Atlantic columnist James Fallows loathes the use of the metaphor about frogs and boiling water, not least because frogs will in fact jump out of water as it approaches boiling point.

It turns out that the truth of the matter is a little more complex: a frog will stay put, but there's one minor detail the metaphor omits to mention:

"Goltz observed that a frog, when placed in water the temperature of which is slowly raised towards boiling, manifests uneasiness as soon as the temperature reaches 25° C., and becomes more and more agitated as the heat increases, vainly struggling to get out, and finally at 42° C., dies in a state of rigid tetanus. The evidence of feeling being thus manifested when the frog has its brain, what is the case with a brainless frog? It is absolutely the reverse. Quietly the animal sits through all successions of temperature, never once manifesting uneasiness or pain, never once attempting to escape the impending death."

It seems to me that the metaphor works much better when you take the brainlessness of the frog into account: what it now says is that people who are unable (or unwilling) to think about the problem at hand will sit tight and boil.

While I'm on the subject of adaptations: should the Harry Potter books have been adapted for TV?

In the wake of Watchmen finally making it to the big screen, Wired wonders which comics and books are genuinely 'Unfilmable'?

I really don't understand why they think that Grant Morrison's The Invisibles will turn up on TV one day. Too long, too weird. Then there's that whole 'The Mayan Calendar ends in 2012 and so does this story' angle: wouldn't it feel a bit silly to show that story in 2013?¹

[Via LinkMachineGo]

1. Plus, if we've all been absorbed into the supercontext by then won't watching TV shows seem rather irrelevant? ↩

Alex Payne bemoans the state of the current crop of feed readers:

[...] Feed readers as we've known them are dying, but it's as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

I don't think using the social graph to filter or rate content adds very much to the feed reading experience. In the end, I pick the feeds I read because I've seen something in a site that tells me that I want to keep track of what that person posts. Whether one of a pool of 'friends' agrees that any given site or post is interesting is beside the point, particularly since any given 'friend' may well share only some of my interests. Maintaining a sufficiently large pool of online 'friends' to cover all my interests is a lot more work than just selecting the Mark Feed As Read menu option every once in a while to clear a backlog.

Sometimes you just can't read everything, any more than you can commit to always reading every section of your chosen Sunday paper from cover to cover by the end of Sunday evening.

[Via Daring Fireball]

I'm sure Jonathan Ive is hard at work on an upgrade:

APPLE boss Steve Jobs was last night recovering well despite being forced to accept a transplanted liver that was badly designed and with limited scope for expensive upgrades. The billionaire businessman had asked medical staff at the hospital in Tennessee to find him a liver that was small, sleek, beautifully white and effortlessly stylish. [...]

[Via Fake Steve Jobs]

I had no idea that Britain's first surfers were pygmies.

Seriously, was the use of grotesquely oversized surfboards a British thing, or was everyone in the 1950s using boards big enough to accommodate a promenade for first class passengers and a full complement of lifeboats?

Ryan Gilbey on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

Ofsted inspection report: Hogwarts.
Inspection date: July 2009.
Boarding provisions: Yes.
Description: Gaudí-lite spires set against an unconvincing matte sky.
Specialist status: Magic.
Age range of pupils: 11-18. (Allegedly.)

[...]

The school serves a community that is largely Caucasian and middle-class, with a dubious sense of entitlement. Exemplifying this is the wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), known informally as "the Chosen One". It was felt that he may harbour a messiah complex, though if you can be dragged underwater by a horde of clawing zombies without your hair getting mussed up, then you have probably earned the right to act the big man. [...]

[Finally...] the Hogwarts admissions office is advised to investigate the claims of Harry and friends that they are 16 years old. Subterfuge on this scale has not been suspected since the 1970s Grease scandal in the US, when adults in their thirties were found to be posing as teenagers at Rydell High.

Reading the MetaFilter thread about the death of Walter Cronkite, a.k.a. "The Most Trusted Man in America", I wondered who would hold the title in the UK.

I'm not sure any of our TV journalists, current or retired, would take the title; there are several who had a good run as the face of the news on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 – Trevor McDonald, Jon Snow, Robin Day, Richard Dimbleby¹, Jeremy Paxman – but I don't think there's one pre-eminent personality who the nation 'trusted' the way a lot of Americans of a certain age did Cronkite.²

Looking beyond the world of news and current affairs programming, it struck me that (for anyone born in the last fifty years or so) there's really only one candidate for the title of "Most Trusted [Man|Woman] on British TV": the one, the only David Attenborough.³

1. He was before my time, but they named a whole lecture series after him so someone clearly thought he'd set a high standard. ↩
2. There are plenty of other trustworthy TV journalists I'd add to the list – the likes of Kate Adie, Charles Wheeler, Tim Sebastian – but they were more roving reporters who'd spend a couple of years covering a particular beat than personalities who would come into your house every weekday evening to bring you the day's news. ↩
3. The evidence is mixed as to whether anyone would agree with me. The Daily Telegraph reported earlier this year that the Queen was the most trusted Briton, whereas the most highly-trusted media figures included Stephen Fry and Jamie Oliver with no mention made of Attenborough. By contrast, the Sun reported in 2006 that a survey for Readers Digest had found that David Attenborough was our most trusted public figure, with Trevor McDonald second and Rolf Harris – Rolf Harris! – third. ↩

Have Amazon just sounded the death knell for the e-book?

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for – thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. [...]

Alternatively – just possibly – could this be a devilishly cunning plan by Amazon to rid the world of DRM by providing a highly visible demonstration of exactly how little it means to 'buy' an e-book when it's 'protected' by DRM, thereby prompting a boycott of the Kindle that'll persuade publishers that their customers just won't stand for such strongarm tactics?¹

Just another reminder that the 'Rights' referred to in the phrase 'Digital Rights Management' are those of the publisher, not the customer.

[Post title stolen from a comment by ross_teneyck.]

[Via James Nicoll]

1. No, I don't think so either. As far as I can see the book publishing world is still – with a few honourable exceptions like the Baen Free Library – a decade or two behind the music industry on DRM. They'd probably be quite relieved if the level of demand for e-books would please disappear for a decade or two so that they could carry on selling books the old-fashioned way. ↩

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has started taking photos of the Apollo landing sites.

At the moment LROC is orbiting at a relatively high altitude, but NASA plan to make further passes over the landing sites in September which will give us a better look at the Lunar Modules, the instrument packages and the tracks left by the Lunar Rovers. I can't wait.

Movieline ponders where the stars of the Harry Potter series might find themselves twenty years on:

"F*cking hell, mate," exhales Radcliffe, angrily stubbing out his Marlboro on the table, ignoring the pristine ashtray six inches from where his crumpled cigarette butt now lays. It's obviously a sore subject, and the pain is perhaps exacerbated by the presence of a 40-foot-tall reminder of the greatest disappointment of a more-than-solid, 20-year career looming just across the street from the cafe patio where he sits: a billboard for The Hildebrand Rarity, the unfortunately titled James Bond franchise reboot based on the obscure Fleming short story that Radcliffe saw slip from his grasp some 18 months ago. And on that billboard is, of course – assuming you haven't already immersed yourself in the 3DMax 007 Experience at the MGM Lion's Roar theme-park, or injected your kid with the Burger King Jr. Spy Meal – the giant, tuxedo-clad form of professional foil Robert Pattinson. [...]

Stephen Fry gave a speech at Lord's the other day:

Thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It is an honour to stand before so many cricketing heroes from England and from Australia and at this, my favourite time of year. The time when that magical summer sound comes to our ears and gladdens our old hearts, the welcome sound of leather on Graham Swann.

I have been asked to say a few words – well more than a few. "You've twenty minutes to fill," I was firmly told by the organisers. 20 minutes. Not sure how I'll use all that time up. Perhaps in about ten minutes or so Andrew Strauss would be kind enough to send on a a physio, that should kill a bit of time. [...]

Are we quite sure this Hello Kitty Exhaust Pipe isn't a Photoshop job?

[Via Fuck Yeah Fuck Yeahs!]

New teaser posters for old films.

The Magnificent Seven and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner come off best, I think; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dr. Strangelove, worst.

[Via Movieline]

Harry Potter and the Fascist Ubermensch:

Harry Potter frightens me. In case you've been in your box for the past week, film number six is about to come out, and all Azkaban is breaking loose amongst children and adults desperate for another fix of the boy wizard's fantastic escapades and Alan Rickman's sexy voice. Now, I love Harry Potter, I do. I stayed up all night reading it on my eleventh birthday, and cried at the end because according to the rules of the book I was destined to be a Muggle forever. But as an adult and a political animal, these phenomenally popular books throw up some serious issues. Just what kind of story is it that 21st century kids are getting hooked on?

The entire premise of the Potter franchise fetishises primogeniture, heredity and aristocracy: the Wizarding world is a glittering ubermensch, and those lucky enough to be born into it are destined for a life more resplendent and exciting than anything the rest of us Muggles (non-magical humans) can hope for. We are told, time and time again, that apart from his jolly old sporting prowess there is nothing that remarkable about Harry apart from the circumstances of his birth and of his parents' death; he is born and fated to be The Chosen One, The Boy Who Lived, acting out sequential showdowns with His Scariness just in time for the summer holidays. Potter readers learn that have a happy, free life, one has to be born special, which is presumably the reason the author donates to the Labour party. [...]

In other news, last week's Torchwood demonstrated that Britain really is the 51st state of the USA…

[Via IanVisits]

E4 have bought the UK rights to the first four seasons of How I Met Your Mother.

Am I right in thinking that the first season originally aired on BBC2 a few years ago? I have a vague recollection of it inheriting Coupling's timeslot and sinking without a trace.

[Via The Medium is Not Enough]

Tracking down the origin of the phrase "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" turns out to be really tricky.

[Via Dan Sandler]

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is really nice.

I always said that Bruce Sterling was a smart guy:

I may also have one of the last blogs surviving in the future, because the rest were held together with duct tape and attitude. Try going around looking for a weblog now that is literally a log of some guy's websurfing activities. Most things we call "blogs" are not "weblogs" any more.

(See this post for context.)

Seriously, Sterling's thought-provoking wander around the subject of what "Web 2.0" was and what it wasn't is well worth a read.

So, you know, whatever next? Web 2.0, five years old, and sounding pretty corny now. I loved Web 2.0 — I don't want to be harsh or dismissive about it. Unlike some critics, I never thought it was "nonsense" or "just jargon." There were critics who dismissed Tim's solar system of ideas and attitudes there. I read those critics carefully, I thought hard about what they said. I really thought that they were philistines, and wrong-headed people. They were like guys who dismissed Cubism or Surrealism because "that isn't really painting."

[Via Memex 1.1]

A nice panoramic shot of Civita di Bagnoregio.

(For more information about "the dying town" see Wikipedia.)

[Via Flickr Blog]