Did you know there are two Star Wars films out this year? There's the one fans are already queueing up for, but first up is Star Wars Revelations, a 40 minute fan film set in George Lucas' universe which serves as an impressive demonstration of how far fannish enthusiasm, a universe with plenty of room to play in and modern graphics and animation software can take you.

You can download the entire film as a 250MB Quicktime movie or Windows Media file entirely free of charge, or there are somewhat larger ISO disk images of the film plus commentary tracks and behind the scenes documentaries. (A BitTorrent client is required to download the ISO files, and is strongly recommended for downloading the Quicktime and WMV versions. Share and share alike, people.)

Whatever fans may think of what George Lucas has done with the universe he created nearly 30 years ago, there's no denying that his willingness to allow the fans to play with his toys so long as they're not making money and don't use his characters and setting for "salacious" purposes is admirable.

As Clive Thompson notes in his Slate article about Revelations, there are a few other franchises which could benefit from such openness. It'd be interesting to see what the fans could do with the Trek universe, to take the most obvious example. I realise that all this film-making is in one sense just fanfic writ large, but I think the step from written fanfic to filmed fanfic is a huge step: all of a sudden, you have to measure up to the source material in every respect: not simply visual effects, but costume design, sets, cinematography and acting. (OK, you don't have to reach the standards of the originals, but as I've said elsewhere with regards to HHGTTG I think that people trying to rework material in a visual medium are held to higher standards.)

Revelations may not quite measure up to the original in all those areas, but it's a heck of a good effort, and I look forward to seeing other people try to pull this off. Heck, there's umpteen generations of Slayers out there, just waiting for someone to tell their story.

Fittingly, considering that today is the day Tiger (a.k.a. MacOS X 10.4) is launched, I've spent much of my evening reading John Siracusa's Ars Technica review of the new version of the Best Damn Operating System for The Rest of Us.

Siracusa is as thorough as ever. Indeed, he's arguably too thorough in his discussion of Tiger's first, faltering steps in the direction of a BeOS-like file system. If you're mostly interested in how Tiger will improve your life today, you'll probably want to skip much of the middle third of the review. On the other hand, if you're interested in the details of Apple's metadata and graphics subsystems, Siracusa's article is a fine starting point.

The general picture Siracusa paints is of a more responsive, more capable OS which (for the third major upgrade running) will run faster on your current hardware than the previous version. What more can you reasonably ask? I don't plan to rush out and buy a copy of Tiger tomorrow, but I can't see myself still running 10.3.9 a couple of months from now.

How can you not want to read a news story entitled "Mystery of German exploding toads"?

The only flaw in the BBC story linked to above is that they unaccountably failed to provide a video of the phenomenon. If ever there was a story that demanded pictures, surely this was it?

[Via Found]

Interested parties should read this ad very carefully before responding.

[Via linkmachinego]

This International Herald Tribune story about the probable cause of Monday's big rail crash in Japan points out the downside of the obsession with punctuality I mentioned the other week.

AMAGASAKI, Japan Anywhere else in the world, a train running 90 seconds late would perhaps be considered on time. But in Japan, 90 seconds would foil commuters who depend on trains' connecting to one another with balletic precision, often with only a couple of minutes to spare.

And so to make up for a lost 90 seconds, a 23-year-old train engineer, it has become increasingly clear, was speeding when his train jumped off the tracks at a curve here in western Japan and hurtled into a nine-story apartment building on Monday morning. [...]

The article makes it clear that there were other contributory factors, such as the tendency for there to be very small gaps – on the order of three feet in some instances – between trains and buildings adjacent to the track, leaving no room whatsoever for accidents to happen, but it seems that severe timetable pressure was a major issue.

Something for me to remember when I'm on the train tomorrow if I'm running five minutes late when I get to Birmingham…

[Via Tin Ear]

The trailer for Serenity, Joss Whedon's big-screen continuation of Firefly, is up at Apple.

It's official: Serenity is now my most eagerly awaited film release of 2005, bar none.

The preview edition of Planetary is available for download as a 1.6MB PDF file at the DC Comics site. It's not a bad introduction to the series, which is well worth collecting if you can get hold of the trade paperback collections.

The Planetary Comic Appreciation Page has a lot more information about the series, though I'm not sure it's quite deserving of the title of "the best comic produced today". Even if you restrict yourself to fun takes on classic superhero themes produced since Planetary's debut in 2000, just off the top of my head I'd say that Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, Dan Slott's She-Hulk, Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, Griffin and DeMatteis' Formerly Known as the Justice League and Alan Moore's work with Gene Ha on Top Ten and with Kevin O'Neill on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have been right up there with Planetary quality-wise. Still, that's good company to be in.

[Via linkmachinego]

Given a few basic parameters, this page will create a downloadable PDF or PostScript template for a 12-sided desk calendar which you can print out on A4 paper. Nifty.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Coming to a cinema near you: the Orange Film Funding Board meets Lord Vader.

[Via Fimoculous]

Another week, another selection:

• A moment captured at Coney Island.
• Hugo and Oliver appear to be having a relay race.
• My Guardian Lights by Sue Anna Joe.
• This shot of an akebia quinata really brings out the different textures of the petals and the flowers.
• Who'd have thought that a Blackpool lamp post could look so futuristic.
• Enceladus and Saturn's rings – delightful symmetry.
• Now that's what I call a bridge.
• Clarity is a beautiful thing.
• Chimney pots galore.

[My Guardian Lights via The Sideshow]

Further to yesterday's post about a stolen laptop, a cartoonist's take on the subject. Priceless.

[Via The Sideshow]

Oh my. (Note: this is not a parody, apparently.)

[Via plasticbag.org]

Some of you may have noticed that all my WordPress-hosted content disappeared in a welter of MySQL error messages some time after 01:00 (BST).

A quick restore from backup appears to have put everything back in place, so fingers crossed that it'll stay that way while I browse log files and generally try to figure out what went wrong and whether it was my fault.

New York Press columnist Matt Taibbi has great fun ripping New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman's new book, The World is Flat, into very small pieces:

The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

[...]

The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase – the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting – ironically, as it were – with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

[...]

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India – Bangalore to be specific – he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat.

Apologies for the length of the quotation, but it's still only a short excerpt from a long, hugely entertaining article. (For example, if you follow the link you'll get to read Taibbi's account of Friedman's bizarre attempt to quantify the effects of this flattening.

[I'm indebted to Avram Grumer for his comment at Making Light pointing out the wonderful cover illustration used by the New York Press for this issue.]

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

Professor Jasper Rine of UC Berkeley had his laptop stolen recently, at the end of one of his lectures. At his next lecture, he pointed out to the thief in the audience that he had picked the wrong laptop to steal, as the professor acts as a consultant to various private firms and the laptop held all sorts of highly confidential and market-sensitive information, the loss of which would land the thief in a world of grief:

Thanks Gary. I have a message for one person in this audience – I'm sorry the rest of you have to sit through this. As you know, my computer was stolen in my last lecture. The thief apparently wanted to betray everybody's trust, and was after the exam.

The thief was smart not to plug the computer into the campus network, but the thief was not smart enough to do three things: he was not smart enough to immediately remove Windows. I installed the same version of Windows on another computer – within fifteen minutes the people in Redmond Washington were very interested to know why it was that the same version of Windows was being signalled to them from two different computers.

The thief also did not inactivate either the wireless card or the transponder that's in that computer. Within about an hour, there was a signal from various places on campus that's allowed us to track exactly where that computer went every time that it was turned on.

I'm not particularly concerned about the computer. But the thief, who thought he was only stealing an exam, is presently – we think – is probably still in possession of three kinds of data, any one of which can send this man, this young boy, actually, to federal prison. Not a good place for a young boy to be.

[...]

It's an enjoyable rant, well worth reading in full, but am I the only person who thinks that the professor is being a wee bit economical with the truth? (Caution: I Am Not A Lawyer, but I do know a little about computers.)

Not that the various regulatory and governmental agencies he cites would be indifferent to the theft of all that sensitive data, but wouldn't those same agencies (not to mention the professor's commercial clients) be asking him a few pointed questions about whether it was really sensible to leave such valuable information on an unsecured laptop – no power-on password set, nor any password required on wake-up, apparently, if the thief was able to use the computer – with the data apparently unencrypted and not even subject to the (admittedly weak) password protection built into at least some of the most widely used applications software.

Furthermore, by the professor's own admission he brought that laptop into a quasi-public venue and left it unattended (since he makes no mention of having had the laptop ripped from his grasp.) Forget that this is a bunch of computer files: if this was a collection of paper documents, containing the specifications and blueprints for a valuable new invention, would they be happy to hear that he was in the habit of bringing the file into the lecture hall and leave it lying on the end of his desk? Come to that, if the person carrying around this laptop loaded with valuable and commercially sensitive data was a civil servant from one of the regulatory agencies mentioned and he'd had the laptop stolen from his or her car's back seat, would that civil servant still be in their job once they reported the theft? I'm guessing they'd be for the high jump: at very least they'd be given a rather pointed lecture about IT security and employee obligations under data protection legislation.

Finally, would the thief really be treated in the same way as someone carrying out an act of industrial espionage by the various agencies involved in tracking the stolen laptop down – assuming, of course, that the thief hadn't recognised what the stolen data represented and tried to pass it off to interested parties? Come to that, I'm a bit dubious about all that "you'd better hope you can prove to me that you didn't take any copies" malarkey. Wouldn't the onus normally be on an attorney to prove, whether "beyond reasonable doubt" in a criminal prosecution or "on the balance of probabilities" if it turned into a civil case, that the data was copied?

I realise that the professor was probably hoping to panic the culprit into returning what turned out to be a very hot piece of kit, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for thieves, but – IMHO, obviously – Professor Rine comes off as a wee bit self-important here.

[Via The Sideshow]

Michael Bywater remembers his friend Douglas Adams:

First, we need to straighten something out. I was never a close personal friend of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, techno-guru, would-be über-geek, visionary, educator of the masses still sunk in the Dark Age of Faith and Superstition… none of those. I was never a close personal friend of that man.

It was another one, of the same name: a big lumbering chap, who had too many guitars, none of which he could play, and a vast array of synthesisers and keyboards on which he produced, after a year's effort, three minutes of the sort of music you'd expect to hear in an affable lift.

A man who liked fast cars, though he wasn't a very good driver, and enjoyed food, though it once took him two days to cook a ratatouille, following three recipes simultaneously. A man – and this is rare, and probably why we got along – not of ambition (alarmingly free of it, actually), but of enthusiasm.

[...]

[Via Danny O'Brien's Oblomovka (Oblinks)]

Does George Lucas know that Lord Vader has a weblog?

Bloody interrogation. Imperial audience. More leg woes.

Did you ever have one of those days?

It can be challenging to maintain your dignity as a dark tyrannical overlord when the circuitry in your left leg constantly misfires, threatening to send you off on a mad pirouette without notice. It requires a serious effort of will to maintain my poise, the tendrils of my connection to the Force reaching deep into space to feel out my distant quarry and at the same time wrapped around the mechanisms of my own body to keep them working.

I am stretched too thin.

The traiterous dog Krelcon was captured early this morning and brought around to the Imperial palace after breakfast. I had poached eggs with ham, buttered crumpets and a glass of wetfruit juice.

During my interview with Krelcon he admitted to me that he had been involved in smuggling the stolen data tapes of the Death Star's technical readout to the Rebel Alliance. In order to produce similarly fruitful results I used the Force to crush all of the small bones in his hands. Krelcon became most chatty then, and we discussed likely locations of the hidden rebel base.

Things went badly after that point, however. I confess that Krelcon took me off guard when he mentioned the prophecy. Eyes burning in a masque of pulp and blood he screamed, "The son of the suns is nigh, knight-bastard! He is on your very threshold!"

I had meant to backhand him but my passions were aroused and my concentration faltered, and so instead I released control of my errant left leg and instantly found myself doing a frenzied, lop-sided jig that turned me in place.

Krelcon found the strength to laugh. Thus, with one powerful thrust of the Force I burst his skull.

[...]

Nice…

[Via Mark Wants a Porsche]

Paleontologists in New Mexico have uncovered fossilized tracks left by an 8 foot long relative of the millipede some 300 million years ago.

"In today's world, you couldn't have a bug this big," said Spencer Lucas, paleontology curator at the [New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science]. "This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period, millions of years before dinosaurs evolved. If you took a time machine back, you'd definitely want to check your sleeping bag for these suckers before getting in."

Make sure that you look at the picture of a life-sized model of the arthropleura in the right-hand sidebar.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

Why wasn't I told that the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce had a web site?

Not to mention a list of useful publications:

Operational guidance – latest publications

UTE-3 – "If it doesn't breathe, how do I kill it?" – Common Field Questions Compendium A

UTE-13b – "Corporal Cooper, is that really you?" – Recognising impersonation in the field*

UTE-15 – "It's in here with us!" Surviving confined situations

UTE-18 – "But what has happened to Luton?" Coping with common press enquiries

(*Please note UTE-13b replaces UTE-13: "Corporal Cooper's Behaving Strangely")

[Via geckodancing, posting at Barbelith Underground]

Over at defective yeti, some political speculation:

New pope intervened against Kerry in US 2004 election campaign:

German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry. In a June 2004 letter to US bishops enunciating principles of worthiness for communion recipients, Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin"…

Hmm. You have to wonder what Ratzinger received in return for this favor. I mean, let's look at the facts:

• Karl Rove "went on vacation to Italy" three weeks ago.
• Shortly thereafter a new group called Noah's Ark Veterans For Truth springs out of nowhere, and begins airing commercials questioning the character of nearly all of the cardinals except Ratzinger.

If Rove announces next week that he's off for a couple of weeks' vacation in England, I think we should probably seriously consider turning back all flights from the US until May 6th. Just to be on the safe side.