Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Working bit by bit on a PHP/MySQL customer tracking / service management / invoicing system for birdhouse hosting over the past couple of weeks. An hour here and there in the evenings and it’s coming together, slowly but surely. Between this and a professor / bio / course / description / location / scheduling system just completed for the jschool, and I’m learning a lot about many-to-many table design lately (intermediate reference tables).
It seems like Amy has photographed mostly Miles for the past eight months, but lately she’s been returning to her art more frequently. Now she’s working digitally rather than analog (we converted her darkroom into Miles’ bedroom a year ago). She was shooting this beet last night.
(When I narrated this to her just now she thought I said “She was shooting speed last night.“)
Outside my office door, students walk past, sometimes I can hear their cell phone conversations. Today, a beautiful day. Sun shining, air crisp, pine trees swaying. And I hear a student barking, nearly yelling into a phone:
“Sorry, I’m stuck in traffic. Yeah, it’s bumper to bumper. It’s going to be a while.”
On a dry lakebed in Death Valley, rocks weighing up to 320 kilograms locomote themselves slightly uphill over time, often leaving zig-zag trails in their wakes. Geologist Paula Messina has painstakingly documented boulder movement via GPS. Smells like a hoax? Take a look at this table, linked to hard data on every named rock. A time-lapse map records boulder movement over time — some have chugged as far as 3.2 kilometers.
The mechanisms for these unusual events have been hypothesized and in some cases tested, but never proven.
If you nevermind the enclosures, giant IDE drives are cheap enough to use as backup for other giant IDE drives. So just ordered a Wiebetech FireWire Drive Dock (not the bus-powered variant). This will give me easy pop-in access to birdhouse backups, a way to finally back up the audio collection, keep a non-CD software backup all in one place, etc.
When people say MS Word is a standard, I ask them to tell me where the document format is published — standards are published by standards bodies, right? So now MS is moving to something vaguely resembling XML for Office documents, and we’re supposed to celebrate the end of format tyranny. But as Andrew Orlowski puts it, it’s mostly a shell game.
“Well formed” means that the document will parse without errors – it doesn’t mean that the document will make any sense.
That’s exactly what I’ve always loved about Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but that’s a separate topic. Meanwhile (as Sun’s Simon Phipps puts it):
“We continue to live in a world where all our know-how is locked into binary files in an unknown format. If our documents are our corporate memory, Microsoft still has us all condemned to Alzheimer’s.”
In other words, Microsoft’s eternal survival is assured by our need for our data to remain accessible. If in ten thousand years Redmond is destroyed by mutant porpoises, archaeologists may still need to reverse engineer the Word document format before they can begin to read history.
First encountered the ever-surprising accidental art of Jodi.org (don’t click that link) on antiweb almost a decade ago. Wired makes the point that Jodi and other net art sites are a sort of indulgence, or embrace of faulty programming.
…what sets online art apart from other technological endeavors is “not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it.”
Check who’s figured out how to stand up all on his own…
Spinning off recent solar conversations, I became interested in the question of whether energy-generating wind turbines actually contribute measurably to bird deaths. Solar Dude had told me straight up that there were only two confirmed bird kills at Altamont Pass. Meanwhile, commentators on the right have called wind turbines “Cuisinarts of the Sky” and worse. Looking for some actual data, came up with a fairly comprehensive research piece (PDF) at Home Power Magazine.
Summary: Solar Dude lied. There had been 183 bird deaths at Altamont at the time the article was written. But Altamont is apparently unique among wind farms. Most wind farms report ZERO bird deaths. The Altamont paradox is a black eye (and merits continued research), but it is not an argument against wind power in general. Now take this in:
… automobiles are responsible for some 57 million bird deaths every year … More than 97 million birds die by flying into plate glass every year … And about 1.5 million birds die from collisions with structures (such as towers, stacks, bridges, buildings) every year. … Viewed in this context, the 183 bird deaths in the Altamont Pass over a two year period of time is a small number indeed. It will take wind turbines in the Altamont Pass 500 to 1000 years to kill as many birds as the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. … Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
The AP story also reports that:
Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard. … Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S.
