November 2007 Archives

Bush's entourage, in graphic form.

There is some doubt as to this graphic being made by Reuters, but the numbers are accurate.

Via BoingBoing.

A nice article on the beauty and deliciousness of a well made biscuit de chocolat coulant: that finicky, all pervasive, but rarely executed correctly "molten chocolate cake" on restaurants' menus.

Yet, when actually molten, I know of no other dessert as capable of making most adults as gleeful as children...there's something about that self-saucing pudding-ness that's immensely satisfying.

(Thanks, Clarke.)

Update: added the link. Forgot it the first time around. Doh.

Sometimes, people do some touching things:

NASA's released a huge photo of Niagara Falls as seen from space. Whoa.

The Webby Awards runs down a list of the 12 most influential online videos, including perennials OK Go, All Your Base, and Star Wars Kid.

Verizon Wireless has pledged that it will open up its network and let any device and any application operate within it, as long as you pay for the bandwidth.

Hell has frozen over.

Flickr user foglera has posted a gallery of his awesome 8-bit videogame inspired perler bead crafts. Want!

Via Ripten.

Yes, I'm aware I did not post on Monday and it's the first time I skipped a day, but I promise to make up for it by posting double my usual two posts today.

Continuing my tradition of following lots of politics/heavy posts with cute breaks, I bring you, via Cute Overload, the purring kitty page.

Perfect for people like me who love the purring kitty sound but are either allergic or aren't allowed to have their own cats. (*grumble*)

The recent Australian elections, which ousted conservative Prime Minister John Howard, and brought in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, have led Rudd to pledge that Australia will ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Australia is the only other major developed nation besides the US to not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

A UN committee of experts has declared that tasers are a deadly form of torture:

The UN committee made its comments in recommendations to Portugal, which has bought the newest Taser X26 stun gun for use by police.

Portugal "should consider giving up the use of the Taser X26,'' as its use can have a grave physical and mental impact on those targeted, which violates the UN's Convention against Torture, the experts said.

Via: Engadget.

Speaking of Election 2008, you may have heard of the debacle Barack Obama caused when he refused to wear a flag pin. Well, Lost Brain brings us the proper etiquette on wearing your own flag pin, so that you aren't "pegged as a terrorist."

The New York Times' Ward Sutton has a gallery dissecting the current and past campaign logos of presidential candidates. Some good design comments and snarky critiques.

The MPAA comments on the previously reported bill now in Congress that would threaten federal financial aid to a college if they did not police copyrighted works for the MPAA and the RIAA:

"When the government is subsidizing universities...and it discovers that those universities are spending a lot of taxpayers' money to build digital networks that are being used primarily to allow college students to traffic in infringing content, I think it's perfectly legitimate for Congress to say, wait a minute, if we're giving you money, we don't want it to be used to help college kids infringe copyright,"

Oh great, it's that stupid argument: "They have the fast Internets! They must be using it solely to infringe on our copyrights!"

Again, please tell your local Congressman to vote against this bill.

I knew there was a reason I didn't like NYU students, besides the horrible experiences I had with them in Union Square:

Two-thirds say they'll do it for a year's tuition. And for a few, even an iPod touch will do.

That's what NYU students said they'd take in exchange for their right to vote in the next presidential election, a recent survey by an NYU journalism class found.

Phillip Torrone, the editor of MAKE magazine, took some neat pictures of Tokyo's 築地市場 [Tsukiji Fishmarket], the largest fish market in the world:

Another stop on the MAKE tour was the Tsukiji fish market, it's one of the largest in the world and it's pretty crazy. You need to arrive before 4am to get a really good experience. There are hundreds of old-style bicycle with roller type brakes, I'm not sure why but they were all the same - they carried out boxes of fish to other trucks and beyond the market. As you move around the market it gets a little dangerous dodging extremely fast fork lifts, the skill the drivers have is pretty incredible.

A neat video on solutal convection by New Scientist, using cream and Tia Maria:

Once per year at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse they shut down the weak insipid modern (presumably electric) light and switch over the the 5 kerosene lamps and fresnel lens of the original, as it was 135 years ago.

Capturing a shot like this is tricky because the lens itself actually rotates, which looks great but is tough for long exposures. But for the first 5 minutes they leave it static to indulge all of the photographers who turn out and want this shot (this highly unique and one-of-a-kind shot of course).

Click to enlarge:

That is one powerful light.

Imagine these water guns today and how much panic they'd induce:

"The look! The feel! The sound! So real!"

The public transportation system here in Miami is less than optimal, leading to low usage and this "Only in Miami" moment:

According to Ignatius Carroll, a woman driving her three teenage children and a teenage friend to meet another family member were heading west on Northeast 13 Street around 7:40 a.m. in a Ford Explorer when they crashed with a bus heading south on Northeast First Avenue.

The bus driver and his three passengers were uninjured, but the driver was shaken up.

(Thanks Clarke.)

5 hurt as Dade bus, SUV collide [Miami Herald]

BoingBoing brings us pictures of an ancient Greek potty training device:

I was in Greece recently, and in the Agora in Athens there's a museum. There's an artifact in there that I just had to take a picture of! It's a potting training seat made from clay (partially reconstructed, from the looks of it). Who knew?

Click to enlarge:

Pink Tentacle brings us 自由国民車 [Jiyu Kokuminsha]'s list of the 60 top Japanese buzzwords in 2007, giving us some neat insight into what was at the top of Japanese people's minds.

My favourite is:

KY [abbreviation of kuki ga yomenai - 空気が読めない]: This is (not a reference to the lubricant, but) an abbreviation of the Japanese expression kuki ga yomenai (”can’t read between the lines” or “can’t sense the atmosphere”), which is used to describe indelicate or unperceptive people. Example: That guy is so KY.

It couldn’t be helped [shouganai - しょうがない]: In a June speech, former defense minister Fumio Kyuma said: “I understand the bombing (in Nagasaki) brought the war to its end. I think it was something that couldn’t be helped.” His controversial remarks were widely interpreted as a justification for the US atomic bombings. He resigned three days later under a firestorm of criticism.

Now to assimilate the list into my vocabulary for reference...

Solar Power Rocks brings us an unabridged bar graph comparing the cost of the War in Iraq versus energy R&D investments in 2007.

Tallest. Bar Graph. Ever.

/film has photos of the coolest theme home theatre ever:

Someone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. Named the best theme theater installation at CEDIA 2007, this Palm Beach County, FL home features motion-activated air-lock doors with series sound effects, and a “Red Alert” button on the Crestron TPMC-10 controller to turn all of the LEDs bright red and flashing. The system also features “one of the largest Kaleidescape hard-drive based storage systems” ever created, amassing eight servers with 3,816 DVDs.

Hit the link for an even more impressive accompanying bar.

Via /.

Food company Podravka hired agency Bruketa & Zinić to come up with a striking way to release their annual report: called "Well Done" it must be baked to be read.

Reuters has photos of a school in china that's been built in a cave:

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning "in cave") primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

WARNING: The link will automatically resize your window. I hate it when sites do that.

If you've been following the news, you know the White House has been pushing to add immunity for the telecommunications companies that complied with the NSA's illegal wiretapping program to the FISA bills currently in Congress.

Good news! The House, and the Senate's Judiciary Committee have both passed versions of the FISA Bill that do not provide immunity to the telcos. Bravo!

Now we just need the Senate to pass it sans-immunity, and Congress to override Bush's veto (which I predict might happen.) Thankfully, Congress is certainly more willing to override him these days.

Congress Keeps Telecoms on the Hook for Illegal Spying [EFF]

Senate Judiciary Committee Passes Surveillance Bill Without Telecom Amnesty [EFF]

It's no secret that I love XKCD (and so does my Mother), so Wired has made me happy by doing a feature on Randall Munroe, the writer behind XKCD:

A geek with a paper cut does not bleed CH3, and every nerd has a heart lodged in his chest instead of a TI-85. Behind those thick polycarbonate lenses is a man of flesh and blood, a man who deserves to be loved. Don't believe him? He has the graphs to show it.

"I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights," says Randall Munroe, creator of the hugely popular comic with the unpronounceable title. "Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles -- normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations." In one comic, the hapless hero charts the size of his dating pool as he ages. "Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve," he declares, "is the girl for me."

I can only hope to reach the levels of insight that Randall has shown through XKCD.

As a follow up to yesterday's The Daily Show writers post, today we have writers from The Colbert Report chiming in:

Wil Wheaton has brought a wonderful and funny video, made by one of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart writers, explaning the writer's strike in the style of The Daily Show:

With guest appearance by John Oliver.

The Telegraph and New Scientist report on a new Unification Theory by a penny-less surfer and theoretical physics doctorate published recently called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything":

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.

Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"

What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.

An interesting read, and when the LHC is finished next year, we'll see if the theory pans out against current favourite, String Theory.

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything [The Telegraph]

Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything? [New Scientist]

Cracked.com has a list of the 25 "most baffling toys" (mostly from Japan, of course), including the "Pee&Poo" plushies pictured:

Making toilet training fun and approachable is an admirable goal, but this seems like a good way for your child to develop an unnatural affection toward their own waste products. At a bare minimum, the sympathetic "Why me?" faces on the waste products will make flushing the toilet a psychologically jarring event.

Wired reports on the leaked Guantánamo Bay manual that showed up on Wikileaks.org last week:

A never-before-seen military manual detailing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay detention facility has been leaked to the web, affording a rare inside glimpse into the institution where the United States has imprisoned hundreds of suspected terrorists since 2002.

The 238-page document, "Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures," is dated March 28, 2003. It is unclassified, but designated "For Official Use Only."

The really heinous part of the manual? A section detailing a tagging system for the prisoners, with each category dictating how much access the Red Cross would have to each inmate:

The manual shows how the military coded each prisoner according to the level of access the Red Cross would have. The four levels are:

• * No Access
• * Visual Access -- ICRC can only look at a prisoner's physical condition.
• * Restricted Access -- ICRC representatives can only ask short questions about the prisoner's health.
• * Unrestricted Access

Even more evidence that the government wilfully denied access to detainees for the purposes of precluding oversight, in order to cover up human rights abuses.

The full document can be found on Wikileaks.

During the half-time of November 3's UC Berkeley vs. Washington State game, Berkeley's marching band performed an awesome video game themed show, including songs from Tetris, Mortal Kombat, Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Bros.:

I was part of marching band back in High School (Bb and Eb Clarinet), and if we would have ever had a video game themed half-time show, my geeky heart would have probably exploded with joy.

Via GayGamer.

In case you missed the news all over the Internet regarding the ridiculous bill introduced by House Democrats on Friday, CNET News has a recap of the idiocy:

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also "alternatives" to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

The U.S. House of Representatives bill, which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) applauded the proposal, which is embedded in a 747-page spending and financial aid bill. "We very much support the language in the bill, which requires universities to provide evidence that they have a plan for implementing a technology to address illegal file sharing," said Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA.

If colleges don't comply by testing "technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity," they risk losing all federal financial aid. Not only that, but they're forced to provide alternatives to downloading, basically making all colleges sign up for music services. What kind of demented lobbying happened to put that in? No wonder the MPAA loves the bill.

Please tell your local representative this bill is a stupid idea that is just meant to divert money from education and into the music and movie companies' hands.

The full text of the bill can be found here.

Mice Age reports on the rising trend of relatives spreading ashes of loved ones at favourite rides in Disneyland, with the practice having started at the Haunted Mansion ride and spreading to others around the park. It's even added its own lingo to Disneland employee talk and the purchase of special HEPA filter vacuums to clean up the remains:

Sometimes however the cremated ashes aren't found until the end of the night when the Cast Members close down the rides and walk the tracks looking for lost and found. Just last month that situation occurred when a Cast Member at the Haunted Mansion found several piles and a trail of ashes alongside the ride track. The Anaheim Police and Disneyland Security were summoned, and judging by the large amount of ashes this deposit was likely a small group of deceased people, or perhaps a very large married couple. The police identified the substance as human remains, and the custodial crew came in for the clean up.

To respond to this growing problem, Disneyland's custodial department recently had to purchase special vacuums with very sophisticated HEPA filters that can capture the gritty ash of human remains while also capturing the small bone fragments that can also be present after cremation. The Cast Members who work in Attractions know the code words when calling the custodial hotline, and they tell the custodial dispatcher that they need a "HEPA Cleanup" as soon as possible.

Are you a wine-sipping hippie? (like me?)

Perhaps you'd be interested in the carbon foot print of your wine, as researched by Dr. Vino. The really interesting part is the wine-carbon line that runs down the US:

There’s a “green line” that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip. In the event that a carbon tax were ever imposed, it would thus have a decidedly un-nationalistic impact.

I'm going to have to add a few bottles of Bordeaux wines next time I'm out shopping.

With "torture" being one of the new hot media buzzwords today, TheContaminated brings us some of the most heinous torture devices throughout the centuries of human civilisation.

WARNING: Graphic images and descriptions. Certainly not for the squeamish.

There's been a couple of heavy entries lately, so to lighten the mood I give you double dutch jumping dogs, brought to you by the masters of cute, the Japanese:

Via Cute Overload.

Whenever people learn that I can speak 5 languages (Spanish is my native, English my second, Italian, French, and Japanese, as well as learning Arabic, Chinese and Greek) they inevitably ask how I can do it.

I always feebly try to explain language deconstruction and pattern recognition to those who have never thought deeply about their language (or only speak one language, in which case the concepts are very difficult for them to understand.) Tim Ferriss; however, manages to explain this language deconstruction in his article entitled "How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour."

The title is misleading in that it actually teaches you how to evaluate basic structures of the language you are trying to learn, and estimate how much effort it will take for you to learn the language fully:

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners.

So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

That's the thrust: identifying languages that you can acquire more easily (for example: for a native Spanish speaker like me, French and Italian are easy languages to acquire due to shared roots and some similar grammar structures, and Japanese is easier due to shared basic sounds) and working with those. As you acquire these "easy" languages, you open up other languages close to those that now become easier to learn due to shared attributes and so on. The more languages you know, the easier it gets, in a way.

There's a personal tip that I also like to add to discussions of language acquisition, and it's something most polyglots do without thinking about it: when learning vocabulary do not translate!

What do I mean by not translating? This means that when you learn the word for "car" in Japanese (for example), do not think "ok, the word for car is 車 (kuruma)" and repeat that to yourself. This is the wrong way of doing it, and it will make it harder for you to really learn the word.

The better way to learn vocabulary is to actually picture and think of the concept of a car... visualise it, and then think "車 (kuruma)." In this manner you're not placing a link between the Japanese word "車 (kuruma)" and the English word "car," but you're actually placing the link between the Japanese word, and your concept of a car. This way, when you think of a car, you will naturally be able to name it in Japanese, without first having to think of the English word for it.

Why is this approach better? Think about it. How did you learn your native language? You didn't have another language to translate to and link the new vocabulary to. You had to learn what words went with what concepts. By using the visualisation model that I've explained, you're forcing yourself to learn the new vocabulary like you learned your native language, and it'll lead to much better results.

I gave my parents the link to this site, so they can keep up with my writing. My mom wrote an e-mail a few days ago that's the equivalent of blogging gold:

Ed,

I like your blog. I had a good time today reading it. I love the xkcd cartoons. Is there a way of you sending me the video of Na being dumped in the lake? I would like to show it to my students.

Love,

Mom

That's right: my mom likes and now reads XKCD. My geek bloodline is strong.

The precipitous fall of the US Dollar in the world currency market is no secret, and with the current administration and its policies, I see no end in sight. The Financial Times brings us a chart from Sempra Metals that details just how bad the situation has become (click to enlarge):

• The US dollar has now lost more than a third of its value (-35%) against a basket of major currencies since Feb 2002.
• The decline is accelerating. The USD has shed -12.5% of its value in the last year, -3.5% in the last month, and -1.5% in the last week alone.

This is scary data. Made even scarier by the fact that the US Dollar would be even lower if foreign countries like China were not buying our debt. This exacerbates the problem by making us beholden to countries, like China, with bad human rights records and incompatible moral outlooks.

Combine this with the real estate market crash in the US, the ongoing and expensive conflict in Iraq (to say nothing of the Bush Administration's inflamatory actions towards Iran as of late, and possibly hinting at their want for armed conflict with Iran), and the terribly botched foreign policy decisions of this administration (most recently the monetary support and other aid given to Musharraf, military dictator of Pakistan, who recently declared martial law and has squashed any hope of democracy for now in Pakistan), and its hard to see any way for the US to avoid an economic depression.

Even US culture is reflecting an awareness that US economic might is no longer top dog.

The first signs? Exhibit A: the new Jay-Z (a popular rap artist in the US) music video "Blue Magic" features the rapper no longer brandishing large denomination, (mostly) green US Dollar bills as a symbol of wealth - he's now brandishing large denomination Euro bills. Even American rappers get it.

When will this administration get it? When will they change their economic and foreign policies to steer this Titanic away from her iceberg?

I hope soon, and if not, I hope the next administration has enough time to repair the damage.

College Humor posts what T.V. series 24 would look like if aired in 1994.

Ah, memories of Lycos search, Prodigy, AOL 3.0, and Windows 3.1. The college freshmen around me kept asking why I was laughing so hard, and then I realised they were at most 5 years old in 1994 and wouldn't understand the references in the movie. I was using the internet when they were 5... it made me feel a little older:

For those that have iPhones, the new software update v1.1.2 is out; bringing international keyboard support with it. I've acquired and installed the update on my iPhone in order to report what's new.

You can find a detailed break down of the changes on my post at Homotron.net.

If you're tuned into the geeky side of the blogging world, you're no doubt familiar with the obsession over the "plane on a treadmill" problem:

Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

The problem has divided physicists, pilots, and bloggers alike, inspiring this Joy of Tech comic that sums up the fervour nicely.

Well... Mythbusters to the rescue! In an episode airing in December, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman will finally lay this problem to rest:

"... We just finished one that has confounded us our entire careers.''

"We put the plane on a quarter-mile conveyor belt and tested it out,'' says Savage about the experiment using a pilot and his Ultralight plane. ``I won't tell you what the outcome was, but the pilot and his entire flight club got it wrong.''

I'm so stoked for this episode. The Physics geek in me can't wait.

CQ Politics brings word that the FBI once attempted to find terrorists by tracking spikes in sales of falafel in San Francisco grocery stores:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

With the amount of (delicious) falafel I go through, I'd probably shine like a great big beacon of Middle Eastern terrorism on that list. Ridiculous.

When the classical music radio station died here in Miami, I turned towards the web to fulfill my listening needs. I was extremely disappointed in NPR's choice of Realplayer as the only way to listen in to their online broadcasts, and ended up looking at less favourable but more compatible online stations.

Fortunately, NPR seems to have heard the complaints and have now relaunched a brand new NPR Music site, where you can listen in to NPR affiliated musical stations around the country, in HD quality, and all over a Flash based player.

From classical, to jazz, to urban, to folk music, NPR Music has you covered.

I can finally listen in to WGBH's musical programming! Via last100.

Deputydog posts a look at some of the more interesting staircase designs out in the world, including a musical staircase that plays notes as you go up or down.

The staircases on the right can be found in the new Longchamp store in New York, designed by Thomas Heatherwick. The steps are formed by continuous steel ribbons that stretch the length of the building and to the ceiling.

Charlie Stross of Antipope.org writes some funny impressions and insights after his long planned trip to Japan:

They've got our future, damn it.

It's not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills — oh no, that's not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they've got it and they're living in it, damn them. They've got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They've got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze — a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they're building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul's Cathedral).

Welcome to Japan ...

Heartbreaking photos of a dog, loyal to his human companion even after death.

WARNING: Graphic photos.

Via Digg.

Stopped Clocks is a blog that collects locations and photos of publicly visible clocks in Britain that are no longer functioning:

This site is a hub for my thinking on stopped clocks, a place to aggregate images and locations of stopped clocks in the UK, as well as a focal point for people to collaborate in actually getting public clocks fixed.

Via BoingBoing.

Kottke has an interview with the father of blog culture Cory Doctorow, who was forever immortalised as the hero of blogging by the hilarious XKCD in this comic. He speaks on his method of giving away free copies of his writing while still maintaining a profit:

I can't think of anyone better suited to answering questions about the state of culture in the Age of the Blog than Cory Doctorow. Whether it's running Boing Boing, writing (and giving away—while still profiting from—his novels and short-story collections), or speaking out for our electronic rights, Cory is a ubiquitous presence on every vector of this discussion. I caught up with him by phone at his London flat.

A nice, relatively quick read for all fans of the blogging world.

Michael Zoellner has made a screen saver for Mac OS X that displays images from publicly accessible security cameras:

SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screensaver that shows live images of over 600 network surveillance cameras worldwide. a haunting live soap opera. it is the first release of my ongoing experiments with network surveillance cameras.

Certainly a way to satisfy your inner voyeur. Via BoingBoing.

Ironic Sans posts a series of photos of trick-or-treaters in the Upper West Side:

Every Halloween, West 69th Street closes to traffic, and thousands of kids go trick or treating from building to building. This year, I set up my camera in one building’s lobby and photographed some of the kids in their costumes. I thought I’d share a few of the shots (I particularly liked the little girl named Dalia who was dressed as the “Dalia Lama”)

Via BoingBoing.

Wil Wheaton (a wonderful writer and general geek, who got his start by playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG) writes a funny entry in his blog on the superstitions all of us gamers have about our dice:

I stabbed the top of a Tofu pouch and drained its water into the sink. I dumped the tofu block out into my hand, and set it on the cutting board. While I sliced it in half, I said, "Anyway, in our second encounter, I had to roll a d20 for something, and while I was shaking it, it hopped out over the top of my hand, rolled across the table to my left, and came to rest against this other guy's stack of dice."

The pan warmed, and I dumped curry powder into the rapidly heating oil.

"It was like time stopped for a second, and the only thing any of us could see was my d20 resting against his d4 -- that's the one that looks like a pyramid."

"Oh, the one that's so fun to step on," she said.

"I said I was sorry about that," I said. I stirred the curry around, and put my tofu into the pan. It sizzled, and a delicious cloud of curry-flavored steam billowed into the kitchen.

"So while the other end of the table continued resolving their combat, he looked at me and said, very seriously, 'Uh, your dice are touching my dice.'"

In my local gaming group, there's one member who we have deemed as the "one-who-sucks-out-the-life-of-dice." We're all absolutely convinced that should he ever touch your dice, they will be cursed to never roll well for you again.

Sure, my intellectual side knows it's a gambler's fallacy, but that doesn't mean I'm going to risk his life sucking hands touching my dice!

Friendly reminder to all my readers living in the U.S. that due to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, daylight saving time falls today. Set your clocks back one hour!

This change to the start and end times of daylight saving time has been implemented this year as an effort to save more energy. Congress reserves the right to change back to the old dates when an energy consumption study is completed regarding the change's effect.

G4's Attack of the Show has created a funny parody of Ken Burns style documentaries by relating the story of LOLcats:

My TV geek genes are fired up over the announcement of Joss Whedon's (of Firefly and Buffy fame) new T.V. series Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku and airing on Fox (the same network that killed Firefly, unfortunately.) From Fox's show description:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody's fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language—even muscle memory—for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments—or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo's burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

There's an interesting interview at E! Online with both Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku regarding the genesis of the show. Tim Minear, the writer/producer behind Wonderfalls, Angel, and Firefly will also be joining Joss Whedon for Dollhouse. The premise sounds good, and they've been given the green light by Fox to create seven episodes. Now to hope they don't kill it by moving air times and showing episodes out of order like Fox did with Firefly.

An independent, government commissioned study in Canada has found out what many of us who keep up with technology know intuitively - people who share and download music using P2P services are more likely to buy CDs than the general public:

When assessing the P2P downloading population, there was "a strong positive relationship between P2P file sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file sharing increases CD purchases." The study estimates that one additional P2P download per month increases music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.

Jack Kapica provides a more in depth analysis of the government report, including this statement, which is obvious to anyone in the P2P scene, but it's nice to have an independent study confirm:

The study concluded that about half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs. Another quarter were downloaded because they were just not available in music stores.

I'll be the first to admit that some of the music I look for, most recently some Tegan and Sara albums, are very rare and not found either in iTunes or in record stores. There's no other recourse but downloading their music via P2P services. Via boingboing.

CNN reports on General Musharraf declaring martial law in Pakistan:

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said he declared a state of emergency and martial law Saturday because Pakistan is at a "critical and dangerous juncture."

The nation is going through "some very rapid changes," Musharraf said in a televised address to the nation after declaring martial law.

Pakistan's Supreme Court declared Musharraf's actions illegal, which prompted Musharraf to relieve Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry of his job for the second time in his career. He was reinstated the last time after massive protests calling for his return ensued in Pakistan. Currently, Musharraf has the Supreme Court and the judges' homes surrounded with troops.

What effects this will have on the January 15 elections is yet to be seen, but it's not looking good.

Following up on my previous chemistry related post, kottke brings this video of 20,000 lbs. of sodium being dumped into a lake in the 1940s:

Boom.

Stephen Colbert's bid to appear on the Democratic presidential ballot in South Carolina, as shown on The Colbert Report on Wednesday, was denied by the executive committee of the Democratic Party of South Carolina:

So much for being South Carolina's favorite son: Despite polling ahead of at least three of the candidates who've been stumping hard in South Carolina, Comedy Central faux conservative Stephen Colbert's bid to get on the ballot for the upcoming Democratic primary in his home state was shot down on Thursday (November 1) by the executive committee of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Colbert's bid was voted down 13-3.

... the executive committee of the state's party denied Colbert's bid when it voted not to certify the candidacy, according to Keiana Page, a communications assistant in the state Democratic Committee's office. Using criteria such as whether the candidate was recognized in the national news media as a legitimate candidate and whether they'd actively campaigned in the state, the committee put the kibosh on the Colbert bid.

My, how the times have changed:

[In] 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. “We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II,” he said.

The slow and utter death of real chemistry sets is something that's bothered both myself and my mom (who is a chemist and science teacher.) Their contents have become more and more barren and mundane, killing their usefulness in learning about chemical reactions and the basics of the scientific method to kids everywhere.

12 Angry Men writes at length on the decline of the once wonderful chemistry set:

Some of Gilbert’s original sets included such items as sodium cyanide, radioactive samples (complete with a Geiger counter), and glass blowing kits. I will freely admit that one of the first things I did with my chemistry set was to attempt to make an explosive. I remember mixing up chemicals that evolved free chlorine gas and having to evacuate the house. I remember mixing potassium nitrate and sugar to make rocket engines and quickly evolving to higher specific impulse fuels. I remember the joy of finally obtaining some nitric acid which allowed me to nitrate basically everything in the house (cotton for gun cotton, glycerine and alcohol for nitroglycerine). So yes, I have to admit that there is a risk involved. But this is how people learn. Sometimes knowledge comes with pain — one-shot induction.

Today however, the Chemistry Set is toast. Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today’s sets cover perfume mixing and creation of luminol (the ‘CSI effect’ I suppose).

Via /.

The Daedelus Project, a site dedicated to researching the psychology of MMOs, posts some thoughts on superstitious behaviour in MMOs:

From beta all the way through months into launch players were CONVINCED that if you used the diplomacy skill on a chest it would improve the loot you got. This was SO widespread that you literally could not get in a pick up group without them querying about the diplomacy skills of the party and someone forcing everyone to wait while the highest diplomacy skill player cringed before the chest sufficiently. No matter how many times we posted on the forums that this was a myth and it doesn't do anything, they kept doing it. It got so bad our community relations manager even put it in his sig. Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we "nerfed" the skill!

This is related to one of B.F. Skinner's behavioural conditioning studies in which he made pigeons behave in a superstitious manner:

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

I myself have experienced these first hand through many games, most recently in WoW and LOTRO. Some even become inside jokes among the sceptics like me (e.g. when someone brings up the belief that the loot table in an instance is determined by who makes and leads the group, we exclaim "Oh, and I hear Onyxia deep breaths more often too!" - a reference to the widely disproved theories that every patch caused the Onyxia encounter to change behaviours for the worse.)

This doesn't mean I'm immune to my own superstitions. For example, I deeply hold the belief that if we're doing well on a new boss encounter, and it looks like we're going to win, it is extremely important NOT to say "We've got this" or any variation thereof. Saying anything even remotely close to that will surely lead to a failed attempt. Granted, there are also psychological reasons for this (someone claiming victory before it is 100% assured can lead part of the group to relax, therefore paying less attention and dropping overall group performance), but in the end, it's just another superstition we all seem to fall victim to. Via kotaku.