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July 16, 2005
Badmovies.org
Suggestion: Mystery Science 3000 movie night. Invite your most wise-cracking, caustic, opinionated and vocal friends over, microwave some popcorn and rack up a couple of these DVDs from Badmovies.org. Sure fire fun. Each movie has a humorous but insightful description, and each movie is scored according to a specially designed bad movie rating system:
Posted by John at 08:11 AM | Comments (0)
Deep Sea Images
Something about pictures from the oceans' depths is fascinating, perhaps the fact that it is a entire world that is so outre, and yet so close. Deep Sea Images is a leading photo stock agency of Natural History images featuring the work of professional landscape and marine photographers. Their business is licensing images and selling prints, but you can browse the fantasic library for free. And explore your world.
(One especially nice feature is that there is an explanatory caption below each picture. Check out this and this and this and this and this and this and this. Not sure what this is doing there, though.)
Posted by John at 07:37 AM | Comments (0)
The micro multinational
In the world of work, programming is the first area to take advantage of outsourcing individual jobs. If you think about it, there are probably ways you, too, could outsource parts of your job and multiple your effectiveness. As the talent pool of English-speaking tecnologists in India, China and even the Third and Fourth World countries increases at an exponentiual rate, true globalization of all types of expertise becomes possible.
Posted by John at 12:15 AM | Comments (0)
The Virtual Society
After the pioneering work done with the Avida program on evolution and mutation (discussed here in February), I suppose it was only a matter of time until the physical testing environment itself mutated into a social one. Well, we're there.
The project, known as New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning – or NEW-TIES – brings together experts in artificial intelligence, linguistics, computer science and sociology. It is backed by a consortium consisting of the University of Surrey and Napier University in the UK, Tilberg and Vrije Universities in the Netherlands and Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.
1000 virtual agents designed to do simple tasks will be living together, interacting and learning from one another while scientists watch to see what behavior emerges. Hopefully a new class of enlightened agents will develop, loving and caring for one another, nurturing each to its fullest potential. In a virtual epiphany, they will realize that their existence is not arbitrary, but purposeful, and will glorify their creator as they seek to model the best virtual ethic in their daily behavior. I'm betting, though, that some agents will emerge to corrupt the rest. Mass starvation will end the experiment as a lonely, down-on-his-luck agent spills hot coffee in his lap on his way home from the casino, and sues the virtual food franchise out of existence.
Posted by John at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
CSS styled checkboxes
Bookmark to self: How to create nicely styled buttons and checkboxes that work with or without CSS, with or without Java.
Posted by John at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 13, 2005
SOW: Week of 7/14/05
Song: Ooh La La
Artist: The Ditty Bops
Album: The Ditty Bops: What is the time?
You will like this if you like: The Roches, Kate & Anne McGarrigle, The Waifs, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Nellie McKay, Regina Spektor, maybe even a little Andrews Sisters (Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy)
A little off the beaten path, down the road not taken, by the sidetrack, you'll find The Ditty Bops. This remarkable debut album is off the charts on originality, mixing folk, pop, rock, country, 1920's flapper music, and performed with dulcimer, guitar, trombone, washboard, banjo - the list goes on and on. The spectrum of songs on this November 2004 release spans Beiderbecke’s swinging twenties, through the Hot Club Quintet of France by way of The Texas Playboys, and into the hyper-modern experimentation of producer Mitchell Froom (Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega).
What grabs you are the harmonies, tight and complex, interesting and relentlessly upbeat - the band name fits them to a tee. What keeps you coming back are the lyrics, which range from wide-eyed innocence to thoughtful probing to irreverent wisecracks. In "Wishful Thinking" we hear this:
Why does blood turn brown when it dries
Why do the tears well up in your eyes
Why didn't I learn to ride my bike
When it was warm and sunny outside
Why can't little kids tie their shoes
Why can't the white people play the blues
Why can't I fall in love with you
It must be because of the seasons
Amanda Barrett (vocals, mandolin and dulcimer duties) and Abby DeWald (vocals, guitar) generate the luscious harmonies that form the core of this quirky group. Barrett and DeWald met in New York City in 1998, but it wasn't until they both moved back to California that they got together to make new and interesting music. With an innate understanding that music is a performance art, they set out to give us a show. I've heard from friends who have seen them that it is quite entertaining. They're currently opening for Tori Amos on a national tour, so if you're a Tori fan, double reason to go.
The band has an appropriately retro-hip and funky little website, complete with a jukebox that will stream (128 Kbps) every song from the new album. (And if you're desperate for more, you can find the song "Angel With An Attitude" on the May 7, 2005 show of The Prairie Home Companion radio show, in segment 3, in Real Media format. Plenty of MP3 conversion programs out there for free!)
I just love these girls, and this album has been heavy iPod rotation for the past month! Highly recommended.
Posted by John at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2005
Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement
Steve Jobs, speaking at the Stanford University commencement, gave a pretty good talk. You can read it here, or listen to it here. Trust your instincts, do what you love, and don't waste what little time you have here on Earth. Good advice, and illustrated with some great stories from Jobs' life.
Posted by John at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)
Bruce Schneier: Beyond Fear
Just got turned on to a site called ITConversations, which provides audio files and transcripts of interviews with leading technologists. One valuable thing I learned from this is the next time I post an MP3 audio file, I'm going to call it a "podcast", and then I'll be all like the uber l33t killaz, I r0x0r j00r s0x0r. Or something.
Leaving the geek self-consciousness of the site aside, there are some jewels here. My favorite so far is from author and security maven Bruce Schneier, on the post 9/11 world, what's working and what isn't. He has some interesting and excellent observations. I like the fun quote on pigs and sharks, but the observation about things that are in the news is pretty profound. And if you start thinking about security that way, scary.
Doug Kaye: Here’s my favorite quote in the whole book, and I know that you probably know which one it is!Bruce Schneier: Actually, I don’t! I can’t wait!
Doug Kaye: That “more people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows just how good we are at evaluating risks.”
Bruce Schneier: That was a fun quote. I actually went to the government web site, which has death statistics from various things. You can see how many people die from lightning, from heart disease, from anything, and the results are surprising. People tend to worry about the wrong things.
We worry about what’s in the news. I tell my friends that if it’s in the newspaper, don't worry about it because it means it hardly every happens. It’s news. News hardly every happens; that’s why it’s news! When something stops being in the newspaper, then worry about it.
Audio here. Transcript here.
Posted by John at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
I Speak American
This PBS series of discussions on the Southern dialect ("suth'en" for those of us who actually speak it), is one of the most literate and accurate assessments of the state of the language that I've ever seen. Start with Sounds of the South, and proceed to RFul Southern and They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City (Language Myth #17). More linky goodness in the shaded "Links" box at the top of each article.
Posted by John at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
Canyon Skybridge
I'm trying to picture what the new glass bridge over the Grand Canyon is going to be like, and having a hard time. I've been on a couple of glass bridges before, and it's amazing how people freak out from the sensation of hanging in mid-air. Or maybe it's the realization that there's nothing underneath them except glass. Either way, at 4,000 feet, I hope they have permanent medical staff standing by!
Posted by John at 01:23 AM | Comments (0)
July 04, 2005
War of the War of the Worlds Reviews
I walked out of War of the Worlds on Sunday afternoon saying, "Excellent, that was a 9 on a 10 scale!" and the wife and the boys agreed. I thought Steven Spielberg did an excellent job of treading the fine line between creating a modern science fiction horror movie and remaining true to the original.
The movie opens with a voiceover straight from H.G. Wells' classic text:
"No one would have believed, ..., that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, parhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
I've read a few movie reviews and there's a stronger polarization than usual on this movie - reviewers either love it or hate it. Roger Ebert, whose reviews I usually find insightful, misses the point entirely.
I'll give him credit for one valid point. In the book, the invasion of Earth was presaged by a series of violent eruptions on Mars for 10 days that are witnessed by astronomers on earth and reported in the news. This provides some context for the invasion which follows several days later, with the landing of the first of many Martian "cylinders" in England. The movie, however, goes right to massive electrical storms generating lightning which causes buried ships to rise up out of the Earth. Viewers who did not know what to expect might have struggled with what exactly was going on in the first 30-40 minutes of the film.
Beyond that, I don't understand Ebert's criticisms. He wants the monster ships to have 4 legs instead of 3? But... the images from the film - like the comic book cover shown above - have been true to Wells' "tripods", and that's the way it's written. He wants the aliens to emote, like in Close Encounters?! That isn't in the book, and Spielberg would have had to invent that out of whole cloth. He wants it to be as intricate as Minority Report? But... the book has already been written! He wants special effects like Star Wars?! The special effects in the movie would have been simply inconceivable to Wells back in the nineteenth century(!) when the book was published. Spielberg did some updating, like the crashed jet in the front yard, and the electromagnetic pulses which rendered electronics inoperative. Overall, I thought he did a simply fantastic job of making a 2005 film of an 1898 book by doing what Spielberg clearly so loves to do - telling a good story.
BTW, Rotten Tomatos currently has the movie rated "Fresh" with 123 positive reviews and 50 negatives.
Posted by John at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
The One That Got Away
Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, local fishermen caught this 646 lb. catfish, immediately recognized by the spouses of fishermen everywhere as "the one that got away", and ruining fishing stories for future generations forever.
Posted by John at 10:53 PM | Comments (0)
