Not your everyday job: Manchester City Council require the services of a Teenage Pregnancy Implementation Manager.

[Via GromBlog]

Fraser Lewry has come up with a rather brilliant idea to make the England football team perform better.

People in Order:

People in Order’s Age is part of a series of short films that assembles the people of Britain in a given order. In just 3 minutes, we meet 100 different people who are arranged according to their age, starting from age 1.

Quirky. Eccentric. Fun.

[Via Very Short List]

Chip & PIN terminals vulnerable to simple attacks:

February 26th, 2008 at 20:33 UTC by Saar Drimer

Steven J. Murdoch, Ross Anderson and I looked at how well PIN entry devices (PEDs) protect cardholder data. Our paper will be published at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May, though an extended version is available as a technical report. A segment about this work will appear on BBC Two’s Newsnight at 22:30 tonight.

We were able to demonstrate that two of the most popular PEDs in the UK — the Ingenico i3300 and Dione Xtreme — are vulnerable to a “tapping attack” using a paper clip, a needle and a small recording device. This allows us to record the data exchanged between the card and the PED’s processor without triggering tamper proofing mechanisms, and in clear violation of their supposed security properties. This attack can capture the card’s PIN because UK banks have opted to issue cheaper cards that do not use asymmetric cryptography to encrypt data between the card and PED. [...]

(For UK-based readers, the Newsnight program referred to is available at the BBC iPlayer for another four days.)

I recognise both those Chip & PIN terminals from the photos in Saar Drimer’s post: pretty much every shop I visit on a regular basis seems to use one or the other of them.

[Via Qwghlm]

At Japundit, the story of the first English teacher in Japan:

The first English teacher in Japan, if you’re curious, was a half-Chinook, half-Scottish man with the unlikely name of Ranald MacDonald. After hearing of the plight of three fishermen who washed ashore in Washington State but were unable to return to Japan because of their country’s sakoku (closed country) policy, he started to feel a strange kinship with the Japanese people, which is interesting since we now know that American Indian and Japanese are indeed connected by blood.

He decided to go to Japan, despite the fact that it was death for foreigners to enter the country, and booked passage on a whaling vessel that would take him close. Pretending to be a survivor from a shipwreck, he was rescued by the aboriginal Ainu and handed over to the local Samurai lord, who shipped him off to Nagasaki. [...]

On the benefits of lying:

One of my favorite professors in college was a self-confessed liar.

[...]

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course. [...]

Clever bugger.

[Via kottke.org]

A dissenter from the Cult of Clooney speaks out:

[George...] Clooney seems to have inherited the mantle of the supernova movie star. One way you can tell he’s being groomed to replace Jack Nicholson as the Zeus of the Hollywood Olympus is the deference he is paid at awards events. He’s the guy that the emcee and the other actors give a shout out to from the stage, that the camera constantly seeks out. Last night on the Oscar red carpet, Regis Philbin gushed that it used to be “everyone in this town wanted to be Cary Grant, and now they want to be George Clooney”. This week’s Time magazine has a cover story titled “George Clooney: The Last Movie Star“ in which the author says “this guy… really is a movie star. Maybe the only one we have now.”

The only one we have. Wow. There’s one teensy-weensy problem, though, that nobody seems to have noticed. One tiny little thing missing from the George Clooney is the World’s Biggest Movie Star storyline…nobody watches his movies. [...]

Basically, his argument is that few of Clooney’s films have made big money, and those that did so owed as much to Clooney’s co-stars as they did to the man himself. The contrast with Will Smith – a.k.a. Mr Fourth of July – in terms of box office takings is striking, but completely misses the point.

Quite apart from the general objection to treating box office take as a measure of anything meaningful to those not entitled to a share of the gross, there’s the question of why people are film stars. It’s not the money, it’s the quality of the films, the iconic roles. We don’t remember Cary Grant for his films’ box office takings, but for his performances. Half a dozen of Clooney’s films are going to be both remembered fondly and regarded as at least minor classics thirty years from now.¹ Thus far Will Smith’s best shot at immortality is probably Ali; his biggest box office hits are destined to look somewhat quaint at best thirty years on.

If you’re going to argue for anyone as a rival to George Clooney in the World’s Biggest (Male) Movie Star stakes, it’d be Tom Cruise: although his star has fallen somewhat lately, when he was on the way up Tom Cruise mixed big, commercial films and films with more adventurous directors.

[Via kottke.org]

1. Whilst it’s certainly true that in some cases Clooney benefited greatly from working with the likes of the Coen Brothers or Steven Soderbergh, that’s no different to Cary Grant’s good fortune in working with Hitchcock and Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. Other than Michael Mann, which top-drawer writers and directors has Will Smith worked with? ^

On the benefits of closing off your options:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational. [...]

[Via 3quarksdaily]

I completely missed The Amateurs¹ on its UK release. This review suggests I’m going to have to track it down on DVD some day:

[The revelation...] to me was William Fichtner as Otis the church janitor who owes his lowly and desperate station in life to his being the most relentlessly, brutally, and compulsively honest man in town.  He knows what’s right and what’s wrong with everyone, and he can’t help telling them.  But the person he’s most honest about is himself, making the case that one of the key qualities of a successful person is a large capacity for self-delusion.  When Otis asks for a job on the movie he’s careful not to request anything that would require real talent or skill because he knows he doesn’t have any of either.  “Is there a guy on a movie,” he asks Andy, “whose job is to just stand around?”

He’s made executive-producer.

Fichtner handles Otis’s merciless truth-telling with a mixture of anger and self-loathing that is somehow charming and admirable and necessary because it both keeps his friends grounded in reality when they are about to float away on the balloons of their dreams and keeps them going when after crashing to earth they are tempted by despair into giving up.

Beyond that there’s not much to The Amateurs.  It’s a slight, if pleasant, film, and I only recommend it to die-hard fans of Jeff Bridges, great ensemble work, the Northern Exposure School of Film and Television making – ensemble dramadies set in impossibly crotchety and eccentric small towns – Glenne Headly’s spectacular cleavage, and the idea of Judy Greer getting her thong spanked by another woman.

1. Also known as The Moguls. ^

Since I discovered podcasting I’ve increased the amount of spoken word broadcasting I listen to by about 300%. Now that I’ve found Speechification, I fully expect that figure to increase to around 500%.

A related site, Watchification points out TV programmes worth watching on the BBC’s iPlayer and other online video sites.¹

Now all I have to do is find the time to watch and listen to all this fascinating content…

1. I was initially sceptical about the usefulness of the online version of the iPlayer; whereas Windows users can download programs to their PC to watch offline, Mac and Linux users are forced to watch a Flash version of the programme at the iPlayer site. However, in practice I’ve found the iPlayer site remarkably usable. The main problem I’ve encountered is that not all BBC programmes are available through iPlayer, presumably due to licensing issues. ^

A true WTF moment:

In my mid-size company the Managing Director has been put in overall charge of IT. I understand that in departmental meetings his most frequent response is “So, if this was a car – what would the problem be? I know about cars.”

The text of David Brin’s alternate history-meets-Norse gods novella Thor Meets Captain America can be read for free on the author’s web site.

[Via Little Man, What Now?]

Raymond Chandler on Oscar Night in Hollywood:

If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, “In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived “; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.

[Via MetaFilter]

Joey Comeau knows what will take Myspace to the next level.

[Via jwz]