Some day every personal computer will come with an Eye Massager with USB Port.
Not to mention a disclaimer you'll be required to sign before breaking the shrink wrap, waiving any right to sue the manufacturer when it puts your eye out following a software crash.
[Via Improbable Research]
Unless you're reading the site via a feed reader, you'll probably have noticed that I've been redecorating. I can't take any credit for the new design – I just downloaded the style sheet and associated images from Alex King's excellent page of WordPress Styles and five minutes later I was done.
I do want to tweak the style sheet a little: I want the links in the sidebar to be slightly more visible against the graded-fill background in places, and I'd like the links in the recent comments section to stand out instead of being the same colour as the associated text. Still, that's a job for tomorrow night.
Obviously if anyone finds any oddities in the new design please post a comment or email me and I'll see if I can fix them.
This week's crop:
J Michael Straczynski has confirmed that plans for a Babylon 5 feature film are officially dead in the water. Truth to tell, I don't know that a standalone movie would have worked very well anyway – JMS's strengths lie in spinning out a big, complex story with several threads running in parallel, so if he were to return to the B5 universe at all I'd rather he got the chance to tell the story in 22-episode chunks, the way he did first time round. Unfortunately, with the show having been off the air for several years the latter option probably isn't open to him unless a rabid B5 fan finds themselves running one of the US networks, so I can understand why JMS would take whatever opportunity he could get financing for rather than hold out for another multi-season commitment.
Perhaps what we need to do is wait for 25 years and see what a new generation of SF programme makers can do with the B5 concept. This approach seems to have worked pretty well for Battlestar Galactica, the remake of which has been getting much better reviews than the original series ever did. The show hasn't appeared on terrestrial TV over here yet, but broadband users who want to see what the remake is like and aren't comfortable with downloading copies via BitTorrent can watch the first episode of the first season via a RealVideo stream put out by the Sci Fi Channel. Having spent the past forty-five minutes watching the episode, I'm very impressed. I was never a fan of the original, which was so obviously a cheap Star Wars rip-off, but this new take on the basic concept show is not remotely cheesy. If it shows up on terrestrial TV, I'll certainly watch it. (Or rather, I'll video it: the chances of it showing up in a pre-midnight timeslot – or rather, of it retaining such a timeslot for more than six episodes – are pretty slim in the current climate for SF on UK terrestrial TV.)
[B5 movie story via Slashdot, BG story via MetaFilter]
The right stuff kicks in at T-minus 31 seconds.
Nowadays, what with the X Prize having been won and Richard Branson lining up bookings for Virgin Space, it's fashionable to damn everyone at NASA as a bunch of time-serving bureaucrats. To pick one, especially classy, example, see a response Wired received from one Jim Davidson of Houston, Tx to an article about the future of manned space travel:
"Unfortunately, NASA's core strength is killing astronauts in batches of seven and keeping the door to space closed. [...] NASA hasn't been to the moon in 30 years, has no capacity to create economic opportunity, and is simply a bunch of looters using public money to support middle-class clock-watchers."
If we're all riding round in computer-controlled cars twenty years from now, would you want the software controlling the size of the gap between you and the car in front and the speed at which you're travelling written by NASA's software team or Microsoft's or Linus Torvalds and friends? I know which I'd feel more comfortable with…
[Via Yoz Grahame]
I've mentioned this in a comment, but it's worth a front page post: the Times published an article about Kim Peek, the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man.
Kim has the staggering arithmetic skills of the Raymond Babbitt character, and can count playing cards. But Kim displays these talents only if he wants to. [Rain Man screenwriter Barry] Morrow recalls, chuckling: "I took him to Reno to see if he could beat the casino. He read and memorised an entire book about gambling, but would not play the tables because he said it was unethical."
Simon Hoggart, writing in today's Guardian:
This year sees the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, so I went to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in central London to catch a lecture by the naval historian David Cordingly. [...]
The lecture was introduced by the first sea lord, Sir Alan West, who told us that last year, as part of the entente cordiale festivities, he had shown a group of French naval officers round HMS Victory. Spotting a pile of cannonballs, one French officer asked: "Are those the ones that were used at Trafalgar?" and a junior British officer cleared his throat and said politely: "No, I think you've still got those."
I do believe Hollywood has finally come up with a sillier piece of dubbing for profanity than "melon farmer": what a bunch of ashcrofts!
[Via Looka!]
A group of developers in Dubai are constructing what might just be the ultimate network of private islands – an array of 300 islands which form the shape of, well, the World.
If nothing else, it'll give the crew of the International Space Station something interesting to photograph. I'm sure they're heartily sick of taking pictures of the Great Wall of China, tropical storms, that sort of thing…
[Via plasticbag.org]
If you're ever fancied trying a palmtop computer but don't feel you can justify the expense, you might find the Paper Palm more to your liking. Apart from anything else, the battery life is infinitely longer…
[Via PalmAddicts]
The page's title says it all: My Collections. There's nothing more to say, I think.
[Via Bifurcated Rivets]
Pixeldiva has been eagerly waiting for some snow. Me, I can't stand the stuff, other than when it's on Xmas cards or in pictures. Sadly I can't do much about the snow outside my front door, but I can at least enjoy her photographs of the Alexandra Palace in the snow.
Very nice work indeed – I can't quite make my mind up whether Snowy Steps or Icy Posts is my favourite.
Zyotism has a beautiful set of icons based on artifacts from my favourite film, 2001: A Space Odyssey available for download free of charge. I don't generally use custom icons, but I may have to make an exception for these.
[Via Ani Moller]
David Birch, writing in the latest issue of Prospect, thinks that if we're going to have a national identity card, it would be nice if it were actually useful:
We can use these technologies to develop a flexible and sophisticated identity infrastructure. For one thing, these technologies mean that people can have lots of "virtual identities" if they want: your public key might be in all sorts of different certificates signed by different people for different reasons and your ID card might be allowed to generate its own private keys for you to use in different environments. This is a good thing. I don't want my kids using their real names in internet chatrooms any more than I want hospital whistleblowers to have to use their real names: a nurse, for example, ought to be able to send an email (to report lax hygiene routines, say) with a digital certificate that proves that she is a nurse, but not what her name is.
An ID card so constructed can improve its owner's life in quite different circumstances, too, such as starting a new job. On the first day, the employee produces his or her card. The employer uses a PC to check whether the card is genuine from its digital signature and to display the picture held inside the computer chip so that the employer can see that it's the right person. The employer submits the citizen number to the Inland Revenue, which matches the individual with the correct taxpayer record without the employer having access to any confidential tax information and generates a PAYE code for the accounts department. This saves time and effort.
It is because of these privacy issues that I think that Blunkett was wrong to suggest that biometrics could render cards superfluous. In the overwhelming majority of cases, citizens will use their cards not to prove who they are, but rather to prove something about themselves: they are entitled to be in Britain, over 18 or allowed to buy cigarettes. A properly designed ID card can disclose such credentials without any need for the central register to be accessed or identity to be disclosed (although it will make the card slightly more expensive).
All of which is fine and dandy, but considering how much the government is set to spend on implementing the system they've decided upon the chances that any of this will come to pass within a decade of the roll-out of version 1 of the ID card are just about nil.
Destroying the planet isn't as easy as you'd think. Sam Hughes has laid out your options:
7. Sucked into a giant black hole
- You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.
- Method: after locating your black hole, you need to move it as close to Earth as possible. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole. Moving the Earth is simply a case of building three or four upward-pointing rocket engines (possibly nuclear? and each roughly the size of Switzerland) and firing them at strategic moments to steer it onto a collision course with your black hole of choice. Moving the black hole requires rather more skill since it is impossible to physically touch it. For this you need to build your rockets on a completely different planet and push this in front of the black hole, towing it along in a carrot-and-donkey fashion. If time is short, you can consider moving both the Earth AND the black hole simultaneously.
- Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole (not a nondescript cubic centimetre of neutronium within it, thank you again, cakedamber).
- Feasibility rating: 4/10. Way beyond our technological reach.
- Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 1600 years for travel time.
[Via MetaFilter]
Posting in rec.arts.sf.fandom, Danny Low relates a tale of just how strong the compulsion to collect can get:
However collecting is in general a strange obsession. I do not know if the story is true but it is interesting. A woman who is a collector of barb wire was in Israel when she noticed a new type of barb wire not in her collection. So she walk through a field to clip a segment for her collection. When she got back to her car, she was surrounded by Israeli troops. First she had wandered through a mine field. Second she was in their gun sight all the time and was saved only by the fact that she was going in the wrong direction and only took a small segment instead of opening a hole for someone to come through. However she spent some time with the Israelis until they were convinced that she was authentically too weird to be a terrorist.
I don't know if it's true, but it certainly should be.
This Seabird Skulls gallery is an impressive example of the sort of thing the web does so well: letting an amateur with an interest share his knowledge with the rest of us. Not that I have any immediate need to find out about the shape of a pelican's skull, but somebody out there will some day and the Seabird Skulls gallery will be right there waiting for him.
In a similar vein, Memory Alpha is a wiki devoted to the creation and cataloguing of a truly impressive collection of Star Trek information. Again, I don't necessarily need to know any of this information right now – though I did enjoy a bit of a browse – but it's good to know it's there in all its' hypertextual glory.
[Seabird Skulls via MetaFilter]
Ken MacLeod has published a short story in the latest issue of Nature.
[Via Wis[s]e Words]
Writing in the New York Times, Henry Fountain describes the fun and games scientists get up to when naming new species:
Scientists may be serious people, engaged in the pursuit of objective truth. But when it comes to naming species, they often let their hair down.
So the insect world has Heerz tooya, Apopyllus now and Pieza pi and Pieza rhea, among thousands of puns and other oddities. (In science, all creatures are binomial, with a capitalized genus name followed by a lower-case species name.) The oceans are home to Ittibittium, a genus of mollusks that are smaller than those named Bittium. There are species named for body parts and bodily functions, for celebrities, painters and writers, for cartoon characters and favorite sports. For those who find it to be all too much, there is even Ba humbugi, a snail from Fiji.
There's even a rather unprepossessing species of ant that goes by the name of pheidole harrisonfordi.
