Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
For all you “cute” fans out there (you know who you are), Fatboy Slim has a new cover out of Steve Miller’s classic “The Joker” that’s killing me and Miles here. Steve Miller provided the backing track for some of the best junior high parties and surf sessions ever, but we never saw it like this:
Trying to imagine the PETA reaction. Am I crazy or is that Boot-say’s voice in the background? Way too funky. In case you’ve ever wondered about “the pompatus of love,” Straight Dope has the dope.
Tired of banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why WPBlogMail (which sends weekly Birdhouse email updates to subscribers) would choke on 3rd-party WP plugins (but only when run via cron). Plus I wanted to pull digests via lynx, rather than handling everything manually in PHP (lynx –dump has some great formatting options). And I hated the name. Finally decided it was time for an entirely new architecture for the system, so started work on WP-Digest.
The Woodland Hills home in which Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band recorded the legendary Trout Mask Replica LP is for sale. At $849,900, it’s a little out of my price range, but man, what kinda crazy vibes must be in that place.
Wonder whether the good capn’s bent-up lamp shade wireframe or Rocket Morton’s ride-on vacuum cleaner come with the deal?
Technorati Tags: music
If you had been an elementary school student in the 1960s, there might have been a dusty record player in a corner of your classroom, and a stack of scratchy educational records to choose from. And you might have heard songs like these playing in the background while you built a papier mache’ volcano with an orange juice concentrate container for its core, which you would later fill with baking soda and vinegar and red food coloring the night the parents came to see what you had been up to all year.
Why anyone can tell you what a mammal is
anyone who understands
they’re warm-blooded, have hair on their bodies
and suckle their young from mammary glands.
Hy Zaret and Lou Singer produced an amazing collection of science songs for kids back in the day as a six-record set, now available as an essential pile of 160kbps MP3s.
via Dylan
Some very cool stuff going on in Microsoft labs. Photosynth is an image browser from another dimension. Give it a giant pile of photos shot from anywhere within a single location (a beach, a museum…) and it will intelligently find edges, determine positions, and stitch together images into a massive 3-D soup of relationships through which users can surf, zoom, spin, dig and dive. No human intervention or tagging needed to build the relationships. Watching the demo, I’m wondering how much CPU it takes to burrow through an environment like this at reasonable speed, or how long it took to calculate the stitching (even creating high-quality QuickTime VR movies can take all night, and this is way beyond anything QTVR is capable of).
Demo is in WMV format (of course). I’ve been appreciating the Flip4Mac module that allows QuickTime to play WMV content.
Technorati Tags: microsoft, photography
My brother-in-law is a philosophy professor, and while in Minnesota recently, I had the opportunity to attend one of his ethics classes. The subject of the week was abortion, and much of the discussion hinged on the difficulty of establishing person-hood. There are philosophers who believe person-hood rests on criteria such as self-awareness, conscientiousness, determination, etc. Other philosophers believe these criteria are ultimately problematic, and that we require a more biological definition — that person = human being, where “human being” is defined by criteria such as being bipedal, possessing a neural network, (and to distinguish us from other animals) unable to fly unassisted, unable to echolocate…
It’s that last criteria — echolocation — I was thinking about while reading the story of Ben Underwood, a boy who lost his sight to cancer at age 3 and instinctively taught himself to emit a series of clicking noises with his tongue and gauge the distance to things by listening for the echoes. But Underwood doesn’t just gauge distances — he can tell what materials things are made of, how they move through space, where they land when they fall. Though he is blind, Underwood skateboards with his friends, plays basketball, and refuses to walk with a cane. And he’s already been offered a job as a dolphin trainer.
Of course no one would say Underwood is not a person, but it’s amusing when we create seemingly universal descriptions such as “A person is a being that cannot echolocate” … and then nature proves us wrong.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes timothydocumentary.com, a site representing the documentary work of J-School graduate Tim Wheeler.
Timothy Documentary clients are production companies, organizations, and publications interested in documenting pressing social issues and underrepresented communities around the world. The work is inspired by the strength and wisdom that people gain from their unique upbringings.
Nice use of Slideshow Pro, which I also use for an “Image of the Week” feature on the J-School intranet.
When I lost a secondary MP3 drive to disk failure a while back, it was like being hit upside the head with a blunt object – a reminder that I had no good way to back up my main MP3 collection, and I could easily lose all my music at any moment (and not just the music, but five years worth of collection tweaking work). This month, finally filled the 160GB main music drive to capacity. Meanwhile, the drive that hosts backups for Birdhouse, plus Amy’s and my home backups, had been flirting with capacity for a while. Decided I couldn’t put it off any longer – time for a fully redundant, high capacity network-attached RAID.
Plastics made from corn (PLAs) are advertised as “biodegradable.” And they are. IF your back-yard composting bin is capable of reaching 140 degrees for a stretch of 10 days or more. And that only happens at industrial composters specifically set up for this kind of thing. In the average home composting setup, corn plastics remain unchanged after six months, leading to accusations of false advertising on the part of firms like Wal-Mart, which pushes corn plastics to consumers as part of its new push to green-wash their image.
Smithsonian: So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.†But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.
I’m in the middle of reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so my head has been swimming with corn-y thoughts lately. More later.
via Boing-Boing
Once upon a time, the nom-de-plume was a rarely used device. Today, it’s practically the norm. Back in February, I posted On Anonymity, clarifying some stuff about my general dislike of handles and nicks, and the general trend toward people writing as other than themselves, not standing personally behind their own words.
Anonymity has its advantages. In some respects, it’s one of the net’s strengths. Anonymity enables people in politically oppressive environments to speak freely. And a 14-year-old girl would probably be foolish to use her real name online. But what about everyone else?
Seems like there’s a lot of talk recently about the declining quality of online conversation. Reasonable people with provocative things to say talk about how every time they try to post something thoughtful, they get torn a new one by readers. I certainly post a lot less controversial stuff here than I used to; finally got tired of the sh*tstorms (though few people comment anonymously here).
And then there’s the GIFT Theory (not safe for work).
Listening to the Gillmor Gang tonight on the way home from work, was struck by something unusual: These guys usually disagree on everything. But for a rare change they were unified — all of them just sick to the gills with a zoo of buffoons out there who can’t express opinions civilly, or whose first priority is to knock a thoughtful writer down. They even talked about wanting to set up systems not just to register commenters, but to enforce verification of real names for anyone who wants to comment.
Later in the evening, a similar thread came up on the O’Reilly Mac Blogger’s internal mailing list – writers fed up with endless snarking and small-minded mean-ness from readers lacking the grapes even to use their real names.
There are several things going on here: The decline of politeness in general, an increasingly fragmented and direct public, and fallout from widespread anonymity. I think anonymity is a bigger factor than is given credit for. Compare: How do you express anger to a stranger when you’re driving your car? Would you express yourself the same way to a stranger standing next to you in the checkout line at the grocery store? If not, why not? The distance, the anonymity, does something to people. And it isn’t a pleasant something.