Talking of tablet computing, here's a nice line from Josh Clarke:

[...] a tablet is like a phone as a swimming pool is like a bathtub. Similar on the surface, but intended for entirely different uses.

[Via carpeaqua]

Fraser Speirs' ongoing series of posts on his iPad Project – a 1:1 deployment of iPads to pupils in the independent school where he teaches IT – has made for fascinating reading for some time now.¹ Not just for the techie stuff about how to manage, configure and backup all the pupil data and all those applications, but for the insights into the way that supplying enough tablet computers is changing how teachers teach and how pupils learn.

The latest post in the series is a good example. With a little help from a simple drawing application, the iPad – when plugged in to an external display via the VGA port – doubles as a digital whiteboard that is much more versatile than a regular whiteboard.

The point isn't that schools should replace their whiteboards with iPads, but that once you have a school where every teacher and pupil has access to a lightweight, flexible tablet computer there are all sorts of things you'll end up being able to use the tablet for that you might not have envisaged beforehand.

1. Of course, this sort of experiment is easier to carry off when the school in question is a smallish fee-paying institution rather than a state-funded comprehensive. Scaling this sort of project up is a very different challenge, but that doesn't in any sense invalidate the lessons learned from the project about the uses to which you can apply a tablet computer. ↩

From One Thing Well, a clever way to come up with a secure but memorable password:

Talking of password generation, if you need to come up with a secure password without the help of software, you should make it one you can sing!

[...]

As an example, my favourite Prince & The Revolution B-side is She's Always In My Hair, and the second verse has been stuck in my head for a decade or two:

Whenever I feel like not 2 great at all
Whenever I'm all alone
And even if I hit the wrong notes
She's always in my boat
She's always there

Take the initial letters, and you get:

wifln2gaawiaaaeiihtwnsaimbsat

Nice. My only problems with this technique are that

1. I have a lousy memory for lyrics.¹
2. Given the number of passwords I have to remember these days, I have a horrible feeling that I'd end up forgetting not just the password, but which song was associated with which account/password.

1. The consequences of which could be ameliorated by my making sure that whichever track I chose is on my iPod and has lyrics. I'm fairly confident that once I saw the lyrics I'd quickly remember which verse I'd used to generate the password. ↩

Quadrocopter Ball Juggling. Apparently the quadrocopters themselves aren't doing the motion tracking – that's being handled by the infrastructure of the arena, with course corrections presumably being sent to the quadrocopters on the fly (so to speak.)

Even if the 'copters aren't fully autonomous, it's still an impressive sight.

One day, a descendant of one of those quadrocopters is going to be equipped with live munitions and hooked up to a powerful AI by some ambitious soldier, at which point we'd best hope that the damned thing decides to emulate a Culture Mind rather than, say, SkyNet.

We should be nice to the quadrocopters, in the hope that they'll tell their grandchildren to keep some of the apes around…

[Via jwz]

Ceci n'est pas une lune. Classy.

[Via the inside of my brain]

About The Greggs Adventure:

Greggs has been around for as long as you've been alive. Always there on the high street ready to offer sandwiches, soup, buns, whatever. You've had a Greggs lunch at least once in your life. It's earned something of a dodgy reputation due to the, ahem, varied quality of the food on offer. I realised one day that I really had no idea what's good and what's not good at Greggs. This blog is my attempt to change that.

I do have to register my strong disagreement with the author on one vital issue: the Bacon and Cheese Wrap is far better when hot. It is Just Not Right to let one go cold.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Jim Emerson is aghast at the notion that at one time cinemagoers used to turn up and watch a film regardless of whether it had just started or was halfway through:

Now, if, like me, you were in college (or university, as they say back East) when Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in "Annie Hall" announced that he had to see a picture "exactly from the start to the finish," and you thought that made perfect sense, it seemed bizarre to imagine a time when people had to be encouraged to show up before the feature started: "No one… BUT NO ONE… will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance…" (It turns out Paramount had done something similar with Hitchcock's "Vertigo" just two years earlier: "It's a Hitchcock thriller… You should see it from the beginning!") As the proprietor of the Opening Shot Project, which emphasizes the importance of the first shot in setting up and framing certain films, the idea that somebody would watch a movie without having seen the beginning is incomprehensible to me. Why cheat yourself of the joys of discovery and development? Or just knowing what's going on in the story?

I'm a few years younger than Emerson¹ but I have a vague recollection that when I was a kid it was deemed perfectly reasonable to arrive part-way through a screening and watch it through to the end, then stay put so we could to see the film's next screening up to the point where we'd come in.

Now that I'm (allegedly) a grown-up, I find it bizarre to think that anyone could sit through the last half of a film knowing that they'd missed so much of the story. It'd be like opening a novel and starting to read it from page 175 … downright disrespectful to the writer and the story, and short-changing yourself. You can never get that first reading of a story back: granted that re-reads are sometimes hugely worthwhile, and that plot isn't by any means the sole engine of a good story anyway, but still – isn't it just wrong to jump in halfway through?²

1. And in the UK, for whatever that's worth. ↩
2. What also puzzles me is that if this practice was really so much more commonplace in the 1940/50/60s I'd have expected that films made in that era would have catered for it more noticeeably, repeating vital clues and plot points at regular intervals so that latecomers wouldn't be completely baffled by later developments. Have I just failed to notice films from that era spoonfeeding the audience? ↩

Meet Buster:

Buster is feeling shy, as usual. Buster is so acutely shy that researchers at the Seattle Aquarium can't tell whether this giant Pacific octopus is a boy or a girl. If Buster is a boy, he'll have a special tentacle (the third to the right, going clockwise, from the front of its mantle) that is both an arm and a dick. And, since the suction cups on octopuses* also function as taste buds, his special tentacle will be an arm and a dick and a tongue – making all octopus sex fisting and intercourse and cunnilingus, simultaneously. The young blonde giving the "feeding demonstration" to a large pack of squirming schoolchildren explains these facts more delicately.

"What if you tasted everything you touched?" she asks. The children are silent. "When you open the bathroom door? When you tie your shoes?" The kids offer a few ewws to her and each other. An assistant perched on top of Buster's tank, her feet dangling above the water, skewers some oily herring onto a spear. While the assistant submerges and gently jiggles the herring in front of Buster's cave (the only things visible are an eye and an indistinct bulge of octopus flesh), the guide gives her spiel about octopuses – how the only bony part of their body is a beak, allowing them to squeeze into small places; how octopuses have three hearts in their mantles; how they squirt ink at predators to disorient them; how they are masters of disguise. They have three sets of camouflage cells that can mimic almost any pattern behind them – a checkerboard, multicolored coral, the moving shadow of a passing cloud – and they can flatten and pucker the texture of their skin to blend into most surfaces. (Compared to octopuses, chameleons are pikers.) Despite the vast palette of their skins, octopuses are colorblind. [...]

[Via The Essayist]

The Manifesto Manifesto:

How to Write a Manifesto

Today, we write a manifesto.

Today, our second sentence starts with the first word of the first sentence.

We write a short sentence.

Then a shorter one.

Then a really, really long one that maybe doesn't make any sense but is immediately followed by

[...]

[Via swissmiss]

Copenhagen will soon be home to the world's least boring power station:

Planned for completion in 2016, the former factory-shaped eyesore will ferry visitors up a vertical elevator to a series of slopes at the top of the smokestack.

Meanwhile — as a gentle nod to the pyramids of garbage churning beneath it — the chimney is designed to puff a 30-meter-wide smoke ring every time a ton of C02 is produced.

"You'll be able to stand in the middle of Copenhagen and tally-up exactly how much carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere," said [architect Bjarke Ingels]. "It's this kind of visual connection that should encourage people to consider their own energy consumption."

[Ingels] said that heat-tracking lights will also be used at night to position lasers on the smoke rings and turn them into glowing artworks, or even pie charts.

[Via The Morning News]

Karlheinz Brandenburg talked to NPR's The Record about the development of the format formally known as MPEG Audio Layer III:

"In 1988 when I thought, 'OK, that's near perfect, what we've done,' I heard about this song and then heard it myself – it's the acapella version [of Suzanne Vega's 'Tom's Diner']. The CD is Solitude Standing. The way it's recorded – with Suzanne Vega in the middle and little bit of ambience and no other instruments – is really a worst case for the system as we had it in 1988. Everything else sounded quite OK, and Suzanne Vega's voice was destroyed."

[...]

"Finally [we] perfected the system and then Suzanne Vega's voice was easy, but it gave us quite some work to have her voice in full fidelity … I think over time I have listened to the song 500 or 1,000 times. In fact, I still like it. That was the good part about it … Interesting thing, later on I met Suzanne Vega and I heard her singing this song in a live performance. It was really astonishing – [it] was exactly like on the CD. It was a like a curtain opening because I knew all the little details in how she sings it, and she still does it the same way."

[Via carpeaqua]

A neat Mac OS X trick from Minimal Mac:

This just in from the Department of Who Knew? You can resize multiple point sizes of text in Mac OS X by using mathematical equivalents in that little box just under "Size". In other words, if you select multiple items of different sizes and want to triple the size of all, just type *3 (times 3) and hit return. Other functions ( / divide, + add, – subtract) work as well.

I'm not sure how often I'd use it¹ but it's worth knowing the option is there if I do have to quadruple the size of an entire block of text in one fell swoop.

1. I'd tend to select the block of text and use Command + and Command - to achieve the same effect, albeit less precisely. ↩

Neil Perryman has embarked on a rewatch of Doctor Who from the very beginning. What makes this worth posting about is that he's persuaded his wife, who is a fan of SF shows from Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica and is familiar with NuWho but not with the classic era, to watch along, rate the episodes and comment on each story. So far, their joint reviews are proving to be good fun. Take, for example, this exchange about first season episode The Azteks:

Sue: So, why are all the Aztecs speaking English?

Here we go. Why it's taken her until now to question why everyone is speaking English (including Thals, Voords and cavemen) is beyond me, but here it is. I can either tell her to wait until the 1970s for an explanation or I can give her the official line now. Sadly, we end up debating this during one of Hartnell's very best moments and she doesn't hear his passionate warning to Barbara. Not one line.

Me: It isn't stated on screen for many years but the TARDIS translates for everyone telepathically. Look, this was a big plot point in David Tennant's very first episode, The Christmas Invasion, which you've definitely seen -

Sue: Like a Baffle Fish.

Me: Yes, exactly like a Baffle Fish. Very good.

Look, my wife is trying to drop references to Hitch Hikers into the middle of a black and white episode of Doctor Who – you try correcting her.

[Via Feeling Listless]

Photographer Irina Werning's Back to the Future:

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else's house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it's imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.

My favourites: Lucia in 1956 & 2010, Ato 1992 & 2010, and Pancho in 1983 & 2010.

[Via Subtraction.com]

Best. Job Ad. Ever!

We want to add some talent to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune investigative team. [...]

[If...] you're the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you're our kind of sicko. [...]

[Via Making Light (Sidelights)]

One Minute Puberty. (Potentially NSFW.)

[Via Etre, via currybetdotnet]

Another day, another post on origami. Dinh Truong Giang uses a technique called wet folding to produce paper sculptures of animals and people.

My favourites are his animals: foxes, gorillas and owls – even more so when they're miniatures.

[Via MetaFilter]

Paul Krugman, commenting on the latest pronouncements of former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan:

Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he's the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.

Sorry, but he doesn't get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it's gone to meet its maker, it's joined the choir invisible.

[Via Memex 1.1]

A timely Long Quote:

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." — Lenin

Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler came up with a cracking idea for an advertising campaign for the Smithsonian Museums: Historically Hardcore.

Sadly, the Smithsonian Institution insisted that the designers remove the museum's logo from their work. Even with a generic logo, they're still pretty damn good.

[Via The Hickensian]