This anthropological style survey of rubbings of desk graffiti will take you back to high school days. The "analysis" of the rubbings is perfect. I particularly like the "devotional rubbings" section. [via PCJM]
While I am very glad to see Genehack back, his new self-portrait freaks the hell out of me. It also reminds me to continue playing with Photoshop.
Another in the "Am I...Or Not" series: rate how annoying different celebrities are with amiannoying.com. The highest rating I think I've seen go by yet was for Ted Kennedy. Each picture comes with a mini-bio, and it's a mystery how they decide whether to list traits as annoying or not-annoying. Smoking, vegetarianism, rumors that you are gay (if male), being in a porn film (if male), getting bit by a dog as a child, and suffering from anorexia make you annoying. Posing nude (if female), dating strippers, or "being an acclaimed actor" makes you not annoying. My favorite, though, is the entry for Jeri Ryan, the actress who played Seven of Nine on Star Trek Voyager and who is not annoying because "she is willing to wear ultra tight clothing for her viewing audience" but is annoying because "she blacked out 4 times because her costume was too tight". Hmmmm - perhaps it isn't much of a mystery what standards they are using to judge annoyingness. I would have thought that after a certain level of hypocrisy your brain would implode. [via PCJM]
A friend subscribes to the New Yorker. He read an article about "some weblog software"called blogger. Asks if I know megnut and jason. Is stunned that I do know who they are. Asks dubiously "Are there weblog cliques then?" I laugh my ass off.
Finally, another Bruching Shuttlecocks Rating: Dante's Inferno Punishments. Very timely, since I've just started Paradise Lost.
Gluttons can't eat or drink in Hell because they ate and drank so much in life. And they are trapped in putrid soil because they produced nothing but garbage in life. And they are being torn apart constantly by Cerberus's three sets of bloody teeth, because Dante is one sick motherfucker.
I'll say! Check out what Dante has to say about one of the guards of the gates of hell (Satan's daughter and lover, no less):
The one seem'd Woman to the waste, and fair,
But ended foul in many a scaly fould
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent arm'd
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark'd
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturb'd thir noyse, into her woomb,
And kennel there, yet there still bark'd and howl'd
Within unseen.
I was asked to repost the Internet Archive Movie Collection link. These are the people who collect and make freely available in digital form various film loops from government agencies, educational groups, industry marketing, etc. - what they call "ephemeral films". They seem to be mostly from the 40s and 50s, but go as far back as the late 1920's. They have classics like "Duck and Cover", or lesser known gems such as one called "Are You Popular?", a 1947 instructional film for teenagers that comes with the following description:
One of the best examples of post-World War II social guidance films, with examples of "good" and "bad" girls, proper and improper dating etiquette, courtesy to parents, and an analysis of what makes some people popular and others not. A scream and a sobering document of postwar conformity.
More Construction Log.
Others sat apart on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argu'd then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie:
Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th' obdured brest
With stubborn patience as with triple steel.
Dante, Paradise Lost, Bk. II
I've got a mini web project I've started up called "The Construction Log". Work has just started on a many-year-long construction project outside my office window. It's pretty interesting to watch, and I thought I'd record the process. Hence, The Construction Log. There should be lots of cool pictures of cranes and steamrollers and cement mixers and such, and they might even blow things up at some point!
Actually, it's as much an excuse to try out Greymatter as anything else. I've seen a few people switch over and be very happy with it. I like the idea of being able to update from any computer, regardless of whether I have special software installed on it or not, but I'm not sure whether the interface will agree with me or not. So, I figured I'd try it on a mini-project first and see what I think. At the least, I think it might be tricky to keep this format with occasional, different images in the right-hand column.
Bad Human Factors Designs is a nice, primarily visual introduction to the basics of human factors design. Various real-life bad designs are shown, with an explanation of the problem, the design principle is violates, and possible solutions. It doesn't go much beyond the basics, though, and at times takes too rigid of a stance about how little obligation there was on people to try to understand how to use something. The issue of context, which is often mentioned as something designers need to take into account, can also be applied to how much effort needs to go into design. I see much larger problems with the design of a car that allows a confused passenger to detach the entire seat they are in from the car than with the design of a shampoo bottle that makes it easy to confuse with a hand lotion bottle. [via RRE]
Aviva catalogs international listings of women's groups and related activities and events. It's a really great starting place to either look at what is going on in your area, or get a handle on when types of activism different women's groups are initiating.
They also have a cooking newsletter. The copy I just received had the following tip in it:
GAS GRILL TIPS: Checking Propane Levels
Wondering how much propane is left in your tank? Pour a cup of boiling water on the side of the tank, then feel the metal with your hand. Where the tank has been warmed by the water, it is empty; where the tank is cool to the touch, there is still propane inside.
I've got a gas grill, and this seemed like a great tip - easy to do and not requiring special equipment. Until someone asked me why this made sense... If the tank is just filled with pressurized gas, then the gas would be everywhere; there would be no sinking level of gas to detect. If the gas is stored in liquid form, then this would be possible, but I've never heard liquid sloshing around inside the tank. And if there is a dropping level of the liquid, that implies the liquid is building up at the bottom of the tank, but the nozzle is at the top, meaning there would need to be some hoses or something inside the tank. And, what is filling up the space where the liquid isn't any more? Does air get in as gas escapes? How does that make sense, since the tank remains under pressure?
So, I jump on the internet to find out how a propane tank works - specifically a little portable one. It took a surprisingly long time to get the answer, and ultimately Ask Jeeves, which I rarely use, was what got me the answer. Turns out that propane is stored in liquid form, put that some of the propane converts to its gas form as the pressure drops (from opening the tank nozzle and removing gas), so there is basically a layer of propane gas over a a layer of propane liquid. And that's why pouring water over the tank can show you a propane level - it's the level of the propane liquid as compared to gas.
Of course, this being the internet, most of the useful information about propane tanks that I found along the way there is not put out by propane tank sellers or propane enthusiasts. It's from people who use propane tanks for unintended purposes, like building their own potato/paint guns or on the psubs mailing list. psubs, of course, stands for personal submersibles. While it isn't recommended, one can use a propane tank as a pressurized hull.
It's nice to see Scalzi updating the Whatever every day, even if he's being brief. Today, he talked about corn and other farming sights:
Not every field around us is populated by corn. The field catty corner to the road from this one, for example, is growing either hay or alfalfa. I don't know which one as I am neither botanist or a farmer, and the only time I see the owner of the field is when he's out there with his baling machine, which chews up the plants with one end and spits out large cubes of compressed green stuff with the other. It's like a huge industrial rabbit. I don't want to get in the way of that thing simply to satisfy my idle curiosity.
Keepers of Lists is sporadically amusing, often derivative, and sometimes comes up with something pretty funny. See, for example, Signs Your Preschooler Is A Future Geek which suggests you watch out if they count from zero, has written a Palm-OS port of Candyland, and this Sesame Street should have a robot muppet.
But having a child who spends time playing computer games may not relegate them to a life of anti-social geekhood. Instead, a study from England's Economic and Social Research Council finds that computer games are helping children get the type of high co-ordination and concentration that top atheletes have. The research was done on subjects who participate in gaming competitions and play around 18 hours of computer games a week. Besides the physical and mental advantages of game playing, it was also pointed out that most of these people were not stereotypical obsessed geek gamers and actually seem to have a reasonable balance of hobbies and social activities. Says the article:
Youngsters who play computer games regularly but not excessively also tend to have more friends and be better adjusted than those who make do with traditional pastimes such as reading and television.
To go so far as to say that computer gaming children are better adjusted socially feels like a correlation with class, or with the type of parenting done, but it would seem to say that you shouldn't keep your child away from the computer for fear of social stunting. [Thanks JRE!]
"In many cases the chains targeted neighborhoods that already had good independents, and many of these fell by the wayside during the first years of the superstore invasion; membership in the American Booksellers Association dropped from a high of about 5,000 in the mid-1990s to a low of about 3,000 in the middle of last year.The article is largely anecdotal, but I think it makes some good points about what chain bookstores have been able to offer us. [via Robot Wisdom]By and large, however, the best independents have held their own, thanks to some energetic rearguard actions and to the realization by the ndependents that if they are going to keep competing, they have to provide some of the more successful features of the chains, such as discounts, extended hours, comfort, and parking. Competition from the chains, in other words, has improved the services in the independents that have survived. Since last year the number of independents has continued to hold steady. According to Scott McKinstry, of the ABA, "We went through some frightening years in the 1990s, but the closings of independents have absolutely leveled off now."
There's a thoughtful review of what went wrong with A.I. over at Tomato Nation (with lots of spoilers). I think there is more interesting content to the movie than Sars does, but she makes some really good points about where the movie chooses to focus.
Invisibles is a visual movie trivia game. Each puzzle has ten still images and you have to name the movie it is from. The twist: most or all of the people in the image have been removed, leaving just their clothing. I've been getting about 3/4 of the images from movies I've seen, which is only about 20% overall. [via Bad Hair Days]
Reading some others' thoughts on weblogging, I realized something - I weblog for people who don't read weblogs. My mental picture of my readers is based on the half dozen readers I know who not only do not have weblogs, only have professional content websites (if any website at all), and maybe read at most one other weblog out there. Of course, I put up links to stuff that I'm interested in, or that might appeal to some random wanderer. But because of the background image of my reader that I have, I'll pass on something that's been weblogged everywhere else. I try to be careful not to assume my readers know anything about the "weblog community" and its social moirés.
On the other hand, I have no qualms about assuming my readers are geeks, as evidenced by my previous link...
My complaints about AI do not extend to its technical accuracy, though. This is not to say that I think the technology was plausible, but rather that they did a good job of saying "we've got this robot that can learn to love just like a person" and going from there without too much technobabble. The advanced futuristic world wasn't filled with tons of unnecessary gadgets. Cars looked different, but the kitchen looked like a very nice, modern kitchen. The coffee maker wasn't even electric.
I do have complaints about this movie, though. The movie had three fairly distinct thirds, and they didn't hang together too well for me. Roughly, the first third looks at what happens when you add a robot to a family in a personal relationship. The second third looks at what happens when you introduce robots into society in general. The third third sort of tries to tie these pieces together, including resolving some questions that would be plot spoilers to discuss. I thought the first third, when we meet David the boy robot who can love, was very well done. Interesting questions are raised from very early on about whether, having built a robot that can love, a person would ever be capable of loving the robot in return. But these questions are almost entirely discarded in the second third of the movie. And in the last third, the movie just refused to end. I kept thinking we'd reached the end, but more would happen. This happened several times, and I think the movie would have been better if it had stopped at one of the earlier closings.
At heart, A.I. was a fairy tale. And, like authentic fairy tales, it was a very dark movie. This is not a real action Disney fairy tale. It definitely deserved its PG-13 rating, though its violence and sexual content were gratuitous. From the previews I thought this might be a movie in the style of E.T. where the audience leaves with warm fuzzies in the end. Instead, there is a lot of despair in this movie. We aren't given an easy answer to what happens when you create a loving robot. And this maybe points to why this movie is worth seeing. It might make you think a little, and I didn't think it was predictable. There are definite sparks of originality. And Haley Joel Osment is incredible.
It's probably unspeakably geeky to review a movie review, but I went back and read Ebert's review of A.I. this morning and while I think he's mostly on target, his criticism of the technology seemed off to me. In fact, Ebert has a bit of a tendency to have unfounded objections to technology in movies (in his review of Swordfish he doubts that programmers type code with the rhythm of the music they are listening to, which some definitely do). He says of the boy robot:
He doesn't sleep, but he observes bedtime. He doesn't eat, but so fervent is his desire to belong that he damages his wiring by ingesting spinach (wouldn't a mecha be programmed not to put things into its mouth?).
First, I thought part of the question was, what determines whether he is a real boy or not? Is it really relevant if he eats and sleeps like a human, if he can love, learn, and adapt? I don't know, but I think it's one of the questions the movie is asking. But to answer Ebert's probably-rhetorical question, it doesn't matter whether David was programmed not to eat - because he can really love, his emotions can overpower any of his other programming. David cannot be just like the computer on your desk. He must be self-adjusting. I thought they got this bit of the technology right. Wrapped up in the movie is not just the question of whether a person can love a robot, but what it means to love. David's creators discuss how they could tell if a robot really did love. They decide it has to do with behaving in ways that its programming alone can't account for. Love is what makes people do more than they should be able to. This, of course, is not necessarily the best answer, but I was pleased that they tried to address the question rather than assume one knows real love when one sees it.
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