Gary Farber found a list of 237 reasons for having sex. From:
1. I was "in the heat of the moment."
To:
237. I wanted to make my partner feel powerful.
Via:
23. The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her.
And:
141. Because of a bet.
Bill Bailey's tribute to Kraftwerk. So good.
(Beware: trawling YouTube for more examples of Bill Bailey in action can account for most of your evening's web browsing if you're not careful. I'm not for a second suggesting that it would be time wasted – far from it – but once you start it's really hard to stop.)
[Via quarsan, posting at MetaFilter]
This Google Maps-style ad highlighting the loss of much of the Atlantic Forest is very nicely done.
Just try zooming out…
Jason Kottke has been engaging in a little scientific research:
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son. [...]
The late Douglas Adams gave a speech in 1998 on the four ages of sand:
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Gallileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out – and this took a long, long, long time to sink in – that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours.
I rather love that notion and, as I was discussing with someone earlier today, there's a book I thoroughly enjoyed recently by David Deutsch, who is an advocate of the multiple universe view of the Universe, called 'The Fabric of Reality', in which he explores the notion of a quantum multiple universe view of the Universe. This came from the famous wave particle dichotomy about the behaviour of light – that you couldn't measure it as a wave when it behaves as a wave, or as a particle when it behaves as a particle. How does this come to be? David Deutsch points out that if you imagine that our Universe is simply one layer and that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on either side, not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes away. This is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances. Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.
This goes straight back to Gallileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican said to Gallileo was, "We don't dispute your readings, we just dispute the explanation you put on them. It's all very well for you to say that the planets sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those planets were all going round the sun; it's alright to say it's as if that were happening, but you're not allowed to say that's what is happening, because we have a total lockhold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal credulity". Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes currently strains our credulity but it may well be that it's simply one more strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we've had to learn to live with a whole bunch of them in the past.
I miss Douglas Adams.
[Via Blog of a Bookslut]
The Economist's obituaries editor has posted a beautifully written account of her week. Much of the entries amount to meditations on aspects of mortality, but the one entry that strayed from that theme was my favourite. Wednesday is press day at The Economist, and the pressure is on:
The windows would not open anyway, even if I tried. They are sealed shut, and covered now with plastic film to stop them shattering in explosions. The air conditioning, which works badly, is meant to remove the desire to open them. I suppose it does. But office mythology tells how one hot-headed editor threw his typewriter through the glass; and one glorious day the north wind blew so hard that the panes behind me burst open with a noise like Armageddon and a hundred copies of the International Herald Tribune, carefully piled by date, flew out like rag-birds over London.On Wednesdays, a prisoner as in Plato's cave, I turn my back on that possibility. I renounce Green Park, even in its spring dress. I try not to notice, from other windows, the blue of the sky and the wooded haze of the hill at Hampstead, where home is. Fellow-prisoners on the 12th floor send "sunset alerts" as the sun smokes in extraordinary crimsons and purples over Ealing; I glance, and get on subbing.
My world contracts to a layout, a line-length, a spell-check and a story of somewhere else, where I try to imagine I have been. Sometimes the television connects me to breaking news (or the late night football) in yet another sphere. The world I do not enter is the one beyond the blinds. That far-too-bright reality is the one I must not waste my time on. "Don't look out of the window!" cried an Irish teacher at my primary school, whacking my arm with a ruler as I dreamed of escaping over the high holly hedges and the walls. She left me wondering defiantly what windows were for.
[Via MetaFilter]
There are rational backup strategies, and then there's utter lunacy.
Nikon's Universcale web site uses a slick Flash-based interface to let you explore the the universe, from microscopic particles to galaxies. Fascinating, and very nicely presented.
[Via Anil Dash]
Karen Allen is returning for the fourth Indiana Jones film.
I can't help but think it'll just be a cameo appearance, but I'd be delighted to be proved wrong. The prospect of seeing Marion Ravenwood and Indy sparring again might actually get me to watch the fourth instalment.
(My rule of thumb is that if there's a gap of five years or more between entries in a film series then the later film is guaranteed to be dreadful. Can anyone think of an example that disproves this rule?)
[Via Ghost in the Machine]
It was plant. It would be watered at will. Such is the way with plants.
A damned sight funnier than the source material, I'd say.
[Via stephenshevlin, posting to a comment thread at James Nicoll's LiveJournal]
I'm not going to quote any because it works much better if you read it in one go; it's got that marvellous two-people-talking-about-three-different-topics-simultaneously thing going, and a short extract simply doesn't convey how neat that sounds when it's done well.
While I'm on the subject of Aaron Sorkin, I saw the first episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip earlier this evening. Knowing the show's fate, I wasn't anything like as excited at the prospect of a new Sorkin/Schlamme show as I was when I first heard about the show, but as it turned out I enjoyed the first episode rather a lot. Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford made a fine, funny double act, and I think I'm going to give it some time to grow on me. (Frustrating as it is that we're not going to see that much more of it.)
It appears that an evil genius by the name of Tim Kring has devoted his life to concocting a TV program designed to press all my buttons. It sounds unlikely, I know, but it's the only explanation I can come up with for the way that BBC2's broadcast of the first two episodes of Heroes hit the spot on so many levels at once. The next 22 Wednesday nights are now spoken for.
Take everything Lost got right in that show's pilot episode – intriguing characters, odd things happening, strong hints of an underlying connection between people who apparently don't know each other, a mostly off-screen menace lurking in the background, an intriguing but brief appearance by J J Abrams' pal Greg Grunberg. Now throw in a story that actually manages to move the plot forward a bit within the first hour and a half of the first season, people developing actual honest-to-goodness superpowers, numerous geeky references, and a hero called Hiro. That, my friend, is the way you hook yourself a geek for the remaining 22 episodes of your first season. And that's before the Ninth Doctor shows up later in the season.1
(I should acknowledge that I can't yet officially declare Heroes my favourite new show of 2007; it'd be presumptuous to deprive Friday Night Lights of that title on the basis of just two episodes of Heroes. But I have to observe that Coach Taylor and his team are going to have their work cut out to stay ahead of an invulnerable cheerleader, Adrian "Profit" Pasdar as a congressional candidate who can fly, a man who is writing a comic book that appears to be predicting the show's plot, a bad guy going round removing people's brains, and Hiro.)
I've tried hard to avoid spoilers for the remainder of Heroes' first season's plot: I know a fair number of viewers thought the season finale was poor, but I haven't dared to read comments in enough detail to judge whether it was simply a letdown after the show set itself such high standard or it was an honest-to-goodness debacle. I look forward to finding out by the end of the 2007, give or take a week. It looks like being a fun ride…
1 While I'm on the subject of Doctor Who, I might as well point to a brief sequence from back in the day featuring Tom Baker, John Cleese and Eleanor Bron. It's a masterpiece, I tell you…
[Doctor Who clip via SciFi Scanner]
A reader of Dan Savage's Savage Love column came up with a positively inspired solution to a message from a mother who said she was worried about her son's use of her computer to seek out porn.1
This is in response to IPRUDE, the mother who's worried about her son's online porn consumption. I'll never forget the day my mom found my porn magazines. She never confronted me; I simply lifted the mattress one afternoon to find my precious Penthouses gone. In their place: Sunset magazine and Good Housekeeping. It was a reminder that 1) I needed to do a better job of hiding my porn, and 2) she wouldn't have found it in the first place if she didn't have to clean my damn room for me. It was the most effective non-conversation we ever had.Here's an update for the Internet age: IPRUDE should clear the cache of her Internet browser, so the zillions of porn website addresses don't show up as soon as she begins typing a URL. Cache cleared, Mom should type in some made-up URLs: stoplookingatporn.com, asianslutsarepeopletooyouknow.com, fortheloveofgodjasonquitwatchingexploitativeasianporn.net, etc. It won't matter that these websites don't exist2; the browser's auto-complete function will list them as soon as her son types the first letter of his favorite porn URL.
Clever people, mothers…
1 For the record, she wasn't so much worried about the fact her teenaged son was looking at porn as she was concerned at the awkwardness of the conversation she was facing when she revealed to her son that he wasn't doing as good a job of covering his tracks as he no doubt thought he had been.
2 Wouldn't you know it, one of those domains is already in use.3
3 It's probably not that difficult to guess which one. Go on, see if you can figure it out before you type them into your browser's address bar.
A couple of Bible-themed items:
[Motivational poster via Pharyngula, spoiler via LinkMachineGo]
Prompted by his recent purchase of a heavily discounted Sony eReader, Adrian Hon posted some thoughts on The Death of Publishers. He reckons that publishers have a decade at best before they go the way of the music industry:
Ripped books do have one huge advantage over MP3s and videos; they are tiny. An uncompressed novel takes up about 100kb in plain text; even with formatting, you could compress it down to around 50kb. That means that a hundred novels would be 5MB – a wholly unremarkable size that could be emailed between friends easily. Ten thousand novels – say, the last 20 years of books worth reading – would take up 500MB. That’s about the same size as a ripped TV show that millions of people around the world routinely download every week.
The barrier isn't distributing the text, it's getting the text into a digital format. The music industry was screwed as soon as multimedia PCs became commonplace because the CD format they were so happy to encourage us all to move to a couple of decades ago made it trivially easy for anyone with a CD drive in their computer to rip the content they already owned to play on their computer or MP3 player.
In principle it's easy enough to take a book, scan the pages and feed the resulting images to OCR software, but very few people bother to do so. Lots of people have scanners, but not everyone has an automated sheet feeder for their scanner, and most people who've bought a book aren't willing to mutilate the book by separating the pages from the spine so they can be scanned.
If you want a usable scanned book, you'll then have to do some proof-reading and spelling checking, to pick up as many OCR errors as you can, and finally convert the text to a format that everyone can use, one that replicates the original's layout at least to the extent of accommodating paragraph indents, fonts and emphasis. I'd suggest HTML or PDF, but some people would probably like RTF or (heaven help us!) Microsoft Word, or perhaps one of the various mobile document formats supported by Palm or Windows for Pocket PC. Not impossible to do, but not a process you can automate with 100% reliability.
There are also questions of post-production quality control. You can check to make sure that you've ripped your CD properly by playing the whole thing back; any significant flaws in the recording like surface noise or stuttering will stick out like a sore thumb. How many people will bother to read an entire book to look for the occasional dropped comma or OCR-mangled word. An occasional typo would hardly be a deal-breaker if you're getting the book for free, but it could easily become intensely irritating.
Another point is that the album market is global: most international acts essentially sell the same CD (with the odd variation in track listings and packaging) worldwide: rip the latest U2 CD and you have a product the whole world will want. Books need translating into foreign languages to crack the mass market worldwide; language barriers serve as region codes.
As Adrian notes, it only takes one person to scan and upload a book, but the requirement that you mutilate your original alone will do quite a bit to reduce the pool of readers who would be willing and able to turn round and scan a book tomorrow with the technology they have to hand. The proportion of people with CD collections who could rip their music collection without further ado is, I suspect, very much higher.
The point is that text is trivially easy to send around the internet. We do it every day when we surf the web. When you couple that reality with affordable eBook readers, you have a serious problem for publishers.
Not just "affordable" eBook readers: affordable eBook readers anyone people are interested in buying and carrying round with them. (Remember the discounted Sony eReader than prompted Adrian to write his post: do you think perhaps it was discounted because the retailer wasn't exactly fighting off customers for the thing at the full retail price?)
I've been reading eBooks for years on my various Psion and Palm PDAs, but I very rarely see anyone else following suit during my daily commute. I'd need a great deal of persuading to spend money on a separate device to carry round in order to read eBooks, and I very much doubt that the average member of the public will feel any differently. The majority of the reading public will only take an interest in eBooks when they're integrated in a device they already want to carry round – i.e., their mobile phone. If trends in phone design lead us in the direction of larger devices that double as portable media players then possibly there's a window of opportunity for eBooks on mobile phones. If portability continues to be the priority, eBook readers will remain a minority interest for the foreseeable future.
The problem will unfold much as it has done with music publishers, with stagnating and then slowing sales of physical products. After a few years of unsuccessfully battling both the piraters and the manufacturers of eBook readers, the publishers will eventually start selling books online at a slightly lower price than in retail. Authors will begin to drift away from publishers – young ones to start with, then a few more famous ones who have nothing to lose and 50% to gain.
Well, possibly. In the music industry you can try to compensate for a loss of income from sales of your albums by touring a lot and releasing work more frequently than the two year release-tour-release cycle the major acts currently follow. If you're an author whose publisher cuts the price of your work, what's your replacement income stream: reading tours?
I'm not saying eBooks will never, ever take off. I just think that the book publishing business has enough advantages compared to the music industry – the extra hassle involved in digitising product, language barriers, the lack of demand for electronic books in the mass market – to give them quite some time to sit back and watch what direction to film and music businesses go in before deciding to shift decisively in the direction of the eBook market.
Finally, I've picked on one particular aspect of Adrian's argument that I had doubts about, but his post is worth reading in full for his thoughts on publishers' web sites and the ways in which they fail to even attempt to build a community around their authors' works.
What a beautifully worded warning sign.
I wonder if the Japanese text is as poetic.
Matthew Baldwin is a very bad man:
Greetings from Amazon.com.We thought you would like to know that we are preparing the following items for shipment:
Qty Item
1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Yes sir, tomorrow is the big day. July 21. The release of the final installment in the Harry Potter seventology, or whatever the hell it's called.
Oh man, you must be excited. I bet you can't wait to get your hands on this book.
Me, I've had my hands on the book pretty much continuously for the last week, preparing all these orders for shipment. In fact, I'm holding your copy as I write this. [...]
This prediction of media coverage in the first 14 days after the BBC launch the iPlayer is depressingly plausible:
Day #2: The press reports that the BBC website 'crashed' due to demand for the iPlayer, because someone emailed someone at The Telegraph saying they couldn't download it over their dial-up connection. A BBC 'source' is quoted as saying that 'managers' are to blame for spending the money on more Jonathan Ross instead of on more computers.[...]
Day #12: A group of support charities issue a report saying that the iPlayer software has high standards of accessibility, and is one of the most usable pieces of video download software on the internet for people with visual impairments. Nobody cares. At the same time, BIPA issue a press statement claiming that page views to non-BBC media websites have fallen by 5% due to the monopolistic ambitions of the iPlayer, and that as a result it will cost the British internet industry millions of pounds and damage long-term job prospects. Every newspaper covers this.
[Via Qwghlm]
