More evidence that reality TV is taking over the world:

"Labor and Materials" is Iraq's answer to "Extreme Home Makeover" and the country's first reality TV show. In 15-minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again. Fancy furniture and luxurious carpets appear without warning in the living rooms of poor families. Over six weeks, houses blasted by US bombs regenerate in a home-improvement show for a war-torn country.

Glenn Mcdonald is going to stop writing The War Against Silence, his beautifully written music column, after not far short of a decade. He'll be missed.

[Via MetaFilter]

From McSweeney's:

Physical Theories as Women

By Simon Dedeo

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

[...]

4. General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.

[Via Beyond the Beyond]

If government departments don't have the sense to register domains that almost match those they own, they really shouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing happens.

[Via qwghlm.co.uk]

Jon at More a way of life…. has posted some photos taken on set during the shooting of the new series of Doctor Who.

Seeing the Autons again is one thing, but it was seeing the TARDIS sitting on a British pavement again after all this time that really did it for me. Somehow now it all seems much more real: the Doctor is coming back. Yay!

Tom Coates has posted the first two articles in a series he's using to lay out his thoughts on what he calls 'The New Musical Functionality' – the effect on our music-listening habits of massively more capable portable players, wireless connectivity and the internet as a means of allowing users to share not just music files, but details of their listening habits. Tom's articles are characteristically thoughtful pieces, exploring the implications of all this technology without getting tangled up (so far) in the intractable debate about intellectual property rights and digital music.

One point in his latest post jumped right out at me:

The reason that people are buying iPods is because they want 10,000 songs in their pockets. They want access to music wherever they are in the world. More still – they want access to all their music everywhere. Every last bit. Every last place.

That's what's prodding me in the direction of buying an iPod. I only developed a practical interest in digital music when I bought my iMac a bit more than a year ago; my previous PC didn't even have a soundcard, and as someone who only got their first Walkman about seven or eight years ago and made only intermittent use of it I was never all that bothered about listening to music on the move. Part of the problem was that I found it frustrating to have to carry round a bunch of tapes if I wanted to listen to more than one album while I was out. Once I got my iMac all set up I was keen to use iTunes to turn it into a jukebox, and it so happened that the Palm Tungsten T I bought not long afterwards had a slot for a Secure Digital memory card which could be used not just to back up my PDA's files but also to hold MP3s. The obvious next step was to copy an album or two of MP3s over. That's what hooked me, but also frustrated me: it's a pain to have to upload a new set of tracks over a USB link periodically, so I'm very keen to put all my music (a comparatively paltry 10GB-worth of MP3s, ripped at 160kbps) on a single portable device. Having made that decision, the next step is an obvious one…

Where my vision of my portable listening device diverges from the future Tom envisions is that I have no use for a wireless MP3 player. I'm aiming to buy a 20GB iPod, which is likely to provide ample space for my music collection for quite a few years to come. So why buy disk space I don't need? Because I find the idea of backing up my iMac to a portable Firewire drive which just happens to be highly portable and to contain all my music too is just irresistible. Unless the music industry manages to force music listeners to use some godawful streamed music format in place of MP3/AAC/WMA or whatever I can see little reason to care whether my iPod is networked, as long as my iMac is.

Anyway, that's enough rambling about my musical needs. The main point of my post is to suggest that everyone with an interest in the future of digital music keep up with Tom's posts on the subject.

The late Sir Laurence Olivier is set to co-star with Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie – not to mention a bunch of giant killer robots – in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

You know the drill by now:

• I think broken window and blue sky works much better as a colour image. (There's a link to a black and white version of the image on that page.) It's the array of colours in the windows that does it for me.
• This little guy is closer to some hot stuff than he knows.
• This spectacular time exposure shot depicts the trail of a Delta II rocket from launch right up to orbit.
• The silence of thunder captures the oppressive weight of the sky beautifully.

Beettam and Geigen-Miller's 10 Laws of Bad Science Fiction:

[...]

3. Appearance supersedes function and reality. Or in simple terms, if it looks or sounds funky, it makes sense. NOTE: This is the MOST IMPORTANT rule of not only bad science fiction, but also "soft" SF like Star Wars and Star Trek, and pseudo-science fiction (which is any non-science fiction story with science fiction elements thrown on top of it for window dressing, like "The Jetsons". More on that another time.) It's not necessarily a bad rule. Someone once told George Lucas that there were no sound effects in airless outer space. Today Mr. Lucas owns a multi-million dollar entertainment enterprise, while that other person runs a moisture evaporator on Tattooine.

One notable corollary to Law #3 is that there is no such thing as a small explosion.

[...]

8. Any form of mysterious or unknown form of energy (like, oh say, nuclear radiation) has the power to give previously-existing lifeforms bizarre powers, increase their size, or bring them back from the dead. Try this trick on your friends; the result will be hours of excruciating and mercifully short fun.

[...]

[Via Exclamation Mark]

Isaac Asimov's daughter Robyn presents the case for the defence:

To loyal fans of science fiction and Isaac Asimov, the only thing more disconcerting than robots attacking humans — a violation of the author's First Law of Robotics — is that the camera filming "I, Robot" focused clearly on a buff Will Smith in the shower but not on the statuesque Bridget Moynihan, as Asimov would have preferred.

Yet the world's most loyal Asimov fan actually likes the new summer blockbuster that bears the title of his 1950 book of robot tales. Of this I am sure, because I am that fan, and Isaac Asimov was my father. I believe he would have liked this movie, too.

[...]

I have no idea whether Alex Proyas' new film I, Robot is any good (though the early signs aren't promising), but these concept drawings of the cities of 2035 look fantastic.

[Via The Big Smoker]

Marine scientists have long claimed that sailors' tales of freak 100-foot waves were mistaken, as such waves would be a freakish once-in-a-millennium occurrence. It turns out that when a pair of ESA satellites were set to watch the oceans for a three-week period in 2001 they provided evidence of about ten such massive waves in that brief spell of time. Considering that these monster waves can easily disable or sink a sea-going vessel, this is a very handy thing to know.

It's amazing how little we really know about how this planet works.

Nancy Lebovitz (who happens to be a regular contributor to the rec.arts.sf.* Usenet groups) has a business selling badges online and at conventions. Her catalogue of cat-related slogans makes it pretty clear who's really in charge:

I have a contract with my cat.  I feed the cat, and the cat, um, lets me.

Anything not nailed down is a cat toy. Everything else is a scratching post.

Cats are poetry in motion.  Dogs are gibberish in high gear.

Cats have simple tastes–the best is satisfactory

IT's HARd to tYpe wHILe holdINf a Cat

[Via web-goddess]

Best. Animated. GIF. Ever!

Unless, of course, you know different.

[Via bluishorange]

William Shatner sings Pulp's Common People. (NB: 1.1MB Quicktime audio file.)

Oh my…

[Via Deep Focus Weblog]

In the week of the 35th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, NASA have digitised a further selection of images from the mission. The web site isn't the prettiest, but it does offer some nice thumbnails of the selected image so the design is at least rather more practical than a page of thumbnails would have been.

I think the picture of the Lunar Excursion Module with the Earth rising above it (standard resolution, high resolution) is particularly fine.

[Via Slashdot]

If you've visited this weblog over the course of this evening you might have noticed that it's been subjected to a particularly heavy attack by comment spammers, with some 70 comments from new domains making it past MT-Blacklist and about as many again which were defeated by Movable Type's comment-throttling feature. Admittedly MT-Blacklist makes it easy to clear up after this sort of attack, but that really isn't the point. I'm getting tired of this nonsense.

I simply have to find a better solution to this problem than MT-Blacklist. I did experiment with a modified comments system last month which required that I add a new comments utility and modify the source code for my Movable Type/MT-Blacklist installation to call it instead of the standard Movable Type comment function. After all that work the program didn't quite work as advertised, but by that time it was too late at night for me to backtrack and figure out what was going wrong so I just reverted to Movable Type's standard comment system. I'm going to take another swing at the problem tomorrow night, so I probably won't be posting to the site. Also, anyone who tries to post a comment tomorrow night may have the odd problem if I happen to be in the middle of updating the comments system at the time.

If I can't find a more effective anti-spam solution I'm going to seriously consider disabling comments completely: I refuse to put up with this crap any more.

The Register reports that US genetics researchers have discovered that Microsoft Excel's oh-so-helpful attempts to automagically identify and re-format anything that looks like a date have irreversibly corrupted their data. Worse yet, they can't easily identify which 'dates' map to the original genetic identifiers: for example, where Excel now displays the date '1-Sep' it's not possible to tell whether the original genetic identifier was SEP1, SEP-1 or SEPT1.

Today's Word of the Day is "backups."

[Via the null device]

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day shows a fantastic time-lapse shot depicting not just the recent transit of Venus, but the International Space Station passing in front of the Sun at the same time.

Apparently the double transit was all over in a less than a second and was only visible from a small area; happily for us those of us who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and weren't looking anyway, there were some photographers who were ready and waiting.

How cute is that?