Why did it take 32 years* for me to realize that Gnip Gnop was Ping Pong spelled backwards? What a racket that game made…
* I got this game for my 10th birthday and played it heavily through much of that year.
Music: Boukan Ginen :: Jou A Rive
Clamshell Sarcophagus
As consumers, we’re conflicted. We want the products we purchase to be pristine, untouched by human hands. But the very thing that keeps products perfect on the long trip from Asia is the thing that drives us nuts when we get the product home — the “ubiquitous plastic clamshell, resistant to scissors, razor blades and loud swearing.” Washington Post says consumer frustration with plastic clamshells has reached an all-time high, and that alternatives are finally on the way. This may be the last year we have to fish our items out of the dreaded translucent sarchophagi.
This year, Consumer Reports magazine gave an award for the worst plastic clamshell packaging to a warehouse-store version of a Uniden cordless phone set: It took 9 minutes 22 seconds to unwrap completely and nearly caused injury to the person opening it. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004.
The article barely touches the larger issue of the environmental impact of all that plastic, but hints that future packaging may be some kind of cardboard/plastic hybrid. But for me, that begs the question: What percentage of products could be successfully shipped and stocked with no packaging at all? Obviously not everything, but what’s wrong with sticking 100 widgets in a cardboard box with some kind of low-impact filler for padding, and letting us select items au naturelle from a crate, as is common with low-cost items found in your local Chinatown, or like virtually everything at Crate and Barrel?
Yes, theft prevention is also part of the equation, but let’s be creative here. We don’t just need different packaging – we need less packaging. A lot less.
The Packaging hall of shame is a nice idea but a small project. Someone could spin that idea off into a great little dedicated web site, collecting images and descriptions of heinous packaging from around the world.
Music: The Knitters :: Rock Island Line
The Great Dutch Firewall
ComputerWorld reports that spam security firm Postini “spotted 7 billion spam e-mails in November, up from 2.5 billion in June.” And 80% of it is apparently being generated by 200 criminal gangs worldwide. But that’s not the part I found most interesting. Despite common wisdom that anti-spam legislation can’t work, evidence to the contrary:
She pointed to the Netherlands as an example of how the current legal regime can be used to cut spam. Holland’s spam-busting unit, known by the initials OPTA, has just five full-time staff and $747,000 worth of equipment, but it has succeeded in cutting spam by 85 percent … Finland was also singled out for praise. A filtering system there has cut the amount of spam to 30 percent of all e-mail, from 80 percent two years ago.
Of course there’s more to this than mere laws, which have no teeth against untrackable crime rings. To make that kind of dent, you basically need to firewall a country — to encircle it with spam filtering hardware. And that kind of government intervention in the “free” internet sounds spookily similar to the Great Firewall of China. Kind of the difference between a benevolent dictator and fascism, I suppose. I might be inclined to go with the benevolent dictator in this case.
Music: Beck :: Broken Drum
Technorati Tags: spam
The YouTube of the Avant-Garde
Posted last year about the re-launch of UbuWeb, a 100% free repository of avant-garde and conceptual audio and video — concrete poetry, experimental sound works, obscure video. Now the site has “converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats a la YouTube … We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Shuji Terayama, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more.”
Unfortunately they don’t offer an “embed this video” option like YouTube does, but no matter – UbuWeb is performing an incredible service by presenting the content. Not all of it is great, but all of it is appreciated.
Thanks Jan Fex
Music: Steve Earle :: Ellis Unit One
How To Be Interesting
Russel Davies has created a mini-primer called How To Be Interesting — a list based on two assumptions: 1) The way to be interesting is to be interested, and 2) Interesting people are good at sharing. The title is tongue-in-cheek of course, but some of the suggestions are good — carry a camera with you at all times and post one photo per day, try things you’ve never tried before (often), pay attention to art, interview one person per month, make things (“Making’s the new thinking.”)
4. Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before. Interesting people are interested in all sorts of things. That means they explore all kinds of worlds, they go places they wouldn’t expect to like and work out what’s good and interesting there. An easy way to do this is with magazines. Specialist magazines let you explore the solar system of human activities from your armchair. Try it, it’s fantastic.
I think the sharing recommendations are great – sharing is the open source of human endeavor. And the more you take in, the more interesting what you have to share will be. I personally feel this tension — like I’ve become less interesting over the past few years as my available time to consume information about things not directly related to my work has slipped toward a vanishing point.
Music: Arrested Development :: Mama’s Always On Stage
Staying in Canada
Back when I worked at Ziff-Davis in Boston, a multimedia developer named David Drucker provided my first introduction to the Macintosh (an introduction I resisted, though his predictions that I would someday become a Mac-head ultimately proved true).
When Bush won re-election in 2004, Drucker and his wife did something many liberals talked about doing, but that few actually followed through on – they up and moved to Canada. Today, the LA Times has published a brief piece by Drucker on whether their commitment to Canada has changed now that Democrats are back: Dems in control? We’re still staying in Canada, wherein he marvels at the fact that Canada’s “conservative” prime minister Steven Harper recently referred to a new “holistic” approach to environmental policy. Imagine anyone from the Bush administration using the term “holistic” with anything but sarcasm.
We’ve come to the conclusion that the United States has drifted so far to the right that any self-respecting Canadian Conservative would be considered a raving liberal in Washington.
Music: Toots & The Maytals :: Monkey Girl
Cleaning Is No Crime
If graffiti is a crime, what about cleaning? What if you clean selectively, removing only the bits that don’t make art? placeboKatz:
Alexandre Orion is cleaning São Paulo’s tunnels by scraping the deposited vehicle exhaust soot from the walls to make hundreds of sculls. Even so police turned up several times they couldn’t do much as cleaning is no crime. After some time the São Paulo municipal started their own cleaning mission, consequently only cleaning the parts already cleaned by Alexandre. Again the skulls appeared on the remaining soot canvas and this time the city decided to clean all tunnels.
More images, and an interesting bit on our glib acceptance of living amidst our own pollution, at the artists’ site.
Music: Pram :: Meshes In The Afternoon
Auto-Save on the Read/Write Web
Just had what I thought was going to be a miserable experience: Had typed a lengthy response to a blog posting but was not quite finished. In the background, the Microsoft Office updater popped up, so I accepted its recommendation to update. Entered my password and it responded with “Looking for programs to update.” Spinning pinwheel of death. But not just for the updater — the entire system was locked. Could not force quit anything, could not even ssh in to kill the process. 10th Avenue Freeze-Out.
Finally accepted that my response-in-progress was lost for good and hard-booted the machine. When it came back up, Firefox asked whether I wanted to restore the previous session. Said yes, and up came all previously open tabs, including the site I had been typing the lengthy comment into, with — yow! — all of my unsaved words totally intact in the comment field, ready to resume. After a hard boot. Auto-save comes to the read/write web.
So here’s my Thanksgiving geek shout-out to everyone who has ever contributed to the Firefox codebase. You guys rock.
Music: The Beach Boys :: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
More on The God Delusion
Seems like you can’t shake a stick lately without stumbling on a discussion about “the new atheism.” Kids’ birthday parties, water cooler conversations at work, barbershop, discussion lists. Sparked by the release of new books by Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett, all of a sudden it’s OK to talk about atheism. We’ve had some great conversations here recently on the subject, but it seems like the topic is bottomless.
In a recent Wired cover story, the state of modern atheism was compared to that of homosexuality slowly emerging from the closet a few decades ago. When pressed, many people who publicly claim agnosticism turn out actually to be atheists afraid of offending the present company. Because to declare yourself an atheist is to say “All that stuff that means more to you than anything, that belief system you hinge your life upon? I reject it entirely.” In other words, it’s not polite to declare yourself an atheist. That’s what the “new atheists” want us to move beyond.
Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, does an amazing job in this BBC interview of summarizing the views of contemporary atheism in ten minutes. Dawkins is extraordinarily well-spoken and charming, though some theists will no doubt find him strident.
Dawkins also has a great essay up on Yahoo: Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. Also worth listening to him describe the stunning predictive capacity of quantum theory to a Christian. If you’ve got an hour to spare, catch NPR’s interview with Dawkins. I found it fascinating and illuminating; a friend found it annoying.
iSquub is struggling with the paradox of feeling agnostic but agreeing with Dawkins’ line of reason:
Still, to me the most gripping part of this discussion keeps boiling down to that one thing: why is he an atheist, and I an agnostic? Why do I care? The god I’m agnostic about makes no perceivable difference in my life, yet I get frustrated when Dawkins uses what is pretty much an identical chain of reasoning to the one I use but suddenly leaps to an entirely different conclusion.
My take is that, for many of us, this is not a matter of being committed to agnosticism, but rather of not being prepared to make a positive statement that it’s insensible to base our personal or political lives on what amounts to myths. When quantuum theory can make predictions about our world with breath-taking accuracy while the story of the Trinity can make none, what are we waiting for? As Harris says, in no other field of human endeavor are we so willing to accept with indifference the possibility that an outrageous claim might have merit (as agnostics are). We’ve accepted agnosticism as safe and non-committal. It’s not impolite to be an agnostic, and agnosticism allows us to walk on the razor’s edge. Why not stand up and say “Fairies aren’t real?”
Perhaps agnosticism is just a “well, maybe” sort of allowance that we give. An allowance we would not allow in any other field of discourse when evidence is shaky.
Lighter side: Dawkins on Colbert. And Salon.com recently called Dawkins one of the sexiest men alive. On the other side, Francis Collins’ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief promises to present equally convincing reason in the opposite direction. I’m interested.
I was going to link to Dawkins’ interview with fallen angel Ted Haggert, but YouTube has “Removed the content at the copyright holder’s request.”
Oh, and Daniel Dennett recently had a brush with death (to which he says “Thank goodness!”)
Music: Talking Heads :: The Book I Read
Bagger 288 Chews ‘Dozers
Posted back in 2004 about the almost inconceivably large earth muncher, Bagger 288 (technically a “bucket wheel excavator”). Here’s what happens when a stray bulldozer wanders into Bagger’s path:
No info there on whether a driver might have been in the bulldozer at the time. More pix at thrillingwonder.
Music: Caravan :: I Don’t Know It’s Name