Category: Misc

Students are taking some time getting used to the new “network homes” thing. In previous years, all J-School Macs had a single sign-on. Private files were stored in remote protected folder shares. This year, a student can walk up to any of our 82 new 20″ iMac G5s and log in as themselves. A few seconds later, they’re looking at their desktop, their documents, their email and bookmarks, etc.

The system is working marvelously, except that some people aren’t quite comprehending that if they walk away from a terminal, anyone can sit down and steal/delete/alter any of their content. Loud lectures from the sysadmin aren’t making a difference, so yesterday I made (a larger version of) this wallpaper. Now when we find a machine left logged in, we copy this file into the user’s home and make it their wallpaper. Could have done a nicer job on the lettering, but it’s not meant to be fine art, and it gets the job done. Reaction so far seems to be one of mixed embarassment and satori.

It’s the “Ah-Hah!” part I’m after.

Bzzzpeek: Sounds of frogs, firetrucks, cuckoo clocks and donkeys as spoken by children from around the world, wrapped up in a nicely done international flag interface. Accepting contributions from children around the world.

This project focuses on the pronunciation and comparison of these sounds by presenting them side by side as each language expresses them differently.

Impossible to tell how much of the variance is due to culture and how much to individual differences in kids, but this is interesting to me in part because Miles had such a gas with it and in part because I’ve been working on a sort-of-similar project for about two years now (but in video, rather than Flash). Promise to have it done by this Christmas (famous last words).

Keepers wondered why they kept finding shark carcasses on the aquarium floor, until one of them decided to stay up all night with a video camera. When they put sharks and octopi together in the tank, nobody guessed that a mere invertebrate could inhale sharks like nachos. Video at KQED/Nature (works in Firefox, not in Safari).

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.

As KrazyDad, Jim Bumgardner produces dozens of web toys every year. His most recent is Colr Pickr — select a color value from a wheel and find Flickr images whose average value match the selected color.

To those that question the utility of this little application, let me point out that it is a toy — like all the stuff on my website. It’s purpose is simply to provide wonder and delight. Nothing more, nothing less. Isn’t that enough? — jbum