Fuck You, Flowers!

If I had a faster internet connection, I’d be sorely tempted to download a copy of gopherspace just out of nostalgia.

[Via Waxy.org Links]

The life cycle of Symbion pandora is so outlandish it reads like something from the first draft of Ridley Scott’s script for his Alien prequel:

Things start to get complicated when you consider their life cycle. Let’s start with a feeding animal living on a lobster’s mouthparts: this individual – it’s hard to assign a sex – can then produce one of three kinds of offspring: a “Pandora” larva, a “Prometheus” larva or a female.

The Pandora larva develops into another feeding adult – a straightforward case of asexual reproduction. By contrast, the female remains inside the adult and awaits a male – but, attentive readers will be crying, what male?

The answer lies in the Prometheus larva [...]

[Via MetaFilter]

Having spent a few hours at work today writing Visual Basic code to automate the production of some documents, I was in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate this account of debugging a thoroughly ramshackle VBA project:

A few lines below that, it tried to load a template called lnternationalRefTemplate. He wasted twenty minutes looking through InternationalRefTemplate before he realized that he really should be looking at lnternationRefTemplate. None of which should be confused with InternatinoalRefTemplate, which was an intentional typo used because someone had once locked IntertanionalRefTemplate for an entire weekend and a previous developer needed to make some changes.

Trust me, it gets much, much worse better after that…

Is this playground in Belleville Park, Paris the best playground in the western world?

Be sure to click on the images to view them at a decent size, the better to appreciate the sheer scale of the thing.

[Via Pruned]

Inspired by his new iPad, John Lanchester wonders:

If the iPad were a British party leader would it be:

1. Nick Clegg, because it’s new
2. David Cameron, because it’s shiny
3. Gordon Brown, because it displays the symptoms of severe control-freakery?

Contestants’ lamps illuminate the trail at the start of the Glacier Patrol, or Patrouille des Glaciers.

Nicholas Lezard on parenting and Time Lords:

Doctor Who with the children. This is an emotionally charged time for the divorced father. When people started tossing around phrases along the lines of “Russell T Davies has brought back family Saturday evening TV viewing”, I wonder if they appreciated the importance of what they were saying. Like Davies – who’s almost exactly my age (albeit with rather more achievements) – I grew up with Doctor Who, and can remember Patrick Troughton as the Time Lord (1966-69). I went a bit meh about the show after Tom Baker dropped out, although I respected Peter Davidson’s cricket jumper, but by then I had other things on my mind: few girls were going to be impressed by boys who watched it.

But when I had children, I became interested in what they might like, so when Davies brought the show back I was delighted that my then nine-year-old daughter, on seeing the first teasing posters with Christopher Ecclestone and the Tardis, said they thrilled her without her exactly knowing why. It was then that I began to suspect that what Doctor Who is about is not so much time and space travel, as modes of alternative fatherhood. [...]

Last December I posted the following description of Blippy, a new social networking site:

Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying.

Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and more.

In the light of this week’s news they should probably amend that to:

Blippy is a fun and easy way to see and discuss the things people are buying.

Automatically share your favorite purchases from iTunes, Amazon, Zappos, Visa, MasterCard, and your credit card details.

The word ‘Oops!’ doesn’t really cut it.

[Via MetaFilter]

The New York Times has a rather good profile of The National, focusing on the internal dynamics of a five-piece band containing two pairs of siblings with a lead singer/lyricist bolted on the side:

Over the years, [lead singer/lyricist Matt Berninger] has accumulated a flock of snide nicknames from his band mates, including the Dark Lord, the Naysayer, Mumbleberry Pie, Mr. Knee Jerk, Mr. Sony Headphones and the Echo Chamber – the last for the coterie of musically astute persons whom Matt frequently invokes supporting his opinion of whatever song they are arguing about. Since the only one of these gifted listeners Matt has ever introduced to the others is his wife, Carin Besser, who until recently edited short stories at The New Yorker, it is Aaron and Bryce’s belief that Matt is not the only fiction expert in the marriage. Matt’s assessment of the situation is: “Everybody thinks everybody else has secret ulterior motives because we all do. We purposefully set up decoys and red herrings to attack a song. That we’re all playing mind games is sort of funny, but it’s also frustrating.”

And yet somehow it works: their last two albums would both make a list of my ten favourites of the last decade.

Thursday’s Guardian also featured a profile of the band:

Because Berninger sounds like a polite Nick Cave and suffers like a literate Chris Martin, the National’s music is often described as elegiac, when in truth, it’s more uplifting than that. The rhythms are much too urgent to be called stately. The juxtaposition between the singer’s mournful baritone and the joyous guitar lines and vocal harmonies is a defining characteristic of their sound. “You have to trust a voice like that,” says friend and neighbour Sufjan Stevens. “He sings like an older brother with a dark side. He’ll protect you on the playground, but he’s not afraid to tell it like it is, and he’ll kick you in the face if he has to.”

The Niagara Falls as you don’t usually see them: minus the water.

[Via Word Magazine Blog]

Steven Johnson on commonplace books and the future of digital text:

[...] We can try to put a protective layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.

On a related point, Martin Belam’s notes on newspaper iPad apps reveal an even worse limitation than a lack of the ability to copy-and-paste from a story:

This New York Times page, from their Technology section, for example, is a list of things that the team have been reading on the web. In the iPad app, it is rendered as flat text – literally a list of hyperlinked documents with the hyperlinks removed, on an Internet enabled device.

Print publications printing URLs is one thing: you can’t make newsprint clickable, so you either print URLs or point people to your web site for links they can actually follow. Not including links in a web-capable device is just plain stupid. It’d be precisely as much use as a printed copy of this weblog.

A pleasant surprise in the TV listings: ITV4 are finally getting round to showing season 2 of Friday Night Lights. Three years late, but I’ll take what I can get.

I know that season 2 is generally regarded as a bit of a wobble, mostly because of a melodramatic and wildly implausible turn one particular subplot from the tail end of season 1 took, but I’ll take my chances that the good will outweigh the bad. All I have to do is hang on until ITV4 to get to season 3¹ and it’ll be plain sailing again…

1. Some time in 2013 at the current rate. ↩

The Trustworthiness of Beards.

On good days I’m ‘very trustworthy’. Most days, I’m somewhere right on the border between Unsavory and Threatening. Oh well…

[Via Matt Haughey]

Abou Farman’s True Dub is a lovely little tale of many happy hours spent watching (strictly unofficial) Farsi dubs of westerns in 1970s Iran:

Every time an actor turned his back, the dubbers, freed from any obligation to sync with the image, would throw in some slangy insults – corpse-washer, stinking vulture – and during gunfights there was always time for jahel philosophizing. Ducking bullets, John Wayne espies a drunk on a porch and mumbles, “Lucky bastard, so totally oblivious to the world.” In Rio Bravo, Wayne addresses his partner Stumpy, an old lame prison guard, as Seedless Fig; and when he and Dean Martin start at a creaking sound, only to discover a stabled mule, there ensues between the sheriff and his sidekick a barrage of donkey-related swear words (in which Farsi is particularly rich). All this, with cheery disregard for the script and the authority of its creators.

According to Farman the practice died out in the latter part of the 1970s – not because of the Revolution, as you might have expected, but because of “the spread of corporate notions of ownership, stricter enforcement of copyright, a growing sense of loyalty to the original, and a swelling class of globally minded consumers who demanded nothing but ‘VO’ (version originale).”

[Via MetaFilter]

William Atherton, talking to The AV Club, describes special effects technology in the days before CGI became commonplace:

AVC: Real Genius had some serious special effects, and quirky ones, like the big ending, where your house is filled with popcorn and collapses.

WA: They popped the popcorn for three months. There was a machine in the studio that did nothing all day long but pop popcorn.

AVC: Really?

WA: Yeah. It just kept popping popcorn. Then they had to worry, because they had to be careful that the birds didn’t eat it, because the popcorn had to be treated so it wouldn’t combust. So there was fire retardant on it, so you didn’t want the birds to die or get high or something. So they were doing all this stuff, covering it, so the birds wouldn’t OD, and everything was going to be ecologically sound. Then they took it way out to canyon country and a subdivision that was just being built, and they threw it into this house that they pulled down. It was real old-fashioned stuff. Now they’d do it digitally, I guess, but in those days, you had to pop the dang popcorn and put it in a truck and schlep it out to the valley.

The ISS Flying Across the Moon.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Once again, the Metropolitan Police find themselves giving Mark Thomas new material:

Police have paid compensation and apologised to the comedian and activist Mark Thomas after they admitted unlawfully searching him for looking “over-confident” at a demonstration.

[...]

The officer said his shoulder bag “may contain such items due to the over-confident attitude of Mr Thomas”. He is also said to have told Thomas he “appeared to know what you were talking about” at the rally. The officer added: “If we only stopped and searched people who looked nervous and shifty and didn’t stop the ones who looked over-confident you would be able to get one past us,” according to legal papers lodged by Thomas, which were not disputed by the police.

[Via GromBlog]

Time Traveler Caught in Museum Photo?¹

[Via kottke.org]

1. No, it’s not Matt Smith. ↩

Impressive as today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is, this gallery of images of the Eyafallajökull volcano is even better. Look at this, or this, or this.

[Via missingvolume, posting to this comment thread]