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Goodbye Shipyard

Sad news: Berkeley’s unique mechanical artists’ collective The Shipyard is being closed down by the city, after six years of creative construction and innovative alternative energy production. At core is The Shipyard’s use of shipping containers as storage and construction bases, and the city’s perception of them as unsafe. Shipyard is moving to Oakland, so it’s not a total write-off, but Berkeley as an alternative cultural mecca will be worse for the loss.

Clock Building
Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid

Neverwas Haul, the ‘Yard’s three-story steam-powered Victorian House, will be on display at this year’s Maker Faire (Miles and I will be there!).

Shipyard rep Jim Mason’s letter to the City of Berkeley is reproduced on their site – the crew is scrambling to meet Berkeley’s demands (which appear to be impossible).

Covered at Laughing Squid and on the O’Reilly Radar.

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Screen Reader for the Sighted

O’Reilly blog entries [example] now feature a small “Listen” icon to the right of each article. Clicking it causes a widget to start reading the page to you in a very smooth/natural synthesized voice. This is all real-time — it’s not like they’re having someone read and record every article on the site. A company called ReadSpeaker provides the software that makes this possible.

The obvious application is for non-sighted users. But wait – blind users already have screen readers set up, or they wouldn’t be using the web to begin with. So who is this for? Sighted users who want to close their eyes for a few minutes? That seems like a very limited application.

While pondering this, it hit me: ReadSpeaker’s widget only works on specially enabled web sites. Imagine a FireFox plugin or browser extension that, when clicked, would run the text of any page through a voice synthesizer like the one O’Reilly is using, but pipe the output silently to MP3 in the background, then load the generated file into my podcast aggregator. All day long I could “tag for voice” various web pages that I wished I had the time to read. When I sync’d my iPod before leaving for work, I’d have all that missed content on it, ready for the road.

Yes, Young Edisons, this is a business opportunity. Run with it.

Update: MacDevCenter blogger David Battino sampled the audio output of an entry and mashed it up into a little song. Says MP3 output is on the way from ReadSpeaker.

Music: Sufjan Stevens :: Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder version)
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Those Fanatical Atheists

For the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner asks just what is supposed to be so radical about Dawkins’ and other popular atheists’ views. Is it what they’re saying, or how they say it?

But just what is the core of Dawkins’ radical message? Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so. That’s it. That’s the whole, crazy, fanatical package.

Why does fighting for sense and sensibility in full public view make someone a radical? Why do some claim that atheists are just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists?

This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims (“John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper”) and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important (“Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” being a notorious example).

Or is it, as I suspect, the mere fact that they’re saying it all? The strange truth is that questioning religion is still equated with the crossing of a cultural taboo — even (strangely) among agnostics.

We’ve had this discussion here before, but the “fundamental” difference bears repeating: Fundamentalists ask us to accept metaphysical claims without evidence; atheists ask us to question everything — even atheism.

Re-published with public comments on richarddawkins.net.

Music: Deep Rumba :: Si! No!
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Pale Virgins and Scallywags

Stuck Between Stations is starting to hit stride, though I haven’t written much for the site in the past couple of weeks – the technical and editorial workload is greater than expected. Some fun stuff planned though. Recently:

A Rehab Playlist for Amy Winehouse – Since soul diva Winehouse seems to think rehab would be too boring, Roger Moore offers a 12-step path to redemption. In song.

Water Walk With Me – Malcolm Humes on an amazing video find – John Cage performing on a 1960 TV game show.

Needle Drop: Pale Virgins and Scallywags – Benoit Baald and I try a blindfolded listening experiment similar to what Downbeat and other mags have done, except that we did it with iChat, and are able to provide the actual audio for readers. Process needs refining here, but could be a lot of fun.

Astral Days – Christian Crumlish at New Orleans JazzFest.

Bob the Builder – Roger on Bob Mould, who can now add the title “advice columnist” to the top of his punk rock resume.

Just Like Hypnotizing Chickens – Malcolm unearths the story behind the famous/cryptic Iggy Pop line.

Mild Horses – Roger on The Stones and a pack of less-than-fortunate Serbian horses.

Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Sex and Cigarettes
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Turtle Egg Defender

Santo Que es mas macho? Sea turtle egg, or Mexican wrestler? Millions of Mexican men believe eating sea turtle eggs will enhance their sexual potency – an unfortunate reality for endangered turtles like the Leatherbacks.

Wrestler supreme El Hijo del Santo (“Son of the Saint”) has been appearing in ads assuring his fans that he acquired his super wrestling powers with no help from turtle eggs. Now that’s a role model. Also in on the campaign is Mexican supermodel Dorismar.

The model appeared in print ads wearing a slinky black bikini alongside baby turtles scurrying across a beach. “My man doesn’t need sea turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make him more potent,” reads the ad’s caption.

Brilliant tactic. I’m trying to imagine how similar campaigns might appear in other countries where species are threatened in part due to demand for animal parts with alleged aphrodisiac powers. Which super-hunks or glamour-pusses are going to stick up for the rightful owners of Chinese tiger penises, or African rhino horns?

Music: Califone :: Pink & Sour
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The Smell of Cat Food

Miles, throwing himself an “eight-est” birthday party in the living room, blocked off the area with green masking tape strung between sofa and stereo as if it were a crime scene. After much crumbling of chocolate bunny crackers, unexpectedly announced: “No one is allowed at my birthday party who doesn’t like the smell of cat food.” With that, he led me by the hand into the kitchen, where I obliged by getting down on my hands and knees and taking a deep whiff from Plato’s bowl.

“Too rich-smelling for me,” I reported. “But I do like the smell of skunk, if it’s not too close.”

“Well, then you’re not allowed at my party. Only people who like the smell of cat food are.”

Five minutes later he relented when he needed help re-assembling a Playmobil outboard motor. Thankfully I still serve some purpose around here.

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Spectacular Failure

News that the HD-DVD encryption algorithm has been cracked and published all over tarnation is a two-pronged story.

First, that the AACS’ vigilance in preventing HD-DVDs from being copied and openly traded is on its way towards spectacular defeat even while the technology is still in its infancy, battling with Blu-Ray for supremacy.

Second, that this has occurred in the era of Web 2.0 and user-generated content. Digg.com’s battle to prevent users from posting stories containing the algorithm was also a spectacular failure.

Digg’s attempt to weed out posts containing the algorithm turned into an endless game of Whack-A-Mole, despite the fact that Digg faced legal action from the AACS if they didn’t get the stories removed – action that could get Digg shut down. But Digg users (or at least a subset of them) apparently cared more about getting the algorithm widely published than they did about Digg getting nailed. Eventually, Digg creators threw up their hands.

“You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be,” [Digg’s Kevin] Rose wrote … If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Looks like Google and WordPress.com may also be busting similar takedown moves.

When you bake user-generated content features into your site, you stand the risk of users posting content that could be threatening to your very existence. So which way do you go? Allow the public to speak through the megaphone you built just for them? Or protect yourself? I think this could set a very bad precedent for traditional publications just now warming to the power of UGC.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You
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Flickr Maps

Late to the party, just realized that Flickr provides an interface for “geotagging” photos — associating images or sets of images with points on the globe, overlaid on Yahoo! Maps. Here are a few of my sets in the context of their location on earth:

With more care and precision, you can get much more detailed, e.g. I could drag each of the Albany Bulb images to the exact spot on the bulb where the sculpture was found.

Music: Dave Van Ronk :: Death Letter Blues
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When White is Black

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes When White is Black (A History of Race in One American Family), a book site for new Author John A. Martin, Jr.:

When White is Black relates the real life experiences of a mixed race family, who, despite significant Caucasian ancestry, lived as Negroes, due to the uniquely North American One-drop rule.

The site was developed by Martin’s daughter, who was a student in an XHTML+CSS class I just finished teaching, utilizing the shiny new skills she had learned. Nice job Lex!

Music: Keola Beamer :: Kealia
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Volume, Volume, Volume

At IT Conversations interesting discussion (podcast) with Mikko Hypponen, director of anti-virus research for F-Secure. Hypponen threw out two sets of numbers that seem to collide, but don’t.

1) Spammers consider a response rate of 0.001% to be a “good” email spam campaign.

2) 40% of Americans (and 60% of Brazilians) report having made a purchase as a result of a spam sales pitch at least once.

How to square the difference? Volume, volume, volume.

I confess to having bought something from a spam once (and only once): A targeted pitch for a T-shirt bearing a big retro “Shacker” logo. It appeared that the spammer in that case had blasted their message to shacker@everydomain.com. No matter that “shacker” in the marketer’s context referred to college students who sleep in a different dorm room every night — I had to have it.

Music: Derek Bailey :: Gone With the Wind