Webcasting Carolyn Raffensperger on Risk Analysis and the Environment right now. This is a first for us in several respects: First time webcasting via WiFi, first time switching from Sorenson3 to MPEG-4 (actually using 3ivx rather than Apple’s built-in MPEG-4 codec) and first time using a new function I built into the events database that lets staff change the event mode between five states with the click of a button: no webcast, webcast scheduled, webcast in progress, webcast complete come back tomorrow for archive, and archive now online. The state of the switch drops the right QuickTime object code into the page to handle the condition.
Abnormally bad guessing is a sign of psychic ability.
Ask me about hosting with birdhouse.
March 31st, 2004
QRIO
Mind-blowing footage of synchronized dancing by four QRIO robots. Graceful like no robot I’ve ever seen seen. Amy sez: “Wake me when they do The Hustle.”
Music: Marc Bolan :: King Of The Rumbling Spires
March 31st, 2004
Backwards Baby Scream
Imagine you’re an Iraqi out in the streets protesting occupation of your homeland. And then suddenly you’re deaf.
Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: It Noh Funny
March 30th, 2004
N-Ster
The backlash against Friendster, Orkut, and other “social networking” apps continues, and I have to say I’m in total agreement with the general “Where’s the beef?” day-after assessment. Despite initial enthusiasm about Orkut, I’ve since lost all interest, and never visit the site without provocation. ZeFrank has a hilarious and searing video indictment of social networking sites. Especially telling: Almost all of my real friends who received inviations from me to join Orkut simply ignored them.
But the problem isn’t with social networking per se’ — the problem is implementation. Friendster, Orkut, etc. make a big deal about who you know. Who cares? No wonder people get burned out on these services – they emphasize the wrong thing. What matters is (surprise!) content.
And guess which social networking experiment got that message from the beginning? LiveJournal. Sure LJ lets you hook up with rings of friends, but those friends are (generally) accumulated as a result of real conversations. Rather than starting with a databased list of favorite TV shows and cat names, people think and speak, others think and speak back, and relationships are forged as a result. Elemental. It’s possible to create relationships that way on Orkut too, but on Orkut, conversation is secondary to the process of artificially jacking up your tally of so-called friends to make yourself appear popular.
I doubt I’ll pull out of Orkut, but I don’t see myself contributing to it either. To me it’s become a non-starter.
Music: Gary Numan :: We Are Glass
March 29th, 2004
Miles Images, 12-18 Months
After Miles’ first birthday, he started running and climbing like crazy, got his first haircut, learned to love the bathtub, visited his great grandmother, started brushing his own teeth, and wants to do pretty much everything himself.
March 28th, 2004
Wikipedia
Wikis are not new, but I feel my fascination with them being kindled. The usual model of web publishing is that the webmaster locks everything down tight; a few people can publish while the rest of the universe gets read-only access. Wikis turn this assumption on its head, asking the absurd question, “What if we let the entire world add or edit pages in real time, without editorial intermediary? Instead of assuming people will vandalize everything not locked down, what if we assumed that people actually want to do cool things together?”
There are a lot of cool Wikis out there, but the most sterling example is WikiPedia — a collaborative encyclopedia being constructed second-by-second by volunteers from around the world — thousands of people adding to and correcting the analysis of others on every facet of human knowledge. More than a quarter million entries since 2001, and growing. What’s really inspiring is that the information it contains seems to be of such high quality. This makes sense – if someone writes on a topic that you understand better than the original or previous author, you can modify the entry right there on the spot.
Of course the WikiPedia is up-to-date in a way no printed encyclopedia could ever be — yesterday’s successful test flight of Boeing’s Mach 7 aircraft X-43 is already a part of the X-43 entry. Seeing collaborative potential manifest is always inspiring.
Installed PHPWiki last night on a side domain, starting to play with it. We’ll see what comes…
Music: John Fahey :: Theme And Variations
March 27th, 2004
Ukulele Freakshow
Good piece summarizing the details of the new CAN-SPAM legislation … Jeff Bridges’ web site is all analog … Amazing (scary!) Dutch dolls … Stupid computer error messages … Ukulele freakshow … The truth about Stonehenge … Mindblowing Flash game – set aside half an hour when ready to slow down, sink in… What is moving, what is not? … Philosophers hate vagueness … The cardinal sins of blogging … The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist … Why the FBI loves Macs … Tatooed baby dolls … Pepsi bottlecap liner leak vulnerability …
Music: Herbie Hancock :: The Prisoner
March 25th, 2004
Greendale
Have been listening to Neil Young’s sonic novella “Greendale” for months – a somewhat disjointed portrait of three generations living in a small town, ultimately focused on granddaughter Sun Green, who awakens to her enviro self, takes over the lobby of Powerco, welds herself to the beak of a bronze eagle and becomes a media spectacle through the oracle of her megaphone (“Hey Mr. Clean, you’re dirty now too”).
Later realized that Young had made a movie out of Greendale — the whole thing shot on a Super 8 underwater camera (“That Super 8 grain looks like my music sounds“); the footage is grainy, never quite in focus, and seems to oscillate between 12 and 20 frames per second. The music is huge, deeply rocking. The stories are completely honest and uncomplicated — no symbolism at all. If a song mentions a rooster, Neil shows you a rooster. The characters speak every word of the songs. In anyone else’s hands, this kind of literalism would be corny, but Greendale is totally truthful, like almost everything Neil Young has ever made.
Music: Cosmic Jokers :: Interplay of Forces
March 23rd, 2004
China’s Chopstick Crisis
Usually when one hears about rates of global deforestation, you get stats such as “Amazonian rain forests are being decimated at a rate of 2.4 acres per second.” But recently I’m hearing more about the amount of forest being razed to create disposable / one-time-use chopsticks throughout Asia:
China now produces and discards more than 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, cutting down as many as 25 million trees in the process, according to government statistics. Another 15 billion pairs are exported to Japan, South Korea and other countries. At the current rate of timber use, environmentalists warn, China will consume its remaining forests in about a decade.
And despite China’s great land mass, they’re importing 60 million cubic meters of timber yearly to meet demand. To make matters worse, the Chinese government actively encouraged disposable chopstick use for years to inhibit communicable disease. There is a nascent environmental movement in China which encourages people to carry their own non-disposable chopsticks, but I’ve heard from Chinese environmentalists that environmentalism in China gets even more strange looks than it does in the U.S.
So… what happens in a decade, when all of China’s forests are gone?
Music: Minutemen :: Beacon Sighted Through Fog
March 22nd, 2004
Un-Electric Fridge
Astoundingly simple, totally elegant: Place a clay pot inside a larger clay pot and line the space between with sand. Dampen sand with water, cover with cloth. As water evaporates, the sand is cooled; basic thermodynamics. Result: Eggplants inside now last three weeks rather than three days, and a region that had no refrigeration now does. Inventor Mohammed Bah Abba wins this year’s Rolex Award for his pot-in-pot system (and can now, ironically, afford an electric fridge).
Music: Steve Roach :: Rainfrog Dreaming
March 21st, 2004
Vulcan Magnolia
This weekend:
ran three miles
made french toast w/ “L’il Smokies”
found a vulcan magnolia at neighborhood dealer
dug three foot hole in clay soil and planted tree
Grass-hogged front and back lawn edges, side strips
raked camphor tree droppings
installed new kitchen faucet
Music: Tom Verlaine :: Saucer Crash
March 21st, 2004
TypeKey
No Movable Type 3.0 yet, but TypeKey has been announced – a centralized login service for all MT and TypePad weblogs (and others?). Free to all, anonymity possible if desired. Most of the advantages seem academic, but this will be a huge win in the fight against comment spam.
Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Ramona
March 20th, 2004
Gruppo Sportivo
Finally got bored of the default Entourage mail sounds I’ve been hearing for two years and went looking for replacements — which turned up in spades at soundsetcentral.com. Paging through the downloads, jaw suddenly dropped when I came across a Gruppo Sportivo sound set.
25 years ago I worked at a surf shop in Morro Bay, when punk and new wave were peaking, and one of our customers brought in a tape of this obscure (to Americans) Dutch new wave band. The tape was on constant loop for an entire summer, permanently burned into my brain. But the funny thing was, I never saw an album cover of theirs, never owned any of their records, and promptly forgot about them when I left the shop.
Suddenly re-obsessed with Hans Vanderburg (Vandefruit) and Gruppo Sportivo, tracked them down on Amazon; turns out a bunch of re-issues have been produced recently, import only. Not a trace at Rasputin’s or Amoeba, so ordered “Buddy Odor Is a Gas,” “10 Mistakes,” “Back to 78″ (full discography). They arrived a few days ago.
It’s strange to compare one’s hermetically-sealed-in-time memory of some forgotten musical branch with current impressions. How one group can be so stupid/silly and so brilliant at the same time is a confounding paradox. But I’m having fun trying to work it out. Amy and I have been singing the “Beep Beep Love” chorus for the past few days – amazing and welcome ear worm.
Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Tokyo
March 19th, 2004
God Hates Shrimp
As it turns out, God Hates Shrimp (and all non-scaly denizens of the sea, apparently). Although that’s just the old testament talking, so nevermind. Actually, it turns out that God Hates Shrimp is a parody (but with gen-you-ine Bible quotes!) of real “God Hates Sodomites” protestors. Not so funny: Rhea County, Tennessee initiated a legal attempt to ban homosexuals from living in their county (that decision has since been rescinded; interestingly, CNN kept the original URL but rewrote the story and replaced the headline without making note of any change – always tempting in web publishing, but editorially weak IMO). Long story short, if you ever need a church sign, you can synthesize one in about two seconds. Or, if you prefer, graze through the amazing gallery of real-world church signs.
Music: The Specials :: Do Nothing
March 18th, 2004
Hans Blix
Went to see CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interview former U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix last night (part of the Media at War conference). A remarkable mind – what struck me most was how totally lucid and committed to his own neutrality he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t have his own conclusions and observations – of course he did – but rarely do you encounter people involved in political processes who so carefully downplay or force aside their own biases, who struggle so carefully and naturally toward the elusive goal of total objectivity. His central problem: The paradox of proving the negative. “How can I prove there is not a tennis ball in this room?” he asked, gesturing to the interior of Zellerbach Hall. Also enjoyed his references to the best headlines he had seen regarding himself in the press, such as “Blix Tricks Irk U.S.”
Dean Schell, in his introduction, quoted Donald Rumsfeld’s tricky koan: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Which is an absurd piece of semantic trickery politically speaking, and yet also philosophically true.
Music: The Heavenly States :: Cumulous to Nebulous
March 16th, 2004
Open-Source Endangers Economy
Microsoft exec Jim Gray: ‘The thing I’m puzzled by is how there will be a software industry if there’s open-source.‘
So Jim, if I read you right, you’re saying that the commercial software industry is like a charity of sorts, and that customers should pay money for software even if equally good or superior open source solutions exist, because commercial software engineers are somehow entitled to the customer’s money?
While my experience with BeOS and Mac OS X make it clear that some commercial involvement results in higher quality products based on open foundations (due to cohesive vision, clear direction, etc.), it is also clear that many purely open source projects have resulted in products that are as good as or superior to their commercial counterparts.
Want to keep your customers? Then beat open source products on features (or service) — but don’t fool yourself that people will pay needlessly for software just to artificially prop up the industry.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is playing matchmaker – introducing deep-pocket funder BayStar to SCO, resulting in a $50 million windfall for the company that has made it a life mission to suck the wind out of open source’s sails. Microsoft downplays the connection. Riiiiiight.
Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Radar
March 15th, 2004
Media at War Conference
Big event being sponsored by the J-School this week: Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV join 50 other journalists and foreign policy experts conducting three days of panels, lectures and discussions on the topic of journalism’s coverage of and bearing on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
For a change, the J-School is not webcasting this one — campus central command is (though they’re not doing live, which we usually do). Parts of the conference will also show up on C-SPAN. Much of the conference will also be covered in near-real-time by Jim van Nostrand at the Western Knight Center seminar weblog.
Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: No Shampoo (Also Very Nice)
March 14th, 2004
Planks vs. Boards
Took a weekend to play in the snow. Shirtsleeve weather at Kirkwood, perfect blue skies, ten feet of spring sugar on the ground, not too crowded. Except for the fact that I was alone, an almost perfect weekend. Decided to find out for once and for all whether I’m a skier or a snowboarder at heart.
(more…)
March 12th, 2004
Office of Special Plans, Shwing Vote
At Salon, a former lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Air Force describes in withering detail what it was like to be inside the Pentagon during the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Five pages of tales on the “Office of Special Plans,” the neoconservatives who run it, their continuous bungling, and most significantly, their willful and calculated manipulation of reality to build a case for war on Iraq from the flimsiest premises. A frightening read.
Also at Salon — and this comes as a total surprise to me — traditionally apolitical shock jock Howard Stern has come out “shwinging” at Bush, and has suddenly become a rare bastion of hardcore liberal speech on mainstream media. I’ve never been a Stern fan, but now I’m curious.
It’s that relative absence of political discussion on Stern’s show in the past that might make the current anti-Bush barrage more influential. “The fact that his audience does not tune in to him to hear about politics means that he is not just preaching to a choir, in the way that most of the conservative talk-show hosts are doing” …
Music: Charles Mingus :: Love Chant
March 11th, 2004
Three Enforcements
Somebody’s psych notes, found crumpled in the bushes in our side yard. If you are the owner of this homework and want it back, please contact me via this web site. I am enamored of the choices you have made while highlighting phrases, such as “following the orders,” “grades rise,” and “decrease a particular behavior.”
Music: The Minutemen :: Futurism Restated
March 10th, 2004
Open Source Homepage
In the spirit of open source development, MIT invites their user community to submit homepage designs: “We’ve found that homepage designs work best as an interactive process…” Check the gallery for historical results. Love the idea. If anyone wants to send a drop-in replacement style sheet for this blog, I just might run with it.
Music: Bad Guy Reaction :: Gas Huffer
March 10th, 2004
Triplets, Destino
Watched The Triplets of Belleville with Amy tonight (see trailer). Refreshing to see animation that impresses not because of technical sophistication or by breaking any particular ground, but because of pure inventiveness — even though most of the film feels like it could have been drawn in the early 60s, the animators make choices that are impossible to justify even within the film’s own universe — such as the gorgeous and eerie, Giaocametti-tall ocean liners Mrs. Souza and her dog chase across the sea in a paddle boat. Likewise, the simple plot is peppered with such bizarre scenarios — picture three musical biddies who subsist on a diet of dynamited frogs navigating a steel ship of bicycles and a projector through a vision of paris where buildings have giant wine bottles built in, and you’ll start to get a picture of the imagination factor here. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but not just “weird” — it’s charming and truly beautiful.
Had read months ago about Destino – the 1946 collaboration between Salvadore Dali and Walt Disney, but never imagined I’d get to see it on the big screen. But we were lucky – Destino screened just before Triplets; perfect pairing. Much of it was exactly what you would expect from these two forces — the best parts were greater than the sum.
Image above snapped with phonecam during Triplets — this is why the Rolling Stones are cracking down on cell phone use at concerts – copyright grey area is simple and instantaneous.
Music: The Polyphonic Spree :: La La
March 9th, 2004
Choke Collar
Odd – in one day, two examples relating to squashed speech and the RNC:
The Republican National Committee is telling television stations not to run MoveOn ads that criticize President Bush. The RNC is trying to convince network execs that the ads are illegally funded, while MoveOn says that “The federal campaign laws have permitted precisely this use of [soft] money for advertising for the past 25 years.”
Meanwhile, Britain’s top scientific adviser David King warned his government that global warming was probably a greater threat to global security than terrorism — referring to Bush’s policies on climate change. In response, Tony Blair’s private secretary warned King to “limit his contact with the media” and “to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio.”
Music: Jean Knight :: Mr. Big Stuff
March 8th, 2004
Inner Space
BBC News looks at the psychology of portable music players, the significance of the aura or bubble that surrounds one the moment the music starts, and why it’s so appealing. A key point is that headphones in part allow one to regain control of the senses – the world represents a bombardment of visual and sonic messages, and by replacing the sonic shell, you in part get to choose your sensual world, rather than moving through the one the world chooses for you.
I didn’t start wearing a music player until my late 30s, and remember the experience being very different than expected at first – it wasn’t just fun to listen to music – the iPod literally changed the way I felt in the environment. It was almost too much. The experience feels much more normal to me now.
More:
Some women use earphones to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. In the same way, removing earphones when talking to someone sends a strong message about how interested one is in what is being said. It pays the speaker a compliment.
Music: Gong :: Master Builder
March 8th, 2004
Martian Mickey
In the first official instance of interplanetary graffiti, Mars rover Spirit pulled out its abrasion tools and left a little Mickey on a Martian rock.
Music: The Pogues :: The Wake Of The Medusa
