Pixar versus Dreamworks.

[Via GromBlog]

Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder:

I don't know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn't explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It's probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between "All You Zombies" and "If This Goes On." [...]

[Via James Nicoll]

Earlier this year, John Dvorak celebrated the 30th anniversary of the invention of the computerised spreadsheet by declaring that the use of spreadsheets to make financial projections had brought about the credit crunch.

I said at the time that Dvorak was aiming at the wrong target, and it turns out that I was right. Dvorak's ire would have been better directed towards one Michael Osinski:

It's not uncommon for people, when I tell them what I used to do, to ask if I feel guilty. I do, somewhat, and it nags at me. When I put it out of mind, it inevitably resurfaces, like a shipwreck at low tide. It's been eight years since I compiled a program, but the last one lived on, becoming the industry standard that seeded itself into every investment bank in the world.

I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds. [...]

[Via The Browser]

What public space wouldn't be enhanced by the presence of a giant baby robot?¹

[Via jwz]

1. Fire-breathing optional, but highly desirable. ↩

Breathing Earth charts the world's population and CO₂ emission rates in real time.

[Via InfraNet Lab]

LübeckerJung has a beautifully decorated MacBook.

[Via Monoscope]

One of these rocks is not like the others.

Two flights after the Challenger disaster, flight STS-27 could easily have brought the Space Shuttle program to a premature end:

I will never forget, we hung the (robot) arm over the right wing, we panned it to the (damage) location and took a look and I said to myself, 'we are going to die,' recalled legendary shuttle commander Robert "Hoot" Gibson. There was so much damage. I looked at that stuff and I said, 'oh, holy smokes, this looks horrible, this looks awful.'

[Via MetaFilter]

You truly do learn something new every day on the internet. From a discussion about company names:

In Australia, now,

6203. For paragraph 147(1)(c) or 601DC(1)(c) of the Corporations Act 2001, a name is unacceptable for registration if the name:

(e) in the context in which it is proposed to be used, suggests a connection with:

(i) a member of the Royal Family; or
(ii) the receipt of Royal patronage; or
(iii) an ex-servicemen's organisation; or
(iv) Sir Donald Bradman.

(Tangentially related.)

Twistori: positively hypnotic.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Newquay's Blue Reef Aquarium had an uninvited guest:

Curator Matt Slater said: As part of our tropical marine displays we have been painstakingly propagating a variety of corals. They are extremely slow-growing and every one we have lost to these attacks was a major blow.

In the end it got so bad that I decided to literally take the display apart to find out who was responsible. I could hardly believe my eyes when I finally caught sight of the culprit. [...]

It's the photograph of the coral-eater that sells the story. Are we sure this whole story isn't a viral ad for the new season of Primeval?

[Via jwz]

Marcus du Sautoy on enormous numbers:

1,000,000,000 (one billion)

In the UK, this number used to be called, simply, 1,000 million, while a billion was reserved for a million million (a number with 12 zeros). But pressure to standardise our numbers with the US drove Harold Wilson to announce in 1974 that any government mention of a billion would from then on mean a number with nine zeros.

If you really want someone to blame for the confusion over billions, however, it's the French. Throughout history, they have flip-flopped between different definitions, wreaking havoc on the names of numbers. In 1480, they proposed that a billion have 12 zeros, which is what the British adopted. Then, in the middle of the 17th century, they knocked three zeros off, so a billion became a number with nine zeros. The young United States inherited this new definition. Then in 1948, the French reverted back to the old system.

After careful study of images taken by the Mars Phoenix lander, some of the mission's science team have authored a paper suggesting that there's evidence of the presence of liquid water in the vicinity of the lander:

First off, get rid of the image in your head of pools of pretty blue water that you could swim in sitting on the surface. If you must think of an Earth analogy, you'll get pretty close with the Great Salt Lake in Utah, except much saltier, in much less quantities, and not on the surface. Specifically, the liquid water suggested in the paper is not pure liquid water, but instead a brine. Brine is liquid water that has a very high salt concentration, either approaching or at saturation. [...]

Bernie Madoff is … Scumbag Billionaire.

[Via The Browser]

Let nation speak clearly unto nation, for all our sakes:

At the height of the Cold War, American and Soviet scientists wrote handbooks for each other that attempted to bridge their language gap. Helping to explain some of the era's more arcane nuclear terminology, these handbooks were a crucial diplomatic tool that helped prevent potentially disastrous misunderstandings.

[...]

Take American nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis's 2007 book, The Minimum Means of Reprisal  –  a title lifted from a Chinese official's description of his government's nuclear stance. When the book was translated into Chinese, its title became The Minimum Means of Revenge.

In a slightly different context, Atlantic journalist Jim Fallows, who has been living in China for the last few years, has written about the apparent inability of Chinese officialdom to communicate effectively in English:

My job is not to help Chinese organizations advance their intended causes. But it doesn't help anybody [...] if China's clumsy public diplomacy makes the country seem more menacing, opaque, hyper-controlled, and overall bad than it really is.

The Big Picture: Signs of Spring.

My favourites: #5 and #29.

Fred Clark proposes a thought experiment:

Imagine a newspaper with no "Business" section. Where the Business section is now, there is, instead, a "Work" section.

It would make sense for the paper from a, you know, business standpoint. Higher circulation means more revenue for the paper, so it makes sense to focus on the needs, concerns and interests the largest number of potential readers. The current model of a Business section is designed for only the tiniest slice of potential readers — those who think of themselves primarily as investors. Why not aim, instead, for the vastly larger, overwhelming majority of potential readers, those who think of themselves primarily as people who work for a living? [...]

How many web browser tabs do you close over the course of a day?

I tend to read too much online, surfing idly, reading industry publications, spawning legions of browser tabs, skimming things, saving things for later and never coming back to them. My ability to read long pieces gradually atrophies, and time that could have otherwise been used for creation is, well, consumed by consumption. In an effort to bring my habit to the surface and get on top of it, I decided to tally by hand every browser tab I closed until I had a page's worth.

Well, I read a fair few web pages between 12th February and 19th March, but as it turned out, half of those were spent in work's ticket-tracking website. But still, 1,700+ of them.

That works out at just under 50 tabs per day. I'd be amazed if I didn't beat that figure pretty much every single day of the week. If you count views of posts via an RSS feed aggregator¹ then I guarantee that I beat 50 tabs a day by a mile.

Hang on a minute. He's saying that's a bad thing, isn't he…

[Via kottke.org]

1. After all, isn't reading a site's feed equivalent to opening and closing the home page in a browser tab? ↩

It turns out that the set of DVDs President Obama gave to Gordon Brown has the wrong region encoding:

A Downing Street spokesman said he was "confident" that any gift Obama gave Brown would have been "well thought through," but referred me to the White House for assistance on the "technical aspects".

You know, it really bugs me that instead of just coming out and admitting that there had been an oversight, an official spokesman had to pretend that questions about "technical aspects" of the gift needed to be directed elsewhere. It's a minor cock-up, for heavens' sake! The revelation that whichever White House intern was sent out to buy some DVDs for Gordon Brown didn't realise that other parts of the world are in a different 'region'¹ is hardly going to imperil the "special relationship."

Of course, Number 10 should have responded by announcing that the Prime Minister had simply sought out a DVD player with a region-free hack, as any sensible consumer would when faced with a consumer-hostile bit of technology like region-specific encoding.

[Via National Review Online, via Progressive Gold]

1. Outside of the minority of viewers who seek out obscure foreign DVD releases, such as European arthouse movies and anime titles, is there much awareness in the USA that the region-encoding scheme even exists? ↩

Will the iPod Femto finally silence the doubters?

2020:
Apple: iPod femto: Size of a business card, but thinner. Direct neural interface. No charging, uranium battery last 5,000 years. Up to 500TB. iPhone X: Instantaneous, realtime language translation. Up to 20PB

Naysayers: Still no ogg. Should be 1PB. Neural interface is only in HD and not Extreme-HD. Should have used plutonium batteries that last 10,000 years. iPhone isn't 6G. Language translation only covers "major" languages and not Swahili. Still expensive.

[Via The Tao of Mac]