Nice view.

Physical Security Maxims:

Rohrbach’s Maxim: No security device, system, or program will ever be used properly (the way it was designed) all the time.

Rohrbach Was An Optimist Maxim: Few security devices, systems, or programs will ever be used properly.

[Via Schneier on Security]

In the latest instalment of The Ten Doctors, Four admires the view whilst contemplating an interesting question:

“Do Daleks even have evasion tactics? I mean, with that kind of superiority complex, how would they justify such a thing?”

Peter Alliss is a very naughty boy.

[I apologise to non-UK readers, who I suspect will lack the requisite contextual information to fully appreciate that anecdote.]

Simon’s Cat in ‘TV Dinner’.

(Previously.)

[Via Progressive Gold]

This video of Dominoes Made Of Dominoes is stunning. Just wait for the moment when the cat shows up…

[Via MetaFilter]

Having read an enthusiastic review by Jim Emerson of Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom a couple of weeks ago, I was interested to see the trailer when I was browsing the Apple trailers site this afternoon.

I only caught up with Johnson’s previous film, Brick when it showed up on TV: I’ll not make that mistake with The Brothers Bloom.

Tom Wolfe on the fate of the Masters of the Universe:

Be aware that your correspondent is merely bringing you the news when he reports how many people have besieged the author of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” over the past week with the question, “Where does this leave the Masters of the Universe now?”

“This” refers to the current credit panic. The Masters of the Universe is a phrase from that book referring to ambitious young men (there were no women) who, starting with the 1980s, began racking up millions every year – millions! – in performance bonuses at investment banks like Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. [...]

(Executive summary: they made their money and/or moved on to other things years ago.)

[Via Memex 1.1]

The Loudness War, illustrated.

Probably the best succinct explanation I’ve seen of why compressing the dynamic range of recorded music is such a lousy idea.

[Via Memex 1.1]

The subtitle of Dahlia Lithwick’s remembrance of Paul Newman sums the man up:

HE USED HIS FAME TO GIVE AWAY HIS FORTUNE.

The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp opened in Connecticut in 1988 to provide a summer camping experience – fishing, tie-dye, ghost stories, s’mores – for seriously ill children. By 1989, when I started working there as a counselor, virtually everyone on staff would tell some version of the same story: Paul Newman, who had founded the camp when it became clear his little salad-dressing lark was accidentally going to earn him millions, stops by for one of his not-infrequent visits. He plops down at a table in the dining hall next to some kid with leukemia, or HIV, or sickle cell anemia, and starts to eat lunch. One version of the story has the kid look from the picture of Newman on the Newman’s Own lemonade carton to Newman himself, then back to the carton and back to Newman again before asking, “Are you lost?” Another version: The kid looks steadily at him and demands, “Are you really Paul Human?”

Newman loved those stories. He loved to talk about the little kids who had no clue who he was, this friendly old guy who kept showing up at camp to take them fishing. While their counselors stammered, star-struck, the campers indulged Newman the way they’d have indulged a particularly friendly hospital blood technician. It took me years to understand why Newman loved being at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. It was for precisely the same reason these kids did. When the campers showed up, they became regular kids, despite the catheters and wheelchairs and prosthetic legs. And when Newman showed up, he was a regular guy with blue eyes, despite the Oscar and the racecars and the burgeoning marinara empire. The most striking thing about Paul Newman was that a man who could have blasted through his life demanding “Have you any idea who I am?” invariably wanted to hang out with folks – often little ones – who neither knew nor cared. [...]

In a similar vein, Avedon Carol passes on a nice anecdote:

Newman continued to act in recent years, notably as the stage manager in a 2002 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” but he was certain acting was not his whole life. He said that over the toilet bowl in his office bathroom he hung a letter from a fan — of his tomato sauce. The letter ends: “My girlfriend mentioned that you were a movie star and I would be interested to know what you have made. If you act as well as you cook, your movies should be worth watching.”

That they were.

[Via The Card Cheat, posting at MetaFilter]

Muxtape’s founder, in describing his meetings with various major record labels in an attempt to find a way to keep his site online, provided a beautiful illustration of precisely how schizophrenic the music business is these days:

I walked into a conference room and shook eight or nine hands, sitting down at a conference table with a phonebook-thick file labeled “Muxtape” laying on it. The people I met formed a semi-circle around me like a split brain, legal on one side and business development on the other. The meeting alternated between an intense grilling from the legal side (“you are a willful infringer and we are mere hours from shutting you down”) and an awkward discussion with the business side (“assuming we don’t shut you down, how do you see us working together?”). I asked for two weeks to make a proposal, they gave me two days.

It’s a transparent negotiation strategy and a sign of corporate schizophrenia, all gathered around the one desk.

As it turned out, no agreement could be reached. Another Napster moment passes.

[Via kottke.org]

I really liked Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but that in no way diminished my enjoyment of the Abridged Script:

INT. BPRD HEADQUARTERS

The crew returns to headquarters with the PRINCESS, the final piece of the CROWN, and the map to the GOLDEN ARMY. But instead of doing anything to further the plot, Hellboy and Abe are DRINKING BEER and SINGING LOVE SONGS. No, I’M SERIOUS.

JONES
(wasted and slurring)
You really know women Ron. I can’t think of anyone better to give me love advice than a guy that doesn’t even know his gal is pregnant.

RON PERLMAN
Whaaaa?!?!

DOUG JONES
Oh nevermind. By the way, the Princess told me that the Prince is probably on his way now.

RON PERLMAN
Cool. Lets finish this six pack. It wouldn’t hurt if the audience started drinking too. The drunker the better.

I had no idea Suzanne Vega was the mother of the MP3:

“I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm,” [Karlheinz Brandenberg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute...] recalls. “Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing ‘Tom’s Diner.’ I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.”

So Mr. Brandenberg gets a copy of the song, and puts it through the newly created MP3. But instead of the “warm human voice” there are monstrous distortions, as though the Exorcist has somehow gotten into the system, shadowing every phrase. They spend months refining it, running ‘Tom’s Diner’ through the system over and over again with modifications, until it comes through clearly. “He wound up listening to the song thousands of times,” the article, written by Hilmar Schmundt, continued, “and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”

Interesting as the story of Vega’s trip to meet Brandenberg is, the rest of her essay – essentially, her reflections upon writing Tom’s Diner and the extended afterlife the song developed after DNA remixed it – is also well worth a read.

There a few new remixes or interpolations every year. Some ask first, and some don’t. The last one to ask permission was the artist Pink, who I love. I feel I have a liberal remix and usage policy – I have said yes to almost every request regarding “Tom’s Diner” – except one, for pornography. The most extreme one is probably “Came in the Door Pimpin’” by Dave Hollister. I approved it because I felt it was his authentic point of view.

I love the remixes, I embrace them, I am proud of many of them. Yes, they have “revitalized and extended my career,” as someone put it to me recently. They make me feel connected to the world beyond New York City in a way I never could have imagined when I wrote the original song about a single person feeling isolated. Absolutely. However, I still believe in copyright protection. This issue alone could take up a blog by itself. Maybe for another day.

[Via Collision Detection]

Back in 2005, I thought that Gapminder was a neat tool for mapping demographic, economic and sociological data that badly needed an online, Flash-based version.

Happily, somewhere along the way they added a full-featured web-based version of their software: I can heartily recommend it as a way to pass an hour or two.

[Via The Scout Report]