Since Channel 4 have done the dirty on terrestrial viewers by making the fifth and final season of Six Feet Under available on E4 only with no Channel 4 showing at all, I've spent some time this evening catching up with online accounts of the show's finale.

(I know they've held onto imported shows as 'E4 exclusives' before this, but not – as far as I can recall – the last season of a show which they'd already broadcast on C4 for four seasons. The nearest comparison I can think of would be Party of Five, the last two seasons of which disappeared onto E4 and later showed up on cable on TroubleTV, but which never ever showed up on terrestrial TV in the UK to the best of my knowledge.)

Judging by this lengthy thread at Television Without Pity Alan Ball and his collaborators put together one heck of an end to the series. I may have to get hold of the DVD when it's finally released, just so I can see that final montage as Claire imagines how the various characters will eventually die. There's a Usenet post here pointing to some small but clear screencaps of key moments from the end of the show. (NB: the post is set to expire from Google's archive on 30 August, so if you're going to look do it soon) They won't make a huge amount of sense on their own, but if they're viewed in conjunction with other material, such as the character obituaries and various comments in the TWoP post linked to above on the show you can get some sense of how the show ended.

If you're a fan of Six Feet Under you may also be interested in Heather Havrilesky's recent interview with Alan Ball at Salon. (NB: non-subscribers will be required to view an advert before gaining access to the interview.)

[Edited to add: fans of the show might also appreciate Steven Johnson's thoughts on what made the show so special.]

I know some people buy speakers so they can listen to their iPod around the house, but isn't the iJoyâ„¢ ZipConnectâ„¢ Massage Chair with Built-In Speakers & Subwoofer – essentially, an expensive chair with a socket you can plug your iPod into – just about the silliest iPod accessory ever?

Unless, of course, you know differently…

[Via Idiot Toys]

Engadget falls through a time warp and lands in 1985:

Kaypro 2000 lap-top marks new era of affordable portability

Related entries: Laptops

We really like portable computers; we’ve broken our backs with Osbornes, Compaqs and others without complaint, glad that we can work on the road. But we’re really impressed with the recent lap-tops from companies like Toshiba, and the Kaypro 2000 looks like it’s destined to be a major step forward. Weighing in at just 13 pounds (our trusty Compaq weighs 28 pounds) — including its tiny 3 1/2-inch floppy drive — the IBM PC-compatible computer has a solid 256K of RAM (expandable to a massive 768K), a sharp 80×25 liquid-crystal-display screen and options that include an adaptor to add a second floppy drive and a “base unit” that has slots for floppy drives, expansion cards or hard-disk drives. While the lack of a standard 5.25-inch floppy drive is a frustrating oversight, you can pony up the $295 for the option and use it to load WordPerfect and VisiCalc, since we’re not huge fans of the bundled software, WordStar and CalcStar. Kaypro’s added some nice touches though, including a detachable keyboard and a battery that can run for up to four hours after charging for a day. At just $1,995, the Kaypro 2000 looks like a computer that will keep the Kaypro name alive well beyond the year 2000.

You kids today have no idea what a nifty piece of kit the Kaypro was back then. And yes, that was a competitive price for that sort of portable computing power. Honest. Not that I could afford that sort of kit. In 1985 I'd recently made the transition to the Sinclair QL at a whopping £400.

Stop laughing at the back there! If the QL had come with a finished ROM, a decent keyboard and a floppy disk drive it would have been one hell of a home/small business machine. Psion's office suite for the QL – which was known as Xchange when they produced an MS-DOS version – was actually extremely capable by the standards of the day, particularly the spreadsheet and word processor. By the time I'd fitted a proper keyboard, added more RAM and installed a utility to enable task-switching in QDOS my QL was a really nice little machine, with the major limitation being the misbegotten Microdrive.

[Via Amygdala]

Reading Sandra Tsing Loh's review of Unraveled by Maria Housden in The Atlantic Monthly this lunchtime, I came across a passage recounting Loh's memory of what sounds like a thoroughly bizarre TV show, inspired by a particularly New Age-ish section of the book under review:

And in that moment, as if with an electric shock, my entire mind and being were hurtled back to the summer of 2004. A cavalcade of images passed before me: the Republican convention, the Athens Olympics, and, as inevitable as the wind-lashed tides of Cape Cod, Oprah's Book Club. That summer OBC was spotlighting Anna Karenina — Western literature's reigning absentee mother.

Oprah had confessed that she'd always had a fear of Anna Karenina, chiefly because of its prodigious length. Hence she and her viewers approached their summer's reading of Tolstoy's novel like an arduous long-distance run. I remember the post-read show as though it were yesterday (although my recollection has been aided slightly by a Nexis transcript)…

Narrator: "They came from across the globe, Oprah Book Clubbers ready to take the Anna Karenina 2004 Challenge. Eight long sections, 817 pages, twenty-three complicated Russian names. The only thing to fear was fear itself. They would battle the elements, summer heat, busy family schedules, obstacles at every turn. Some would stumble, exhausted from reading. But could they pick themselves up and press on to the final chapter? Could they do it? Could they read Anna Karenina in just one summer? Could they conquer Tolstoy?"

Group of people (in unison): "Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna."

The opening guest of the Book Club episode was one of Oprah's all-time most requested: the Music and Passion — meister himself … Barry Manilow. (Alternate haunting question: Does each generation of females get the romantic hero it deserves?) Manilow led in by singing, to the tune of "Copacabana," "Her name was Anna, Anna Karenina … The hottest broad north of the Kremlin!" The final comment came from Will & Grace's Megan Mullally, who was most intrigued in her reading by Anna Karenina's mental unraveling: "Of course, now she'd just, like, take some Paxil and it'd all be good. But … they didn't have those mood stabilizers back then, apparently."

Which is to say that Oprah and her army of Lady Reebok-shod women did, chapter by chapter, "conquer Tolstoy," practically trampling him.

Unfortunately The Atlantic locks the full text of their articles behind a subscription wall to which only subscribers to their print edition have access, so all you can read online is the first couple of paragraphs, but a bit of googling located a copy of the full review at Powell's Books.

The original lyrics to The James Bond Theme:

I was born with this unlucky sneeze
And what is worse I came into the world the wrong way round
Pundits all agree I am the reason why
My father fell into the village pond and drowned.

[Via New York London Paris Munich]

This may or may not be a true story. If it isn't, it damn well should be:

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorb heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and the pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct … leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

[Via 13 days from monday]

This Spartan Life has all the features of a modern chat show: a wisecracking host, a backing band, dancers, and of course guests with interesting thoughts to share. However, as the show takes place in the middle of Halo Online, it has a few unique features.

First of all, every couple of minutes a player not involved in the show will wander onto the virtual set and not realise they've encountered an interview. Secondly, guests and host alike are armed, so when an uninvited spectator takes a potshot at the guest our host will have to do that multi-tasking thing we're always being told that TV presenters are so good at, taking out the assailant whilst prompting the guest to finish that point he was making about how Marx and Engels might have revised The Communist Manifesto if it had been a hypertext publication.

Come to think of it, arming the host, the guests and the audience is an innovation which would render the average TV chat show at least 500% more entertaining. Not to mention the auditions for shows like Pop Idol…

[Via GromBlog]

Camilla Queen: an Flash-based ode to our future King's consort to the tune of a classic track by, appropriately enough, Queen. All in the best possible taste, I assure you.

It's the kazoo solo that really makes it something special…

[Via MetaFilter]

Medium Large reveals what dogs really think when their masters get it on.

[Why do I have a horrible feeling that that post title is going to attract all sorts of people who are going to be very dissatisfied with what they find round here.]

Jon Carroll finds a rather neat analogy that nicely sums up the worth of the theory of Intelligent Design, as compared to real, messy, fallible science:

Here's what it's like. Suppose there were a conference on child development and parenting. And some people are saying that children should start early on a rigorous academic program, and others are saying no, they should have real childhoods and be allowed to develop their creative abilities naturally. And some people say that children should get regular allowances, and others say, no, children should always do chores to get money. And some people say children should get complete sex education and access to birth control devices as soon as they reach puberty, and others say no, that just encourages promiscuity and reinforces our society's unhealthy preoccupation with sex.

And then someone says, "We should throw pingpong balls at them. All day, every day, we should throw pingpong balls at our children. It just seems like the right thing to do."

That's the role of the intelligent design people in serious discussions about the nature and the origin of life. They are the pingpong-ball people. They're not even talking about the same thing. They have an agenda. They want to change the subject.

The Intel Digital Home PC Contest 2005 Award produced some of the ugliest personal computers ever seen.

The sofa PC with the display built into the cushion is particularly impractical: is there the slightest chance that the display would survive a week in the average household before a pet peed on it or a child sat on it?

[Via Engadget]

Masturbation Horror Stories. Regardless of the title of the site, somehow you just know that a story beginning with the words "I came home drunk one night…" is going to end badly…

Do I really need to add that the site is Not Safe For Work?

[Via Cruel Site of the Day]

Samuel L Jackson knows what he's talking about:

Interviewer: One of those films that you’re working on right now is… well, it’s called Pacific Air 121 —
Jackson: Snakes on a Plane, man!
Interviewer: Exactly.
Jackson: We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.
Interviewer: Snakes on a Plane! That’s everything!
Jackson: You either want to see that, or you don’t.

[...]

[Via Defamer]

Hear, hear!

Tonight's episode of Lost was really, seriously good fun. It was clear that the first order of business once the pilot was out of the way would be to complicate some of the obvious stereotypes from the first episode and deepen some of the characters a bit. They've started the process in fine style. I actually felt sorry for a certain deeply unsympathetic character from the first two episodes who botched an important task this evening.

Not to mention, sorry for the poor bastard who was on the end of the task in question. By the way, did anyone else find themselves wondering exactly what Jack did when he went into the tent afterwards to cause the victim to fall silent? (Sorry to be so cryptic, but I'm trying not to spoil things for those who may have taped the show to watch later.)

Talking of Lost, I came across this "enhanced" animation (NB: 735KB animated GIF) of a sequence from early in the first episode this evening. Can anyone who taped the show last week confirm whether that mysterious item – you'll know what I mean when you see it – is visible in the original broadcast?

[Animated GIF via Tom Coates, posting at Barbelith Underground]

Lauren Frey reckons there's a positive side to plagiarism:

[...]

Downloading Papers Keeps Professors Computer Savvy

Most tenured professors didn't grow up with computers, so they're not always that sharp when it comes to zeroes and ones. I used to work as an administrative assistant at a very reputable college. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the professors couldn't handle making microwave popcorn, much less checking their email.

But since students started downloading papers, professors have been forced to catch up with technology. Skipping past the skills needed to operate a microwave, they now have to search the internet looking for proof that the papers are "plagiarized." Professors have had to learn software such as the "Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program," which blanks out every fifth word of a student's paper and then tests how long it takes the student to fill them all back in. Also, many colleges maintain online anti-plagiarism databases that allow professors to type in any eyebrow-raising turn of phrase from a student's paper to see if it was copied from another source.

This may sound like simple stuff to you and me, but keep in mind that about half of currently tenured professors were born before TV sets became common in American homes.

[...]

I wonder how long it'll be until some enterprising student "borrows" Frey's list of justifications to deploy it in their defence.

The Register's report on ICANN's decision to postpone the approval of the .xxx Top Level Domain points out a delightful little irony. ICANN's Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi wrote a letter to ICANN's board urging them to postpone approval:

Rather deliciously, Tarmiz says in his letter: "I am omitting the specific TLD here because experience shows that some email systems filter out anything containing the three letters associated with the TLD", which has to be something of a first for ICANN: having created the .xxx beast in the first place, it now can't mention it in its correspondence for fear that porn-busting email nannys might incinerate the offending domain.

It turns out that the advertising slogan "It's a Mini adventure" is more appropriate than you might think:

Small cars driving through a safari park in Merseyside have been chased by confused lions who think they are prey.

Staff at Knowsley Safari Park are monitoring smaller vehicles, including Smart cars and Mini Coopers, after the lions started paying special interest.

[Via the null device]

It's a terrible thing to be a workaholic.

[Via Hedonistica]

Tales From the Chalk-face presents End of Year Reports – The Director's Cut:

If only, if only, we could produce uncensored End of Year Reports. Here is a brief example of the sorts of things I’d love to write.

Sixteen Uncensored Comments

1. Cut your losses, let him run away with the circus.

2. Organ donation is a lucrative and humane option in your son’s case.

[...]

16. In the future, I see your daughter enjoying a long and fruitful relationship with the Child Support Agency.