Best. @Reply. Ever?.

[Via @davepell]

Jason Scott found a Facebook exchange that neatly encapsulates the pros and cons of the latest round of changes to the way Facebook operates.

Over at collision detection, a post on squid sex that includes the phrase "This behaviour further exemplifies the 'live fast and die young' life strategy of many cephalopods." Of course you want to read the rest.

In the preface to a new edition of Good Times, Bad Times, former Sunday Times and Times editor Harold Evans finds one small consolation in the wake of his having left the News International empire:

On my departure from the Times I became a non-person, and it proved a very happy experience. For years my birthday had been recorded in the Times, a matter I felt more and more to be an intrusion into private grief. After my resignation, my name was left out of the birthdays list. I then came to regard each passing year as not having happened since it had failed to be recorded in the paper of record, and I adjusted my stated age accordingly. More recently my name has been put back in the birthdays list, which is a pity. Perhaps this new edition of Good Times, Bad Times will generate another act of rejuvenation.

Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre is about 90% of the way to being excellent. Michael Fassbender is a terrific Mr Rochester, Mia Wasikowska does well enough as our heroine,¹ and there's a fine supporting cast featuring the likes of Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hawkins.

There are really only two problems, so far as I can see. First, in a film that clocks in at two hours, there's not quite enough time for the plot and the relationships to develop. Not just Jane and Rochester, but Jane and St John Rivers and his sisters: I didn't feel enough of a sense of how thoroughly Jane had settled into her life with her new family by the time the prospect of going off to be the wife of a missionary came up. Fassbender and Wasikowska make their on-screen relationship work despite the lack of time, but it all feels a little rushed.

"Rushed compared to what?", you might ask. Which brings us to the second problem. My point of comparison is the 2006 BBC miniseries,² which not only had the advantage of twice the running time but (more importantly) featured hugely accomplished lead performances from Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson. Fassbender is almost up there with Stephens, but Ruth Wilson was a revelation in her first major TV role; the chemistry between 1996's Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre took the entire production to another level. Mia Wasikowska, fine as she was, wasn't quite at that level.

For all that, the 2011 version is a handsome, highly enjoyable adaptation that's well worth a look.

1. The simple fact that the actress is only 21 herself reminds us just how young Jane was when she set out in her career as a governess, but Wasikowska's performance is much more than her age. ↩
2. Previously. ↩

I'm sufficiently unhappy with Safari's performance since the introduction of version 5.1 to give this a try:

Annoyed by Safari 5.1's tendency to spontaneously reload pages when you didn't ask it to? There's a workaround for it, but it introduces a few problems of its own. Some Safari extensions will not work, and some of the new gestures won't work either. [...]

Given how many extensions were broken anyway by the 'upgrade' to WebKit2 in Safari 5.1, I'm willing to risk losing the use of a few more extensions if it results in a more stable browser.¹ I hope Apple have thrown a bunch of people at this problem and are going to roll out Safari 5.2 with WebKit2.1 ASAP, or I'm going to have to learn to live with OmniWeb's lousy Applescript support all over again, or else switch to Google Chrome and rewrite my various Applescripts one more time.

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. So far, so promising. But it's very early days. ↩

Abroad: they do things differently there…

Swiss animal lover Priska Küng runs a kind of matchmaking agency — for lonely guinea pigs that have lost their partners. She lives with around 80 of the furry, squeaky little creatures, in addition to six cats, a number of rabbits, hamsters and mice in the village of Hadlikon, some 30 kilometers from Zürich.

Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other's company.

As a result, the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law if they only had two of the pets. [...]

[Via The Awl]

Introducing Pablo Fanque:

Anyone who has ever listened to The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [...] will know the swirling melody and appealingly nonsensical lyrics of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," [...]

For the benefit of Mr. Kite
There will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair – what a scene
Over men and horses, hoops and garters
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
In this way Mr. K. will challenge the world!

[...]

While true Beatlemaniacs will know that Mr. Kite and his companions were real performers in a real troupe, however, few will realize that they were associates of what was probably the most successful, and almost certainly the most beloved, "fair" to tour Britain in the mid-Victorian period. And almost none will know that Pablo Fanque – the man who owned the circus – was more than simply an exceptional showman and perhaps the finest horsemen of his day. He was also a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years. [...]

"Pixels" by Patrick Jean is both beautifully put together, and guaranteed to make fans of arcade games of a certain age feel terribly nostalgic.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

We can but hope that The Muppets will live up to the high standards set by this latest teaser-cum-parody trailer.¹ I can't help but notice how much fun Chris Cooper looks to be having playing a character by the name of Tex Richman. I'm thinking he's probably not one of the good guys.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. If you're wondering about the target of the parody, see here. ↩

Emily Lakdawalla has put together a slide showing "all the big stuff in the solar system, to scale. Or, as one commenter put it:

Beautiful

[It ...] demonstrates very nicely what I've always said: the Solar System has just four planets!

#1 – David – 09/15/2011 – 12:58

Alderaan shot first!

[Via Daring Fireball]

Harlan Ellison is trying to prevent the release of Andrew Niccol's In Time, on the grounds that Niccol's film rips off one one of his better-known short stories:

Ellison says the new film is based on his multiple prize-winning 1965 work, "Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman" which the complaint calls one of the most famous and widely published science fiction short stories of all time.

For years, according to Ellison, he has resisted producer interest in adapting this story into film, but in late 2010, Ellison's company, The Kilimanjaro Corporation, entered into an agreement with a third party to create a screenplay based on the story so that it could be sold or licensed to a Hollywood studio. Now, Ellison says that In Time jeopardizes an official film adaptation of "Repent Harlequin!"

Ellison says the similarity between the two works is "obvious" and quotes critics such as Richard Roeper who have attended advanced screenings and seem to believe that In Time is based on "Repent Harlequin!"

Both works are said to take place in a "dystopian corporate future in which everyone is allotted a specific amount of time to live." In both works, government authorities known as a "Timekeeper" track the precise amount of time each citizen has left.

The complaint goes on to list similarities in the features of the universe as well as the plot surfaces — the manipulation of time an individual can live, the type of death experienced by those whose time runs out, rebellion by story protagonists, and so forth.

For what it's worth, "Repent Harlequin!", Said the Ticktockman is one of my all-time favourite short SF stories; when I saw the trailer for In Time a few weeks ago, it didn't remind me of Ellison's story in any respect – not the storyline¹, not the motivation or actions of Justin Timberlake's protagonist, and certainly not the tone and style.² The central issue in Ellison's story isn't so much that everyone has a strictly regulated amount of time to live, but that everyone is forced to live those lives in a highly regimented manner imposed from above in order that society stays on schedule.

Put it another way: Timberlake's character fights back against a society where a powerful elite tries to control how long he's allowed to live by taking up arms and kidnapping a young woman. Ellison's Harlequin disrupts his society by showering factory workers with thousands of jellybeans to throw off the Ticktockman's production schedule.

[Via The Medium is Not Enough]

1. Insofar as it's possible to discern the outline of the story from the trailer along. ↩
2. Again, to the extent that one can tell from a trailer that comes in at a little under two minutes. ↩

Thirst by Vadim Trunov.

[Via oilygrrl, posting to James Nicoll's LiveJournal]

Amusingly Horrible Things Significant Others Have Said: The Bracket:

9. [Shortly after we were married my husband told me that he'd never wanted to marry a beautiful woman because she would attract too much attention, so I:] "truly fit the bill."

[...]

11. [Boyfriend of three years, when I was crying hysterically because I had just found out my mother was on a life-support machine across the country and I was asking him to come home and comfort me:] "Well, what good would me coming home do? You're just going to cry. I'm drinking with my friends, I haven't seen them in a while." [A while = two weeks.]

[...]

27. "I wonder when you're going to start actually looking pregnant. You just keep getting wider."

Consider Alexis Madrigal's thought experiment:¹

Imagine you've got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you'd get [Redacted] of battery life out of the Air's 50 watt-hour battery [...]

Try guessing the number that I removed from that passage before clicking through to the article itself.

[Via kottke.org]

1. NB: for the first – and only – time on this site I've used a URL shortener to obscure the original URL of a link, because the original link's URL gives away the answer to the question. In the event that Bit.ly ever goes away, the original URL is here. ↩

The Cooling Kludge:

Alex's phone interrupted dinner with his Fiancée. It was the office. Again. The phone server had gone down, and that meant callers were being greeted with a busy signal instead of the friendly auto-attendant. As one of the few employees capable of toggling a server power switch, Alex asked for a doggy bag and headed to the office to reboot the server.

It was the third weekend in a row that the phone server had gone down, and Alex was getting a little tired of the mid-weekend interruptions. He didn't mind providing the occasional off-hour support, but this was getting a little out of hand.

"Don't worry," his boss assured him on Monday, "I've figured out the problem. It's heat ventilation, and I'm taking care of it today!" [...]

Call me a wuss, but when the 'solution' involves situating a 25 gallon tub of water in close proximity to a server closet full of expensive electronic equipment I reckon a rethink might be in order.

The Curious Science of Counting a Crowd.

Give us another half decade or so of smartphone market penetration and this'll be a solved problem, at least in the 'developed' world. The police will just grab copies of the logs from the mobile phone masts adjacent to the meeting site and count up the number of different devices that tried to access them during the course of the demo/rally/parade.¹

OK, so strictly speaking they'll be counting mobile phones rather than people, but I bet it'll still produce a count well within the 10% margin of error researchers currently hope to achieve using statistical methods.

[Via The Morning News]

1. For bonus points, by that time smartphone suppliers will be under a legal obligation to make their devices pass on their GPS coordinates whenever they try to talk to a mobile phone base station, so as to make it easier for the police to distinguish between those situated inside the park and those 50 yards outside, just passing by. What do you mean 'It's no business of the government where I'm standing'? If you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to worry about, have you? Well, have you? ↩

Lt. Col. Dan Ward, USAF urges military procurement professionals to heed the lessons of the Death Stars:

The truth is, Death Stars are about as practical as a metal bikini. Sure, they look cool, but they aren't very sensible. Specifically, Death Stars can't possibly be built on time or on budget, require pathological leadership styles and, as we've noted, keep getting blown up. Also, nobody can build enough of them to make a real difference in the field.

The bottom line: Death Stars are unaffordable. Whether we're talking about a fictional galaxy far, far away or the all too real conditions here on Planet Earth, a Death Star program will cost more than it is worth. The investment on this scale is unsustainable and is completely lost when a wamp-rat-hunting farmboy takes a lucky shot. When one station represents the entire fleet (or even 5 percent of the fleet), we've put too many eggs in that basket and are well on our way to failing someone for the last time.

The answer isn't to build more, partly because we can't and partly because the underlying concept is so critically flawed. Instead of building Death Stars, we should imitate the most successful technology in the saga: R2-D2.

[Via MetaFilter]

My favourite thing about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's images of the Apollo lunar landing sites is that you can still see the tracks of the lunar rovers, and the trails left by the astronauts walking from the lander to the local landmarks.

It's one thing to be aware that there's no atmosphere to disturb the tracks left in the lunar dust, but seeing the evidence almost forty years on is something else entirely.