you who are patiently waiting for a Mac OS 9.1 version of my Finder patch: I've reserved the July 4 holiday for putting that package together. Keep checking this page. My complete lack of a life is your gain!
When you take panels from a Jack Chick tract and dish them out three at a time in random order, does the result make any more sense than the original? Find out here.
Sometimes I like to enter more or less random search terms into Google and see what weird or interesting pages I get in return. This is quite a hit-or-miss proposition, and sometimes I have to burrow several pages deep into the results to get something worth looking at. Sometimes I get a lot of stuff tantalizingly close to being good, but not quite. Like this.
For extra credit, try to figure out what search term I was using when I found that.
Sunday 7/1/01
I just sat down and tried to watch an episode of Six Feet Under. Many people I know seem to like other HBO series, but once a show comes to my notice it always seems like there's far too much backstory for me to catch up on. However, there are only a few episodes of Six Feet Under so far, and HBO obligingly ran them all this weekend, so I TiVoed them. I dipped into one at random (it appears to be the second one), enjoyed the Thomas Newman theme music, and settled in to watch.
Within twenty minutes I had seen a dead man's penis, erect in "angel lust." Call me a Philistine, but I don't really think I need that on my television screen, you know? The score so far: TiVo's Delete Button 4, HBO 0...
Today I finished Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, which I have been slogging my way through in fits and starts since last Thanksgiving. The experience probably ran up against the limits of my education, but it struck me that the distance between Nobel-prize-winning literature and mediocre science fiction is a mighty short one. The novel takes place in an unspecified near-Utopian future in which the maintenenace of culture has been given over to one specific province, Castalia, in which the entire population is free from the mundane concerns of politics and sustenance and thus to participate exclusively in the study of art and culture. The culmination of this order is the Glass Bead Game, which is not a competitive event but a sort of intellectual Jenga in which ideas from several intellectual disciplines are used to illuminate each other and thus edify the whole. The rules of the Game are not explicitly described in the novel, nor, really, do they need to be, since the book is not about the game itself but about one of its Masters, a man named Joseph Knecht. Written in the form of a history by some future historian, The Glass Bead Game traces Knecht's progress from childhood in the elite schools of Castalia to his unexpected death. Throughout, the stultifying academic narrator does his level best to smother Knecht's biography under layer after layer of leaden prose, and almost succeeds.
The Glass Bead Game seems to me to be an explicit allegory to the times it was written in and a warning of the dangers Hesse perceived therein. Castalia itself, of course, is the Academy, and its residents the ivory-tower philosophers whose thought processes have evolved to have little relation to the "real world," which they disdain for its lack of aesthetic elegance. The Game then is nothing less than the self-absorbed but irrelevant rhetorical tricks and sleight-of-mind that academics so venerate. The novel scores many trenchant observations off this target: the inevitable sterility of any self-proclaimed bastion of culture which attempts to wall itself off from new ideas and celebrate only the old, the inflexibility and shortsightedness of even those institutions with the best of intentions, the limitations on personal growth imposed by institutions which claim to be all about "freedom" but which stifle initiative under responsibility to the organization, the inherent fragility of a culture preserved under glass and the futility of attempting to do so to begin with. It was tough reading, and like much literature, not particularly interesting in quite large stretches. I felt particularly cheated by the ending, in which Knecht, having decided to leave Castalia because it impedes his transcendence to the next level of personal growth, jumps in a too-cold mountain lake to race with his new pupil and drowns. (I suppose this can be taken as allegorical as well: a man can devote his entire life to serving the academy, even rise to the top of its hierarchy, and still be unprepared for life in the real world.) Little hint is given by the narrator why Knecht is considered to be worthy of biography; one keeps waiting for the moment when Knecht has the epiphany that revolutionizes thought, thus making him worthy of study by a future historian. But it never comes.
More satisfying, to me, were the three "Lives" appended to the main novel. One of the exercises given to pupils in Castalia's elite schools was the creation of a "Life," a historical fantasy that used the student's knowledge of the culture of a particular time to place himself in a fictional autobiography, as if he lived in that time. Three ostensibly written by Knecht during his studies are included. These stories have the benefit of being more lively (unsullied by the voice of the pompous narrator) and mercifully much shorter than the main narrative. It is mildly interesting to draw parallels between these stories and the novel itself, but more provocative to contemplate the idea that the larger portion of The Glass Bead Game is not actually intended to be taken at face value but rather as another "Life" written by some pupil still farther in the future -- i.e., it is not truth within Hesse's fictional world, but a fiction on top of a fiction. The academic author, then, becomes a student poking fun at the writing style of his professors, with Hesse cackling behind it all. This is a neat narrative twist that casts the novel in an entirely new light. The introduction reveals that Hesse originally intended Knecht's story to be just one of four, with the other three "Lives" being equal to it, but changed the conception of the novel partway through writing it -- but did he, really?
Of course, even though Hesse never spelled out the rules of the Glass Bead Game, that hasn't stopped others from inventing their own. One attempt I located via Google shows what it might have been like. There are probably others. It amuses me that so much energy has invested in something that was never really intended to have a life of its own by its creator, and which in fact the novel reveals as more or less fruitless. Sort of like a highbrow equivalent to Trekkies who insist on learning to speak Klingon.
