The Top 100 Quotes from Fundamentalist Christian Chatrooms:

Gravity: Doesn't exist. If items of mass had any impact of others, then mountains should have people orbiting them. Or the space shuttle in space should have the astronauts orbiting it. Of course, that's just the tip of the gravity myth. Think about it. Scientists want us to believe that the sun has a gravitation pull strong enough to keep a planet like neptune or pluto in orbit, but then it's not strong enough to keep the moon in orbit? Why is that? What I believe is going on here is this: These objects in space have yet to receive mans touch, and thus have no sin to weigh them down. This isn't the case for earth, where we see the impact of transfered sin to material objects. The more sin, the heavier something is.

Aagh! The stupid, it burns…

My favourite:

I can sum it all up in three words: Evolution is a lie

[Via The Pagan Prattle Online, via Charlie Stross]

Worried by the failure of Friday Night Lights to build an audience, Virginia Heffernan wonders whether a modern TV show needs an internet fanbase to survive:

The fault of “Friday Night Lights” is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be “Heroes,” “Project Runway,” “The Hills” or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no “Friday Night Lights: Origins,” and no “FNL Touchdown” for PlayStation.

This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.

Personally, I enjoyed the first season of Friday Night Lights quite a bit when it ran on ITV4 last year. However, it seems to me that the "fault" of the show is not extrinsic at all.

For one thing, Friday Night Lights was essentially a character-led drama that relied upon viewers getting to know the characters. For another, it was easy to dismiss at first glance as a niche show – a teen show or a sports drama. In fact the adults – and especially the Best Married Couple On Television – got very nearly as many plotlines as the high school kids, and there was an average of maybe five minutes of on-field football action per episode. Finally, surely the fact is that most TV shows don't attract big online followings, particularly ones in real world settings. This is why the shows that do have a serious online following get stories written about them in the offline media. Heffernan touches on this last point later in her article:

Perhaps the characters’ motives and futures are too haphazard and lifelike to be guessed at by fans. Perhaps the “Friday Night Lights” narrative lacks a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes.

Half the fun of a new science fiction or fantasy show is to try to figure out the world the writers have built, particularly in a show like Lost or Heroes where the very structure of the show makes it amply clear that there's a lot we don't know yet. Even in an SF show lacking a well-defined story arc, there's by definition work to be done unpicking the setting and theorising about what we haven't seen yet.

Good SF shows, the ones that will still have active fansites half a decade or more after they've gone off the air, will also have engaging characters and intriguing plots, but a lot of the initial attraction lies in inspecting the writers' worldbuilding.¹

In a show set in the 'real world' where most episodes began or ended with a high school football match and the real drama lay in interpersonal relationships, there wasn't as much scope for fans to erect an online encyclopaedia.

Perhaps the series is like fine embroidery or precise machinery: it extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It’s possible that “Friday Night Lights” even brings on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us.

Or perhaps it's just that a lot of perfectly decent TV fails to pick up the audience it deserves.

¹ One of the problems writers of SF shows face is that if their show is picked up and runs for a few seasons they'll find themselves filling in some of the gaps in their worldbuilding and discover that their most diehard fans would rather they'd not gone in that direction. See, for example, the number of fans of Babylon 5 who would much rather have seen the show end at season 4, episode 6 (but without that "Now get the hell out of our galaxy!" speech) or at the end of season 4. Or the number of Buffy fans who can't forgive Joss Whedon for seasons 6 and 7.

Cosy cat.

[Via The Sideshow]

I was sceptical that Gene Hunt's return in Ashes to Ashes could possibly be as much fun as he was in Life on Mars. Repeating the 'modern day officer finds themselves in the past' formula seemed like a terrible idea.

I had to sign an embargo form, so I can’t tell you too much about the plot, but I can say that the first episode, as you would imagine, is a bit of scene-setter, explaining why Keeley Hawes' character (DI Alex Blake) gets back to 1981 and what she makes of her new surroundings. When I say surroundings, I mean shoulder pads, MASSIVE hair, strange, stripy shirts, white, grey and black colour schemes and stilettos. And when I say surroundings, I also mean… Gene Hunt.

As soon as Gene Hunt roars, "Right lads, let's fire up the Quattro" in his singularly leonine way, you know that you are on reassuringly familiar ground. He’s still the man, the sheriff, the gunslinger… and now London is his town. If anything, it looks as though Gene might have mellowed ever so slightly in this series – he seemed a little quieter, and a little more worn down by the constant battles he wages. This is just me speculating, but I wonder if all the feuding he did with Sam Tyler has affected him. Only time will tell. BUT, the classic one-liners are there, as is the everything-we-love-about-Gene-Hunt too.

Could it be that it's going to work out nicely after all? I'd dearly love to be proved wrong.

[Via feeling listless]

The Tribune Company's Policy Manual and Employee Handbook is both commendably brief (just 11 pages long) and thoroughly sensible:

Rule #1: Use your best judgment.
Rule #2: See Rule 1.

[...]

2. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT
[...]
2.5. Discrimination based on gender, age, race, religion, national origin, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or any other characteristic not related to performance, ability or attitude, protected by federal or state law, or not protected (such as inability to tell a joke, the occasional poor wardrobe choice or bad hair day), is strictly prohibited.

[...]

7. DRUG POLICY
7.1. If you use or abuse alcohol or drugs and fail to perform the duties required by your job acceptably, you are likely to be terminated. See Rule 1. Coming to work drunk is bad judgment.

7.2. If you do not use or abuse alcohol or drugs and fail to perform the duties required by your job acceptably, you are likely to be terminated.

[Via kottke.org]

Shelf is such a neat idea that I really hope someone produces a fully functional OS X version:

I really miss Dashboard. It was an effort to display some context around whatever person you were interacting with at any given moment – look at an email from Paul, or open an IM chat with him and you’d see things that he’d blogged or uploaded to Flickr recently. Genius. From the screenshots, it looks practically magic, tying into incoming SMS messages, IM conversations, the RSS feed reader, etc.

[...]

I’ve had a stab at doing it again, but worse.

Shelf will look at the current foreground application, and try to figure out if what you’re looking at corresponds to a person in your Address Book. Then it’ll tell you things about them.

If only someone could persuade Steve Jobs that this is the killer feature for MacOS X 10.6…

[Via The Tao of Mac]

What does talk of 'corporate DNA' really suggest about your company's culture:

• Often we often repeat ourselves often repeatedly, often repeating repetitiously.

[...]

• Some pieces of our organization are non-functional, though they closely resemble functional pieces of related organizations.

[...]

• Our corporate practices are not the best designable, but rather reflect an accumulation of historical accidents.

[Via Away With Words]

The US Library of Congress has been persuaded to reverse a decision to reclassify a section of their catalogue:

The decision by the library's Cataloguing Policy and Support Office to abandon 40 headings and subheadings for Scottish writing meant every author in Scotland would be categorized under predominantly "English" categories.[...]

Not even the national bard, Robert Burns, was exempt from the new Library of Congress rules. Despite penning the indisputably Scottish line "Wee, sleekit cow'rin, tim'rous beastie," he stood to be reclassified from the heading "Scottish Poetry" to "English Poetry, Scottish authors," under the system.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

Idiomag attempts to generate a personalised online music magazine, based on information you enter about your favourite bands or (more intriguingly) on your profile at an online music profiling service like last.fm.

The site is quite attractive and easy to use, but I'm not sure it's all that useful. I fed it my last.fm account details and it produced a 'taster' intended to show what I could expect if I registered:

1. A Billboard magazine article about the 20th anniversary edition of U2's The Joshua Tree.
2. A review of last year's compilation album by Garbage.
3. A review of an album by an R&B artist I've never heard of by the name of Baby Boy Prince.
4. The Wikipedia article about industrial rock.

So, having picked up the four top artists from my profile, idiomag came up with two reviews of old material re-released last year, one article picked up because the artist's name overlaps somewhat with that of Prince Rogers Nelson, and a Wikipedia article about the genre in which my number four artist works. Not a very inspiring taster.

In fairness, it probably didn't help that with Garbage on hiatus and U2 between albums there's not much new material to be found about them online right now. If I'd trialled the service when the bands were releasing new material, doing interviews and so on it's quite possible that I'd have found myself reading articles that told me something I didn't know. The sampler might do better to concentrate on showing the user more extensive information about two acts, to give a better taste of how the service will work when an act is doing the rounds of the media.

Alternatively, the taster could have been more interesting if it had covered, say, four artists from my top 20, or six acts scattered throughout my top 50 with at least one from between 40 and 50. I assume the strategy is to show potential users articles about their very favourite artists as this'll help encourage them to sign up, but if your musical tastes are as mainstream as mine then this seems to just pick up rather dull, not especially timely content. Perhaps this is a sign that the service is better suited to people whose tastes are more obscure, who may appreciate the service as a way to locate information about their favourite artists, or perhaps it's just that you need to use it over time with a greater range of artists to get the full benefit.

It's not a bad concept, but I don't think the taster does it any favours.

[Via Fabric of Folly, via city of sound]

Who would have thought that a weblog post about Thai personal names would turn out to be so interesting:

There's an election coming up in Thailand on December 23rd and the streets are lined with election posters.  As a bit of an i18n geek, I find it interesting that the posters almost all make the candidates' first names at least twice as big as their last names. [...] Thais have a given name and a family name; the given name is written first, and the family name last.

The correct explanation that given names play a role in Thai culture that is similar to the role that family names play in many Western cultures. The polite way to address somebody is with an honorific followed by their given name. The Thai telephone book is sorted with given names as the primary key and family names as the secondary key.

[...]

I guess that historically the main reason for the dominance of given names in Thai culture is because family names are a relatively recent innovation: they were introduced by King Rama VI towards the beginning of the 20th century. Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related. This leads to Thai family names being quite a mouthful.  Here's a sample from people in the news over the past couple of days: Leophairatana, Tantiwittayapitak, Boonyaratkalin. Even Thais have difficulty remembering each others family names.

If you become a Thai citizen, you have to choose a new, unused family name.  Just as with domain names, all the good, short names have gone. So the more recently your family has become Thai, the longer and more unwieldy your family name is likely to be. [...]

The comment thread that follows, where various people describe equally complicated naming conventions in other countries, is well worth a read.

[Via Kevan Davis]

The Death and Taxes 2008 Poster charting the US federal government's expenditure is both fascinating and attractively presented:

"Death and Taxes" is a large representational graph of the federal budget. It contains over 400 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president's 2008 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their spending totals and the percentage change from 2007 is included to spot trends and disproportion.

Part of what makes it work so well is that almost all the agency logos are circular, making for an appealing symmetry.

I'd love to see someone produce a version of this based on the UK government's expenditure. This is both dull and insufficiently detailed. (Note to self: next time you're bored, consider tracking down a more detailed data series and see what you can come up with.)

[Via Qwghlm]

Scrivener is a rather nice Mac-based text editor optimised for writers of lengthy, structured texts that require lots of supporting data to help the writer keep track of who/what is used where in their text: the likes of novelists and researchers.

I've been playing round with Scrivener for the last few days; whilst I don't think I can justify spending money on it given the type of text-editing work I do at home, I can certainly see how useful it could be in the right situation. I wish I'd had a program like Scrivener some fifteen years ago when I was an undergraduate with essays and reports to write.

One feature of the program's web site that I find endearing is the section of the Links page headed Writing Software for Mac OS X:

There is a lot of good writing software out there for the Mac. Most of the programs linked to below are direct competition for Scrivener. I provide links because the writing process is different for everyone. Scrivener suits the way I write, and hopefully some others too, but if it doesn't suit the way that you write, then you may want to check out some of the excellent software below to see if any of it fits the way you work. [...]

You don't see Microsoft doing that sort of thing.

The headline says it all: Sri Lankan spent 50 years on remand.

DP James was 30 years old when he was arrested for stabbing and wounding his father and sent to jail. He is now 80.

James was moved to a psychiatric hospital shortly after he was remanded into custody while awaiting trial and remained in hospital until he was returned to jail in the mid-1980s; it appears that somewhere along the way the reason for his detention was simply overlooked or forgotten.

The lawyer who organised his defence in court, Darma Veejaya Seneveratna, says his client did not complain because he was from a village and ignorant of the law.

That's a really good argument for a publicly-funded legal aid system to ensure that the most clueless, penniless clients have someone looking out for them. (As it turns out, the Legal Aid Commission of Sri Lanka was set up in 1978, twenty-odd years too late for DP James.)

[Via Jonathan, posting to a comment thread at The Magistrate's Blog]

Joe Quesada = Ozymandias.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

Nancy Friedman returns to one of her favourite subjects, passion in business:

Corporate Printers (is that a passionate name or what?) in Cummings, GA, is "as passionate about print as you are." I can't resist quoting the first sentence of Corporate Printers' home page: "Nothing has the sheer emotional sizzle than a beautiful piece of printing." Tip: Less passion, more grammar.

Astronomers from the University of California have found a Double Einstein Ring:

The phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, occurs when a massive galaxy in the foreground bends the light rays from a distant galaxy behind it, in much the same way as a magnifying glass would. When both galaxies are exactly lined up, the light forms a circle, called an "Einstein ring," around the foreground galaxy. If another background galaxy lies precisely on the same sightline, a second, larger ring will appear.

[...]

The massive foreground galaxy is almost perfectly aligned in the sky with two background galaxies at different distances. The foreground galaxy is 3 billion light-years away. The inner ring and outer ring are comprised of multiple images of two galaxies at a distance of 6 billion and approximately 11 billion light-years.

It's a big, beautiful universe out there.

[Via Universe Today, via kottke.org]

This isn't going to end well…

[Post title borrowed from the first comment on jwz's post]

How to Win a Darwin Award.

[Via Oliver Willis]

Like every other gadget geek with a weblog, I first posted about the Optimus keyboard back in the summer of 2005. It's finally on the verge of shipping, and this Ars Technica article reveals a detail about the design that I hadn't picked up on:

So what happens if you damage a key and blow out the the tiny screen? Simple, I'm told. Replacement keys can be ordered online for $10 each. In fact, the lowest-priced configuration for the keyboard is only $462, and comes with one OLED screen in the keyboard, inside the space bar. Other configurations with differing numbers of OLED screens are available below the full-priced 113-screen configuration, so you can, in essence, order the base keyboard and add a few screens every paycheck.

I can't make my mind up whether the buy-as-many-OLED-keys-as-you-need plan is a stroke of genius or a really dumb idea. What I do know is that the US$1,500 price being quoted for a fully-stocked keyboard is too rich for my blood.

[Via bump]

I may have to save this picture for use on next year's Xmas cards.

[Via FFFFOUND!, via plasticbag.org]