Was this photo worth the cost of a camera lens? I think so.

[Via GromBlog]

If I were making a list of things I wouldn't have expected Umberto Eco to say, this quote taken from an interview with Der Spiegel would be a contender for the #1 spot:

I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel.

Heh…

[Via MetaFilter]

The Scroll Clock: utterly useless, yet I feel compelled to keep watching.

I have this nagging feeling that if I just keep watching long enough all those scroll bars are going to move in the same direction at once and … something … will emerge.¹

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. It's like a Javascript version of the Lament Configuration. ↩

Context is for the weak:

Repent Harlequin Said the Ticked Off Band

(Post title borrowed from this comment earlier in that same discussion.)

With his review Alain de Botton's A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary, Dan Hill adds another book to my to-read pile:

He is particularly good on the peculiar sense of pervasive yet largely internalised tension created by the emotional and psychological pressures of airports. He makes a series of acute observations predicated on this interplay between banal environment and heightened emotional intensity. Perhaps it's that the situations are indeed essentially emotionally intense, often being a series of greetings and goodbyes, set to the backdrop of persistent minor failures of complex systems amidst the possibility of major disasters. It's quite a brew. De Botton wryly skewers this extraordinary emotional confection, describing the long goodbyes of couples or the simmering cauldrons that are families on holiday.

"We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother's cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative."

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office".

Simply put, the question is this: at work, are you a Sociopath, Clueless, or a Loser?

[Via rc3.org]

I'd love a Whatever clock.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

A lovely poster advertising an exhibition of illustrations inspired by the work of Stanley Kubrick.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Just because you're at the top of a food chain, doesn't mean you'll win.¹

[Via jwz]

1. Link text borrowed stolen from this comment. ↩

Matthew Baldwin on being the parent of a five year old:

Children are a marvel, like the aurora borealis with scissors.

Yes, there is a story behind that phrase. And yes, you should definitely follow the link and read it.

The Orange Film Club on Facebook recently gave a virtuoso demonstration of how not to run an online competition. Idiots!

Andrew Zuckerman's Bird: stunning.

[Via kottke.org]

I could have sworn that I'd posted a link to this before:

Permit me to introduce John Ringo.

Ringo is the author of a bajillion books, including fantasy and military SF. The novels (oh, yes, there is more than one) we'll be considering are from the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series. These are modern-day action thrillers in which — well, let's look at GHOST, the first novel in the series. The story begins with our hero, Mike Harmon, a accidentally witnessing the abduction of a college coed. He witnesses it because he just happens to be lurking in the shadows and watching the coeds himself. This is Mike's recreation. Why? Well:

He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any "normal" human being. They purely pissed him off. He'd spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He'd fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in. He'd had one truly screwed up bitch get completely naked, with him naked and erect between her legs, and she still couldn't say "yes." And he'd just said: "that's okay" and walked away with an amazing case of blue balls. When men gave in to that dark side, it made him even more angry then listening to leftist bitches scream about "western civilization" and how it was so fucked up.

Ladies and gentlemen, *our hero.*

You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO." [...]

The whole review is well worth a read.

(In case you're wondering, John Ringo has posted an approving link to this review.)

The litl webbook looks like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and (rather bravely) promises to be a "maintenance-free" home computer with an "intuitive interface."

Whether the litl is the future of domestic computing (which seems to mean "domestic web access") is only going to become clear with the benefit of a few years' hindsight. I suspect it's going to turn out to be too expensive by comparison with a basic laptop that does web access and a good deal more besides for not that much more money. But then, someone like me who has been using personal computers at home for a good quarter of a century and carrying round a programmable PDA of one sort or another¹ since the very end of the 1980s probably doesn't represent the litl's target market, so what do I know?

If nothing else, perhaps it'll finally persuade Apple to give us a successor to the Newton MessagePad…

1. A programmable pocket calculator – make long since forgotten – followed by a Cambridge Computers Z88, two models of Psion in a row, then three different PalmOS machines. ↩

On the way past Earth one last time, the Rosetta probe grabbed a couple of gorgeous photographs of the crescent Earth.

I can't make my mind up which I prefer: the shot of a blue-and-white planet posted by Emily Lakdawalla or the warmer, more colourful picture posted by the ESA, featuring sunlight glinting off the ocean.

Why does NASA show the movie Armageddon as part of its management training programmes?

[The...] screenings are just a game for NASA's space geeks: who can find the highest number of impossible things in the movie? The record, Feedback is told, stands at 168.

I'm a little surprised the total is that low, to be honest. Perhaps I need to watch Armageddon again.¹

[Via WhackyparseThis, commenting at MetaFilter]

1. On second thoughts, perhaps not. Deep Impact was a much more palatable take on the death-by-asteroid-impact sub-genre. If I must devote a couple of hours to a Bruckheimer explosion-fest, I'd much rather it was Con Air. Just as daft as Armageddon, but Cyrus the Virus was a much more enjoyable adversary than an asteroid the size of Texas. ↩

The best comment on MightyGodKing's heartbreaking, heartwarming, downright awesome Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer came from MarvinAndroid:

MarvinAndoid said on November 11th, 2009 at 2:16 am
I think Douglas Adams would appreciate this, and that's just about the best thing I can say about anything.

Note to newspaper publishers everywhere: if you announce that you're going to contract out the work of your copy editors, you can expect the memo you issue announcing the decision to be copy edited to within an inch of its life.¹

[Via iamcal]

1. On the one hand, I understand full well that many of the style guidelines you'd apply to a newspaper article are, strictly speaking, not applicable to an internal memo. On the other hand, I don't doubt that the anonymous copy editor relished every minute of that particular editing job. and I can't say I blame them. ↩

Q. What if Charlie Chaplin had been given the script for The Matrix?

A. We'd have been invited to choose the grey pill, witnessed a bullet time pie fight, and seen Morpheus teach Neo how to box. Whoa!

[Via MetaFilter]

Scott Brown reckons America is finally ready for Doctor Who:

Before you brand me a Benedork Arnold, let me explain: There's a fix I just don't get from mainstream American science fiction, perhaps because of its grinding obsession with the imperialistic (and its depressive sibling, the dystopic), not to mention its wearisome push for ever-shinier effects. Like its not-so-distant cousin American religion, American sci-fi is fixated on final battles, ultimate judgment (particularly on questions of control and leadership), and an up-or-down vote on the whole good/evil issue. Even the most morally restless imaginings Рthe Losts and Battlestars Рeventually prolapse into Bruckheimer-esque excerpts from the Book of Revelation. As an antidote, I turn to the Doctor Рa fussy 900-year-old neurotic who's part Ancient Mariner, part Oxford don, with a whimsical fashion sense, a close acquaintance with defeat and futility, and a tendency to rattle on. He subscribes to no Force-like creed. No enlightened military Federation stands behind him, photon torpedoes at the ready Рindeed, his race, the Time Lords, is more or less extinct. His signature gizmo isn't a blaster or a phaser but a souped-up screwdriver. His Millennium Falcon? The Tardis, which looks to the unschooled like an old telephone booth. It's actually a police call box, a relic from the '50s, and the ship's most spectacular feature isn't artillery; it's feng shui: It's bigger on the inside. The Doctor is courageous and heroic, sure, but in the M̬decins Sans Fronti̩res vein. Oh so Euro!

Preach on, brother…

[Via The Null Device]