Abi Sutherland gives SF a little pep talk:

SF sat at my dining room table, crying into a cold cup of coffee. It was oh-God late, and I was trying not to think about having to be functional in the morning. But Fic has been a friend since I was four years old and in love with Spock and Aragorn at the same time. I cherish it more than sleep. I met my husband and most of my friends in its clubs and parties. I've been with it through its identity crises ("Speculative Fiction now, please") and it's been with me through mine.

This was a long session. [...]

Lovely work.

The case of the 500-mile email:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible… I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. [...]

[Via kottke.org]

Joss Whedon's having a pretty good year. As if seeing The Cabin in the Woods¹ finally arrive in cinemas wasn't enough, now he's gone and delivered Avengers Assemble.²

In comics, superhero team-ups and crossovers can work extremely well when done right, but they have the advantage of being able to spread their (frequently ludicrously complicated) back-stories over multiple issues. Fitting half a dozen major characters into 140 minutes of film, giving them all something to do, and keeping the audience on board and entertained is a neat trick, but one Whedon pulled off beautifully. We got just enough information about who the main characters were and what they were capable of to bring those of us who hadn't seen all of the lead-in films up to speed³, and then the fun really started.

When I say 'fun', I of course mean crisis, tension, clashes between characters, conflicting motivations and all that good stuff, mixing big action scenes and little character moments and the odd belly laugh, all to keep the audience entertained.

And then we come to the big battle at the end, when our heroes find themselves outnumbered and outgunned and needing to work together just to stay in the fight. It's beautifully choreographed, coherent and hugely satisfying.⁴

Unless you're allergic to the very idea of superhero stories being told straight, you're likely to have a hell of a good time with Avengers Assemble. Marvel took a big risk in trying to make the Avengers work on the big screen, and Joss Whedon has made it pay off about as well as it possibly could have.

Finally, three random thoughts:

• All the main cast members gave good performances, with Tom Hiddleston's Loki coming second only to Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner. I'd happily sign a petition to have Mark Ruffalo digitally inserted into the two earlier Hulk films in place of Eric Bana and Edward Norton. Ruffalo was just outstanding in this, not least for providing the entire audience with two huge laughs late in the film.
• You definitely want to stay in your seat once the credits start rolling. You needn't stay right until the very last credit appears, but there is a mid-credit return to the story that provides a delicious reveal for anyone familiar with the comics.
• Now can we have a She-Hulk film, please? Preferably directed by Joss Whedon, and based on Dan Slott's Single Green Female storyline.

1. Previously. ↩
2. And he still has a Shakespeare adaptation to come this year. ↩
3. I haven't seen the second Iron Man film, Thor or Captain America. In fairness, I have to acknowledge that I knew all the main players from the comics, but I still think Whedon gave his audience what they needed to follow who had done what and the sort of people they were. ↩
4. The various Superman films tended to fail in part because their writers and directors were averse to having Superman solve problems by punching them really hard: that isn't a problem Joss Whedon has here. There's something deeply satisfying about seeing the Hulk punch a gigantic space worm to a standstill. ↩

Another day, another bit of furniture. Yesterday it was Bed Cartography, today it's chairs:

If you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they're really into chairs.

[...] Every design school graduate wants a cool-looking chair in their portfolio, and chair design can be a savagely competitive field. [...]

I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad. [...]

[Via Arts & Letters Daily]

Dan Hon's email autoresponse message is – quite literally – an epic adventure.¹

1. Ain't that last line the truth! ↩

Bed Cartography.

Also, from the comments at Flowing Data, Christoph Niemann's take on the problem.

[Via Flowing Data]

So there I was, having just watched the second trailer for Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom and feeling quietly optimistic that it might be a pretty decent show.¹ I've always liked Jeff Daniels, the supporting cast looks fine – not to mention that Jane Fonda looks to be having fun playing her ex-husband – and at least this subject matter might provide a better backdrop for Sorkin's concerns than Studio 60… ever could.

Then I happened upon a comment thread at Ta-Nehisi Coates' weblog devoted to discussing the show's prospects, in which a commenter by the name of jkrusequirk linked to an excerpt from a film about TV journalism that I haven't thought about² in quite a while but which set the standard Sorkin should aspire to.

I'm referring, of course, to Broadcast News. How the hell did I forget Broadcast News? More to the point, what are the chances Sorkin can reach those sort of heights? Now I'm apprehensive all over again…

[Trailer for The Newsroom via Pop Loser]

1. Once it finally turns up on DVD over here. See my previous post for more on that issue. ↩
2. Or seen, come to think of it. In what sort of world does pablum like Picture Perfect show up on free-to-air TV in the UK multiple times a year, whilst we're lucky to see Broadcast News once every 18 months or so? ↩

I meant to post this last week: Carrie Manolakos covering Creep by Radiohead.

I could do with hearing a recording where her voice is more prominent and the piano (a lot) less so, but this is still a hell of a cover version.¹

Whatever you do, be sure to keep listening to the 2:25 mark – which is to say the point where it goes from classy to pretty fantastic.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. The track isn't included on her debut album or available as a studio recording; if I were her management, I'd get right on that. ↩

Good news and bad news for Mac users.

• Oracle have started producing Java releases for Mac OS X, following Apple's decision to … de-prioritise … updates to their own port of Java.
• Oracle are only supporting MacOS X 10.7 onwards, so those of us still using 10.6 are still at the mercy of Apple's release schedules.

I wondered what software update/new release was finally going to prod me into updating to Lion; I think this might just be it.

[Via Ars Technica]

Text-Only Instagram serves as a sort of companion piece to yesterday's Descriptive Camera, Descriptive Friends post.

[Via jwz]

Some of the parallels drawn in Game of Votes¹ are just so good.

That's not a perfect fit – on the basis of what he showed us in season 1,² I don't think Joffrey sees himself as much of a historian or intellectual – but the elements of the comparison that work really work.

1. NB: contains some spoilers for Game of Thrones season 2. Nothing major, I don't think, but there's a picture of one character we heard about but never met in season 1, and a couple of allusions are made to not completely surprising plot developments. ↩
2. I'm following the show as it comes out on DVD, so it's going to be a long while before I find out how Joffrey changes as he gets comfortable on the Iron Throne. ↩

I was never a big fan of Quantum Leap, but even I can recognise a good proposal for a sequel when I see one. From a Q&A post at Mightygodking:

Der Whelk: Is there an old series or property out there you think deserves and would be a perfect for a big budget re-make?

It's not so much a remake as it is a continuation or sequel or even logical endpoint: Quantum Leap. You would still have Scott Bakula as Sam Beckett, leaping from life to life, his memories continually fogged, and you would still have Al traveling alongside him, guiding him in his tasks, and that would be the first quarter of the movie or so – maybe one or two quick leaps – and then Sam jumps into a timeframe he shouldn't be able to jump into normally, a time well after his death would have occurred. Something has gone wrong in the quantum stream. Somebody is interfering. Al is completely panicked and Sam is at a loss. And that's when he meets a second Leaper – one Al recognizes, not that he can tell Sam this – and although Sam doesn't quite understand it, suddenly they're working together to do something he can't quite understand. [...]

It's the closing sentence of that answer that's the killer.

I'd probably watch such a film, though I think it'd do much better as a short – 4 to 6 episode? – miniseries than as a standalone film. Figuring out what Sam and his new friend can do and how they can do it and then having them try to do it and come out the other side would take time to do right.

The Descriptive Camera takes what the concept of metadata about images to a new level, making use of cameras and Amazon's Mechanical Turk:

As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly – information about who is in each photo, what they're doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don't yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities. [...]

Having said that, isn't at least some part of the Descriptive Camera's functionality being undertaken – albeit for very different reasons – by Facebook users who go round tagging one another's photos? Isn't every Facebook 'friend' potentially a stand-in in for the Mechanical Turk, busily identifying who's who in their friends' photographs?

[Via kottke.org]

Towards the end of a posting at the Wellcome Library weblog commemorating the 80th anniversary of the mass trespass that led, in time, to the creation of Britain's first National Parks and the establishment of the Right to Roam, the subject turns to libraries:

One of the inspirational presentations [at a symposium in London last year] came from information professionals in the Swedish city of Gävle, describing an initiative that promoted the city's libraries, archives and museums together under the slogan "Kulturell Allemansrät" – the cultural right to roam. A library gives its users the same freedom that the Manchester Rambler needed: access to the whole world of knowledge, without restrictions (except for a few on behaviour that harms other people's rights: [...]), without the concept of trespassing. The world of knowledge is laid out: and readers have the right to roam.

Damn straight.¹

1. Reading that passage, I couldn't help but think that a recording of Jerusalem should have been playing in the background. Well, either that or the Manic Street Preachers' A Design for Life. ↩

APOD: 2012 April 22 – Flowing Barchan Sand Dunes on Mars.

Be sure to click on the image to see it at full size – it is so worth it, I promise you.

Ferdinandea will rise:

In the Mediterranean Sea southwest of Sicily, an island comes and goes. Called, alternately and among other names, depending on whose territorial interests are at stake, Graham Bank, Île Julia, the island of Ferdinandea, or, more extravagantly, a complex known as the Campi Flegrei del Mar di Sicilia (the Phlegraean Fields of the Sicily Sea), this geographic phenomenon is fueled by a range of submerged volcanoes. One peak, in particular, has been known to break the waves, forming a small, ephemeral island off the coast of Italy.

And, when it does, several nation-states are quick to claim it, including, in 1831, when the island appeared above water, "the navies of France, Britain, Spain, and Italy." Unfortunately for them, it eroded away and disappeared beneath the waves in 1832. [...]

The other day, Kieran Healy had a bright idea:

The other day Brett Terpstra posted a gigantic and quite beautifully-executed feature comparison of all of the text editors available for iOS devices. The table is really terrific and also a bit overwhelming, as there's so much data. On the bus home yesterday, it struck me that it might make for a nice data visualization exercise. [...]

He was right. Good work.

H.G. Wells gave the original 1927 release of Metropolis a truly scathing review:

Rotwang, the inventor, is making a Robot, apparently without any license from Capek, the original patentee. It is to look and work like a human being, but it is to have no "soul," it is to be a substitute for drudge labor. Masterman very properly suggests that it should never have a soul, and for the life of me I cannot see why it should. The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul. But this is evidently regarded as very dreadful and impressive by the producers, who are all on the side of soul and love and such like. I am surprised they were not pinched for souls in the alarm clocks and runabouts. Masterman, still unwilling to leave bad alone, persuades Rotwang to make this Robot in the likeness of Mary, so that it may raise an insurrection among the workers to destroy the machines by which they live and so learn that it is necessary to work. Rather intricate that, but Masterman, you understand, is a rare devil of a man. Full of pride and efficiency and modernity and all those horrid things.

Having seen The Cabin in the Woods, I don't feel able to write very much about it because anyone thinking of seeing it absolutely owes it to themselves to go in with as little foreknowledge as possible of the storyline.

I will say one thing. You may think the trailers and poster have given away the plot. They haven't. Trust me on this.

I didn't expect to encounter the phrase "the cult of vice surrounding urban post offices" when I started reading the web today.

Angela Serratore's Post Secrets recounts the reaction of New Yorkers to the spread of a modern postal service:

Communication of and by women has always struck fear into the hearts of men (see: novels; epistolary), but until the middle of the eighteenth century it was largely manageable – husbands and fathers, even servants, monitored a lady's letters, and the wild fluctuations in cost of mail kept all but the wealthiest of girls and women from taking pen to paper on a regular basis. That changed with the standardization of postal prices in 1845. [...] Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things – the mail and the post office. Anthony Trollope's 1852 invention of the pillar-box had given British girls a chance to subvert the authority of their scandalized parents by mailing letters in secret, but their New York counterparts who visited the post office could both send and receive mail almost entirely unmonitored by those who might want to regulate their epistolary lives. [...]

[Via The Awl]