Friday 5/31/02 §
Garfield slash fiction is just wrong. (memepool)
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Self-Annihilating Sentences. (diablog at geegaw)
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Conservative pundit George F. Will comes out against arming airline pilots. A lot of pilots are for this, but Will found three who were able to supply some good reasons not to. I'd not necessarily be opposed to having a pistol in the cockpit, but if this were the case I think it certainly ought to be secured in such a way that it can't be used rashly or go off accidentally. Pilots should not carry them on their person. (Follow Me Here)
8 comments
Thursday 5/30/02 §
Shorten is a lossless audio compressor that on average reduces audio files to half their original size. (Unlike MP3, no data is lost during compression.) It also has a lossy mode where you can set the amount of compression or the acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. A Windows version can be downloaded from the site above; there are also Mac and Linux versions including one for Mac OS X. Inventor provides details on how it works in a technical paper.
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Wednesday 5/29/02 §
Brown and Michaels Weird and Wonderful Patents. (Craig's BookNotes)
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Write DVD-R at up to 4X and CD-R at up to 24X (and double the CD capacity!) with Sanyo's just-announced combo drive. This is the kind of drive I want; I'd hope Apple will offer something similar in their G4 towers, at least, with the next revision. (MacNN)
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Bob Miller's Light Walk is a "lighthearted" (groan) introduction to optics, accomplished outdoors using the light of the sun and a few simple props. You can follow along with Bob on the Web site, then go try it yourself. Bob's illustration of the concept of depth of field via overlapping images is one of the simplest yet most illuminating (groan) ways I've ever seen the idea explained.
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People categorized into suits of cards. Very interesting analysis of the personality types of players in MUDs (text-based multi-player online games) and how they interact, with a view toward building a balanced community inside the game. Obviously applies in many different ways to online communities in general. (Kottke)
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I had to buy a box of paper last night for the laser printer. Now, admittedly, I don't print much and so it's been a while since I bought a box -- at least two years -- but when the hell did they start making the wrappers for the individual reams of paper out of plastic? That's just unnatural.
3 comments
Tuesday 5/28/02 §
Those of you who have PowerBooks or iBooks and are still running the "classic" Mac OS (e.g. 8.x, 9.x) should try out SmoothType 2.3. It brings subpixel font rendering (as found in Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft's ClearType technology) to all your Mac software. The utility also has regular anti-aliasing for traditional CRT monitors, but the sub-pixel stuff is new in this version. It makes a subtle but noticeable difference in the legibility of smoothed type on the iBook I use at the office.
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The first 90% or so of Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis is an ambitious, clever, faithful, and quite enjoyable re-imagining of, and homage to, the universe Isaac Asimov created for his classic "Foundation" series. Kingsbury has updated Asimov's basic premise, that of a galaxy-spanning empire ruled by an oligarchy whose mathematics allow them to predict the future, with twenty-first-century thinking. Chief among Kingsbury's additions is the fam, a personal quantum computer that augments the wearer's mental capacity. Most people are fitted with fams during childhood and come to depend on them for most of their thinking. The idea is more than a little bit cyberpunk, and therefore practically retro now, and Kingsbury manages to deftly weave it into his world-building. As the novel opens, a psychohistorian named Eron Osa has been sentenced to have his fam destroyed, essentially making him a mental cripple unable to remember even what crime he has been convicted of. Over the course of the novel, his heresy is revealed, and -- no surprise -- ultimately vindicated.
Kingsbury's impersonation of Isaac Asimov is nearly flawless. (There are some colloquialisms here and there that seemed out of place to me, but I was looking for things like that; most readers probably won't even notice.) The novel is chock full of the the things that Asimov's fans like about him. There are lots of scenes with people just sitting around talking about ideas, working out their implications and drawing conclusions, and there's a tangible sense of vastness to the millieu in which the story takes place: you can really believe there are so many human-populated worlds that no one can enumerate them all, that an entire planet can be "lost," that the early history of the human species, back when it only lived on one planet, has become a dim, distorted memory. The male-dominated future society Kingsbury describes is positively antiquated in its attitudes toward women, which has drawn the author a fair amount of criticism, but it does help him match the tone of Asimov's original "Foundation" novels. There's a good deal of fun to be had for Asimov buffs in matching up people and events in Kingsbury's novel with their "Foundation" counterparts. (Kingsbury did not get permission to play in the real "Foundation" universe, in fact I'm not clear on whether he even asked, so he had to file all the serial numbers off Asimov's parts and give them different names. To his credit, his feel just as right as Asimov's by the end of the novel.) Another amusing conceit that runs throughout the novel are the mixed-up "facts" that denizens of the 761st Century "know" about early human history, right down to the name of humanity's purported origin world, "Rith."
I find it odd indeed that Asimov's ficticious mathematical discipline of psychohistory hasn't been explored in more depth than it has. Asimov himself, and, later, his estate, has occasionally allowed other writers to play in his universe (Orson Scott Card's contribution is quite worth a read), but there's no reason the basic idea shouldn't be as widely-used in science fiction as faster-than-light travel or artificial intelligence. I'm surprised there haven't been more "unauthorized" psychohistory novels, to be honest. The premise is rich, and the territory it lays out is largely unexplored.
Kingsbury's novel reads like it's a lot bigger than it is, and it's plenty big enough in real life (512 pages). Typically, after reading just a few chapters, I felt full and needed to take a break to digest what I'd read. This is not a complaint; in fact, it's rather an accomplishment to pack as much intrigue and implication into as few pages as Kingsbury does. Unfortunately, like too many of the science fiction novels I've read recently, the ending is weak and feels rushed. Once I got to it, I finished the last seventy-five pages or so at a sprint. Still, the rest of the novel was so engrossing that I think I can safely say that if you enjoyed "Foundation," you'll enjoy Psychohistorical Crisis. It's SF in the grand old style, with a modern twist.
6 comments
Sunday 5/26/02 §
For terminal-averse Mac users, this AppleScript serves much the same purpose as the rootfinder command alias described below. When you run it, the Finder is quit and re-launched using the root user account. (You'll need to enter your account password the first time you use the script.) The script remains running until you quit this copy of the Finder using the Quit command under the Finder menu, at which point the Finder is re-launched with your regular user privileges.
You definitely don't want to run with a root Finder all the time, since it's easy to mess up some part of Mac OS X's Unix underbelly. That's why the script hangs around until you quit the root Finder. But it can be very handy sometimes to be able to move files around without being concerned about permissions, such as when you need to put files into someone else's user folder.
3 comments
Mac OS X users, add this line to your .login script:
alias rootfinder sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
You'll need to open a new terminal window for this new command to become available. The rootfinder command opens a second copy of the Finder, one with root privileges. Since it uses the sudo command, you will probably have to enter your account password after invoking it. It's just the thing when you need to make changes to protected directories and don't feel like using the shell. To remind you not to leave a root Finder running all the time (it can be dangerous), the terminal window from which you invoked rootfinder is locked until you press Control-C in it, which will quit the root Finder and return you to the shell prompt.
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Thursday 5/23/02 §
In Dallas, the police have been arresting clerks at adult video stores, rather than the prosperous owners of the store, for selling obscene material. The stores had been advising their employees to plead guilty and paying the $1000 fines for them, as a cost of doing business. But now, a few stores have started fighting back, hiring a young lawyer named Andrew Chatham to defend their employees in court. So far, he's won every case. Great story, well worth a read. (Obscure Store)
4 comments
Wednesday 5/22/02 §
Speaking of Wendy Carlos, on her site she has a page about how human color vision works. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, discovered a fascinating optical illusion based on the way we perceive colors. Would you believe that using only red and white, it is possible to create an image that appears to contain green? Land called this process Retinex. Carlos's exploration of color phenomena is detailed and interesting (don't miss the second and third parts, follow the links at the bottom of the page).
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Animusic is "computer-animated music" -- a collection of seven imaginative 3D animations to accompany original electronic compositions. Each 5-to-7-minute video demonstrates a group of elaborate Rube Goldberg-style "instruments" that "perform" the music. The animations are created with proprietary software that generates motion paths based on MIDI data, so the visuals appear to actually generate the music rather than merely responding to it. TechTV showed "Pipe Dream" from this collection on its Eye Drops program, and I was quite entranced by how clever and visually striking it was. The DVD is $20. You can get it at Amazon, but it might be better to order it directly from the creators, so they see more of the proceeds.
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Careful, those things will give you cancer! (Two Things at Once)
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Seattle musicians Scientific American and Plastic Phantom have created a new score for the geek cult film Tron. It'll premiere May 29 at the Experience Music Project. I'm not sure how I feel about this; the original soundtrack was composed and performed by synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos and is pretty respectable in its own right. Still, this re-imagining might be interesting, or it might suck. Anybody going? (BrainLog)
3 comments
Transdermal caffeine delivery with your morning shower. Washing with Shower Shock is equivalent to drinking approximately two cups of coffee. Talk about an eye-opener. (Boing Boing)
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Tuesday 5/21/02 §
The Secret Garden: radiographs of flowers. Shadowy, exotic, and beautiful. (MeFi)
1 comment
Monday 5/20/02 §
Finally, one of the mapping Web sites understands what we really need: driving maps that can be easily deciphered in a moving car. Check out MapBlast!'s LineDrive map format -- enter two addresses as usual and make sure you've chosen LineDrive for the format. (rc3)
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Beating Bill. How to compete with Microsoft, in Business 2.0. (CamWorld)
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Sunday 5/19/02 §
Last night I heard a very loud crash and felt a solid thump in the foundation of my apartment building. I looked out the front window and didn't see anything, so I figured someone in the downstairs apartment had just knocked something over, like a big china cabinet or something. This morning I went outside and saw:
I'm not quite sure how this happened, but I'd not be surprised to find out that alcohol was involved. The car came from the parking lot, which is behind where I was standing to take the picture and approximately level with the second floor of the apartment building. Damage to the structure was minor, as the car merely clipped the corner of the building while taking out a few shrubs on its way down the embankment. Still, for the first time, I was glad that I live on the second floor of the building. The downstairs tenants could easily have had this vehicle in their living room, or their bedroom.
While I was taking the pictures, a guy I presume to be the owner of the car showed up with a tow truck operator in, er, tow. He seemed a little nonplussed that I was taking pictures of the scene, and he looked like he could kick my ass, so I scampered. I may post a few other pictures later, but they're really not much different from this one.
6 comments
Saturday 5/18/02 §
If you're worried about enduring a "chick movie" for a date, take her to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding if it's playing near you. It's a comedy, and there's romance, but it's not technically what I'd call a romantic comedy, in the formula sense. The romantic plot travels in a pretty straight line; there's never really any doubt that the two leads will end up married, given the title of the film. The trouble is, she's Greek and her family expects her to marry another Greek, and the name of the man she's fallen for is Ian, a decidedly non-Greek name. The humor arises from the characters and the inevitable cultural conflict between Toula's huge family and Ian's uptight white-bread parents. Toula's father in particular is a riot; he's involved in several running gags, and much to my pleasure, the most prominent of these are wrapped up nicely at the end. Nia Vardalos, who wrote the film based on her one-woman stage show and who also plays Toula, is charming whether she's playing frumpy (early in the film) or radiant (after her makeover). I suppose I probably didn't get all the jokes, not being Greek myself, but trust me, it's funny enough even if you're not. I can't imagine anyone not enjoying it. Also, you'll learn how to say "nice boobs" in Greek -- which is enough to make it at least nominally into a "guy movie" in my book.
4 comments
Wednesday 5/15/02 §
You can now see an archive of previous user-submitted taglines here. I just added the logging code, so any taglines entered previously won't appear on the log.
Someone who likes anagrams keeps setting the tagline to "Nil Jerky Lard." Cute, but why don't you let someone else have a turn?
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The Royal We: virtually anyone with European ancestry descends from English royalty. Strange but apparently true, according to The Atlantic's Steve Olson. (memepool)
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This is one I'll be visiting regularly: Exploit! Seattle, a Weblog-format guide to events in the area. I'm always too lazy to pick up one of Seattle's two free alterna-weeklies, so I'm usually terminally out-of-touch on interesting things to do around here. (BrainLog)
3 comments
Tuesday 5/14/02 §
If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you'll find a box that will let you enter a tagline for this site. (That's the text to the right of "Jerry Kindall" up there in your browser's title bar.) Go nuts.
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Joe Ganley wrote a small LISP interpreter in JavaScript. It runs in your Web browser. (protocol7)
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Bert Hickman built a 10" Tesla coil that can throw 5' long sparks. More impressively, he also built a gadget that shrinks quarters by inducing a million amperes of current into the coin. In the process, the wire used for the induction (#10 AWG) is vaporized into an 8" ball of plasma. All this happens in about 20 microseconds. (tranquileye)
3 comments
Monday 5/13/02 §
Although I suppose it's remotely possible that it might be an elaborate hoax of some sort, as far as I can see, The Thought-Space appears to be exactly what it claims to be: a collective Web journal written by a group of five people who happen to live in one body -- la gente della luna, or "the people of the moon." (leuschke.org)
11 comments
Saturday 5/11/02 §
This is freaking brilliant: using fragment identifiers in URLs (that is, the part after a # symbol) to allow dynamic pages and framesets to be bookmarked. (glish)
1 comment
Friday 5/10/02 §
Writer and NPR commentator Daniel Pinkwater is a man of girth. Men of girth often have difficulty entering and exiting cars. He did a little informal research (in a K-Mart parking lot) before buying his latest car and made an unexpected choice. I can't say I'm surprised; although I'm not quite of Pinkwater's dimensions, I've sat in that model of car myself and been equally amazed at how roomy it was and how easy it is to get in and out of. But then, as my buddy Warren (who owns one) points out, it's designed in, by, and for a country that subsists on bratwurst and beer.
2 comments
Thursday 5/9/02 §
Finding the speed of light experimentally using marshmallows and a microwave. (larkfarm)
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Be kind to your local Nazi. (randomWalks)
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Call me a Philistine, but if a fake highway sign is art, then the word "art" is meaningless. (Boing Boing)
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KartOO is a search engine with an interesting cartographical, object-oriented, Flash-based user interface. (The search results themselves don't seem to be all that great, though, and it's a bit slow.) (Follow Me Here)
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Upgrade Photoshop to version 7 for $87. Woohoo! (dangerousmeta)
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Very good article on Japanese pop culture and its growing influence on the rest of the world at Foreign Policy. (CamWorld)
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A developmental disorder seemingly in the same general family as autism, hyperlexia describes a constallation of symptoms that revolve around an extremely precocious reading ability, to the extent that the child is obsessed with letters and numbers and words. Like autism or Asperger's, social problems are also involved. "Also ask: what can the child spell? Often this simple question is the most immediate clue to hyperlexia. One 2-year old child came in and spelled 'Ponderosa Steak House' with magnetic letters." Yow. (Electrolite)
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Tuesday 5/7/02 §
Frans Masereel's The Idea (1920) is a novel told in 82 woodcuts. (wood s lot)
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Sunday 5/5/02 §
The BBC's television version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been released on Region 1 DVD for all us American Douglas Adams fans. (Thanks, Scott)
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Friday 5/3/02 §
A fugue version of the early synthesizer novelty hit "Popcorn," a Super Mario remix of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," the theme to Jeopardy! as a samba, Toto's "Africa" as a polka, and much much more at Laura May's Musician Extraordinaire. (anil dash)
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Thursday 5/2/02 §
Here's a terrible ZDNet headline from last December. Ambiguous in the worst possible way. Anybody got any other good, bad headlines?
9 comments
Wednesday 5/1/02 §
This article is depressing. 70% of adult Americans do not understand the scientific process. 60% believe in pseudoscience such as astrology and ESP. Sigh. (yaysoft)
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