Compressed 02: ferrofluid meets capillary action meets soap bubbles meets time-lapse photography.

[Via kottke.org]

Kevin Kelly, quoting from Douglas Coupland's biography of Marshall McLuhan:

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature. — Alfred North Whitehead

I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it. — M.M.

[...]

Marshall describes Margaret Mead bringing several copies of the same book to a Pacific island. The natives had seen books before, but always different books, one copy of each. When they saw copies of the same book, their minds blew.

Different Type Sizes Can Make Aphorisms Profound.

[FX: Applause!]

[Via jwz]

Andrew Kolb on his David Bowie Children's Book:

Have you ever listened to a song and your mind's eye is immediately filled with visuals?

David Bowie's classic space epic is one such song for me. Every lyric paints such a vivid picture that I figured "Oh hey, I guess I'll make that into a children's book!" Yes, I talk like this. [...]

[Via MetaFilter]

@tcarmody:

Could you imagine if Jobs reappeared in a few months with long straight hair, bright white turtleneck & NBs, & said "I am Steven the White"

[Via Snarkmarket]

John Naughton on Hugh Trevor-Roper:

I've always been morbidly fascinated by Trevor-Roper, particularly by his mordant wit and elegantly mannered literary style. He spent most of his life in Oxford and lost no opportunity to assert its superiority over Cambridge, but then astonished everyone by accepting the Mastership of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His time there made Tom Sharpe's great comic novel about Peterhouse, Porterhouse Blue, look like a publicity brochure. Trevor-Roper spent much of his time at war with the Fellows, and the mutual contempt with which both sides regarded one another was a thing of wonder.

A friend of mine, a liberal American historian whom we will call X, was astonished once to receive an invitation to call upon Trevor-Roper. Arriving at the palatial Master's Lodge on Trumpington Street, he was ushered into the great man's study. The dialogue then went something like this:

T-R: "Ah, X, good of you to call by. I would like to seek your advice".

X: "How can I help?"

T-R: "I was wondering if you knew of any black, lesbian American historians".

X: "I'm afraid that nobody matching that description comes to mind."

T-R: (Thoughtfully) "Pity."

X: "Might I ask why you are seeking such a person?"

T-R: "The Fellows are seeking to appoint a College Lecturer in history and I was looking for a candidate who would really annoy them".

Rui Carmo poses the right question in the wake of Steve Jobs resignation from the post of Apple's CEO:

The real question is not "What will Apple do without Steve Jobs", or even "what will the industry be like without him".

No, the question we should ask ourselves is "Why are there no others?"

Why, short of a handful of people peppered around the industry (some in the unlikeliest of places), are there no publicly recognizable, charismatic leaders driving their own Apples with a laser-like focus?

Grant Morrison on Mark Millar:

Do you still hang out with your former protégé Mark Millar at all?

No.

Is that an estranged situation?

It's a can of worms. I met Mark when he was 18, and I really got on with him, because he laughed at all my jokes. He has the same sense of humor as me, he's very dark, and has that sense of humor, so we bonded. I used to phone him every day, and we ended up doing some work together on 2000 AD, which went well. [...]

[Later...] his star started to rise, and at that point, he felt he was in my shadow and he had to get out, and the way to get out was to do this fairly uncool split. [...] It was seen by him as a dimunition of his position, even though it wasn't, I was quite proud of him as a mentor. He's done well without me, he has his own style, he does his own stuff. It was kind of that archetype, you get caught up in that story.

You came out and acknowledged this, but that was after the estrangement?

Yeah. Before that, everyone in the business knew that I was working with him, it was obvious, I was 10 years older, I was already successful. His star rose, and that history became sidelined.

He still lives in Glasgow, is there a chance of bumping into him?

There's a very good chance of running into him, and I hope I'm going 100 miles an hour when it happens.

[Via Scans_Daily]

Brian S Hall on Microsoft and the foo fighters, wherein Microsoft's Corporate VP of Microsoft Corporate Communications tries to persuade the world that the (Windows) PC has a vibrant future ahead of it:

In the past year, and again in the past few weeks, I've seen a resurgence of the term "post" applied to the PC in a number of stories including The Wall Street Journal, PC World and the Washington Post. Heck, I even mentioned it in my 30th anniversary of the PC post, noting that "PC plus" was a better term.

Translation: Everyone but Microsoft, even staid old media, has come to accept that the PC is dead.

Nothing draws more links and eyeballs than saying something is a foo-"killer" or that foo is "dead." That's human nature and part of the way we like our stories, simple and straightforward, black and white.

Translation: Or beige, as in the case of that PC gathering dust in your house.

A new thing shows up, kills the old thing, end of story. But in the world of technology, it's rarely (but not never) that clear cut. Most of the time, in fact, new objects enhance and complement the things we've already got. They don't replace them.

Translation: Those that do the "enhancing" and "complementing" wind up earing all the money. Microsoft will still be around. Just not making any new money.

I truly don't think the PC is dead, whether it runs Windows or Mac OS X or Linux. There are still times when some of us need a big screen and a hardware keyboard and a lot of mass storage: it'll be a while yet before I can access the sort of quantities of data I have sitting on my Mac Mini's hard disk over a wireless connection at acceptable speeds wherever I go. It's just that relatively few of the niftiest new toys will be designed for the PC any more.

Congratulations to Kris on reaching 10,000 posts. Here's to the next 10,000!

My Facebook Purity Test score: 98.

If I am interpreting this set of images correctly, it would seem that Tokyo's New Transit Yurikamome train service takes a detour through a Stargate. Neat.

[Via BERG Blog]

Worst. Security. Question. Ever!

Unedited Thoughts About Technology:

Microsoft

The most mindblowing thing in technology right now is your inability to make products that people love (with very few exceptions). Brilliant, creative people work for you, and they have seriously incredible ideas. You have more money than Jesus Christ's rich uncle. I have these crazy high expectations, these hopes that you'll blow me away and you totally let me down. Just try making something other than an Xbox that I can fall madly in love with, and that more than 5 other people will buy because you didn't wait until 3 years after the rest of the market to launch it? Please? Also: I can't fucking believe you won't have a real tablet until 2012. I guess we can use it to liveblog the end of civilization. It better be so good Jesus Christ himself rides down to earth on it, if you're going to take that long. People like Skype, though, and Windows 8 looks alright maybe, so good job there. I guess.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Stakes, Perky Hairdos, and Other Things That Matter:

Those of you with no experience of Australian Protestant culture might assume that we'd be okay with tv shows. Those with a little more experience might assume that we'd run away from all slightly dubious tv shows, proclaim them satanic, and start boycotting everyone in sight.

You wouldn't be far off – but my church wasn't quite that bad. We were avid Friends fans, happily read the Harry Potter books, and used clips from The Matrix in sermons. The only pop culture we really stayed away from was the worst of the worst: shows which had demons, or witches, or pagan gods.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer had all of those, and more. There were lesbians, resurrection spells, sex, demon possession, and explosions. It was not something that any good Christian girl should be watching.

I… was rather sick of being a good Christian girl. So, with a few doubts and hesitations, and the firm conviction that I was not going to let my parents find out, I started watching. Anything to get another fun and distracting form of entertainment.

(Then it went and changed my life. That was unexpected.)

[Via Slacktivist]

Maciej Cegłowski on learning Arabic for fun, not profit:

[Now] that Arabic is the key language for career advancement in places that have no sign out front and a large eagle emblem in the lobby, the civilian programs have begun started to attract the kinds of calculating douchebags who used to make studying Russian so unpleasant. They are still in the minority, but having even one of these guys (and they're always guys) in your class can lead to needless suffering [...]

So I would like to stand up for the language nerds and give some reasons for studying Arabic that have nothing to do with politics. The language of the National Designated Other is bound to switch to Chinese in a couple of years, but until colleges start teaching Martian, Arabic is going to remain the strangest, most interesting language you can study in an undergrad classroom.

Where's Wall-E?

Never mind Wall-E, they've got 790!¹ And a DRD!² And a Smash Mash robot!³

For the record, I have to lodge an objection to the inclusion of a Dalek and a Cyberman in a collection of robots. You can argue that a Cyberman qualifies because the brain is apparently just being used as a fancy CPU,⁴ but a Dalek is unquestionably a battle suits being driven by little mutated Kaled, so they definitely don't qualify as robots IMHO. Details like this matter, dammit!

[Via MetaFilter]

1. From Lexx. ↩
2. From Farscape. ↩
3. From the 1970s TV adverts. ↩
4. AFAIK Cybermen show no trace of the brain's original owner's personality. ↩

My first thought upon reading National Public Radio's list of the Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books was that they desperately needed to impose a one-book/series-per-author rule. I like Neal Stephenson's and Neil Gaiman's work as much as the next man, but I'm pretty sure that between them they haven't written eight¹ of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books of all time.

A list with a one-book-per author limit would have had room for something by Frederik Pohl,² and C J Cherryh,³ and John Brunner,⁴ and Alfred Bester⁵, and John Varley,⁶ and Ken MacLeod.⁷

[Via ongoing]

1. Four each. ↩
2. Gateway or Man Plus, or Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants. ↩
3. Cyteen, for a start. ↩
4. Stand on Zanzibar being my personal favourite. ↩
5. The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man, dammit! ↩
6. In fairness, his strengths lay more in his short stories, but you can make a case that The Ophiuchi Hotline or the Gaea Trilogy could stand alongside a fair number of the works on NPR's list. ↩
7. For the Fall Revolution series. ↩

Photographs of dogs shaking their heads by Carli Davidson. Completely adorable.

[Via Subtraction]

Talking of the lessons of history, The Economist's Bagehot columnist provides a much-needed sense of perspective, largely drawn from a 1982 book called Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears by Geoffrey Pearson of Bradford University:

"Hooligan" compares the 1958 and 1978 Conservative Party annual conferences. In 1978, buffetted by calls from the floor for a return to the birch and "Saturday night floggings" for football hooligans, it notes, the future home secretary William Whitelaw pledged a new regime of short-sharp-shock Detention Centres modelled on army discipline.

And in 1958? The agenda included a debate on a "disturbing increase in criminal offences", and speakers asserting that "our wives and mothers, if they are left alone in the house at night, are frightened to open their doors", and that "over the past 25 years we in this country, through misguided sentiment, have cast aside the word "discipline", and now we are suffering from it". Delegates fumed over the "leniency" of modern courts and the way that young people were "no longer frightened of the police". Over calls from the floor for a return to flogging, the home secretary R A Butler pledged a programme of building short-sharp-shock Detention Centres, wherein "there should be a maximum of hard work and a minimum of amusement."

Still, no African-American rap music to corrupt the young, at least. Alas, "Hooligan" notes, the country was in the grip of a moral panic about rock and roll. In a 1956 front page editorial, headlined "Rock 'n Roll Babies" the Daily Mail declared:

It is deplorable. It is tribal. And it is from America. It follows rag-time, blues, dixie, jazz, hot cha-cha and the boogie-woogie, which surely originated in the jungle. We sometimes wonder whether this is the negro's revenge.

[Via James Nicoll]