And now, the inevitable weekend picture post.

• :cold: I and :cold: II by ~sckamb are beautifully overexposed, fabulously colourful portraits. My only quibble is that I'd have preferred that the two images in the first picture be posted as separate images. I don't think the totally bleached out background in the right hand image works as well.
• With Digital Sun, ~nasigoreng performs the by no means minor feat of making Birmingham look exotic.

Incidentally, I had no idea Birmingham had its own ferris wheel right in the middle of Centenary Square. If work ever takes me down that way again I'll have to see if I can't find time for a visit. And come to think of it, the new Selfridges store looks to be quite an eyeful. When I left Birmingham in 1995 the Bullring redevelopment was barely getting started, and last time I was back in 2001 there were just a lot of muddy lots where new building was taking place. You turn your back for a few years and look what happens while you're away…

The London Review of Books has a fascinating review by Chalmers Johnson of Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold by Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave. The Seagraves' book discusses the fate of the war treasure looted by the Japanese during the late thirties and early forties. The first question is why the two main Axis powers were treated so differently by the occupying powers.

The real differences between the two nations, however, developed in the years and decades after 1945. Survivors and relatives of victims of the Holocaust have worked for almost six decades to win compensation from German corporations for slave labour and to regain possession of works of art stolen from their homes and offices. Litigation continues against Swiss banks that hid much of the Nazi loot. As recently as July 2001, the Austrian Government began to disburse some $300 million out of an endowment of almost $500 million to more than 100,000 former slave labourers. The German Government has long recognised that, in order to re-establish relations of mutual respect with the countries it pillaged, serious gestures towards restitution are necessary. It has so far paid more than $45 billion in compensation and reparations. Japan, on the other hand, has given its victims a mere $3 billion, while giving its own nationals around $400 billion in compensation for war losses.

One reason for these differences is that victims of the Nazis have been politically influential in the US and Britain, forcing their Governments to put pressure on Germany, whereas Japan's victims live in countries that for most of the postwar period were torn by revolution, anticolonial movements and civil wars. This has begun to change with the rise of Sino-American activists. The success of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking (1997), a book the Japanese establishment did everything in its power to impugn, heralded the emergence of this group.

More significant, however, are differences in US Government policies towards the two countries. From the moment of Germany's defeat, the United States was active in apprehending war criminals, denazifying German society, and collecting and protecting archives of the Nazi regime, all of which have by now been declassified. By contrast, from the moment of Japan's defeat, the US Government sought to exonerate the Emperor and his relatives from any responsibility for the war. By 1948, it was seeking to restore the wartime ruling class to positions of power (Japan's wartime minister of munitions, Nobusuke Kishi, for example, was prime minister from 1957 to 1960). The US keeps many of its archives concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws.

As recounted by Johnson, the story the Seagraves tell of the US efforts to grab as much Japanese wartime loot as possible ties in somewhat with one of the subplots in my current reading, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. (NB: I'm only just over halfway through Stephenson's novel: if there are any plot developments which invalidate that comparison, please don't tell me!) The Seagraves' book looks like yet another candidate for the To-Read pile.

Neil Gaiman has given an interview to Kathie Huddleston for Science Fiction Weekly about Don't Panic, his companion to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and his friendship with Douglas Adams.

What surprised you most about the experience of writing this book and the journey that it's taken?

Gaiman: I think there have been several surprises. The biggest one when writing it was how many of the things in Hitchhiker one thought of being set in stone, when they were merely accidents. The biggest and most obvious one is Arthur Dent's dressing gown, which may seem a silly and rather goofy thing. But in the first couple of Hitchhiker books on radio they never actually mention the dressing gown. The dressing gown only turns up on the TV series and, in fact, Douglas wrote a scene where Arthur gets to wear this silver space costume. And the director, who Douglas very much disliked, Alan J.W. Bell, took it out and kept him in the dressing gown the whole time. Which was something that Douglas actually liked enough to keep it in subsequent books. So, Arthur Dent and his dressing gown remained after that. I always like the strange accidental nature of that.

Later in the interview Gaiman notes that some of the stories Adams told in later years about the reception Hitchhiker's received … um … grew in the telling. It'll be more difficult for writers to pull that sort of trick now that so many of them have weblogs and online journals where they discuss that sort of thing more-or-less as it happens

[Edited to update URL for interview. jr 12 Dec 2003]

The Washington Post invited its readers to create some new words by taking an existing word and adding, removing or changing a single letter. And, of course, coming up with an appropriate new definition. My favourites:

• Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

[...]

• Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidently walked through a spider web.

Brigita has the full list.

[Via 13 days from monday]

It looks as if Farscape will be coming back after all, albeit only as a four hour miniseries rather than a full fifth season. Great news, even so.

I just hope they can get all the main cast members back – it won't be the same if they had to recast a character, or leave someone's storyline to be resolved off-screen.

[Via feeling listless]

Good Product.

A helpful household hint.

People never remember to write in about the good things a product does, always the bad! So this is very refreshing!!

……………………………

Dear Tide,

I am writing to say what an excellent product you have! One evening about a month ago, while at home, I spilled some red wine on my new white blouse. My husband started to berate me about my drinking problem and how expensive the blouse was. Well, one thing lead to another and I ended up with a lot of his blood on my white blouse, as well.

I tried to get the stains out using the bargain brand detergent my cheap husband bought, but they just wouldn't come out. I went to the local convenience store and got a bottle of liquid Tide with bleach alternative, and all of the stains came out! They came out so well, in fact, that the forensic DNA tests were all negative!

I thank you, once again, for a great product!

Well, gotta go, I have to write a letter to the Hefty bag people.

Sincerely,

Recently Widowed

Elinor Mills Abreu laments the tyranny of the TiVo.

Fanatical TiVo users complain that their TiVo quickly fills up with shows they can't bear to delete, from self-improving educational fare like "NOW with Bill Moyers" and "Chimps: So Like Us," to less cerebral programs such as "Sex and the City."

Like an ever-growing stack of magazines on a coffee table, the TiVo glut promises many enjoyable hours of entertainment. But the sheer amount is also overwhelming.

Many TiVo users say they bought the device thinking it would allow them to take greater control of their TV watching. Instead, they find themselves burdened with another obligation in their already filled day.

[...]

For something designed to solve a simple problem – making recording TV shows easy and reliable – TiVo has created whole new categories of need.

Posting the link to this article at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow noted that the same problem of endless queues of material to read or watch arises with email programs and RSS readers. I'd add web browsers and Usenet clients to that list. However, I'm not sure that this is in fact the same problem. Surely one of the worries about your TiVo filling up is that you'll lose a programme you might have really, really wanted to see if you don't watch it soon. However, there's not (usually) much danger that a pile of unread bookmarks/email/RSS feeds will use up all my spare disk space. The other major difference is that our email and internet software usually allows us to manage outstanding messages/bookmarks etc. quite flexibly, sorting and searching using a variety of criteria and making it easy to pick out a subset of items from our backlog. (For example, many of this weekend's posts will be the result of my using the bookmark-management facilities of my web browser. I'm making a concerted effort to work my way through some of my older bookmarks tonight – material I either read a few weeks ago but didn't find time to post about, or links I knew I'd want to look at but not just yet.)

As I haven't played with a TiVo myself, I'm not sure exactly how programme retention works. I know that the TiVo not only records the programmes you tell it to but also programmes it thinks you'll like based on your explicit choices. Does the TiVo indiscriminately retain both classes of programme, or does it remove programmes it recorded of its own accord after a certain period of time, or perhaps when it's at risk of running out of disk space? That would seem to be an obvious solution to the storage problem, so I assume it's not that simple. Would any TiVo owners care to enlighten me?

[Via Boing Boing]

I can but echo the comment at the head of this photo: what the hell were they thinking?

Anil Dash has posted a short essay about how our choice of the tools we use to present information shapes the reader's expectations. Why exactly do so many people like receiving information as a PDF file instead of a web page?

It seems that the PDF format signifies something now, and it's something more than just user inconvenience. In addition to requiring the user to shift mental modes, ("I'm seeing something designed as a PDF now, this must be serious information …") the requirement that a document either be downloaded or viewed in a context that's radically different from standard web pages seems like a subtle assertion of authority by a document's creator. The decision to switch from standard HTML to PDF isn't arbitrary, but it isn't based on technical requirements either. It's based on the value that an author wants to assign to the work, and it benefits from the still-prevalent, though rapidly fading, consensus that print work is somehow more inherently valuable and authoritative than web pages and other online content.

I think there's something to that argument, but that it's by no means the major factor in the rise of the PDF file. The biggest advantage of PDF is that it can be used to create a single, self-contained file which can easily be emailed to colleagues and will basically be presentable regardless of the platform you try to read it on. The various options available to content creators allowing them to control how the recipients use the document may be important to some, but most recipients of PDF documents will barely notice any restrictions just as long as they're permitted to copy selections from the PDF in order to extract quotations to insert in their own reports. It's the presence of all the information in one easily accessible file that makes all the difference.

Murphy's Laws of Combat:

Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo.

[...]

If your attack is going well, you have walked into an ambush.

[...]

Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Evidence that the Inland Revenue are only human:

Dear Mr Addison,

I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise. I will address them, as ever, in order.

Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter". It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand". This is how we, at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy, traditionally referred to such documents.

[...]

There's more, and it only gets funnier…

One poster to the MetaFilter thread pointed out that this letter was originally published in the Guardian, and suggested that it was a fake. As someone who has worked as a civil servant for the best part of 20 years I so want it to be for real.

[Via MetaFilter]

One for the .sig file:

"The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." — Robert Frost

[Via Something...]

I realise that anything Matrix-related is now officially Totally Unhip, but I don't care: this Reloaded-meets Stick Figure Death Heineken ad is too much fun to pass up. (NB: 580KB Flash animation.)

[Via Adrants]

Bruce Tognazzini's latest AskTog column takes on the Security D'ohLTs:

I've been watching security people for years as they've slowly increased the security of everything they can get their hands on until any idiot can wander in.

He's not just talking about computer security:

Excessive security can not only turn your financial and medical information into an open book, it can actually kill you.

Fifteen years ago, the approved method for gaining possession of a vehicle other than your own was to wait for the owner to wander off, then jimmy the door and hammer a screwdriver into the ignition. Bowing to auto-insurance industry pressure, auto makers have removed that option in many high-end cars, which are no longer practical to steal.

This has made the insurance companies very happy, but, unfortunately, it is getting a lot of their clients killed, since high-end cars are no longer being taken when the owners are away, but when the owners are there, car keys in hand.

D'oh!

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a lovely shot of the Moon's 500-kilometre shadow falling across Antarctica during the recent solar eclipse. Simply breathtaking.

What's your Digital IQ? I scored 131.

If "some might call [me] a nerd" then I suppose I can live with that.

Infinity Plus has an interview with Richard Morgan by Stuart Carter.

SC: Both Altered Carbon and Broken Angels are pretty pessimistic about our future and about humanity generally–does this reflect your worldview?

RM: Yeah, I suppose so. As a species, we're survivor types — evolutionary winners, which by definition makes us pretty unpleasant. And now we've run out of space to be unpleasant in, we have to learn a whole new approach to each other and our environment, which is hard to do quickly. So you've got a few centuries of coherent humanist thought, set against a million odd years of evolved killer ape tendency. No-one's going to give you very good odds on humanism, are they? Worse still, in the face of our recent understanding of how complex and difficult the universe actually is, the reaction of most people seems to be to retreat back into simplistic null-thought modes of operation. Fundamentalist religion is big everywhere you look, a kind of proud-to-be-pigshit-ignorant ethic prevails in the developed world, and even the gentler souls among us seem more inclined to buy into New Age bullshit than face the facts constructively. Kurt Vonnegut once proposed, in the book Cat's Cradle, that we should leave a message for any exploring aliens who might arrive on Earth after we've killed ourselves off through environmental damage. Carved into the wall of the Grand Canyon, the message would read — We Could Have Saved It, But We Were Too Fucking Cheap. Under that, I'd add the byline And It Was Too Fucking Complicated.

Altered Carbon was one of the better debut novels I've read lately: a sexy, violent, blackly funny thriller. I'm not sure what's caused the UK to start producing really good SF authors over the last 5-10 years, but I'm glad whatever it is is still going strong. Morgan is a definite candidate for my buy-on-sight list. Maybe not -in-hardback (yet), but certainly buy-on-sight-in-paperback.

Humorous eBay auctions: #3,563,566 in a never-ending series. Item Number 2362150346: Australian Rugby Trophy Cabinet.

[Via GromBlog]

It's fairly well-known that footage from feature films is sometimes re-used in later productions. I had no idea that unused commercials were recycled wholesale.

Schaff bought a TV ad from the Atlanta Ballet that showed two guys Kung Fu fighting which the Ballet found too racy for use and resold it to WyoTech, an auto repair school.

Kung Fu opens with two guys slouched in front of the TV. A commercial comes on and they're up and doing their own Jackie Chan riff, in slow motion, complete with sound effects. It ends when one guy leaps over the other, lands on the coffee table, which crashes to the floor.

"Too much free time?" says the voice over. "Go see the ballet."

The new version: "Everyone has skills. Some earn money. Enroll at WyoTech."

The Digital Bits rumour mill reports that George Lucas just can't leave well alone. Yes folks, he's reportedly contemplating making yet more changes to the original Star Wars trilogy.

[The changes include...] an aged and scarred Hayden now appears as Anakin at the end of Return of the Jedi when Luke removes Vader's helmet. Among the other changes reportedly being made are the restoration of the original "Han shoots first" moment from Star Wars and a revamped lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan and Vader.

(See the "Rumour Mill entry for 20 November 2003 for the full text. There's much more.)

It's not clear whether these changes are for the forthcoming DVD release of the trilogy or some later release. The thing is, it doesn't really matter. Most of us who saw the original films on their first release – i.e. the people who remember that the first release of Star Wars did not call itself "Episode IV", dammit! – would just like the chance to buy the films we remember first time round on our latest favourite format. I wouldn't mind all the fiddling with the original theatrical releases if they were issued in parallel with enhanced versions, but this is just getting silly. It'll take a lot more than restoring the "Han fires first" moment to make me buy these DVDs. It's entirely possible – indeed, it's devoutly to be hoped – that these reports are nonsense, but it's not as if they're totally implausible given George Lucas' track record.

On the other hand, this could be part of a Cunning Plan: perhaps LucasFilm are going to announce that the first DVD release will be of the original trilogy in pristine form for a limited edition, which will be replaced three months later by the "enhanced" editions. That'd pretty much guarantee a stampede on release day.

Just for the record, although I'm a science fiction fan and I enjoyed the Star Wars films when they first appeared, I'm by no means a Star Wars fanatic. It's just that I hated it when Steven Spielberg pulled this crap with Close Encounters of the Third Kind – a film which I truly love – and I think it's a shame to see Lucas following in his pal's footsteps and messing with another of the 70s SF classics.

[Via Sci Fi Wire]