Category: Media

Posted on

Statistics and Suffering

Not sure what to make of this Der Spiegel piece on how statistics of death and deformity are consistently overrated after nuclear accidents. Upshot: real rates of destruction are generally far lower than popularly reported.

To answer these questions, the Japanese and the Americans launched a giant epidemiological study after the war. The study included all residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had survived the atomic explosion within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius. Investigators questioned the residents to obtain their precise locations when the bomb exploded, and used this information to calculate a personal radiation dose for each resident. Data was collected for 86,572 people. Today, 60 years later, the study’s results are clear. More than 700 people eventually died as a result of radiation received from the atomic attack:

  • 87 died of leukemia;
  • 440 died of tumors;
  • and 250 died of radiation-induced heart attacks.
  • In addition, 30 fetuses developed mental disabilities after they were born.

Even sites like Nature News say Chernobyl’s ecosystems are “remarkably healthy” and that “biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster.”

My initial reaction is that this is an incredibly skewed, twisted perspective – some flavor of (possibly unintentional) historical revisionism. Or that data simply conflict, and different reporters pick and choose their angles. Yet the piece is very even-handed, doesn’t seem to be written with any kind of pro-nuke agenda, more a commentary on how exaggeration commonly follows on the heels of tragedy. But I’d like to see a rebuttal or response to this article written by other science journalists.

And then… stop. Just. Stop. It’s madness to talk this way.

Chernobyl

Watch Paul Fusco’s photo essay on victims of Chernobyl, and their children. And remember that everything beyond these messed up human lives is just statistics. And that death rates are very different from suffering rates. And that statistics are just damn lies anyway. And that people are real. Suffering is real, and cannot be reduced like this.

Thanks Jim Strickland

Posted on

Publishing Frontier

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two great new media blogs:

pubfrontier.com: A raucous public discussion of the publishing revolution with an all-star list of contributors. “The goal of our site is to conduct provocative public discussion of the revolution that is happening in publishing and how it effects readers, society, economics, and fundamental values such as privacy.”

aliceinradioland.org: The blog portfolio of Pauline Bartolone — multimedia storyteller, radio producer and investigative reporter.

Music: Steve Coleman And Five Elements :: Twister
Posted on

Geekdad, Hovercraft

Hovercraft Crazy how things come together. Birdhouse user and cell phone haiku proprietor Dylan Tweney is an editor for Wired Magazine. He’s also a dad and a contributor to Wired’s Geekdad blog. Wired recently started collaborating with PBS on an interesting TV show called Wired Science. Recent J-School graduate Sasa Woodruff just spent a season as a researcher for Wired Science, helping to select and assemble pieces for the series. Sasa was also Miles’ babysitter last year (being a J-School dad means access to an endless supply of interesting babysitters!).

Thanks to the Geekdad connection, Dylan recently did a segment for Wired Science on building a hovercraft in the comfort of your own living room, with his daughter Clara as helper and co-star. Which means Miles recently got to watch his once-or-twice playmate building a UFO on HDTV.

The connections go still deeper, but I’ll leave it at that. Except to say, “My hovercraft is full of eels“.

Music: Peter Brotzmann :: Sanity
Posted on

Gravatar

Headshot Fur Bulletin board readers are accustomed to using icons/avatars to represent their identities in online discussions. But because blogs are scattered to the wind across a bazillion servers, this capability is not generally available on weblogs. What is consistent across your participation in multiple blogs is your email address (even though it’s never displayed publicly, it’s usually required for comment posting). Gravatar leverages this consistency by letting you create a (free) account with them. Your avatar then appears automatically when you participate on any Gravatar-enabled blog.

All a blog owner has to do is add a few lines of code to their templates (or install a plugin), and the right avatars show up in the discussion automatically.

Auttomatic (the hippy/corporate entity behind WordPress) has acquired Gravatar, giving the the service the juice it needed to keep performance up. I’ve enabled Gravatar on Birdhouse — set yourself up a free Gravatar account and watch all of your historical posts on this site grow a magic tumor avatar.

Aside: WordPress now powers almost 1% of the web. Don’t tell me it’s just a blogging tool.

Music: Van Morrison :: Madame George
Posted on

Depends on What “Is” Is

After the initial glow of playing with social networking again wore off, I (predictably) reverted to ignoring Facebook. Except that every time someone friends me or begs me to add the app for their pet cause, I get an email ping reminding me that Facebook exists and that I, apparently, have unmet social obligations. Which reminds me that I really need to update my profile so I don’t look like an abandoner. 99% of my Facebook activity over the past month has been relegated to obligatory updating of my “Is” status.

Scot is contemplating Joomla.
Scot is digging the new William Parker disc.
Scot is no longer contemplating Joomla.

and so on. Not much, but it keeps my crackers from getting too stale. In so doing, I’ve been flummoxed that the “is” part is required. If I want my profile to say “Scot digs the new William Parker,” it comes out as “Scot is digs the new William Parker.” Lame. But Machinist says Facebook has dropped the “is” requirement, and that the verb is now free-form. Thank god for small miracles. But did the “is” play an important linguistic/artistic role?

What Flaubert meant was that it is precisely an artform’s constraints — and not the lack of constraints — that juice people’s creativity; the Facebook “is,” no differently from Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, forces people to look for interesting ways to say things.

Nevertheless, the new API lets the user control “is,” not the API. But hold the phone… that’s all lovely, but apparently not yet in play.

Scot is wonders when Van Morrison jumped the shark.

Standing by…

Music: William Parker :: Corn Meal Dance
Posted on

Comicon

Lulu2 As kids, my brother and I heard plenty of stories about how people dug 30-year-old comics worth thousands of bucks out of their garages, and entertained fantasies that one day our own comics would be worth a mint. Throughout the 70s and early 80s, we dutifully bagged our X-Men, Fantastic Four, Richie Rich, Epic, Mad Magazines and Howard the Ducks, then stashed them in cardboard boxes to “mellow” for a few decades.

A year ago, I finally excavated the collection from mom’s basement and moved them into our own garage, planning to finally see what they were worth. Today, actually got around to hauling them down to an actual comics shop. Though we had a few gems worth upwards of $20, the bulk was of the collection was barely countable, and represented nothing but a PiTa to the store owner, who would have to put a ton of effort into re-bagging, organizing, cataloging, and pricing, only to sit on most of it for god knows how long. And that Howard the Duck #1 I prized so much fetches only $3.75 today. Likewise for all those Mad Magazines — even though some go back to the mid-60s, the market remains glutted.

Was it worth hanging onto them at all? Hardly seems like it. But there’s another factor at work here – there just aren’t as many collectors around as there once were. Fewer comics are being printed, for shrinking audiences. Young kids don’t hop off their bikes on their way home from paper routes to pick up the latest X-Men anymore – they might download them from the internet and read them on-screen. But for most kids, the internet itself has taken the place that comics once filled in our lives.

Being in the store was like living through an episode of the Simpsons. The employees tossed impenetrable inside jokes back and forth: “Avengers #117! We should totally give this to Zach for Christmas! [chuckle chuckle]. And I loved that they referred to comic books with no term other than “books.” In the end, Mr. Comicon offered me $100 for five boxes of “books.” I couldn’t do it. I understand the market forces at work here, but come on… Decided to craigslist the collection and let individuals come and pick it over. Crossing fingers.

Music: Van Morrison :: Virgo Clowns
Posted on

Future Post

One of WordPress’ little-used features is its ability to set a “drip date” – to set a post’s timestamp in the future so that it doesn’t go live on the site until that time comes around. Recently I was working on a site for a client who needed an Events section. For various reasons, I didn’t want to use any of the existing events plugins for WP – I just wanted to override the behavior for future-dated posts so that they’d go live on the site immediately, without waiting.

For the past year or so, I’ve virtually never found a case where anything I wanted to do with WP hadn’t already been solved by an existing plugin or tweak to template logic. But amazingly, I couldn’t find anything to override the default future post behavior. Posted on WP-Hackers about the problem and got a few solutions volunteered within a few hours (there’s nothing like a vibrant open source community). By far the most elegant was this one from the magical Ryan Boren (same guy who planted the semi-secret WordPress t-shirt geocache):

Stick this in a php document in your plugins folder (remember not to include any whitespace after the closing php tag!), activate it, and create a post with a future timestamp. The post’s status field in wp_posts will be set to “publish” rather than “future” and it’ll go live on the site immediately.

You can also download this as a ready-to-go plugin.

Ryan’s too busy to host this trivial but super-useful plugin himself, but invited me to. I’ve submitted it to WP-Plugins and am awaiting a response – should be available there as well before long.

Music: Daniel Mille :: Les Minots
Posted on

Tivo Transfers

Part of the fun of exploring the brave new world of HDTV and Series 3 TiVo is figuring out how to get Tivo-recorded shows onto the Mac and preserved on DVD, and to go the other way around, from the Mac to the TiVo (i.e. watching BitTorrent movies in the living room). None of this is built in, exactly, or well-documented. But it’s do-able.

For the First Case, I’ve used TiVo Desktop, which only comes bundled with Toast Titanium 8 (grrr — if you’re going to bundle a network connection on a device, then software to make it work should be included free), then burned to DVD with the awesome VisualHub.

I haven’t yet mastered the art of the Second Case, going from the Mac to the TiVo. Michael Alderete, who was a communications ace at Be back in the day, has written an excellent guide covering the process soup-to-nuts. We hooked up on the topic through a post in the VisualHub forums, and I wound up throwing in a few edits to his doc.

This document describes set-up and processes for downloading videos from the Internet using BitTorrent or other mechanisms, and then transferring them to a TiVo Series 3 high-definition (HD) recorder, for playback on a high-definition TV (HDTV).

Ironically, I haven’t yet gotten the Mac –> TiVo connection working yet myself; TiVo says my “brain” (that’s this Mac’s hostname) is empty. I suspect a firewall issue. Alderete’s directions assume Tiger, not Leopard. The problem is that in Leopard you need to manually poke a firewall hole for the apps you want to be able to communicate with the rest of the world — but Tivo Transfer is a preference pane, not an app, so there’s no clear way to add it (adding the preference pane module to the list of apps hasn’t unblocked the pipes).

Will get this licked eventually. And keep burning DVDs when necessary until then.

Music: Henry Kaiser :: It Happened One Night
Posted on

Hermenautic Circle

Hermenaut In the beginning, there was Hermenaut, an excellent ‘zine out of the Boston area from the mid-90s. Hermenaut hit it pretty big, as zines go, because it was packed with excellent writing and funky topics (issues had themes like “False Authenticity” and “Vertigo”). My old Liberace piece was originally written for Hermenaut’s “camp” issue. Fast forward a decade. Some of the original Hermenenaut authors, including Boston Globe writer Josh Glenn (who was one of Hermenaut’s founders) participate in a free-form (but closed) mailing list for around a hundred writers and gadflies.

Eventually, the “Hermeneutic Circle” realized that many of its subscribers maintained their own blogs, which gave rise to the idea of a “planet” web site that could be used to aggregate new posts from all of the individual blogs (without requiring writers to post in two places). Glenn signed up with Birdhouse Hosting, we registered hermenaut.org, and went looking for a solution.

The rub was that Glenn wanted more than simple RSS aggregation. He wanted posts from scattered blogs made into actual posts on the Hermeneutic Circle, so people could comment directly on the site. Somehow we needed to consume RSS feeds and produce new entries on the new blog, rather than just links. Eventually I stumbled on FeedWordPress – one of the coolest WordPress plugins I’ve tried in a while. Hand it a URL and it will discover all embedded feeds and ask you which one to subscribe. Each new author found in the feeds is made into a genuine author in the local WP system. Each category found in a feed becomes a genuine category in the local WP system. A nice API gives you a new set of template tags you can use to control whether commenting happens on the original author’s site or on the local site. And so on. Really nicely done (and yes, we tipped the plugin developer).

Hermenautic Circle went live today in starter mode; we’re off and running. And once again, I’m just amazed at the amount of work saved by the rich plugin landscape surrounding WordPress (I really thought I was going to have code this by hand).

Music: Angels Of Light :: Black River Song