If the BBC is feeling a bit battered after all the fuss over changes to the TV weather map, perhaps it should go the whole hog and import Super Duper Doppler. (NB: 2MB Quicktime movie.)
[Via Fimoculous]
Quite possibly the best entry to be found in the Uncyclopedia:
Fountainhead Earth
Fountainhead Earth is a twenty-volume philosophical fiction novel by Nobel prizewinning author Ayn Rand. It was Rand's last work of fiction, and all volumes after the first were published posthumously. All volumes made the New York Times Best Seller list, but the series received almost universal critical condemnation.
The series successfully achieved negative sales, with critics sending their copies back as returns, and more copies being remaindered than were actually printed.
Fountainhead Earth is not a series of twenty novels, it just feels like it.
[...]
Class.
[Via the null device]
The Guardian's Alexis Petridis recently undertook an unusual mission:
The girl behind the counter at British Home Stores looks distinctly nonplussed. She is clearly too polite or too loyal to her employers to say anything about my purchases, but she doesn't need to: her expression as she runs them through the till says it all. I'm buying what may be the most appalling item of clothing currently available in Britain: a crimson short-sleeved shirt in a man-made fibre that purports to be the erotic-sounding "Soft feel", but to the touch bears a distressing similarity to clammy human flesh. Worse than that, I'm buying four of these things, in a variety of sizes, along with four equally unpleasant black ties. "Fifty-two pounds," she mumbles, stuffing everything into a bag with undue haste.
I could explain, but it might only make matters worse. [...]
He's right – the explanation is even more embarrassing than you probably suspect.
What with the "7th generation" of games consoles almost upon us, it's an appropriate time for A Gamer's Manifesto:
12. Don't bullshit us on the difficulty
[...]
Instant-Failure Stealth Levels. Ack. This brings back horrible memories of a Goldeneye level where if you tripped an alarm, an infinite number of bad guys poured forth. We knew a man who failed that level 37 times, then got the Infinite Health cheat for it and came back. He intentionally tripped the alarm, the guards rushed out. Laughing maniacally, he proceeded to shoot those fuckers for four hours, killing 1,183 of them – 682 with groin shots – before his thumbs cramped up. Your game should not create this kind of bitterness.
[Via Slashdot]
You might think that there's only so much comic mileage to be had from discussing vintage sewing and knitting patterns (beyond noting that occasionally the models graduate to the silver screen.) You'd be wrong.
Exhibit A is the delightfully snarky Threadbared. Barbie & Ken – Living In A Crocheted Paradise made me laugh so hard I forgot to breathe.
[Via bluishorange]
The PDA/laptop replacement market is getting interesting again. Barring a hardware failure, it'll be a little while yet before I look to replace my Tungsten T, but when I do I'm going to have some interesting devices to choose from.
PalmInfocenter has the first detailed review I've read of the palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager, which is essentially a moderately upscale Palm PDA with a hard disk. My first reaction is that the price (£329) is a little higher than I'm comfortable paying for a PDA, but when I consider how much I'd be prepared in principle to pay for an iPod – which is, at best a dual function device for my purposes (i.e. an MP3 player & portable Firewire backup drive) – I can certainly see how I could be persuaded that a device I'd use solidly day in, day out for three years could be well worth that sort of money. The real drawback to the LifeDrive, rather predictably, is the battery life:
For my general reviewing purposes, I was able to get about 4 and a half hours out of a full charge. This included moderate web surfing over WiFi, lots of Bejeweled 2, using the PIM applications and listening to a few track's (sic) from the HDD. palmOne's official numbers are with 45 minutes of use per day, one would get about 2-2.5 days of use. Because the HDD does not need a charge to store your data you will not loose memory content's when the power is empty and the device has a longer keep alive time.
Over the last 4 weeks I've used my Tungsten T for an average of 2 hours 47 minutes per day, with the maximum daily usage being 5 hours 48 minutes. My daily routine typically involves a mix of using DateBk5 for the usual calendar/to do/address list/notepad-type tasks, reading HTML documents using Plucker, listening to MP3s off an SD card, using Handyshopper to keep track of my shopping list and tracking my expenses with PocketMoney. That's not an unreasonable mix of activities for a moderately powerful PDA. I realise that the hard disk would preserve my data when the power ran down, but the point is that I want to be able to access that data all day if necessary. I can just about manage that with my Tungsten T (though a lot of MP3-listening really taxes the battery) but the quoted battery life of a LifeDrive just doesn't come close to meeting my needs. Which is a real shame, because otherwise it's a tempting package.
By way of a contrast, the Nokia 770 isn't a PDA at all. However, considering that it's a Linux-based tablet computer which comes with Bluetooth and WiFi, has a nice big screen and uses an MMC card for mass storage I'd anticipate that after a year in the wild all sorts of PDA-type applications will have been ported to it. If Nokia turn out to be the company that establishes a tablet-based form factor as one consumers are willing to buy, I can easily see the 770's successors turning into enormously useful general-purpose portable computers.
[LifeDrive review via PalmAddict]
It's been too long since the last roundup:
[Pink Floyd tribute via The Sideshow, Art of Science Exhibition via Amygdala]
Lee Maguire brings us Microsoft's thoughts on how the XBox 360 will attract the interest of non-gamers:
Allard takes Tony Hawk as a starting point and suggests different ways for non-gamers to get involved. A girl watching her brother play might be affronted by his avatar's poor choice of clothes and use her laptop to access the Tony Hawk website's clothing design tool. A few experimental efforts later, and she can upload a new T-shirt for him in the game. He wears it with pride, and his friends online like the look of it. And now the sister can go into business, selling her design via Live's peer-to-peer micropayments system (previously announced at GDC). "Is she playing the game?" asks Allard. "I don't know, but she's having fun." Mum can get in on the act too. Not much of a gamer, but she's keen to watch her son compete in one of these pro-gaming tournaments. Using a photo of herself taken with the 360's camera, she can use a Sims 2-like system to create a recognisable avatar of herself, and get in position in the crowd, ready to cheer as her son comes in for his run.
Go and read the linked post for Maguire's pithy response.
The Guardian invites readers come up with new badges for Manchester United. Hilarity ensues.
Maya takes on Revenge of the Sith:
A long time ago, in a galaxy where Maya was completely indifferent: CGI! CGI! CGI!
LUCAS: Look, look what I can do! They all totally look like real spaceships! I don't need humans to make a movie at all! You're all fired, all of you! Fear me, puny earthlings!
OBI-WAN: Right then, it's time to fight General, er… (Ewan nobly controls himself) Grievous.
ANAKIN: Grievous? Seriously?
OBI-WAN: Yes. General Grievous. Seriously. Because that is what his name is.
ANAKIN: You know, if I was evil, I'd want something with a more sinister ring to it. Not that I'm evil. Totally not evil.OBI-WAN: R2D2, can we make the lifts go up? (His voice blares out to more or less the entire spaceship)
R2D2: It's the future and I don't have a mute button? Harsh, Lucas.[...]
[Via Jack the Bodiless, posting to Barbelith Underground]
The UK Department of Social Scrutiny web site is just marvelous. Take a look at Your Claim for Surveillance Benefit. And you should definitely check out Orwellian Mode.
Pitch-perfect satire.
I've never seen a photograph of the effects of an atmospheric gravity wave before. Very impressive.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was used for years by the Russian space programme to launch satellites. The thing is, when you launch a satellite the booster stage of the rocket has to come down again, so the land around the town is littered with all sorts of junk. (The American space program doesn't suffer so badly from this problem, since the flight path from Cape Kennedy in Florida usually takes rockets over the ocean.)
The photoessay linked to from this page contains some highly evocative images of what would be perfectly ordinary rural vistas from your average Central Asian former soviet republic if it weren't for the nose cones, spent boosters and what have you littering the fields.
Some of the photographs look like perfect cover illustrations for a certain type of SF novel, one set in a future where our industrialised society has collapsed and we've abandoned spaceflight. Something by Brian Aldiss, perhaps. Or, as a commenter at Gary Farber's site suggested, a Miyazaki film.
[Via Amygdala]
Call me old-fashioned, but do we have some pressing need for new toaster technology?
[...] Leave it to the Japanese to improve on toasting. Panasonic's NB-G100P doesn't have a heating element. No orange-glowing wires here — instead, it uses near- and far-infrared light that ends up getting hot immediately (up to 500 degrees) so there's no pre-heating and toast and whatever else you put inside it (frozen hash browns, fresh bagels, toaster streudel, last night's leftover pizza) cooks 40% faster than typical toaster-ovens.
I realise that this is probably just me, but I find that the delay while my (dirt cheap, very low tech) toaster heats up gives me just enough time to fetch the butter/margarine/whatever I'm going to spread on my toasted treat, grab a plate and a knife, and find my place in whatever newspaper, book or magazine I'm going to read while I eat the toast (assuming I don't have company.)
If you cut 40% out of my toasting time, I'd have to actually get organised before I started heating up the toast: I doubt there'd be any net time saving in it for me.
[Via A Whole Lotta Nothing]
Writing about the entertainment industry's kneejerk hostility to the very idea that it might be easy for consumers to make the different components of their home entertainment setup (in particlar, their PCs and PVRs) work together, Professor Felten coined a rather fabulous phrase:
The most dangerous place in Washington is between Americans and their televisions.
Now that the government has decided to push the ID card scheme as the solution to the problem of identity theft, we're going to be hearing the phrase "£1.3 billion" quite a lot: according to the government, that's what identity theft costs the UK economy each year. John Lettice's article in The Register takes a look at how that estimate was arrived at, and uncovers an awfully long list of guesses made by government departments over the last couple of years:
Department of Work & Pensions: Regular readers will know the DWP has a new wild guess for this one, an impressive £50 million. In the 2002 study the ID fraud component of welfare fraud of "£2-5 billion" (a pretty tight estimate, that) was around one per cent, i.e. £35 million. Shall we let them have that one? So the score is £610 million to £35 million.
Even better is the figure for ID fraud relating to immigration:
Immigration: The Home Office claimed that in Heathrow Terminal 3 alone around 50 fraudulent documents were found each month, and that the detection rate was at most 10 per cent (it wouldn't be hard to project this up to a nationwide, annualised border control catastrophe if that was what you wanted to do), and that it could save £6 million per 1,000 reduction in clandestine entrants. This produces the somewhat dubious 'ID fraud' cost estimate of £36 million for Heathrow T3 alone [...]
Hang on, this sounds as if it might be a usable figure …
[...] but as they're foreigners just arriving in the UK they don't qualify for ID cards. Biometric visas might qualify, but that's a different Bill, not the ID Cards one.
Oh well.
Note to all UK-based readers: if you haven't already done so, this might be a good time to visit the No2ID campaign site and read all about why the proposed ID card system is such a terrible idea, then sign their petition. (Or, better yet, visit WriteToThem, the site formerly known as Fax Your MP, and tell your elected representative what you think about this fiasco-in-the-making. MPs take faxes and letters a lot more seriously than they do petitions, particularly online petitions.)
The Rock Snob's Dictionary sounds like an essential read. Nerve's Margaret Wappler interviewed authors David Kamp and Steven Daly:
How does one spot a rock snob at a party? Can you describe the typical male and female rock snobs?
Steven: The male of the species flourish because these are guys who don't have a good deal of luck with the gentler sex [laughs], so they put their energy into something else. It would be the person at the party who's going to ask you who you're listening to, and they'd give you only one shot, and then whoever you said, they'd turn around and tell you more about that band than you ever wanted to know.
David: There are two schools of the male rock snob: One is the slovenly guys who will never cohabitate with women, the Jack Black type in High Fidelity or even School of Rock. He's the kind of guy who doesn't budge on his opinions — it's my way or the highway. Then there is the romantic embodiment, who is John Cusack in High Fidelity and Say Anything. He's the guy who labors over mix tapes for his girl. Or he holds up the stereo in the pouring rain, playing Peter Gabriel.
But with the female snob, it's not always a fat goth girl. A month or two ago, we ran our best-dressed list in Vanity Fair. Sofia Coppola was asked to name her sartorial influence, and she said Siouxsie Sioux. Siouxsie Sioux! It's in her movies, though. Just think about the karaoke scene in Lost In Translation, the choice of music. She's an emerging rock snob, she's one to watch. She's getting into the Wes Anderson zone. Though we don't mention him in the book, Wes Anderson has exquisitely calibrated rock-snob taste — using Nico songs in Royal Tenenbaums, using Lennon's "Oh, Yoko" during a crucial point in Rushmore, using Portuguese versions of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust-era songs in The Life Aquatic. The dude just nails the snob sensibility, though, I must admit, artfully.
[Via Blog of a Bookslut]
The Dragonflies Photo Gallery does exactly what you'd expect.
There's some really fine macro work there: I think this shot is my favourite.
[Via Exclamation Mark]
According to Rich Johnston, Alan Moore seems to be pretty happy with his next graphic novel, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dark Dossier:
Moore tells me this "will slip in between volumes two and three" of the "League." Moore described it to me as "not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin…" The human brain? "Yes and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It's quite good."
For anyone whose only experience of Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories was the Sean Connery film, you should be aware that the comic is precisely 534.62% better than the film.
[Via Amygdala]
Tom Coates is understandably enthusiastic about BBC Radio's podcast trial, which makes MP3s of a selection of BBC Radio programmes available for download.
One of the nicest benefits of my finally signing up for broadband at home has been that I've been able to make serious use of the BBC's Radio Player, which allows users to listen to live (give or take a few seconds) BBC Radio broadcasts and – handily for those of us who can't listen to the radio at work – makes Real Audio and Windows Media streams of most BBC radio programmes available online, typically for a week after the initial radio broadcast.
I've been using a very nice program called iRecordMusic which lets me record streamed audio as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files which I can then upload to my Palm Tungsten T and listen to during my daily commute. The BBC's podcasting solution is more convenient still, in that it's much quicker to simply download an MP3 than it is to have iRecordMusic 'listen' to a thirty minute streamed version of a programme in real time then spend about a quarter as long again encoding the stream.
I've subscribed to the RSS feeds for a couple of BBC Radio programmes already: if they make more available I can see me making a lot of use of the service.
[Edited to add: For much more on the BBC's forward-thinking approach to learning to live with the internet, see Cory Doctorow's article from last week at Wired News, which I also found via plasticbag.org.]
