I could spend hours exploring this gallery of high-resolution images of potential landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory.
There are 154 images so I couldn't begin to pick a favourite just yet, but Inverted Channels Near Juventae Chasma is definitely a contender: why do they call it the Red Planet again?
[Via Pruned]
A filmgoer’s guide to bad sex with Christian Bale:
Batman Begins: Might fake it okay, since he’s had a lot of practice for his secret identity, but you’re always going to come in second to his dead parents, his martyr complex, his secret fear that any time wasted on foreplay is time that some lunatic is out killing up Gotham City, and his pondering over whether that smear of white clay at the scene of the crime could only have come from the Murder City lime-pits, or Joe Kerr’s Pottery Outlet.[...]
Reign Of Fire: Too embarrassed about being in this movie to relax and open up emotionally.
[...]
Velvet Goldmine: Gay. Oh, you lucky gay men, you.
[Via kottke.org]
Early versions of the elevator were largely failures, moving sideways if they moved at all. Over millennia, those devices evolved into the motor vehicles we know today.[...]
The elevator concept is only vaguely hinted at in the world's holy books.
DeviantART user Promus-Kaa draws Art Deco Daleks and Steampunk Cylons, but for my money the best thing on his home page is the animated GIF he uses as a webcam picture.
(Just in case he changes the image, I've mirrored it here.)
It's hypnotic, I tell you…
[Via Needcoffee.com]
I haven't done one of these posts for a while:
[For clarity's sake, I must emphasise that I didn't take any of the above pictures: I simply came across them while browsing and decided they were worth posting about.]
Another day, another film to look out for. The trailer for Juno looks quitely promising:
JUNO stars Ellen Page as the title character, a whip-smart teen confronting an unplanned pregnancy by her classmate Bleeker (Michael Cera). With the help of her hot best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby), Juno finds her unborn child a “perfect†set of parents: an affluent suburban couple, Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), longing to adopt. Luckily, Juno has the total support of her parents (JK Simmons and Allison Janney) as she faces some tough decisions, flirts with adulthood and ultimately figures out where she belongs.
The presence of Ellen Page (so good in Hard Candy), JK Simmons and Allison Janney (Vern Schillinger and CJ Cregg, together at last!) in a film from the director of Thank You For Smoking is more than enough to get me into the cinema.
Visualizing the ‘Power Struggle’ in Wikipedia:
[We...] began this piece by representing the data as a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and the edges are the links between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000 nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots, which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint to the whole picture.The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. There is an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user ‘zooms’ in or out. Stay tuned for that.
Fascinating work.
[Via Memex 1.1]
Therapeutic Efficacy of Cash in the Treatment of Anxiety and Depressive Disorders: Two Case Studies.
This report discusses two cases in which complete symptomatic relief was achieved following the administration of large sums of money to the patients. The comparative safety, efficacy, and tolerability of cash is assessed. Based on our findings, the clinical utility of monetary incentives in the form of cash deposits or lump sum payments directly to patients should be reappraised as a viable alternative therapeutic modality for the treatment of mild, moderate or severe cases of anxiety with or without co-occurring depression. Cash payment should also be considered the treatment of choice for all major depressive disorders including mild, moderate and severe clinical or sub-clinical depression, depressed moods, or any and all dysthymic, cyclothymic or depressive symptoms appearing with or without comorbid anxiety disorders.
At last, a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it.
[Via Ben Goldacre]
The Mom Song sung to the William Tell Overture:
What a mom says in 24 hours, condensed into 2 minutes and 55 seconds!Get up now
Get up now
Get up out of bed
Wash your face
Brush your teeth
Comb your sleepyhead
Here's your clothes and your shoes
Hear the words I said
Get up now! Get up and make your bed
Are you hot? Are you cold?
Are you wearing that?
Where's your books and your lunch and your homework at?
Grab your coat and gloves and your scarf and hat
Don't forget! You gotta feed the cat [...]
[Via Betsy Devine]
The Global Incident Map (stated purpose: "Displaying Terrorist Acts, Suspicious Activity, and General Terrorism News") sounds like a neat mash-up, taking news headlines on a topic and using Google Maps to display their location.
The thing is, if you're honestly trying to depict the state of the world you have to be really careful about how you represent your data. As I type this, there are three incidents showing on the map of Great Britain.
"Six activists climbed a 200-metre chimney at around 5am. Another 20 activists chained themselves to the station's conveyor belt"
"One woman was arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass"
"Their actions coincided with a blockade of the entrance to the domestic terminal at Manchester Airport yesterday morning"
[Screencap]
"A man accused of recruiting and grooming the July 21 bombers encouraged his followers to die as martyrs and told them to attack the Houses of Parliament, a court heard."
[Screencap]
"We have received a package containing a white powder and we are working with police and their experts to get to the bottom of it"
[Screencap]
So, that's one group of ecological protestors (not remotely terroristic if, as the story suggests, the worst they did was chain themselves to things and get arrested for trespassing), one story quoting a prosecution argument from an ongoing court case (not a current terrorist incident), and one potentially suspicious incident involving some white powder.
Two points come to mind. First, if you're going to operate a site like this then you really must make icons that unambiguously differentiate current incidents from follow-up stories. Rather than showing a new link against London every day for the next fortnight as new stories from that trial are reported, you should have a single link about the 21 July bombers that aggregates all the related stories. By all means make the icon bigger as more follow-up stories arrive, or change the colour according to how many stories you have about the incident or whether there are fresh stories, but don't just dump the links without context.
Second, you can't just add any news story containing the right keywords without exercising some sort of editorial judgement about what distinguishes a "terrorist" incident from a "protest" from some sort of "suspicious activity" and what is a new incident versus a follow-up story; by all means include them all on the map, but don't give them equal visual weight. If that's too difficult to automate using current technology, get a human to do it.
[Via MetaFilter]
The Alphabet of Endangered Species in the British Isles. Nice.
[Via Monoscope]
Coming soon: Bush vs Gore 2?
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that Al Gore will get 1/2 the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.â€Washington insiders say that lawyers for President Bush have quietly filed an appeal with the US Supreme Court, seeking to have that decision overturned. [...]
I've not read Steven Gould's Jumper, but the trailer for next year's film adaptation looks quite promising. Director Doug Liman gave us Go and the first Bourne film, David Goyer has written several very decent genre films1, and the cast – headed by Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell – looks capable.2 One to look out for, I think.
1 Also, admittedly, some stinkers. Let's hope it was the Good Goyer of the first two Blade films and Batman Begins who showed up for work this time.
2 Look, George Lucas made everybody look like a bad actor in the prequels. Give Hayden Christensen a break.
[Via Ghost in the Machine]
On performing Fiddler on the Roof in Texas, in 1971:
My high school was a large yellow-brick edifice built under Title IX, and boasted a state championship basketball team, a respectable number of National Merit Scholars and a tyrant of a music director, Russell Creaser. Mr. Creaser not only managed to terrify his students into performing in a variety of musical ensembles including an a capella choir, he also bullied the administration into funding a lavish musical production every year. When I was a senior, after the triumphs of "Most Happy Fella" and "The Pajama Game," he chose "Fiddler on the Roof."The story of a small rural town grappling with rebellious young folk, changing times and an external enemy was easily grasped by the cast, crew and faculty. Even Billings had been touched by the upheavals of the Vietnam War, youth culture and — as the local paper regularly editorialized — the Russians had long had us squarely in their bomb sights.
Mr. Creaser liked musicals with large casts, and with about 1,000 kids in school "Fiddler" was a good pick. We had singers, we had dancers, we had cows, we had carpenters — what we didn't have was anyone who knew about Judaism. No one in the senior class was Jewish. One kid in the whole school was Jewish, and he couldn't sing.
Enter Dr. Small. Billings had a synagogue — Congregation Beth Aaron — but ecumenical community outreach wasn't a priority. Rabbi Horowitz wasn't a particularly glad-handing kind of guy, and the ingrained anti-Semitism of the preceding decades had taught most synagogue regulars to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
Dr. Small had moved to Billings in the early 1950s and taught literature at the same college my mom taught political science. He was a barrel-chested man with curly dark hair, and as an "eligible widower" was considered very attractive by most women. He never lacked for baked goods. Somehow, he was recruited to teach the cast how to be Jewish. I spoke to him recently, and he recalled the first meeting: "Kosher — the kids knew pickles were kosher, and that was about it."
He added "You all were ignorant, but an ignorance born of innocence. I could work with that." [...]
Nice story.
[Via MetaFilter]
Dan Davies' critique (in four parts so far: 1, 2, 3 and 4) of Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics is well worth a read.
The problem comes in when someone attempts to present their view of a question as if it is the final indisputable answer. A lot of the things in Freakonomics are things that I wouldn't make too much of a fuss about if the authors were just advancing them as their view of one way of explaining the facts. But they don't do that; at key points in the book, they keep claiming that they're reporting the facts when they're clearly (to me at least) reporting a particular spin on the facts. This is the pop-science approach to social questions, because it's trying to combine the authority of a scientific investigation with the unequivocal certainty of a theoretical pronouncement. What Levitt and Dubner are doing is exactly the same thing that Thomas Friedman does; telling a bunch of stories and then explaining how these stories fit into their view of the world. However, in the case of Friedman it's always obvious that someone else could tell entirely different stories about the same kinds of people and events and fit them into an entirely different worldview. Because of the way that Freakonomics has pitched itself at the pop-science crowd (constantly banging on about Levitt's John Bates Clark medal and referring to all the statistical analyses; for fans of cringeworthy exegesis, page 161 of the American edition contains what I strongly believe to be the worst description of the linear regression model ever committed to print), however, they are always either implying or outright saying that their stories are the only ones consistent with the facts, so we can either fit their stylized facts into our own worldview or (preferably) drop ours and buy theirs. As you can tell, I don't like this.The pop-science approach to economics is dangerous and irritating in itself (Krugman's "Pop Internationalism" refers). But when combined with the panache of a seasoned magazine journalist, it becomes downright sloppy. What actually set me off on this trail the initial clue that there was something very wrong about Freakonomics was a throwaway remark, presumably inserted by Dubner and certainly unsupported by any of Levitt's work, to the effect that "the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect". This remark is asinine. What on earth are they talking about? There is probably a reasonable working definition of a "typical architect" (though I can think of about five different types of architect off the top of my head), but what is a "typical prostitute"? Do they mean per hour or on an average annual earnings basis? Is there any data to back this up (the only study I could find put average earnings for street prostitutes in Los Angeles, who are about as "typical" as any other prostitutes at $23485 in 1991, which seems low for an architect)? Fair enough, this is really just a throwaway remark aimed at illustrating a point about labour market theory, but surely the whole freakonomicsing selling point of this book was meant to be that the authors didn't make lazy assumptions and throwaway remarks but checked things against the data. I'm sorry, but if a bloke says "of course, prostitutes make a mint, they do, they earn much more than you or I", then in my estimation it is going to count very much against his subsequent claim to never take things on trust or to tirelessly question conventional wisdom. And once you start looking at Freakonomics with a critical eye and the view that some of the facts in it might not have been checked all that well, you find a lot of other things start shimmering and vibrating with the temper of a fact at bay.
When I read Freakonomics I was impressed with the storytelling but wished the authors had spent more time explaining how their data justified the conclusions they'd arrived at instead of just assuring us that it did. Davies has put the time in, and I'm grateful for the effort.
[Via The Sharpener]
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the nation's latest sporting knight, Sir Ian Botham:
"I was playing for Durham, against the Aussies, and David Boon faced my last-ever ball. Booney was struggling for his Test place and was deadly serious. But he just about fell over laughing and shouted, 'Beefy, you can't do this to me.' I was midway though my run-up and he'd spotted that I'd unzipped my fly and hauled out the meat and two veg. The old man was dangling in the wind as I steamed in. If I'd got it on target I would've bowled him. I thought it was a nice way to go out."
If you run the concept for Apple's famous '1984' TV spot past a focus group, this is the result.
Wow.
[Via scaryideas]
Coming sooner than you'd think: The Halocaust.
[Via Needcoffee.com]
