Author: shacker

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Lobotomy Inventor Could Lose Nobel

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, lobotomies actually helped about 10% of the people upon whom they were performed. Many of the remaining 90% of lobotomy recipients were left in a vegetative state and spent the rest of their lives in institutions. Now, 30 years after doctors stopped performing lobotomies (electroshock and drugs took over where physical brain scrambling left off), groups are mobilizing to strip lobotomy inventor Egas Moniz of the Nobel prize he was awarded half a century ago. Associated Press:

“How can anyone trust the Nobel Committee when they won’t admit to such a terrible mistake?” asks Christine Johnson, a Levittown, N.Y., medical librarian who started a campaign to have the prize revoked.

Ironic to think that if he had born 30 years earlier, Joey Ramone probably would have been a prime candidate for the barbaric procedure. Instead, his song Teenage Lobotomy became a proto-punk smash hit.

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Albany Bulb

57 Images from a sunset walk with Miles and Amy at the Albany Bulb, June 1, 2005. The Bulb is a local landmark – artists (many of them homeless) use this strut of land jutting out into the harbor to create installations improvised from existing junk and ingredients brought onto the land in wagons drawn by pedaled trikes. Repeat visits bring new discoveries. The light is nearly edible at sunset. Rust and graffiti and plant life in chaotic collaboration. Deterioration part of the artistic process, always a joy. Miles mostly concerned with finding rocks to huck into the sea, but occasionally adds his own contributions to the public spectacle.

Music: Palace :: All Gone, All Gone
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Deuteranopic

I’m one of those people who don’t see numbers in most of the color-blindness crop circles. Have never minded, nor known what I’m missing (though I have at times felt bored by the available spectrum and daydreamed that some genius will come up with a new primary color one of these days). Vischeck helps normally-sighted people visualize how the world looks to color-blind people — a process that proved fascinating to Amy just now.

But the really cool thing at Vischeck is their web page processor, constructed to help web designers see how their sites will look to color blind users. Running the test in deuteranopia mode, pages look identical to me before and after.

I had been on the job two years before I learned that most people see the J-School‘s homepage as greenish — I had always thought of it as beige or tan. The designer who preceded me should have used Vischeck :)

Note: Planned downtime at the jschool today as we undertake a Tiger Server upgrade.

Music: Jean Bosco Mwenda :: Watoto Wawili
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Brain Candy

People are getting smarter. Remove the periodic recalibration of IQ tests that keep the mean IQ at 100, and you find that average intelligence is rising as the decades pass.

For the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell covers Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. Johnson pins causes for rising IQ on the increasing complexity of pop culture. As much energy as we spend pointing fingers at the idiot box for dumbing us down, TV puts “greater cognitive demands” on us today than it did 30 years ago. Compare the simple, linear, single-plotline pace of “Dukes of Hazzard” with an episode of “The Sopranos” or “Desperate Housewives” and you see a marked uptick in complexity and the demands put on the viewer to keep track of multiple threads and do lots of “filling in” (less is spelled out for the viewer). Johnson sees the same trend in video games — steadily increasing complexity putting ever-greater intellectual demands on the player.

Most of the people who denounce video games, he says, haven’t actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today’s games belong to another realm. Johnson points out that one of the “walk-throughs� for “Grand Theft Auto III�—that is, the informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities—is fifty-three thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Have to say I’m a hard sell on these points, but it’s not an unconvincing argument. Might make a good summer read.

Music: The Meters :: Liver Splash
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.piz policy

With so many mail scanners rejecting mail with .zip attachments (which so often carry malware payloads), some sites are moving to a “.piz policy.” Need to send a .zip attachment? Rename it to filename.piz and instruct recipient to rename it back. A pain in the neck, but effective if you can manage the user education component. Hopefully .tgz will remain unsullied for a while, but I predict that all compression formats are ultimately doomed as simple attachment formats.

Music: New York Dolls :: Trash
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Thanks For Your Time

Jury Check Being a university (i.e. state) employee means I’m not entitled to the generous $15/day stipend for my time serving jury duty last month. No idea what this whopping extraneous sum for my excruciating civic effort is all about, but I plan to spend it all in one place, profligate wastrel that I am.

Music: Bob Log III :: Boob Scotch
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TypeKey vs. OpenID

Six Apart’s TypeKey is a damn fine authentication system, and its open API means it can be implemented in any application, not just in Movable Type. A common complaint about TK is that it runs as a centralized system on Six Apart servers. If Six Apart tanks or goes down for a while, your authentication system goes with it. LiveJournal’s Brad Fitzpatrick has launched OpenID, an open and distributed authentication system with similar goals, but without the problems of centralization.

But there’s no denying that despite its efficacy at stopping spam and limiting the strain on server resources, required authentication on comments inhibits free-wheeling conversation and casual commenting. To overcome this obstacle, an authentication system needs critical mass, needs not to be regarded as alien or invasive to the user’s privacy. If OpenID can solve the social barrier problem and gain mass acceptance, it could have legs.

But wait… Six Apart now owns LiveJournal, and OpenID will compete with TypeKey. The page says that Fitzpatrick is working to make TypeKey into an OpenID server. Making that so could amount to an implied admission by Six Apart that centralization of an authentication service by a commercial entity puts a lot of people off. This could be interesting to watch. Discussion on Slashdot.

Music: Charles Mingus :: Haitian Fight Song
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Etymology of Baba O’Riley

Recently discovered that the title of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” (the swirling keyboard intro of which I used as the soundtrack to a speech given by a talking moose to Amy at our wedding five years ago) is derived from the names of composer Terry Riley, who gave Pete Townsend the idea for the synthesizer part, and spiritual teacher Meher Baba, who was Townshend’s spiritual guru at the time. The things you learn.

Music: Raymond Scott :: Peter Tambourine
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Disaffection

The GOP ain’t what it used to be. After 25 years of affiliation with the Republican party, attorney James Chaney is calling it quits. Chaney writes for the Eugene Register-Guard:

My Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and George H.W. Bush. It was a party of honesty and accountability. It was a party of tolerance, and practicality and honor. It was a party that faced facts and dealt with reality, and that crafted common-sense solutions to problems based on the facts as they were, not as we wished them to be, or even worse, as we made them up. It was a party that told the truth, even when the truth came hard. And now, it is none of those things.

Not sure I agree that the GOP was traditionally a party of honesty and accountability, but it sure as hell isn’t now. Disaffection seems be a growing trend as the needle on the seisomograph of extremism continues to wander off the charts.

Via Liberaltopia

Music: Stiff Little Fingers :: Wasted Life
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Summer Project

Bath Remodel Break Took less than two hours to remove the toilet and sink, pry out the baseboards, and chisel out the floor tiles (sledgehammer, goggles, earplugs). It’ll take the rest of the summer to rebuild our main bathroom. Got the tiles out without gloves, then cut myself pretty good throwing them in the trash. Busted tile sharp as razors. Next up: recondition walls and smooth out flooring with thinset mortar, paint, re-tile, install new sink and toilet, lighting, and new shower fixtures. It’ll be nice to have a bathroom not reminiscent of Holiday Inn.

Music: Brian Eno :: Bottomliners