To file under "Positive effects of global climate change": a NASA scientist reports that noctilucent clouds are getting both brighter and more commonplace.

After the Sun sets on a summer evening and the sky fades to black, you may be lucky enough to see thin, wavy clouds illuminating the night, such as these seen over Billund, Denmark, on July 15, 2010. Noctilucent or polar mesospheric clouds, form at very high altitudes – between 80 and 85 kilometers (50–53 miles) – which positions them to reflect light long after the Sun has dropped below the horizon. These "night-shining" clouds are rare – rare enough that Matthew DeLand, who has been studying them for 11 years, has only seen them once in person. But the chances of seeing these elusive clouds are increasing.

DeLand, an atmospheric scientist with Science Systems and Applications Inc. and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has found that polar mesospheric clouds are forming more frequently and becoming brighter. [...]

One for the geeks: PBS documentary Code Rush is now available for online viewing or for download under a Creative Commons license.

Jeff Atwood sets the scene:

Code Rush is a PBS documentary recorded at Netscape from 1998 – 1999, focusing on the open sourcing of the Netscape code. As the documentary makes painfully clear, this wasn't an act of strategy so much as an act of desperation. That's what happens when the company behind the world's most ubiquitous operating system decides a web browser should be a standard part of the operating system.

Cory Doctorow's extended review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion is well worth a read:

[...] At its core, there is some very smart stuff indeed in The Net Delusion. Morozov is absolutely correct when he forcefully points out that technology isn't necessarily good for freedom – that it can be used as readily to enslave, surveil, and punish as it can to evade, liberate and share.

Unfortunately, this message is buried amid a scattered, loosely argued series of attacks on a nebulous "cyber-utopian" movement, whose views are stated in the most general of terms, often in the form of quotes from CNN and other news agencies who are putatively summing up some notional cyber-utopian consensus. In his zeal to discredit this ideology (whatever it is), Morozov throws whatever he's got handy at anyone he can find who supports the idea of technology as a liberator, no matter how weak or silly his ammunition. [...]

I generally enjoy Morozov's posts at Net Effect: at his best – as in, for example, his posts about last year's Haystack fiasco – he can be devastating.

As to Morozov's ongoing quest to stamp out the term "[Twitter|Facebook] revolution",¹ I think he should be directing his ire towards the media – eager to find a novel label to place atop the BREAKING NEWS banner scrolling across the foot of the screen – rather than the "cyber-utopians."

1. Nobody seriously suggests that the mere fact that a subset of a population has access to Twitter causes revolutions. However, it's hard to deny that social media services can help spread information – be they rumours, counter-rumours, propaganda, eyewitness accounts, lies, damned lies and statistics – far more quickly than officially sanctioned media channels. ↩

This week's selection:

• My Shadow 9
• Metromorphosis
• white street
• Blind
• ATTENTION
• Untitled
• brain wave
• Icy Reflections
• 197.

Scale shows how the night sky would look if the Moon was replaced by various other planetary bodies.

I'm a little disappointed we don't get to see Saturn¹ close up, but it's still a neat concept, well executed.

[Via Wis[s]e Words]

1. By which I mostly mean Saturn's rings, obviously. ↩

Long Exposure Pictures Of Robots Cleaning. Fascinating to see how differently the three robots tackle the job. The Roomba may take longest – and have the action that least closely resembles the approach a human would take to vacuuming that space – but I find that pattern much the most appealing of the three.

I should probably never consider buying a robot cleaner, because it certainly wouldn't save me any time. For the first several months – at an absolute minimum – I'd be observing it in action instead of leaving it to get on with the cleaning; moving furniture around between cleaning sessions in an attempt to pose it a new problem, trying to work out the algorithm it was using, making predictions about which way it'd turn next.

[Via Russell Davies, via Interconnected. Both posts are well worth a read in their own right.]

I didn't need Michael Wood's London Review of Books piece about the Coen Brothers' True Grit to make me want to see the film. It's the Coen Brothers directing a cast headed by Jeff Bridges, with Matt Damon and Josh Brolin in supporting roles and what looks from the trailers to be a terrific performance from Hailee Steinfeld: I'm sold.

Wood's review did, however, make me think that I might enjoy catching up with the source material some day:

[There...] is nothing in the film that resembles the dry, prim wit of Portis's narrator, who is Mattie at a later stage in her life. Thinking of the hanging judge who became a Catholic, the strictly Presbyterian Mattie says: 'If you had sentenced 160 men to death and had seen around 80 of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.' When she first sees Cogburn, she describes him as 'an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland', following up with the comment: 'Some people will say, well, there were more men in the country at that time who looked like Cleveland than did not. Still, that is how he looked.' Forced by the bandits who capture her to forge a signature, she has no taste for the task but does it well. 'It is not in me to do poor work where writing is concerned' – and indeed she never does. Finally faced with the man who killed her father, she says, 'You may readily imagine that I registered shock at the sight of that squat assassin'; and when the bandits are defeated she notes that 'no doubt they were surprised and not a little disconcerted by the interesting development.' Every word is perfectly in place, and her unperturbed fussiness in this world represents a form of courage. Mattie is the comically extreme version of the woman as civilising influence in the old west: only 14 and already able to boss everyone around, especially the rugged individuals so infatuated with their own independence.

Do not provoke the athletes.

From The Oatmeal: The State of the Web (Winter 2010).

[Via Daring Fireball]

James Cridland highlights an element of the BBC's announcement about Reshaping BBC Online that makes me nervous:

In a long blog entry with a few slides with the swirls and blobs beloved of management, Erik Huggers announces a slew of cuts and changes to the BBC website: including…

"Radio and music will come out of BBC iPlayer, and we'll develop a new stand-alone product."

Now it could be that the new Radio offering will be perfectly fine, providing all the features of the current iPlayer setup but with an interface better suited to an audio-only player. I'd love to think that would turn out to be the case.

But then you read that "All radio station sites, music events, podcasts and programme pages will be integrated to focus on highly interactive live radio, quick and seamless access to programming, support for new music and personalisation – on whatever internet-connected device you happen to have." and that "Selected archive content will be featured in TV & iPlayer and Radio & Music"¹ you have to start worrying that perhaps this new service is going to be somewhat more concerned with acting as an online interface to live radio streams, and somewhat less with providing the sort of Listen Again service that preceded the iPlayer. That would be a shame.

[Via 853, via currybetdotnet]

1. Emphasis added, in each case. ↩

Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots gone bad. One for my desktop, for sure.

Ten Obscure Factoids Concerning Albert Einstein:

10. His Cat Suffered Depression

Fond of animals, Einstein kept a housecat which tended to get depressed whenever it rained. Ernst Straus recalls him saying to the melancholy cat: "I know what's wrong, dear fellow, but I don't know how to turn it off."

[Via Interconnected]

The Tragedy of King Ferguson:

Britannia, AD 600. Ferguson is king of Britannia, lord of all he surveys. A firebrand Celt, his armies have marched as far south as Barcino in Hispania and towards the rising sun as far as the banks of the Volga. Old in body and yet nimble of mind, Ferguson seeks the affirmation of his kin, weighing the devotion of his sons in a ceremony at Trafford Castle. Shall a successor be determined?

[Enter King Ferguson, Jason, Darren, the Dukes of Phelan, Gill, and Solskjaer, and attendants.]

[...]

This week's selection:

• Kipling Bound
• Flocking Gulls
• light
• almost as light as air
• 149
• Soundproof
• double merry-go-round planets happy
• glove
• inspiration

Courtesy of Julia Young and Zachary Smilovitz at McSweeney's: A 12-Year-Old Explains the Information Age's Facts of Life to Her Mother.

Mom, it's gonna be a long ride to Grandma's, and while we have some time alone together, I think it'd be good for us to talk about some things. I'm getting older, and I'm not always gonna be around the house to explain stuff to you. I know you have a lot of questions, and I want us to be open with each other. So, I think it's time you learned where blogs and tweets come from.

I don't know what kind of stories you've heard from your friends or the ladies in your book club. Sometimes, old people will spread around what they've heard from other old people. This can make things even more confusing and scary. That's why it's important you get the straight facts from me.

The Internet is a very beautiful thing if used properly. [...]

[Via Ben Hammersley's return to old-fashioned blogging]

Confessions of a Science Librarian quotes a joke from Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code:

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer, and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers until it miraculously ground to a halt scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: They were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know," said the Departmental Manager. "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer. "That will take far too long, and, besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."

"Well," said the Software Engineer, "before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have been thinking about how to build a [better|bigger] mouse trap:

The Mouse Trap Coffee-table Robot:

A mechanised iris is built into the top of a coffee table. This is attached to an infra red motion sensor. Crumbs and food debris left on the table attract mice who gain access to the tabletop via a hole built into one over size leg. Their motion activates the iris and the mouse falls into the microbial fuel cell housed under the table. This generates the energy to power the iris motor, sensor and a LED graphic display on the front of the table–top.

[Via Pruned]

The Coenfographic.

[Via @sizemore]

On the great English breakfast:

[...]

6. Open a can of Heinz baked beans – accept no substitute – these are not so much a foodstuff as an architectural element of the finished plate. Think of beans as colour and a concealer of disheartening flashes of empty plate between meats.

7. Mushrooms and tomatoes may be grilled at this stage but no gentleman would consider eating them. They are vegetables. Vegetables are a form of table decoration. They aren't food – they go next to food. As the great Dr Johnson should have said 'Vegetables are what food eats' and I have no intention of disagreeing.

[...]

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Please can some visionary TV executive make this happen:

[...] I dream of a CSI: Miami/Dexter/Burn Notice triple crossover, but I can't figure out the logic. Dexter only kills bad people and he always gets away. The CSI: Miami crew always gets their man (and isn't Dexter in their crew?). Michael Westen helps people who break the law, but are basically good guys. Would he help Dexter escape Horatio Caine?

posted by kirkaracha at 5:17 AM on January 19