Signs that I’m a geek (#12,354 in an ongoing series.)
Upon seeing this MetaFilter post…
A five meters long 1/72 scale model of the USS Enterprise is looking for a new home
… my first thought was, “NCC-1701 or NCC-1701-D?”
Supplementary question: would it have been more or less geeky if my first thought had been “Constitution class or Galaxy class?”
Ceiling porn. (SFW, honest…)
I like the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki best: an impressive site sight inside and out.
Ant mega-colony takes over world:
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered.
Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another.
The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. [...]
Two thoughts:
The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time.
Numbers 15, 10 & (especially) 2 are the highlights, IMHO.
[Via GromBlog]
Geek fact-checkers, start your DVRs:
Martin Freeman (The Office/Hot Fuzz) and Alexander Armstrong (Armstrong & Miller/Mutual Friends) lead the cast in Syntax Era (working title) a single drama from Darlow Smithson for BBC Four.
Syntax Era provides an affectionately comic account of the Eighties race for home computer supremacy. The drama documents the lengthy rivalry between maverick visionary Sir Clive Sinclair (Armstrong) and his former colleague Chris Curry (Freeman) as they go head to head to achieve domination of the growing home computer market. [...]
Just as long as the closing scene doesn’t feature a surprise cameo appearance by Alan Sugar…
[Via The Medium is Not Enough]
The Treptow crematorium in Berlin might just be the most imposing place of mourning in the world.
[Via deputy dog]
Sadly, I’ve written code that merited this comment more than once:
/* ---------------------
This is the messiest code I've ever produced. But that doesn't matter, as it's clearly been spec'd as a quick'n'dirty throwaway project that'll never be reused.If you're reading this, that's been disregarded. Quit your job, leave the country, fake your death, whatever it takes to avoid working on this file.
--------------------- */
The worst of it is, it’d probably be me1 reading it again a couple of years hence.
__________Malcolm Gladwell is sceptical about the case made by Chris Anderson in Free: The Future of a Radical Price:
Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” “What if Strauss had been right?” Anderson wonders, and then diligently sorts through the implications: as much fresh water as you could want, no reliance on fossil fuels, no global warming, abundant agricultural production. Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.
As the governments of Kiribati and Tuvalu contemplate the prospect that their islands are going to disappear beneath the waves of the South Pacific, they come to very different conclusions about how best to proceed:
[The government of Kiribati ...] recognises that migration schemes will eventually need to be accompanied by humanitarian options. It is keen to secure international agreements in which other governments recognise that climate change has contributed to their predicament and acknowledge “relocation” as part of their obligation to assist. The government of Tuvalu, on the other hand, does not want relocation to feature in international agreements because of its fear that if it does, industrialised countries may simply think that they can solve problems like rising sea levels by relocating affected populations rather than reducing carbon emissions, which would not bode well for the world as a whole.
The whole article is a fascinating read: strongly recommended.
Rafe Colburn has posted a couple of entries about Scott Rosenberg’s history of weblogging, Say Everything:
[Scott...] does a truly outstanding job of capturing the essence of events as they occurred. The toughest job for a historian or journalist is making the events recognizable to those who observed them closely, and Scott succeeds admirably on that front.
There are also pieces of analysis in the book that really impressed me. [...] He draws a distinction between “professional” bloggers and “traditional” bloggers that never occurred to me but that defines things perfectly – the pros write about what they think will interest their audience. The traditionalists write about what interests them. The difference is profound. I read all sorts of amateur blogs but very few professional ones. And what’s interesting to me is that the line is not whether the author gets paid or not – it’s the sensibility they bring to their work.
I’ll have to get a copy of Say Everything at some point. I’ll be interested to see how he tackles the question of what exactly makes a site a weblog.
As long-time readers may be aware, I’m finicky about this. Online journals aren’t weblogs, even if the author posts using WordPress or Movable Type. Personal sites that consist of a series of posts ordered chronologically but that don’t normally link to an external source aren’t weblogs, they’re opinion pieces.
There’s nothing wrong with either type of site, obviously – I read and enjoy plenty of both sorts – it’s just that IMNSHO they’re Not Weblogs. If the intent of the site’s author is to point out and/or comment upon material the author comes across on the internet, it’s a weblog,1 be it a linklog like LinkMachineGo or Bifurcated Rivets or a series of short essays on things the author has seen online or been thinking about like Rafe Colburn’s very own rc3.org or Amygdala.2
At any rate, that’s another title to go on my To Read pile some time soon…
__________Kevin Kelly hails the triumph of the default:
A default is an assumption that can be changed. The assumption of right-handedness in a hammer, or pliers, or scissors, could not be switched. The assumption of a driver’s gender as manifested in the seat position in an automobile could not be altered easily in the old days. But in much of modern technology it can be. The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. Technologies can be tailored to your preferences, and optimized to fit your own talents.
[Via Rebecca's Pocket]
T-shirt of the day: It Came Out of Nowhere.
[Via orrnyereg, posting at MetaFilter]
