"People like myself, who don't have good handwriting, are wondering if some anonymous person is going to think I spelled stuff wrong and not understand what I'm trying to say," said Lucas Rohm, a 16-year-old Country Day alum who is now a rising junior at Greenwich High School. "I definitely feel handwriting is something I need. Country Day just kind of brushed that out."I can sympathise. I'm a journalist, and I crank out quite a lot of text each month, but since I spend the majority of my time at my keyboard, my muscle memory for handwriting is simply shot. I take notes pretty frequently on notepads, but I almost never write entire stories by longhand. But every once in a while I'll have to work with pen-and-paper -- as, for example, when I'm on the road and can't use my laptop, but am on a deadline and need to start sketching out an article while on a bus. And as I work away, I wonder: Is there any difference between our cognitive styles when we write longhand, versus typing on a keyboard? Since I type about 70 words per minute, I can type practically as fast as I can compose sentences in my head. So does the much-slower pace of handwriting actually create a different way not just of writing, but of thinking? Does the buffer buildup between my brain and my arm affect things? What I mean is this: When I'm typing, because I can generate text so fast, I'll toss lots of stuff out on the page -- and then quickly edit or change it. But when I'm writing by hand, because it's so much slower I'll try to compose the sentence in my head before trying to write it. With a keyboard, I sort of offload some of my mental-sorting onto the page, where I can look at the words I've written, meditate on them, and manipulate them. With writing, that manipulation happens before the output. Clearly this would lead to some cognitive difference between the two modes ... but I can't quite figure out what it would be. Along these lines, it's worth pointing out that a 23-year-old student in Singapore seems to have set a new world record for speed-typing on a phone keypad. As the Globe and Mail reports:
Student Kimberly Yeo, 23, managed to type a fiendishly complicated 26-word message on her phone in 43.66 seconds, organizer Singapore Telecommunications said in a statement Monday. Her effort — in heats held at the weekend — could beat by a wide margin the existing text message record of 67 seconds, set last year by Briton James Trusler in Sydney, Australia, it said. [snip] Contestants had to type: "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."(Thanks to Techdirt Wireless for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chris EMAIL: customerservice@usedcartests.com IP: 24.8.219.147 URL: http://www.usedcartests.com DATE: 06/29/2004 09:33:55 PM YES!!! ...is the answer to your question (below): > So does the much-slower pace of handwriting actually create a different way not just of writing, but of thinking? Does the buffer buildup between my brain and my arm affect things? > As an opposite example, I occasionally use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate directly into the computer, and my "writing" style becomes totally different than a typed document. In this case, your mouth works MUCH faster than your brain, and MUCH MUCH faster than your fingers. The dictation is quite easy with these programs (IBM ViaVoice also) but the composition is quite hard! :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: rb EMAIL: IP: 207.144.135.2 URL: http://blogs.salon.com/0003974/ DATE: 06/29/2004 09:44:29 PM this is fascinating. the structure and rhythms and even the look of language are changing because of technology. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://clive@collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/29/2004 11:09:13 PM Yes, it's really fascinating! And yes, Chris, I tried Dragon systems a couple of years ago, and noticed the same thing. Composing sentences by speaking them is a whole other cognitive ball of wax. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tom EMAIL: Tom_Good1@excite.com IP: 24.20.52.139 URL: http://ironmonkey.blogspot.com DATE: 06/30/2004 12:38:09 AM Just about the only time I write with a pen any more is to sign checks. The rest is all computer keyboard, Palm OS Graffiti, and Clie and Treo thumb keyboard. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Crazy Carl EMAIL: crazy_carl_@hotmail.com IP: 66.166.116.121 URL: DATE: 06/30/2004 01:17:42 PM I was curious whether T9 predictive text input was allowed in the competition... Certain delays are inherent when using alpha-input, such as hitting the number 2 three times to select the letter 'c'. Now in typing 'Cheese' I must press 2,2,2,4,4,3,3, then pause a moment to advance the cursor, then 3,3,7,7,7,7,3,3. That's 15 keystrokes and an obligatory 1 second pause in the middle. On the other hand, with T9 input I can press 2,4,3,3,7,3 and it automatically determines that I must mean 'cheese' because that's the only word in its dictionary that can be reached with that sequence of numbers. In the whole typing test, which is curiously exactly 160 characters, only 'piranhas', 'Serrasalmus' and 'Pygocentrus' are absent from the T9 dictionary. They may be manually entered, but assuming they aren't then that's 17+28+25=70 keystrokes for those 3 words and a remaining 130 keystrokes for the rest of the message. Over half the message is contained within those 3 words. No point, just idle observation. This test is rather subjective to the layout of the handset used, the capacity of its text-entry features, T9 or otherwise among other things. I wonder what's really being proven... the increasing aptitude of a person to enter text on a phone, or the improvement of text-entry and ergonomics on those phones? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: ESB EMAIL: esb@sample.com IP: 195.137.88.18 URL: DATE: 07/11/2004 05:41:13 AM With my PDA I find it much easier to take part in a discussion while making notes in Graffiti-style "handwriting" even though using the keyboard is faster -- typing on the tiny keyboard noticeably takes up more of the available brain power when you need to multitask. This seems to be an effect of the tiny keyboard as I am pretty slick with a full-size one. [And, yes, the competition described did involve typing without predictive text assistance.] ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 07/11/2004 10:30:49 PM Ah, interesting. After Carl did that neat analysis of the multi-tap aspects of those words, I was wondering. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: payday loans EMAIL: afdafjadf@hotmail.com IP: 205.173.135.114 URL: http://65.217.108.182/loans.php DATE: 07/16/2004 03:53:45 AM I don't really think your thoughts are right. Maybe you need a loan? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Lucas EMAIL: IP: 217.34.190.146 URL: http://www.txt2nite.com DATE: 02/25/2005 07:19:35 AM Before that stupid person made that post, this was a serious conversation about the text message language. I actually wrote part of my dissertation on this point. The title is… ‘is texting making us all illiterate?’. I’ve posted this here thanks ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aeon17x EMAIL: IP: 203.76.247.136 URL: DATE: 02/26/2005 02:24:46 AM Interesting. I never thought of that before. And I think it also affects the way we memorize. For example, when I'm trying to get a poem stuck in my head, I write it down on paper, not on my cellphone. I find it more difficult to memorize if it's on the latter medium. ----- PING: TITLE: online poker URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ IP: 211.250.76.162 BLOG NAME: online poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:16:15 AM Please check out the sites dedicated to party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Grow your own antenna STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/29/2004 12:45:22 AM ----- BODY:
Dig it: NASA has been using evolutionary algorithms to evolve superior antenna designs. As their web site puts it:
Our approach has been to encode antenna structure into a genome and use a GA to evolve an antenna that best meets the desired antenna performance as defined in a fitness function. Antenna evaluations are performed by first converting a genotype into an antenna structure, and then simulating this antenna using the Numerical Electromagnetic Code (NEC) antenna simulation software.That tiny, weird-looking antenna above? It uses less power than previous, similar designs, yet allows for a broader array of angles at which it can receive data. (Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: party poker EMAIL: bushmills2177@mail.com IP: 202.113.49.22 URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ DATE: 03/18/2005 03:28:38 AM In your free time, check some information in the field of party poker party poker http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.vpshs.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.vpshs.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.vpshs.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.vpshs.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.vpshs.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.fearcrow.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.fearcrow.com/ poker rules poker rules http://poker-rules.fearcrow.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.fearcrow.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.fearcrow.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.fearcrow.com/ party poker party poker http://party-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.fearcrow.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.fearcrow.com/ wsop wsop http://wsop.fearcrow.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.vpshs.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.vpshs.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.vpshs.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.vpshs.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.vpshs.com/ poker rules poker rules http://poker-rules.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.vpshs.com/ ... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: The corpse plant is blooming! STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/29/2004 12:19:53 AM ----- BODY:
The corpse flower is about to bloom! I'm very excited. The corpse flower, in case you don't know, is nature's single-most revolting plant. When one of these three-foot-tall beauties opens up, it gives off the scent of rotting flesh. The University of Connecticut has managed to cultivate one, the first example in the northeast in 60 years, and any day now it's due to open up. If you're lucky enough to be nearby when it opens, here's how University officials describe the smell:
The corpse flower is specifically adapted to attract carrion flies and beetles, which ferry pollen between plants so they can produce seed, a job accomplished for more ordinary plants by bees or butterflies. The colors of the corpse flower — a sickly yellow and blackish purple -- imitate a pot roast that sat out in the sun for a week. The fragrance is universally described as being powerful and revolting, with elements of old socks, dead fish and rotten vegetables. As if that isn't weird enough, the corpse flower is actually warm-blooded, heating itself up at the height of flowering, probably to help spread its putrid odor. All of this is totally irresistible to flies, who must think they've chanced upon a dead elephant, and are tricked into pollinating the plant.Kind of like Enron investors. At any rate, there's a web cam on that page I linked to above, so you can check in periodically to watch U of Connecticut botanists retching uncontrollably. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chris EMAIL: cmf107REMOVE@hotmail.com IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 12:41:48 PM the corpse flower- believe it or not, the 'official flower' of the bronx for many many years. adaption or adoption? go red sox! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/29/2004 01:02:57 PM Is that actually true? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chris EMAIL: cmf107REMOVE@homail.com IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 02:04:24 PM absolutely true- first cultivated in north america in 1937, in the BX. the sight of the huge phallic bloom inspired the borough president to claim it as the bronx's own. amorphophallus titanum in the hizz-ouse! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tara Abbey EMAIL: ladytnoble@earthlink.net IP: 4.155.63.90 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 04:17:16 PM This is probably not the best way to cultivate (harhar!) interest in all things botanical. Note to visitors: please eat lunch AFTERWARDS! Tara Abbey, horticulturist ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chris EMAIL: cmf107REMOVE@hotmail.com IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 05:11:17 PM interesting article about warm-blooded and often stinky plants here: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20031213/bob9.asp ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Uncle Rob EMAIL: IP: 66.185.85.81 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 10:33:21 PM Completely foul!!! Your most disgusting posting to date.... Keep up the good work Clive. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/29/2004 11:10:13 PM I exist to serve! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: ditto EMAIL: IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/30/2004 12:54:35 PM servio ergo sum! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeni Moore EMAIL: myssage@aol.com IP: 149.174.164.20 URL: DATE: 07/05/2004 11:30:30 AM HI,I'm Jeni from Mystic. I need to know what campus at UConn this is located at.. Thanks, Jeni Moore ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Christina EMAIL: Ayla1188@aol.com IP: 137.99.156.185 URL: DATE: 07/07/2004 08:52:54 PM It has already semi bloomed and has began to whither... too bad. I didn't get to fully bloom. I work on the storrs campus and got to see it at its best. Hurry up if you want to catch a glimps of the plant it has already began to close but the full plant will die with in the next few days. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: I, robot STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/28/2004 11:49:03 PM ----- BODY:
Two years ago, when I headed off to a science-journalism fellowship in Boston, I realized that I'd spend nine months in a long-distance relationship with my New York girlfriend. Being long-distance sucks, so I was trying to figure out ways to simulate being together as much as possible. We already IMed a lot, so we had a lot of virtual "presence." But I wanted more than that. I wanted telepresence. I wanted a robot avatar that I could command from afar, and use as my proxy in her physical space. You might well ask why in hell this chick goes out with me, but that would clearly be a much longer post. Anyway, the point is, I originally hoped to get my hands on a first-generation iRobot. You probably know iRobot as the company that makes the impossibly cute Roomba. But iRobot's original product was a full-on telepresence 'bot. You could leave it in whatever location you wanted, and when you needed to virtually visit, you'd use a web interface to remotely "robot in" and control the avatar -- seeing what it saw through its webcam eyes, and speaking to people in the room using its speakers. It was just beyond righteous. Unfortunately, it was also somewhere north of $3,000 and the company had sadly stopped making them. So I gave up on my dreams of creepy stalker robotic telepresence. Until I logged on today and got wind of the Pekee robot by Wany Robotics. It's even more expensive -- $10,000 -- but seems nicely customizable for remote control. As the manufacturer's web site points out:
The Pekee robot is designed around a completely open architecture that provides total flexibility for your robotic application testing and development. Its built-in infrared, temperature, and light sensors, odometers, shock detector, and gyrometers ensure that you can monitor critical elements in the robot’s environment at all times. The Pekee platform lets you pursue your own projects at all levels, from trajectory planning to real-time programming in consumer prodcuts such as robotic vacuum cleaners and interactive toys.(Thanks to Sensory Impact for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mark Eichin EMAIL: eichin@thok.org IP: 4.36.43.88 URL: http://www.thok.org/bloggery/ DATE: 06/29/2004 03:55:02 AM And just like a Dalek - completely stymied by stairs :-) I've actually considered convincing work that we need a telepresence robot to poke at the hardware in the machine room, but manipulators that can properly seat keyboard cables, even in racked machines, probably aren't off-the-shelf items yet... and it's cheaper to have one of the locals show up with a cellphone :-) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/29/2004 10:20:45 AM Yes, you always had to wonder how the Daleks achieved intergalactic domination when they couldn't handle stairs. Or, like, push buttons and shit. Mark, you've got a Friendly Robotics robot lawnmower! What's it like? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mark Eichin EMAIL: eichin@thok.org IP: 66.92.95.189 URL: http://www.thok.org/bloggery/ DATE: 06/30/2004 02:55:49 PM It's a lot of fun to watch (the local cats stalk it sometimes too :-) It is a little finicky in that it can't handle steep slopes (so there are some places I need to move the perimeter wire to get it to stop getting stuck.) Also, perimeter wire maintenance is sometimes an issue. On top of that, the older ones (like I have) don't know how to find "home" - they just run for a while, and stop (you then use the nintendo-ish controller to "drive" it back to the garage.) Supposedly the new RL10000 model fixes that; one of these days I want to figure out the protocol between the controller and mower and add an "extra brain" to it, both to handle "driving home" and for speciallized jobs (like mowing narrow areas that it won't find randomly, or particular specialized trim jobs.) I haven't actually put any time into the hacking, though. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: amir sakhaei EMAIL: amir_64s@yahoo.com IP: 217.219.4.3 URL: http://iran DATE: 08/14/2004 10:40:47 PM i have a question how can i make a infrared sensor for detect te wall from distance of 2 cm?? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Penis Enlargement Pills EMAIL: fasldf@hjasldf.com IP: 67.173.145.239 URL: http://www.penisincreaser.com DATE: 02/02/2005 09:37:03 PM Enhance Penis Size Increase Penis Size Erection Pill Male Enhancement Pill Review ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: online poker EMAIL: azaddin6445@home.com IP: 200.189.66.58 URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ DATE: 03/18/2005 03:20:53 AM Please check the pages in the field of party poker party poker http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.vpshs.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.vpshs.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.vpshs.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.vpshs.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.vpshs.com/ wsop wsop http://wsop.vpshs.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.fearcrow.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.fearcrow.com/ poker rules poker rules http://poker-rules.fearcrow.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.fearcrow.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.fearcrow.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.fearcrow.com/ party poker party poker http://party-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.fearcrow.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.fearcrow.com/ wsop wsop http://wsop.fearcrow.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.vpshs.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.vpshs.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.vpshs.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.vpshs.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.vpshs.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.vpshs.com/ - Tons of interesdting stuff!!! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: My Slate column on computer illiteracy STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/28/2004 11:18:45 PM ----- BODY: A couple of days ago, one of the blog readers here criticized me for my position that computer illiteracy is a problem. This might have been a bit mysterious -- the poster wrote this in my blog entry about a virtual bugle. But what the poster was responding to was a piece I wrote for Slate last week but have yet to blog. So, henceforth, here's a self-aggrandizing link to my article of last week, which surveys the world of malware -- adware, spyware, and viruses -- and proclaims the dismal truth: Some of the problem is rooted in our massive cultural ignorance of how computers work. At the center of my argument is this point:
Is it fair to expect computer users to be knowledgeable about the innards of software? We use plenty of other complex, dangerous tools—such as cars—without needing to understand the fine points of their internal mechanics. But our computer ignorance is, even by those standards, horrific. When a computer user doesn't know that an ".exe" file is a program (and possibly a virus), it's like not knowing that cars are fueled by gas and that gas is explosive. It's basic stuff.----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: woot EMAIL: omgwoot@yahoo.com IP: 65.105.213.99 URL: DATE: 06/30/2004 02:39:04 PM It is impossible for any user to know exactly what the software on their computer is doing. You stated that reverse engineering software is illegal (it's also very hard to do). Most software running on your computer is software you would have to reverse-engineer to figure out. As in, you can't possibly know everything it is doing. Should we expect users to probe in the depths of their computer to find malware? No. This is not only a problem of computer illiteracy but of simple impossibility. Computers are far too complex to go poking and prodding around, and if adware really wanted to hide itself any user, even the most experienced wouldn't be able to find it. Instead focus on prevention of adware getting on the computer in the first place. Have a well documented site that tells users what programs install what adware, what they can do to get rid of or probe for adware (Ad-Aware type programs) and what they should and shouldn't do when browsing the internet (never EVER click YES to one of those popup dialogues that ask about installing things) By having a single source for adware information, when people install new software they can check if it has adware in it right on the site (instead of scanning through a purposely made unintelligably long user agreement) and can know how to get rid of the adware even before they install the program. So the problem is not with computer ignorance on a technical level, but lack of information and documentation on adware, including what installs it and its removal. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: RobG EMAIL: robertg@tec.com IP: 12.153.200.244 URL: DATE: 06/30/2004 05:07:42 PM You probably could have saved yourself a lot of time by downloading Spybot S&D their web site is: security.kolla.de/ They offer a registry analyzer that is free along with the spy removal software that is free. Notice that they are located in Germany which as I understand it has favorable laws relating to this issue. Most of the software makers in the US that have developed spyware removal software are hamstrung by our legal system due to the user accepting the agreement to install the software/spyware on their computer (of course this is only if the spyware maker sues). ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cap'n Marrrrk EMAIL: platts42@hotmail.com IP: 216.23.5.162 URL: DATE: 07/02/2004 03:27:51 PM Unless you are a mac user then you don't know. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: EMAIL: IP: 81.100.89.17 URL: DATE: 07/18/2004 05:59:05 PM http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php Would've saved you loads of time... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 64.146.214.76 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 07/19/2004 11:33:07 AM Excellent! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joe bob EMAIL: IP: 205.204.242.22 URL: DATE: 09/21/2004 03:09:15 PM I hate macs. Macs must die! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joe Bob EMAIL: IP: 205.204.242.22 URL: DATE: 09/21/2004 03:10:32 PM I hate Macs! 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Behold the minibike. I've seen one or two people riding these things around Brooklyn, but apparently they've really taken off in San Francisco. The New York Times had a terrific piece in the weekend Fashion & Style section about these street-illegal teensy rides, which included this observation:
According to riders, part of the thrill is the bikes' proximity to the ground; they are only 16 to 18 inches tall. "You're inches from disaster," said a San Francisco rider named Dan, 22. "It's a spectacularly precarious, awesome feeling." Yet many street riders don't even wear helmets. In San Francisco, a typical rider zipping at a fast clip along Page Street last weekend wore shorts, a T-shirt, a backward ball cap and flip-flops.----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jason EMAIL: jason@gravitymonkey.com IP: 209.73.221.2 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 12:45:45 PM The perfect bike for the new mutant super babies. Be careful who flip off at the playground... ----- PING: TITLE: online poker URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ IP: 202.113.49.22 BLOG NAME: online poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:37:17 AM You may find it interesting to check some helpful info in the field of party poker online poker texas hold em ----- PING: TITLE: online poker URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ IP: 202.113.49.22 BLOG NAME: online poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:37:20 AM You may find it interesting to check some helpful info in the field of party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: DOESN'T ANYONE SPEAK ENGLISH AROUND HERE?? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/23/2004 03:33:18 PM ----- BODY:
Ever wonder just how multilingual your state is? The Modern Language Association has an incredibly cool online application that lets you pick a state, pick a language, and map out the density of speakers in the region. Above is a map showing Spanish speakers in New York. (Thanks to MemeFirst for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: blackjack EMAIL: bob@y5519o.com IP: 217.63.140.184 URL: http://www.blackjack-p.com DATE: 08/23/2004 03:22:04 AM 5519 check out the hot blackjack at http://www.blackjack-p.com here you can play blackjack online all you want! So everyone ~SMURKLE~ ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: party poker EMAIL: absinth462@mail.ru IP: 195.229.241.181 URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ DATE: 03/18/2005 03:33:46 AM You may find it interesting to visit some information dedicated to party poker party poker http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.vpshs.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.vpshs.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.vpshs.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.vpshs.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.vpshs.com/ wsop wsop http://wsop.vpshs.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.fearcrow.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.fearcrow.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.fearcrow.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.fearcrow.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.fearcrow.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.fearcrow.com/ party poker party poker http://party-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.fearcrow.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.fearcrow.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.vpshs.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.vpshs.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.vpshs.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.vpshs.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.vpshs.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.vpshs.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.vpshs.com/ ... Thanks!!! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Is music like language? STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/23/2004 03:29:42 PM ----- BODY: I've written before about Zipf's Law -- a concept invented in the early 20th century by the social scientist George Zipf. Zipf counted word occurence in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and found that while English has about 26,000 common words, over 90% of everything we say or write uses merely 2,000 of them. So if you plotted the most-common to least-common words on a graph, you'd see the first few spiking way up high, then quickly dropping down to an almost flat line as you get past the 2,000 most common words. A Zipf Curve looks like a ski slope. Later on, the economist and sociologist Herbert Simon offered an explanation for this. He pointed out that words gain meaning the more they're used -- which gives the first few words in a text "first mover" advantage, since they're helping to define the topic under discussion. For example, I'm more likely to re-use words "occurence" or "meaning" in the rest of this article, while probably never using the word "lawnmower." That's part of how a text builds meaning: By introducing a few key words and repeating them, over and over again. (On a broader scale, that's probably how language evolved too, and possibly why the Zipf Curve exists.) Anyway, a physicist recently decided to see if music behaves the same way. Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute studied the occurrence of notes in several pieces of music. Presto: They, too, had Zipf-Curve distributions. What's really interesting is when he compared the distributions in "pleasant" music -- like Mozart -- versus atonal, "difficult" music, like Schoenberg. As Nature reports:
The pieces by Bach, Mozart and Debussy all produced a relatively steep graph, suggesting a strong relationship between rank and frequency, and therefore a high level of meaningful context. In other words, if you have heard part of the piece, it is relatively easy to predict what kind of thing will come next. Zanette adds that jazz pieces he tested showed a similar pattern. But the Schoenberg piece, one of the first truly atonal works, had a much flatter graph. This means that the piece does not have a set vocabulary of commonly used words that keep appearing. Instead, the size of the vocabulary increases at about the same rate as the length of the piece; new "words" are constantly introduced, while earlier ones are seldom repeated.----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cultureraven EMAIL: epweissengruber@hotmail.com IP: 216.208.80.139 URL: http://cultureraven.net DATE: 06/24/2004 07:07:03 AM Clive: you must read "The Rules of the Game" by Eigen and Winkler. In 1975 2 German scientists sought to survey the relevance of Game Theory -- especially the idea of decision-making automata -- to EVERYTHING. This includes language and evolution and music. It is full of nuggets like this: In the 18th century some composers wrote down "create your own sonata" algorithms that involved dice and decision trees. Moreover, each chapter concludes with a game that adapts the principles outlined in the preceding pages. In any case, they try to demonstrate that even in Schonberg's way-outiest compositions there are perceptible patterns, changes and resolutions. But let's think about this in the context of your article: The majority of persons appreciate a piece of communication that establishes what it is about right away (those "first-mover" words you talked about) and then returns to and expands upon those initial terms. However, some people appreciate more demanding rules in the games they play, or have trained themselves to handle a larger dataset, or to assimilate data over a longer period -- say a 2-minute long passage that directly correlates changes in pitch to a change in volume volume -- than the 8-note phrase that is the most common unit of musical discourse and perception. The trouble is, the development of this ability has one friggin' steep learning curve. This is why I follow Deluze and Guattari and think of experimental art as minority literature rather than avant-garde. It's cool that you are doing stuff that no-one has done before -- and stuff that only a tiny fraction of the population will appreciate. But please, don't kid yourself into thinking that you are ushering some bright new future that will sweep away all that has gone before, or that promises a new beginning for everything. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Erikw EMAIL: epweissengruber@hotmail.com IP: 216.208.80.139 URL: http://www.cultureraven.net DATE: 06/24/2004 07:17:05 AM On the Jazz thing Jazz is a conversation. What satisfying conversation heads off on new topics and introduces new terms every 2 seconds? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jason EMAIL: jason@gravitymonkey.com IP: 209.73.221.2 URL: DATE: 06/24/2004 10:58:06 AM The study makes a pretty simple point, which is that atonal pieces lack pitch redundancy which makes it harder to "appreciate". Of course, that was the point, especially at that stage for Schoenberg's work, to push beyond the boundaries of tonality (which you could view as a fixed or limited pitch set). While these works lack the formality of the 12-tone system to come, it's still fully chromatic in a way that others (Wagner, Strauss, etc.) did before him, albeit still returning to the tonic for structural meaning. I do recall analytical discussions of this era of his work in grad school -- you can rationalize a lot of this era of Schoenberg in d-minor...if you really try. For me (and I was never a theorist, nor would I claim to be one if you tied me to chair and whipped me...nuh-uh) I don't think the pitches are the central component of "appreciation" or what makes "difficult" music "difficult". It ain't all about the pitches, not to ears like ours that have grown up with a wealth of recorded music and electronic sounds. There are tons of work prior to Schoenberg, and popular music since, that roil about the entire chromatic -- think of the most angst ridden scenes in romantic opera, think about most advanced jazz, even the wildest of sample/mixed hip-hop -- but since they still return, structurally, to a chord or key that is based upon the standard diatonic, or a regular beat, people are better able to "appreciate" it. Something like "Yeah, ok, that was a wild break, but now I know where we are (cue drum solo)." The works of Schoenberg's pupil, Anton Webern, takes it to the next level, also disrupting any sense of rhythm and conventional structural periodicity -- and leaving a listener without a leg to stand on, if she is approaching the work within the scope of Western/Classical music. Personally, I love the challenge of having to figure it out myself. And, to the sense of music "as conversation". Of course, music can serve lots of purposes, and we're most used to it functioning in a narrative manner (that's a Western bias, of course. I simply can't figure out the Japanese aesthetic, for example, in movies or children's books). Cage questioned that in a meaningful way, but left little room to build on. Again, it's simply what you want to get out of it -- talking to a crazy person (who changes topics every 2 seconds) can be terrifying and fascinating. At least as "art", you're a safe consumer of said craziness. As much as I enjoy that chaos, I wouldn't want it driving the cab. Or as a spouse! Damn, Clive, can't I change this timestamp so it won't seem like I've just blown off a morning of work? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiodetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/24/2004 11:17:50 AM Ahahahah! I think you're stuck with the Eastern Standard Time stamp. I'll forward that post to your boss right now. Killer points all around. Erik, indeed, I gotta read that stuff -- and the distinction between an avant-garde and experimentation is both completely apt and badly misunderstood by practitioners of the art, as well as their critics. Jason, yes, I think the return-to-center moment is most important in giving a work of music a sense of human-like shape; you can do all manner of weird stuff so long as you resolve to the 1st of the scale in which you began. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Scott Fahlman EMAIL: moham4med@yahoo.com IP: 63.215.199.40 URL: http://www.geocities.com/moham4med/ DATE: 06/25/2004 08:13:50 AM If you are always pressing the envelope, you will suffer many paper cuts. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chuck EMAIL: ragpicker8@hotmail.com IP: 209.180.219.26 URL: DATE: 06/26/2004 04:28:52 PM Clive Part of the problem with the web and why people are ignorant of its workings is YOU and your kind) and your attitude. Why the hell should I HAVE to learn more about the working of the web or even computers to be ablr to use what I own. Yes if I bought the damn thing and its software , why the hell should some asshole geek like your self be able to write into the contract that he "will monitor your surfing, or even control your computer remotely...". If I take my car into the mechanic does then have the right to place into his contract that he can monitor where I drive and even control my car remotely (with electronics today both are technically possible)? So according to YOUR esteemed logic, I must learn EVERYTHING there is to know about cars, engines, electronics, transmissions, etc. And you should learn everything there is to know about how women think because one of them may take you for a ride through court? Oh, and you should also learn to know everything there is to know about thelaw too. Great logic geek. Time will come that people like myself get fed up enough with the viruses, spyware peopel that we will start supporting legislation with incredible controls on your guys. SO much for freedom. What will it take for folks like you to get to "know even a little bit" about what the rest of the world out here really wants in computers. You don't read the license agreement how can you even "think that real people would"? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chuckisaravingidiot EMAIL: ragpicker8@hotmail.com IP: 141.150.100.11 URL: DATE: 06/27/2004 05:11:43 PM what? what the hell are you talking about chuck? point well taken. you do have every right in the world to choose to be as ignorant as you wish. Godspeed. Leave Clive alone. Go back to reading Rod and Reel Illustrated. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chris EMAIL: cmf107REMOVE@hotmail.com IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/29/2004 01:16:52 AM reminds me of other smarties who tried to formulate esthetic theories in terms of mathematical relationships. like george david birkhoff, who ambitiously applied power laws to theories of music, art, etc. he calculated aesthetic enjoyment as the quotient of complexity and order. a kind of orderliness coefficient. max bense took birkhoff as a departure point and applied information theory to derive an 'information esthetics'. for him, the esthetic experience remained an experience of orderliness, the perception of regularities within a context, as one moves from initial perceived input/detail to a larger conceptual pattern. so the enjoyment of an esthetic experience comes in perceiving a balance between those expected formal regularities, and the stimulating novelty of deviations from the formal pattern. so the best music, in the parlance of signal theory and power laws, rests somewhere between brown noise (overly predictable) and white noise (too irregular or random) -more in the 'pink noise' range. just the right balance of expectation and surprise. see: adlibs, happy accidents, and charlie mingus improv. as it turns out, the allman brothers 'whipping post' live at fillmore east, ranks highest in birkhoff's calculations for 'esthetic effect', with a coefficient of 0.92! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/29/2004 10:15:42 AM Okay, that is totally wild about "Whipping Post". 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For years, the bugle song "Taps" has been the song played over a soldier's funeral; its instantly-recognizable tune is the psychological soundtrack to North American postwar grief. But apparently, as the years have gone by, military buglers have become something of a dying breed. It's now quite hard to find one for a military funeral. So the Pentagon developed a digital bugle -- a small speaker that is placed inside a bugle horn, and which plays a digitally recorded version of "Taps", while the faux-bugler holds it to his or her lips and fakes it. It's been used in half of the 38,000 military funerals held so far this year. As CNN reports:
"It's the closest and next best thing to the real thing," said Mark Maynard, director of the Riverside National Cemetery in California, where a few of the Iraq casualties have been buried. "A bone of contention with veterans organizations and families was just the sound and tackiness of the military carrying boom boxes to play taps."What's interesting here is people's natural distaste for simulation, when it comes to something as sensually rich -- and emotionally significant -- as a bugle performance of Taps. A boom box seems inescapably tacky; a real bugle emitting the sound of taps doesn't, even if the person isn't really playing. According to the CNN piece, the families sometimes don't know the alt.bugle isn't the real thing. That means there's a sort of emotional Turing Test going on here: When the fake bugler puts the fake bugle to his lips, what precisely alerts the family to the presence of a simulation? His cheeks aren't blowing in synch with the music? The tonality of the song isn't quite right? Does the recording sometimes seem too "perfect," and devoid of the tiny flaws that make the real seem real? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Uncle Rob EMAIL: IP: 66.185.85.81 URL: DATE: 06/22/2004 11:40:50 PM I have blown various forms of bugles and trumpets over the years.....single valve, 2-valve, trumpets.....the single valve can be a little challenging but the bugle is bloody hellacious....I don't think I know anyone who can play it well.... With all it's might, you'd think the US military could train a few more Air Cav guys to learn to blow the little suckers ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mario EMAIL: IP: 62.241.2.2 URL: DATE: 06/23/2004 03:33:21 AM Funny enough I think during WWII they had real people playing the real thing. Maybe they suked at it, but still it's preferable. Soon enough we will have robo-priests and such... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/23/2004 11:33:14 PM Ahahhaha! Yeah, Rob, I know what you mean. Back when I was playing French horn, I tried out a bugle once. Damn they're hard. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Uncle Rob EMAIL: IP: 66.185.85.81 URL: DATE: 06/24/2004 11:03:30 PM I could probably get better tone out of a duck or moose caller than a bugle... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Keep the aspidistra flying STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/22/2004 12:48:46 PM ----- BODY: There's a great story in today's New York Times science section about the different types of malevolent bosses. It quotes several psychologists who've recently been studying the ways in which nasty, abusive, mean-spirited tyrants affect a workplace. Among their most surprising finding is this:
The mystifying thing about this pattern is that it does not appear to undercut productivity. Workers may loathe a bullying boss and hate going to work each morning, but they still perform. Researchers find little relationship between people's attitudes toward their jobs and their productivity, as measured by the output and even the quality of their work. Even in the most hostile work environment, conscientious people keep doing the work they are paid for.The funny thing is, this shouldn't be surprising. Management studies have found -- time and time again -- that low morale does not correlate to low productivity. A workplace can be a total sinkhole of misery, presided over by the most tiny-minded suburban Napoleons that god ever suffered to crawl across the face of the Earth ... yet the employees can still be extremely productive. What's even more interesting is that people frequently refuse to believe this, even when confronted by empirical evidence. I've gotten in huge arguments with friends of mine about it. They insist that the only way a company can be productive is if its employees are happy; it offends them, on some moral level, to suggest that happiness and morale are irrelevant in a company. I think it's because, culturally, it's alarming to realize how little the marketplace cares about your well-being at work. The free market may be many excellent things -- efficient, productive, and a producer of fascinatingly unpredictable bits of distributed intelligence -- but it absolutely is not an instrument of justice, fairness, or even happiness. That ought to be obvious. But we've been lovebombed for years by political economists who equate the free market with democracy and human rights, when the two are rather different fields: Not necessarily opposed, but sometimes -- even frequently -- in conflict. The other reason people assume unhappy workers will be unproductive is that we make a logical mistake inferring from the opposite. We see situations in which a) the employees are happy, and b) the company is productive, and think one necessarily follows from the other. Sure, a productive company can be the result of happy employees. But it doesn't have to be. The company would probably do just as well if the worker bees hated their bosses and most of their jobs. I'm not arguing that employers should be disdainful of their workers' happiness. On the contrary, I think we have a moral imperative to treat people decently. It's just that the marketplace will almost never punish a boss for being a complete dick. And hey, so long as I'm pontificating here, I'll go even further: I think the entire social role of happiness is poorly understood. In last week's New York Times Magazine, Jim Holt reported on an intriguing new psychological study that upends some of our most cherished beliefs about happiness:
Researchers found that angry people are more likely to make negative evaluations when judging members of other social groups. That, perhaps, will not come as a great surprise. But the same seems to be true of happy people, the researchers noted. The happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments -- like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because he's a member of a minority group. Why? Nobody's sure. One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ''everything is fine'' attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones.----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mario EMAIL: IP: 62.241.2.2 URL: DATE: 06/23/2004 03:37:30 AM "The free market may be many excellent things -- (...) -- but it absolutely is not an instrument of justice, fairness, or even happiness." Heretic! Heretic! ;-D ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: JohnK EMAIL: IP: 203.217.25.86 URL: http://www.fibrowalls.com DATE: 06/24/2004 11:47:34 AM Wow. Sounds *exactly* like my boss, down to the last detail! Now looking for an anonymous emailer to send that article to management... :) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Franco EMAIL: fbaseggio@hotmail.com IP: 66.108.104.142 URL: DATE: 06/24/2004 08:03:58 PM Anyone know if these studies take into account turnover? I could believe that any given employee is just as productive regardless of the personality of their boss, but a jerk boss may incur more turnover costs. I could easily imagine constructing a study that would hide this cost. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/24/2004 10:59:50 PM Yeah, it certainly would seem that a jerk boss would drive people away. I don't know if they've controlled for that in any of these studies ... be interesting to find out. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Bob Potter EMAIL: bepotter1@mindspring.com IP: 207.69.137.203 URL: DATE: 06/25/2004 06:58:13 PM What studies are you referencing for the statement about "management studies" and "empirical evidence." I am doing a dissertaion on leadership and change and one of my contentions is similar to the point talked about here. I contend that operating in crisis mode can lead to high productivity but will result in employee burnout. I would like to look at the studies you are referencing to see if turnover is addressed, as you suggest would be interesting to find out. Thank you, Bob Potter ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeff EMAIL: jeff@osoft.us IP: 63.243.53.10 URL: http://jrhicks.net DATE: 06/26/2004 02:13:37 PM Disturbing study indeed, nothing I have read says that personality has much to do with effective management - but I would suspect that an a-hole manager would be "so in the box" that they wouldn't know effective management principles. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: EMAIL: IP: 207.91.142.166 URL: DATE: 06/27/2004 07:13:20 PM Yes yes - let's see the original work and find out how they are measuring productivity. Turnover is expensive - and what level of work are we looking at? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jade bilder EMAIL: ralf90@web.de IP: 217.255.85.160 URL: http://jade.bilder-i.de DATE: 07/18/2004 02:03:57 PM bilder
I have no pithy observations on this one, other than to say -- god in heaven that's a big truck. How big? It's 224 tons, 24 feet high, and can carry 624 tons. For a sense of scale, note the size of the construction worker standing next to it. It costs $3 million and worldwide demand is only 75 a year. The New Scientist interviewed Francis Bartley, team leader for the company that makes this thing:
What's it like to drive? It's like driving a house. After you've been around a lot, it's not as exciting as if suddenly someone said: "Would you like to drive one?" You'd go crazy in that case! It's not hard to drive, basically like driving an automatic shift car. Isn't it so big you could roll over a car without noticing? That's basically true. The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn't feel a thing.(Thanks to the J-Walk Blog for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: june EMAIL: junemiller31@hotmail.com IP: 206.40.41.253 URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/pinstripe_bindi DATE: 06/21/2004 02:57:18 PM Great, I'm sure I can look forward to seeing those lumbering down the freeway and taking up 19 parking slots at once any day now. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: marc EMAIL: marc@squarescubed.com IP: 63.250.107.162 URL: http://www.squarescubed.com DATE: 06/21/2004 03:41:13 PM Well, you know, they ride a little higher so it's easier to see the traffic around you, and, well, they just make see feel safer, especially with the children and everything... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/21/2004 03:47:17 PM Ahahahaha! Incidentally, I drove an SUV for the first time last week. While I can certainly see the allure -- sheerly on "fun" levels -- I realized a couple of things: i) They'd be *really* easy to roll over if you didn't know what you were doing. And I'd suspect that a *lot* of people driving them don't know what they're doing. ii) They're really not that big inside. A minivan *easily* has as much space as an SUV, maybe more. Anyone who says they need an SUV for the space is, frankly, wrong. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: arnold EMAIL: arnold@etherdrift.net IP: 216.249.101.197 URL: http://www.etherdrift.net/arnoldcam DATE: 06/21/2004 05:00:37 PM Too bad you didn't get any pictures of the mashed down service truck! And June... you know they'll be parking in the "Compact only" spaces. :) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: coderman EMAIL: coderman@peertech.org IP: 208.27.83.5 URL: http://peertech.org/ DATE: 06/21/2004 05:25:37 PM That is awesome; reminds me of the huge transport platform they use to move the space shuttle around... BIG TOYS++ ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jake EMAIL: jake@shiftwork.org.uk IP: 217.158.156.235 URL: DATE: 06/22/2004 05:26:41 AM I'm guessing the Tonka version is the size of a regular truck. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reuben Reviewer EMAIL: IP: 205.175.225.5 URL: http://reubensandwichreview.blogspot.com/ DATE: 06/22/2004 07:08:44 PM Did you see one that had a "How's my driving?" sticker? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gord EMAIL: gord@gordfynes.com IP: 64.231.221.131 URL: http://gordfynes.com DATE: 06/22/2004 09:54:47 PM Bob the Builder, eat yer' heart out! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/22/2004 11:45:01 PM No matter how many times I see that picture, every time I look at it I just think, "holy moses is that a big truck." My brain won't go any further than that. ----- PING: TITLE: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003384.html URL: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003384.html IP: 66.33.213.5 BLOG NAME: linkage DATE: 06/21/2004 02:20:44 PM collision detection: A really big truck... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Headmaker STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/21/2004 01:17:43 PM ----- BODY:
Ever wished your IM buddy icon looked more like you? Go to Abistation and try out the free Portrait Illustrator Maker, which lets you customize about 20 different vectors of your face and head. That icon above is the closest I could come to illustrating myself, though I'm not thrilled with the hair (a little too weirdly spiky on top) and the mouth (I look like a smug Great Ape).
Having said that, it's an interesting gloss on my recent column about the Uncanny Valley -- the robotocist theory stating that as emulations of humans become increasingly realistic, they become increasingly unsettling. Would a hyper-realistic CGI version of me look more true to life than the one above? Or would it look kind of creepy, because it'd look like an animation of my corpse? Is it possible one could get a better sense of my personality by looking at a highly stylized cartoon version of "me," like the one above?
Assuming I didn't look so freaking self-satisfied, of course.
(Thanks to Chris Shieh for this one!)
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AUTHOR: party poker
EMAIL: otard3804@yahoo.com
IP: 64.109.242.65
URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/
DATE: 03/18/2005 04:03:09 AM
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AUTHOR: Clive Thompson
TITLE: Maybe skateboarding is a crime
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 06/21/2004 12:38:52 PM
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As the slogan goes, "skateboarding is not a crime." But for property-owners increasingly pissed at finding their rails and benches crapped up by teenagers using them for serious grinding on the weekends, skateboarding is at least a hassle. So now there's a company called Skatestoppers, and they sell these little metal brackets that prevent skateboarders from enjoying a nice smooth surface. (The company slogan: "Because signs are not enough!") That's one of the brackets pictured above, and the web site describes them thusly:
SKATESTOPPERS® skate deterrents are specially designed brackets that deter unwanted skating/biking by eliminating the long, smooth edges that skaters and bikers seek out. In effect, they are speed bumps for your walls, handrails, curbs, etc.Skatestoppers also sells these little metal discs that can be affixed to flat concrete, making a smooth surface bumpy. They've got an example picture here, and it's oddly beautiful! But then again, so is skateboarding. (Thanks to Serial Deviant for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: John Fleck EMAIL: jfleck@abqjournal.com IP: 216.85.20.2 URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/paperboy/ia/weblogs/fleck.htm DATE: 06/24/2004 06:08:59 PM The interesting thing will be to see how long it takes before clever skaters figure out challenging new tricks associated with these devices, therefore making the surfaces to which they're affixed *more* attractive. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alfred O. Cloutier EMAIL: IP: 66.126.233.134 URL: http://www.blaulb.com DATE: 06/24/2004 06:32:59 PM These things have been around for at least a decade, and they are usually reinforced by aggressive security guards. I, too am also curious to see some moves based on these devices. It does seem inevitable. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/24/2004 11:00:34 PM Yes -- then we'll have the Xtreme sports version of the new tricks televised on ESPN! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: frank EMAIL: IP: 66.206.229.227 URL: DATE: 07/13/2004 04:36:08 PM why do you people want to stop kids from being kids. when you were their age and adults and authority figures would try and prevent you from doign something fun, you would still do it. I know you would. Now, kids know how to use screw drivers and power sanders, so i garantie these "skatestopers" won't last. Bite it. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: colby EMAIL: sk8element_4life@hotmail.com IP: 206.158.2.80 URL: DATE: 07/27/2004 09:02:00 AM i have my own skate team, and for us to see this crap everywhere we travel... It annoys me . i dont see why they put us in this spot . i mean hippies got to smoke so why cant we skate ? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 07/27/2004 12:16:57 PM Heh ... I know, I find good skateboarding really amazing to watch, so I can't figure out the animosity either. I know they're trying to keep their rails from getting damaged, but on the other hand, they've got some killer skateboarding going on. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alex EMAIL: voiceof_dissent@yahoo.com IP: 12.222.92.196 URL: DATE: 08/07/2004 03:35:50 AM The fact of the matter is that these things are needed because of the destruction that comes from skateboarding. Also, on the college campus in my hometown (where it is only hs students skateboarding) they are REALLY annoying. (As a note, im just 16, not some angry old man.) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Andres EMAIL: anto_rd1@hotmail.com IP: 200.122.198.191 URL: DATE: 08/18/2004 09:43:46 PM You are just assholes Trying To destroy a culture, My culture, so Stop talking Crap why don't you stop destroying our lives, and start doing something good for yourselves, so stop beeing a ball of idiots, please? can you do that? you are just shit commpared with us ! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: y should i leave a name? EMAIL: mrwuggles@aol.com IP: 69.138.236.187 URL: DATE: 08/20/2004 11:29:21 PM hey im tired of this skatestoppers shit, i say it makes ur place look even more messed up cause u still sometimes get the wax off so whats the point. skateboarders will just keep comming back and hack those stoppers off. i think its a waste of time and money. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jon EMAIL: magicpotato1@msn.com IP: 69.0.96.93 URL: DATE: 08/30/2004 09:37:30 PM all things like this are going to do is end up leading to vandalism or new ways to use these "skate stoppers" for other kinds of tricks...here ive got a plan that should be fair, you put up the skate stoppers, and we put up spike strips all over the parking lot. its a perfectly fair exchange ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: glare from hell EMAIL: IP: 65.177.112.234 URL: DATE: 09/19/2004 07:46:02 PM go skatestoppers! skate boarding was not meant to be culture it was was meant to be a form of transportation nobody needs to flip all over the places where people need to sit and lovers want to lean and kiss I am 23 and would skateboard to get from point A to point B makes no sense to see this in terms of culture and especially not a rude one I hate cops and I can't stand rude skateboarders who give this form of transportation a bad name culture phfft ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: ariseone EMAIL: ariseone@hotmail.com IP: 67.94.76.153 URL: DATE: 10/27/2004 04:24:09 PM saying that skateboarding was intended as a form of transportation only is completely inaccurate. it was originally used to practice surfing maneuvers (i.e. turns and tricks) on land. saying that skateboarding should ONLY be used as a form of transportation is like saying someone shouldn't do flips from diving board, or pirouette on ice skates...funny that both of those "sports" are some of the most aesthetically appreciated events in international games...our overpaid b-ball jocks can't perform regardless, but nobody's installing trip wires on their courts. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: andrew EMAIL: IP: 69.244.132.121 URL: DATE: 11/23/2004 11:40:31 PM I dont see why every one puts the blam on skateboarders. People just use the kids as scap goats for what there sports are doing. Skateboarding does not do as much damage as you people think. The real crimanals are BMX bikers. They use pags to grind across surfaces and becuase the bikes weigh more they come down harder on ledges and rails. FUCK SKATESTOPPERS ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: adam mandarino EMAIL: radicalradio18@yahoo.com IP: 67.149.65.39 URL: DATE: 11/24/2004 11:36:30 AM id hate to break it to ya but, knobbing handrails is a violation of a uniform building code 1003.3.3.3.6: Stairways shall have handrails on each side, and every stairway required to be more than 88 inches (2235mm) in width shall be provided with not less than one intermediate handrail for each 88 inches (2235mm) of required width. Intermediate handrails shall be spaced approximately equally across with the entire width of the hallway. The top of handrails and handrail extentions shall not be placed less than 34 inches (864mm) nor more than 38 inches (965mm) above landings and the nosing of treads. Handrails shall be continuous the full length of the stairs and at least one handrail shall extend in the direction of the stair run not less than 12 inches (305mm) beyond the top riser nor less than 12 inches (305mm) beyond the bottom riser. Ends shall be returned or shall have rounded terminations or bends. The handgrip portion of handrails shall not be less than 1 Ľ inches (32mm) nor more than 2 inches (51mm) in crossectional dimension or the shape or the shape shall provide an equivalent gripping surface. The handgrip portion of handrails shall have a smooth surface with no sharp corners. Handrails projecting from a wall shall have a space of not less than 1 ˝ inches (38mm) between The wall and the handrail. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Matt EMAIL: adiooo@aol.com IP: 24.98.4.25 URL: DATE: 02/06/2005 10:46:45 AM ya those things are pretty fucking easy to get off OR you can just go over then HAHAHA heres an example http://www.powow.com/appleskeet/skatestoppers%20will%20NEVER%20win_Custom3.mov ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: hgahah EMAIL: IP: 24.98.4.25 URL: DATE: 02/06/2005 10:47:28 AM hahahaha ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: panda EMAIL: IP: 68.69.216.193 URL: DATE: 02/06/2005 11:38:43 AM You might want to realize that by putting these things on your property you will probably end up causing yourself more trouble than you would have had with a few marked up ledges. If you are a business dealing with product that may be used by young people (CD's/movies,convenient store,etc.) you will probably lose a lot of customers. People will still try to skate on your property anyway, and those unsightly sharp objects that protrude from your curbs/handrails are going to cause MORE chance for injury and MORE chance for lawsuit. (Hey, isn't freedom from the stress of kids getting hurt one of the things you wanted to get away from?) Your ledges and rails are going to look TERRIBLE with these things on too. I laugh at you if you decide to use these things. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: asshole EMAIL: IP: 69.14.13.50 URL: DATE: 02/06/2005 11:48:32 AM haha this shits gay. yeah youre faggots, "oh my god, its so annoying!". and what do you do at home, walk around the house naked? im sure youve done some pretty stupid things. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: adam EMAIL: MyPaperHeart8822@aol.com IP: 204.171.48.3 URL: DATE: 02/09/2005 12:24:16 PM i'm doing an english report on how skateboarding is not a crime...and since i'm going threw all these sites i'v noticed that people suck and they should just suck it up and let us skate...basketball players need the corts to practice just like we need the streets, curbs, ledges, and handrails to practice...it's not like we're doing any real harm to anything anyway...if anything it's bikers who screw up the benches because the bikers combined with their bikes weigh alot more then a person on a skateboard...so how about you think next time you try and open your mouth to yell at skateboarders...because frankly...no one gives a damn what you say anyway because we'll be back the next day doing the same exact thing regardless of what you tell us. SKATE OR DIE! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: matt EMAIL: IP: 24.102.149.131 URL: DATE: 02/13/2005 11:42:56 PM whats the difference between a 150 pound biker ona 30 pound bike to a 175 pound skater ona 5 pound board? ----- PING: TITLE: business mentor URL: http://www.wealth-coaching.com IP: 202.168.65.70 BLOG NAME: business mentor DATE: 03/15/2005 05:27:40 PM
jessie connors
real estate coaching
success coaching
I'm not joking, actually. Last night I was IMing with a friend from Chicago and he mentioned that Diana Krall was about to go on The Tonight Show to perform a Tom Waits song. He told me to turn on my TV and check it out.
That's when I realized -- holy moses, I no longer know how to work a television set other than to play video games on it. I have six gaming systems hooked up to the TV in my office, and a complex system for powering them and allowing me to instantly switch from one gaming system to another. But I never actually watch television on the set. It is purely and solely an output device for games.
My TV isn't even hooked up to cable. Mind you, it's been so long since I've watched The Tonight Show that I had to concentrate for a second to recall whether it's on cable or broadcast. Then I remembered, okay, it's broadcast, so theoretically my cable-less set ought to be able to receive it. But I couldn't figure out how to tune it to a channel. I know it's theoretically possible, but it had been years since I'd done so; like a muscle that atrophies after years of living on a space station, or a limb that slowly shrinks and falls off during evolution, my ability to use a regular television had vanished.
Over in the living room, my fiance has her own TV hooked up to a Tivo. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but when I do, it's always something she's Tivoed for us. So this is another interesting cultural barrier: Were I to want to watch a show, I'd simply ask her to Tivo it, or figure out how to use the Tivo myself. Actually, more likely, I'd simply try to find the video online and download it or watch it streaming. Probably 95% of all TV I've seen in the last few years -- and fully 100% of all news TV -- has come to me over the Internet.
But the concept of turning on a normal TV to watch something live? Utterly foreign.
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AUTHOR: Daejin
EMAIL:
IP: 216.16.237.2
URL: http://www.suburbanperil.com
DATE: 06/17/2004 02:44:20 PM
"I have six gaming systems hooked up to the TV in my office, and a complex system for powering them and allowing me to instantly switch from one gaming system to another."
*cough bastard *cough
...with six gaming systems can that still be rightfully called "an office?"
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiodetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/17/2004 02:55:45 PM
Ahahahahaa! Actually, online games on the computer tend to be an even worse distraction, because they're right *there*, waiting to be loaded while you work, all day long.
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AUTHOR: Robin
EMAIL: robin@snarkmarket.com
IP: 65.127.186.226
URL: http://snarkmarket.com
DATE: 06/17/2004 04:34:41 PM
Wait, so which six gaming systems, Clive? PS2, Game Cube, Xbox... and... I'm guessing an NES and SNES for two of the mystery three.
But maybe I'm way off and it's like a Pong unit, a TRS-80 and a Japanese dehumidifier w/ "Super Mario Bros. 3" built in.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/17/2004 04:40:16 PM
Ahahahaha!
I have a PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and this totally deranged "Power Player" system that I bought here in New York from a dollar store: It's fabricated totally illegally somwhere in China, and seems to be running some version of MAME on a super-cheap chip; it's got dozens of classic arcade, NES and SNES games on it. I'm planning on writing an article about those things sometime soon ... they're totally nuts.
I also have a PS1, which I don't count since the PS2 plays all PS1 games. And I've got a busted Atari 2600 -- I gotta get a new one.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: eric
EMAIL: eric@redherringtv.ca
IP: 216.18.53.90
URL:
DATE: 06/17/2004 08:41:56 PM
The most disturbing thing here, Clive, is not that you have six gaming systems in your office, but that this whole TV realization was a result of your wanting to watch Diana Krall. Surely there are more compelling reasons to pull out the bunny ears! (On this topic and this topic only I find myself in agreement with Mark Steyn, who once pointed out that Krall sounds like she might as well be reading the phone book.)
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: George
EMAIL: george@bookninja.com
IP: 65.95.12.41
URL: http://www.bookninja.com
DATE: 06/18/2004 11:16:56 AM
I believe the Tom Waits cancels out the Krall. In fact, they cool-o-meter may tip somewhat generously in his favour.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/18/2004 11:20:09 AM
Ahahahah! Yeah, I'm with George on this one. I should point out that I had no particular jones to hear Krall -- I've never actually heard her music before, so I have no idea if it's good or horrible; it was merely that my friend IMed me and told me to check it out, which led down the path to my TV self-gnosis.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Scott
EMAIL: scott_j@spymac.com
IP: 24.66.94.140
URL:
DATE: 06/18/2004 01:01:10 PM
Note how often you actually get a call or a message from someone saying "there's something you gotta see." Clearly not only have you forgotten how to use a television, but TV producers have also forgotten how to program interesting shows.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Uncle Rob
EMAIL:
IP: 66.185.85.81
URL:
DATE: 06/18/2004 10:56:10 PM
Tom Waits...gimme a break....
Dianna Krall is pure superstar and a "real" talent not to mention a genuine hottie....her music is not horrible or good....it's superb.
This reverse-ludditism you're expeirencing is disturbing.....although you're grass-roots love for gaming would suggest otherwise.
Curious,
What would you feel most comfortable using?
(a) lawn mower
(b) washer and dryer (yes, those large white steel cube-like things down in the basement)
(c) Stratocaster
(d) elevator
(e) iPod
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Friend from Chicago
EMAIL: mono@moxmas.com
IP: 12.159.245.2
URL:
DATE: 06/21/2004 04:34:33 PM
1 -- I have no question that Clive would go for the Strat.
2-- I have to call you on full disclosure, Robot: you not only couldn't get reception on your basic TV, you also admitted you had no idea how to use your Nice Lady's TV. It's not so much a form of Luddite-ism as it is incompatibility between your networks and technology and HER networks and technology.
2-- Robot, I didn't think to ask during the conversation: do you know how turn on a radio? Do you even OWN a radio anymore?
3-- Finally: Krall wasn't singing her Waits cover, so I turned off the TV myself.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Nice Lady
EMAIL:
IP: 64.74.45.38
URL:
DATE: 06/21/2004 05:46:15 PM
I've got to take responsibility for some of this problem: this is no simple TV but a TV, a Tivo, a digital cable box, a dead VCR, and a live VCR/DVD, all piled in a shaky Easter Island formation and topped off by a gratuitous bunny ear antenna. Add an overflowing caddy of working and non-working remote controls, and live Diana Krall is not exactly at Clive's fingertips, no matter how skilled he is at killing aliens.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: incest erotica
EMAIL: 31@eeawixeu.com
IP: 81.83.39.52
URL: http://www.geocities.com/geincestqrst/incest-forum.html
DATE: 01/08/2005 11:33:12 AM
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PING:
TITLE: http://randomwalks.com/flux/collision_detection_a_blog.php
URL: http://randomwalks.com/flux/collision_detection_a_blog.php
IP: 66.33.211.4
BLOG NAME: randomWalks flux
DATE: 06/20/2004 08:57:35 PM
collision detection: a blog of clive thompson This is an excellent weblog....
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AUTHOR: Clive Thompson
TITLE: Gmail frenzy
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 06/16/2004 12:31:31 AM
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BODY:
In our modern culture -- addled to the point of delirium with celebrity culture, wealth worship, the nanofame of reality TV and the Washingtonian/Nietzchian pursuit of power for power's sake -- there's nothing so intoxicating as an elite club. Particularly when you get to be on the inside with the kewl kidz, sneering at the unwashed masses crushing their noses against the glass! Nobody understands this better than Google -- and they've proved it, with the fiendishly brilliant rollout of Gmail, their new email service. Gmail is technologically very cool, with its enormous 1-gig storage space and intelligent "conversation" threading. So I wasn't surprised when Gmail Beta launched last month, and people began wondering: How could they score one of these rare, exclusive, first-peek accounts? By cosying up to the cool kids, that's how. Google set up its Beta as a sort of influence-peddling scheme: It handed out a bunch of accounts to its friends and family and admirers, and allowed each of them to have a few "activation codes" so that they could invite their own friends and admirers in. And so on and so on. The end result? By last week, my circle of high-tech friends was consumed by people frantically sucking up to those who were on the inside, in hopes of someone letting them past the velvet rope. You can't buy buzz like that. What Google realized was that while Americans love to prattle on about the democratic flatness and meritocratic fairness of their country, what they love even more is the ability to lord social power over others like nobleman at the Elizabethan court. It's high-school dynamics as marketing! Anyway, this freaky little Milgram experiment that Google is conducting has produced a rather funny side effect: Gmail swap. It's an attempt to derail the Buffy-at-the-prom dynamics of Google's marketing scheme by setting up an open trading board. People who want a Gmail account make an offer of something they're willing to trade with people who have invitation codes. If the two agree, then voila! The transaction occurs. What's most interesting about this exchange is that -- much like Ebay -- it fixes a price on things that you'd otherwise consider intangible or priceless. Here are some of the things people are offering today as a trade for Gmail:
nekura offers "Your name in credits of my first game." sweet82 offers "a frienship with a sweet girl" redredwine offers "$25 worth of underwear and socks" got gmail offers "FREE lunch in San Rafael, Ca" abazoe offers "a lukewarm poem and a mix cd" db5z offers "Swap an Apple iPod" pacmanfan offers "Few video clips of a redneck's habitat" collins619 offers "9/11 powerpoint pictures" RadicalSpaceDude offers "Jesus Action figures!!!" coco82173 offers "my homemade spring rolls" Feedback offers "Original pictures of Adolf Hitler-1940s" sammyafrikan offers "video thanks in tribal language"By the way, if anyone here thinks my grumpy little rant here is prompted by my inability to score a Gmail account myself -- you can send your comments to clive.thompson@gmail.com. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daejin EMAIL: IP: 216.16.237.2 URL: http://www.suburbanperil.com DATE: 06/16/2004 11:31:20 AM I keep thinking the hotly anticipated Google IPO should coincide with the "official" Gmail launch. That being said, I can't help but think the launch is imminent. I've already "invited" 8 people to Gmail and still have 3 in reserve. They just keep upping my invite allowance. As a result, the gmail market has officially crashed. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/16/2004 11:34:02 AM Oh, thanks for the link! That's interesting to know. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: marc EMAIL: marc@squarescubed.com IP: 63.250.107.162 URL: http://www.squarescubed.com DATE: 06/16/2004 12:08:08 PM Now, what they SHOULD do is leave enrollment on an invitation only basis, and allow complaints against email content to affect the sender's sponsors. This would effectively eliminate spam coming from Gmail accounts, since you would never ask a spammer to join Gmail as you would risk losing your own account as soon as they posted anything. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 207.237.84.135 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/16/2004 02:10:03 PM Not a bad idea ... use a reputation-management system to keep spammers at bay! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Karmakin EMAIL: karmakin@gmail.com IP: 24.224.254.164 URL: DATE: 06/16/2004 10:19:32 PM One other thing, is that Gmail is fairly original, at least as e-mail systems go. It looks different, which is a big deal for people who are strictly e-mail animals. So by doing it through the invite system, each person that has an invite, is going to have someone who they know who also uses the system to help them with any questions they may have. That said, my wife opened her account on Friday. On saturday, she had 3 invites to give out. Gmail is the first actual competition in the webmail market in years. And from my initial impressions, it's actually innovative. Just from initial use, having mail stored in conversational threads is amazing. It's an idea long past due. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: andrea EMAIL: me@NOSPAMserialdeviant.org IP: 220.160.177.100 URL: http://www.serialdeviant.org/weblog/ DATE: 06/16/2004 10:43:21 PM Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Opera's M2 does a decent job doing something similar (not the same). I've not asked my mate with Gmail for an invite, because I don't need yet another e-mail address. I just don't understand why this is not much more than brilliant marketing on the part of Google. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/16/2004 11:41:25 PM Well, I certainly do think the nesting of conversations -- and the ability to use Google's killer search technology to look through your old email -- is amazingly useful. My main problem is that, like Andrea, I don't want another email address. What I'd *love* is to be able to use Google's technology as a front-end for my existing email address. If they ever sell this as a webmail package I'm going to lobby my ISP intensely to adopt it. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: maya EMAIL: mayamail@gmail.com IP: 64.249.27.98 URL: DATE: 06/17/2004 02:45:28 PM I wish I could dump all my e-mail from every address (including work) into gmail, that's one thing I like about my current SBCYahoo! (which upped it's storage capacity 10 fold this week) arrangement, I have 3 addresses that route into it, and they each get a little color code. Between gmail, and the recent innovations at Blogger (which include free photoblogging and other features) I've decided that Google elected to adopt a prime directive that storage space or costs is no longer a concern for them. Use all the Google space you want! Constraints are for all those other companies. I got gmail because I use blogger, and I was able to invite 2 people. I invited one friend, and then no one else seemed desperate for it, and none of my real blog readers wanted it. So I went trolling on the swap board. I found my thought process very bizarre. I didn't trust people who wanted to trade something "too nice" and the people who were swaping cool things were all-too-frequently challenged in the ways of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. I became mildly obsessed with giving the invite to someone I felt good about. The demand for the invites made me take the decision of who to give them to very seriously. In the end, I swapped it to someone with decent grammar who promised to buy a meal for a homeless person. Did they? Who knows, I choose to believe that they did, and I feel good about the entire transaction. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Roshan EMAIL: Roshan.Abraham@gmail.com IP: 24.187.205.204 URL: DATE: 06/20/2004 11:01:20 PM I also got my Gmail account through blogger Aparently I didnt log out from a public computer and someone stole my account for a good month (gmails customer service is practically nonexistant by the way) when i finally got it back i had only one invite left. I haven't decided what to do with it yet. Nor have I figured out who stole my account. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: coderman EMAIL: coderman@peertech.org IP: 208.27.83.5 URL: http://peertech.org/ DATE: 06/21/2004 12:44:26 PM I'm not so quick to assume that the invitational beta of gmail is solely for the purpose of building buzz and projecting exclusitivity. We are just starting to discover how social networking in the context of a large digital communications infrastructure affects our interaction with peers and the ability to discover and utilize new links (people, services, ideas, *.*) The invitational expansion of gmail (and any other network application) provides a way to observe some aspects of this social interaction between peers. I'm not sure exactly how this information can be used, but I am certain that it provides some valuable feedback that could not be obtained in any other manner. If they wanted exclusitivity alone they could just as easily setup a lottery or other method that is less cumbersome to build and operate than the use of individually tracked invitations handed out to current members based on as yet unknown factors (some people get more invites more often, and I haven't found a good explanation of why this is) I like the way they have executed this beta, but I also didn't pay $200+ for an invite on eBay. It's nice to see them ramp up invite frequency to prevent this kind selfish trade in a free service (the gmail market crash). ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/21/2004 12:50:36 PM It's true, this technique for handing out email addresses nicely leverages the power of social networking. It's also possible that since you have to do some social "work" to get an account, you value the service more. And certainly the guys who founded Hotmail knew all about awesome network effects. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chris EMAIL: Ck87.JF@gmail.com IP: 67.33.242.151 URL: DATE: 07/14/2004 03:03:45 PM Okay, that kind of sucks. Daejin says they got 11 invites, but I've not gotten ANY yet! I joined probably about a month ago. So, they say if they decide to give me invites, they shall be in my inbox. I have never gotten any of these invites, which doesn't make sense when it seems many others are getting invites... even after they already have them when signing on. I would think they'd be fair and say, "Okay, this person had invites before, but that one didn't. It goes to 'that,' because we are fair here at Google." Ah, well... suggestions? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jade bilder EMAIL: sabine13@web.de IP: 217.255.85.160 URL: http://jade.bilder-i.de DATE: 07/18/2004 02:11:44 PM bilder
This is the best casemod I've ever seen in my life. G-nome, an Australian dude, spent seven months hand-tooling the plexiglass, chrome, and piping necessary to produce this water-cooled desktop masterpiece. It looks like what you'd get if Ridley Scott channelled the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci and the two designed a computer together. Check out his web site -- it's crammed full of lavish pictures and specs. You really have to zoom in on the zillion different details to appreciate the stunning gorgeousity of this thing.
More proof that casemodding is the signature folk art of our times.
(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: marc
EMAIL: marc@squarescubed.com
IP: 63.250.107.162
URL: http://www.squarescubed.com
DATE: 06/16/2004 12:16:46 PM
This is another great case mod I saw recently (I think on BoingBoing...)
Half Life Case Mod
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/16/2004 03:43:09 PM
Ooooo, that's a good one! Also good were a few of the ones that Cory Doctorow reported on back in Wired last year. The "Shiny Aluminum" one there takes the cake for me. I would *so* buy that if the guy could mass-produce 'em.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: damaris
EMAIL: da_damnn@hotmail.com
IP: 84.104.101.61
URL: http://holland
DATE: 01/10/2005 10:47:35 AM
hello lil romeo
(i'm a girl)
a'm 12 years old. a'm from holland so I don't speak verry wel english
a tat would you com to my school???.
(to sing)
it dossend mather wen.
pleaze if you com, com to (clusius college at alkmaar)
and aks for damaris quak (don't lave to my surmane please)
-XxxXxxX- damaris quak
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: party poker
EMAIL: napoleon2425@bigfoot.com
IP: 193.191.141.3
URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/
DATE: 03/18/2005 02:37:16 AM
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AUTHOR: Clive Thompson
TITLE: Deep Throat in ASCII
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 06/15/2004 11:09:52 AM
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BODY:
A bunch of Slovenian digital artists have taken the classic porn movie Deep Throat and rendered the entire thing in ASCII animation: Deep ASCII. That picture above? It's a shot from the opening credits -- if you squint you can make out a woman walking to the right along a sidewalk. On their web site, the artists explain their concept thusly:
Deep ASCII is a full length conversion of the classic porno film Deep Throat, which amounts to 55 minutes of pure mute ascii porn. This genre was selected for its dominating close-ups, very convenient for resolutions ASCII can support.I particularly love the Matrix-like quality of that old-skool, green-on-black computer-screen text. The whole world's an illusion, particularly when you're shooting porn in L.A. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daejin EMAIL: IP: 216.16.237.2 URL: http://www.suburbanperil.com DATE: 06/15/2004 03:54:55 PM Wow, it's just like watching scrambled pr0n on cable... umm not that I ever.. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 04:14:10 PM Ahhahahaah! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joe EMAIL: IP: 24.101.179.77 URL: DATE: 06/16/2004 05:24:02 PM I used to watch Scramble porn! I think this is better. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mario EMAIL: IP: 62.241.2.2 URL: DATE: 06/17/2004 03:55:13 AM This thing is FASCINATING! And the fact that I can't put in words how fascinating it is is the real proof that this IS art! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/24/2004 11:00:59 PM Heh. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: beastiality movies zoo sex EMAIL: 38@xyiilem.com IP: 24.99.235.178 URL: http://www.geocities.com/gezooqrst/beastiality-movies.html DATE: 01/08/2005 09:54:18 AM Zoofilia free animal sex videos, beastiality pics animal farm sex. Beastiality mpegs beastiality galleries, horse sex stories bestiality videos. Free animal sex men having sex with animals, beastiality sex sex horse. Sex with dogs free beastiality movies, free bestiality pics girls having sex with dogs. Free horse sex pictures free zoophilia, animal sex free sex animal. Girls having sex with dogs free beastiality, horses having sex with women beastiality pics. Free bestiality stories free animal sex videos, zoophilia people having sex with animals. animal sex movies. ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: E-Z bake meteorites STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/15/2004 10:58:47 AM ----- BODY: So this three-pound meteorite -- the size of a grapefruit -- smashes through the roof of a house in New Zealand, nearly killing a couple's young son. The mother, Brenda Archer, retrieves it, and according to Reuters:
The Archers, who are following expert advice by drying the rock out in their oven, plan to sell it or give it to a museum.Their oven? ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: june EMAIL: junemiller31@hotmail.com IP: 206.40.41.253 URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/pinstripe_bindi DATE: 06/15/2004 12:02:50 PM Why does it need to be "dried out"? It came flaming through the earth's atmosphere, didn't it? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/16/2004 02:32:23 AM I wondered about that, too! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chris Walsh EMAIL: chris@donutrockcity.com IP: 69.157.0.84 URL: http://www.donutrockcity.com DATE: 06/21/2004 03:54:13 PM Meteorite Preservation and Repair http://www.alaska.net/~meteor/preserv.htm ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/21/2004 09:49:20 PM Oh, that's totally excellent! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: The computerized critic STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/14/2004 11:24:49 PM ----- BODY:
Recently, I wrote a piece about an art forger whose copies of Gaugin, Monet, and other modernists were good enough to fool experts in several countries. But could they fool a neural-net trained on the artists' work? That's what computer scientist Eric Postma is trying to find out. He's created an artificial-intelligence program called Authentic -- which can stare at hundreds of a painter's works, figure out regularities in his or her style, and then use that knowledge to deduce whether any particular painting is authentic. This also produces an interesting side effect: The program is able to spot patterns in an artist's technique that no human has noticed before. As the New York Times reports:
By analyzing several hundred low-resolution images of van Gogh paintings downloaded from the Web, the Authentic team still managed to pick out, in hours, patterns that would have taken much longer to detect using manual research — for example, the fact that van Gogh's use of complementary colors was greater when outlining human figures than it was for other objects in his paintings. "As data, these Web images are terrible," said Mr. Berezhnoy. "Nevertheless, our method confirmed an increase in van Gogh's use of opponent colors. I could tell you that van Gogh started to use blue-yellow opponency in such and such year, and red-green later on, or that he used opponent color to highlight portrait silhouettes and human figures. Do you think I had time to draw those conclusions by studying all 854 paintings?"That picture above is, by the way, Van Gogh's "Olive Grove". ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jason EMAIL: jason@gravitymonkey.com IP: 209.73.221.2 URL: DATE: 06/15/2004 10:24:05 AM Amazing stuff. When you think about all the levels of knowledge, skill and aesthetic choices that go into a piece of art, or for that matter, the level of complexity that goes into something like machine vision, an application that could do something like detect authenticity seems worlds away. But somehow, when it's stripped of all of that and reduced to data, finding a pattern in the data that would separate a pretender from the real thing isn't impossible. In grad school a professor casually introduced neural nets as a way to analyze, then generate, data sets for music. He mentioned that these nets were being used as a pretty reliable indicator of the composer of origin (i.e. is this piece really a J.S. Bach, or a fake? No, not the guy from Skid Row). What if Sakhai worked with Robert Peake (both earlier posts)? Talk about 'collision detection', huh? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 10:38:34 AM Excellent set of links to connectionist models of music, sir! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: chris EMAIL: cmf107REMOVE@hotmail.com IP: 66.30.181.236 URL: DATE: 06/15/2004 08:28:35 PM interesting additions to the toolbox of the fakebusters. i believe we are many many years from any machine learning capable of matching the sophisticated eye of a true expert. some very deep synthetic processes of analysis go into a "feel" for bogus works. interestingly, the problem of developing an eye for fakery is complicated by the fact that there are so many fakes, in relation to the number of truly-authenticated works. advances in technical analysis- of which i include mr. postma's efforts- will always make the archnacometrist's job easier. but when it comes down to it, sometimes it's all about gut feelings. thomas hoving, late of the new york met, described how famed art historian Bernard Berenson would sometimes react to fakes. that even in the absence of any scientific indications of dubiosity, berenson would say that his stomach felt wrong, that he felt a curious ringing in his ears, or that he was struck by a momentary depression. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/24/2004 11:01:52 PM A momentary depression! 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Okay, this rocks beyond description. Rollei has just released a miniature, digital-camera version of the classic Rolleiflex 2.8 -- the old-school piece of precision-tooled German engineering that revolutioned personal photography in the 1920s. Just like the original version, it has a top-down viewer: You hold the camera at waist level and peer down into the viewer, which is now, naturally, an LCD screen. As the Rollei site points out, this style has a bunch of cool psychological properties:
Why has the Rollei Twin Lens Reflex always been preferred for portraits? The camera, held at waist level, never 'stares the model in the eye.' People go on looking and acting naturally instead of posing for the camera. This is true for grown-ups but also goes for small children and even animals. With this type of viewfinder, you can also hold the camera very low or even place it on the ground when the shot requires that. And you don't have to lie flat on your belly yourself.This is brilliant: Using the ergonomics of classic design, but updating it with modern technology. One of the interesting problems about today's digital tools is that they have a lot more flexibility in their design -- maybe too much flexibility. Old-school cameras had rigid limits that helped structure them: A camera had to have a certain shape and size because it contained canisters of film and lenses that needed to physically zoom in and out. Modern digital cameras don't have these restrictions, so you're allowed to make them tinier and tinier. Obviously, being small is good for portability -- but it means that designers lose some of the ergonomic elegance that was built into old-style cameras. It's the same thing with phones -- one of my personal bugbears. Ever wonder why people bellow into mobile phones? It's because the devices have been shrunk so small that they no longer feel like phones. They're so small and flat that you might as well be holding a stapler to your head, or perhaps a TV remote. They don't seem like phones any more; they've lost all sense of phone-ness. No wonder we holler and yell into them! On some subconscious level, we're worried they're not really listening to us. In contrast, when you pick up an old-school 1940s bakelite desk phone, the ergonomics are lovely: With the clam-curved mouthpiece close to your lips, and the earpiece snug and cupped against your head, it elegantly seals out all outside noise. The phone feels like it's actually paying attention to you, so you realize you can whisper and still be heard. Because the old phones have such a superb aura of phone-ness, nobody feels the need to yell and holler on them, they way they do with teensy mobiles. I've always wanted to rip the guts out of my old 1940s phone (I collect old tech, in case you hadn't guessed) and put GSM technology in it so I could carry it around as my mobile phone. Sure, it'd be heavy -- but at least it'd feel like a phone. So what's interesting about the Rolleiflex MiniDigi is that it's harvesting the useful ergonomics of the old design -- with all its psychological nuances -- yet mixing in digital technology. My only complaint is that I don't think they should have shrunk the Rolleiflex down in size. I think the heft of the old design actually imparts a sense of "seriousness" about the tool that probably has its own interesting psychological impact on photographic subjects. (Thanks to Gizmodo for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: boynton EMAIL: missboynton@hotmail.com IP: 203.166.23.74 URL: http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com DATE: 06/15/2004 02:26:14 AM some retro mobiles here. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Francis EMAIL: f_heaney@yahoo.com IP: 24.29.155.79 URL: http://www.yarnivore.com DATE: 06/15/2004 08:46:37 AM Yeah, I can't stand those mobile phones that don't actually reach from your ear to your mouth, for that very reason. But since I was aware of this fact, I got a flip phone instead. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 09:16:41 AM Yes, flip phones can help out a bit with this problem! Boynton, those retro mobile phone handsets rock! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gord EMAIL: gord@gordfynes.com IP: 64.231.226.192 URL: http://gordfynes.com DATE: 06/17/2004 07:30:01 AM Speaking of retro - Just when you thought you were running out of things to spend your money on: http://www.leica-camera.com/digitalekameras/digilux2/index_e.html As far as trends go, how long before rotary dial phone technology shows up on a mobile? That should make for some interesting design, non? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: John EMAIL: shorttermpessimist@yahoo.com IP: 207.126.236.162 URL: DATE: 07/08/2004 07:34:33 PM In case you haven't seen it yet, this NYT article discusses the handsets that are available at the pokia.com link posted above: "Mr. Roope sent me one of his originals, a 60's Ealing model with matching spiral cord. I plugged it into a Nokia cellphone, and I was off, walking the streets of Midtown Manhattan this week. It felt strange at first, but the way the Pokia cradles in your hand, and fits against your head, was comforting. And it truly can be hands-free — with the receiver trapped between head and shoulder." The guy who created this is selling the one-off handsets on eBay. You can see them on his site. ----- PING: TITLE: online poker URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ IP: 212.141.90.195 BLOG NAME: online poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:34:24 AM You can also check out some helpful info about party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Simon says STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/14/2004 10:36:48 PM ----- BODY:
Ralph Baer is the godfather of video games. In 1972 he released the Odyssey, the "brown box" game set that plugged into a TV and let you play "video tennis", Breakout, and a few light-gun games. But, having single-handedly invented the video-game age, did he rest on his laurels? No sir. He went out and pioneered the hand-held electronic game -- by inventing Simon. But there was plenty of conflict along the way, including the fact that the military -- for whom Baer worked -- actively discouraged him from his work in video games; Baer and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell have also spent decades arguing over who was really the first person to invent the consumer video game. Anyway, to set the record straight, Baer is releasing a book this spring with Rolenta Press. As a prequel, High Times (!) did an interview with him, and it's a joy to read -- mostly because Baer, who is by now like 117 years old, has clearly long ago ceased to give a crap what people think of him, and thus is piercingly funny and sharp in his tale-telling. Here he is on his military employers:
The technology was almost ready, and like anything new, there was a 50-50 chance that it would go over. I didn’t think of it as particularly important. The plan was to have a gadget with a TV set on top of it. I’m working for a company that only builds military products, and I’m an engineer exercising my freedom because I’m a division manager thinking I can do whatever I damn well please. That’s how that came about. Numerous people, including my boss, an executive VP, took great pains for several years to tell me that I was screwing around with things I shouldn’t be screwing around with. Then, ten years later, money started coming in as a result of various trials and court cases that we had won, and everybody stopped asking me if I was still screwing around with that stuff. On top of that, under contract, everybody reminded me of how supportive they’d been. Supportive my ass.Even cooler, Baer discusses the sound design of Simon. As you might recall, Simon had only four notes -- one for each color. But each note had to work perfectly with the others: Since the patterns Simon displayed were random, the notes would be played in equally random patterns. So how do you pick four notes that sound good no matter what order or periodicity they're played in? You pick a real-life instrument that itself only has four notes -- the bugle. All four notes sound harmonious when played in any order, which is precisely why the bugle is such a useful military signalling technology. (Before anyone rushes in to correct me on this last point -- yes, I know that a skilful bugle player can produce a much larger range of notes than just four. You can also produce ton of weird in-between noises if you've got good embouchure control. I played the french horn for eight years myself, and my teacher forced me to play for weeks at a time without using the valves, until I too became able to produce a range of notes so high-pitched that fish would wash up dead on the shores of Lake Ontario. I still think Baer's epiphany was cool.) (Thanks to El Rey for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: online poker EMAIL: pokeronweb@yahoo.com IP: 193.151.75.22 URL: http://www.poker-on-web.com DATE: 12/14/2004 05:33:53 AM You should enter the most inspiring and resourceful online poker site on the web! We are happy to present you with the most informative piece of data you can http://www.poker-on-web.com find on the online poker. The best of online poker tips. To satisfy your curiosity, click on the online online poker news, and if you wish to download poker-on-web, make it happen ! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Someone can buy me one of these STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/14/2004 09:59:42 PM ----- BODY:
Pretty much anytime you want, you know. It's called the "Roadster" chair. Just go over to the web site of Szado Design and order me one. Email me and I'll give you my shipping address. It's only $3,740 and I think if I sat in one of these I could die happy. (Thanks to Sensory Impact for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tom EMAIL: IP: 24.20.52.139 URL: http://ironmonkey.blogspot.com DATE: 06/14/2004 11:18:30 PM I just got the iJoy chair and it is pretty nice, and much cheaper. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 12:23:56 AM Wow, you got one of those? They look incredibly cool. What's it like to sit in? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joe EMAIL: IP: 24.101.179.77 URL: DATE: 06/16/2004 05:25:55 PM Probably feels like it will break. ----- PING: TITLE: party poker URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ IP: 212.199.249.206 BLOG NAME: party poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:09:11 AM Please check the sites dedicated to party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Dead man flying STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/13/2004 11:57:23 PM ----- BODY: Now that airlines are developing increasingly long-range airplanes, they're running into some interesting problems. Say you're captain of the Singapore Airlines 12,600-kilometer trip from Singapore to Los Angeles -- which, at 17 hours in the air, is the longest non-stop flight in the world. Now suppose someone has a heart attack or their appendix bursts. An on-board doctor could help the person out, and in a pinch, the flight could simply land somewhere quickly. But what if someone dies on the flight -- peacefully and in their sleep? What do you do then? Believe it or not, this actually happens with some regularity. And in situations like this, the airlines apparently just keep on flying. Because really, whaddya gonna do? Guy's dead. It's not like there's any need to rush him to an E.R. Still, there's the touchy question of what to do with the body. If someone passes away one hour into a 17-hour flight, that's an awfully long time to leave a cadaver sitting in its seat, particularly if there are people sitting on either side. But where else would you put it? Singapore Airlines has a solution: a new "corpse cupboard" will be installed on its new fleet of Airbus A340-500 aircraft. As the F2 Network reports:
The cupboard, near an exit door, will be fitted with special straps to prevent the body moving during turbulence. A spokesman for Singapore Airlines, Rick Clements, said the cupboard would be used only if there was no other suitable space in the cabin. "On the rare occasion when a passenger passes away during a flight, our crew do all that is possible to manage the situation with sensitivity and respect, " Mr Clements said. "Unfortunately, given the space constraints in an aircraft cabin, it is not always possible to find a row of seats where the deceased passenger can be placed and covered in a dignified manner, although this is always the preferred option."(Thanks to Howard Sherman for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Abe EMAIL: a@SPMFREEabstractdynamics.org IP: 68.164.202.226 URL: http://www.abstractdynamics.org DATE: 06/14/2004 12:29:44 AM ""On the rare occasion when a passenger passes away during a flight..." Hmmm, they sort of pointedly ignored the question that concerns me, what if a crew member passes away? The pilot particularly... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/14/2004 01:29:10 AM I've always wondered that too -- particularly when I'm flying on tiny little 12-seater prop planes that only have one pilot. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Uncle Rob EMAIL: IP: 66.185.85.81 URL: DATE: 06/14/2004 06:08:36 PM There's the rub.... I would wager ud be toast. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 01:04:41 AM Egad. As I feared! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Andy Obuoforibo EMAIL: goalstandard@yahoo.com IP: 68.2.120.248 URL: DATE: 06/17/2004 12:32:15 AM My pilot brother tells me that in such a situation as the one Clive described above, the passengers had better find their happy thought. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: online poker EMAIL: pokeronweb@yahoo.com IP: 193.151.75.22 URL: http://www.poker-on-web.com DATE: 12/14/2004 05:32:00 AM You should enter the most inspiring and resourceful online poker site on the web! We are happy to present you with the most informative piece of data you can http://www.poker-on-web.com find on the online poker. The best of online poker tips. To satisfy your curiosity, click on the online online poker news, and if you wish to download poker-on-web, make it happen ! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Big Bang MP3s STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/13/2004 11:21:14 PM ----- BODY: In 1963, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs noticed a strange hiss coming from their astronomical radio antennas. They eventually realized it was the sound of cosmic radiation -- the background hiss of the universe. Since then, scientists have discovered slight ripples in the background noise, which correspond to various cosmic events in the history of the universe. But the frequency of these noises are about 50 octaves lower than what a human can perceive. So Mark Whittle decided to make them audible. The University of Virginia astronomer shifted the sounds up into the human range and produced a series of 5-second .wav files of the resulting noise. The New York Times wrote a story about it, whereupon the guys at Engadget turned the .wav files into into MP3s -- so you can download the sound of the universe being born and play it on infinite loop on your iPod. And what, precisely, does the music of spheres actually sound like? A totally gnarly 70s synthesizer being coaxed into producing triptastic sound f/x for an unnamed episode of Doctor Who, that's what! Seriously, this is some kooky stuff. One of the files -- I can't link to it directly, because they all download in a single .zip folder -- sounds almost precisely like the opening "note" produced by the classic Robotron 2084 arcade game in "sell" mode. (If you want to compare it for yourself, go to Shockwave, where they've emulated Robotron in Flash.) Even more fun is Whittle's musical analysis of the birth of creation:
"For the first 400,000 years," Dr. Whittle said, "it sounds like a descending scream falling into a dull roar." Over the first million years, Dr. Whittle said, the music of the cosmos also shifted from a pleasant major chord to a more somber minor one.I can't wait for some DJ to sample these sounds and produce "house music of the spheres." Hell, maybe I'll dust off my copy of Acid Pro and make it myself. (Thanks to Slashdot for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: online poker EMAIL: huy_lo5719@mail.me IP: 148.244.150.57 URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ DATE: 03/18/2005 02:50:00 AM You are invited to check out the sites dedicated to party poker party poker http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ texas hold em texas hold em http://texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.vpshs.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.vpshs.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.vpshs.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.vpshs.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.vpshs.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.vpshs.com/ wsop wsop http://wsop.vpshs.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem texas holdem http://texas-holdem.fearcrow.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.fearcrow.com/ free poker free poker http://free-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.fearcrow.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.fearcrow.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.fearcrow.com/ empire poker empire poker http://empire-poker.fearcrow.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.fearcrow.com/ party poker party poker http://party-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker games poker games http://poker-games.fearcrow.com/ free texas hold em free texas hold em http://free-texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ how to play poker how to play poker http://how-to-play-poker.fearcrow.com/ poker online poker online http://poker-online.fearcrow.com/ texas holdem poker texas holdem poker http://texas-holdem-poker.fearcrow.com/ pacific poker pacific poker http://pacific-poker.fearcrow.com/ world poker tour world poker tour http://www.vpshs.com/ free online poker free online poker http://free-online-poker.vpshs.com/ world series of poker world series of poker http://world-series-of-poker.vpshs.com/ poker hands poker hands http://poker-hands.vpshs.com/ poker tables poker tables http://poker-tables.vpshs.com/ poker rules poker rules http://poker-rules.vpshs.com/ poker poker http://poker.vpshs.com/ online poker online poker http://online-poker.vpshs.com/ ... Thanks!!! ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Virtual Kandinsky STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/13/2004 10:57:03 PM ----- BODY:
Kandinsky's art has never really been my cup of tea. I dig abstract art, but I need a little more prettiness in my abstractness. Kandinsky was more into the sort of deeply angular weirdness that inspired many devoted postmodern followers, and probably a few Yes album covers. (Interestingly, Kandinsky was something of a synesthesiac, and claimed that he saw color when he listened to music.) Anyway, Robert Peake is both a very cool programmer and a fan of Kandinsky, so he created a virtual-artist artificial-intelligence program that produces Kandinsky-like drawings -- including the one above! Just pump in a few variables -- how many shapes you want, the size and width of the picture -- and it'll kick out insto-art. His FAQ is a blast to read, and includes this Q&A:
C'mon, isn't this really just a bunch of random shapes? Well, yes and no. I have already begun to make aesthetic decisions, like assigning a color palette to the shading and constraining how far the shapes can be flung. Also, the "randomSymphonic" class does something very common in Kandinsky's work - arranges either 3, 5 or 7 shapes in a vertical pattern. Usually, these look like brush strokes. It's a start. So, already the beginnings of human aesthetics are poking their way in to the picture. I'll need to bear these in mind as a baseline when I start applying more advanced principles. The ultimate goal of this project is to apply and then test (via human feedback) a wide variety of aesthetic principles. Because it is web-native, the potential for getting a large sample size for human data on what "is and is not art" as well as mapping this data to precise heuristics makes this project interesting.(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mario EMAIL: IP: 62.241.2.2 URL: DATE: 06/17/2004 05:12:06 AM In my opinion the program is art (conceptual art), the outputs are not. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: jason EMAIL: jason@gravitymonkey.com IP: 209.73.221.2 URL: DATE: 06/21/2004 03:58:33 PM I know I'm late to the party on this point, but you gotta see this Processing applet as far as "generating art" goes. My first pass really does look likea Franz Kline or something... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Fioricet Online EMAIL: shannyn@bmaster3.com IP: 207.150.162.20 URL: http://www.fioricet-web.com DATE: 07/21/2004 10:46:19 AM now begin Fioricet a home. 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I cite the theories of Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori thusly:
In 1978, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. If an android become too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted. The problem, Mori realized, is in the nature of how we identify with robots. When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don't care that it's only 50 percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike—so close that it's almost real—we focus on the missing 1 percent. We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes. The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge "the Uncanny Valley," the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad. As video games have developed increasingly realistic graphics, they have begun to suffer more and more from this same conundrum. Games have unexpectedly fallen into the Uncanny Valley.You can read the rest of the piece for free on Slate here! If you have any comments to put in my discussion boards here, you might also want to go cut and paste it into the Fray, Slate's own discussion area, which always appreciates smart contributions. ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Peter da Silva EMAIL: peter@collisiondetection.2004.taronga.com IP: 206.109.159.11 URL: DATE: 06/10/2004 12:25:24 PM It's going to be tougher than realistic human speech, and look how long it's taking us to get that right, but I don't think there's any reason to believe we can't eventually get avatars that are both realistic and 'human'. Computer graphics still has a long way to go in general. Even the best video game graphics don't look real enough for me, the shadows and lighting are always off one way or another... I suspect that will continue to be true so long as GPUs can't manage global raytracing and global lighting. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alfred O. Cloutier EMAIL: IP: 66.126.233.134 URL: http://www.blaulb.com DATE: 06/10/2004 12:27:05 PM Isn't this something you had written about before? If not, then I had read about it before, maybe a year ago--that is what drew me to this article when I visited Slate this morning. If you have written about it before, did you do a professional piece on it? What was it? If so, is it a tactic of journalists to revisit (rehash) ideas into new articles? Does the Uncanny Valley apply only to visual images? I think our voice synthesis is starting to get there, and some of it is actually fairly good, but again it sounds "dead". I think we may have overcome any uncanny aversions to artificial foods, scents... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alfred O. Cloutier EMAIL: IP: 66.126.233.134 URL: http://www.blaulb.com DATE: 06/10/2004 12:30:28 PM hmmm, my last comment sounds like an attack, it's not, just a curious question. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ray Seals EMAIL: rseals@htc.net IP: 204.193.75.20 URL: DATE: 06/10/2004 12:47:24 PM Very interesting article. How does a character like "Max Headroom" fit in. While he was very human in appearance maybe the jerky, stutter style made me like him. Human in appearance but very mechanical in action. Good article. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Daejin EMAIL: IP: 216.16.237.2 URL: http://www.suburbanperil.com DATE: 06/10/2004 01:46:40 PM Maybe it's jarring when we are familiar with the individuals these dopplegangers are based on. Take the intro trailer for Onimusha 3. I don't have a clue who Takeshi Kaneshiro is and as a result he remains an uber cool game avatar. It doesn't hurt being culturally programmed to assume a natural disconnect in voice and expression after a lifetime of badly dubbed Kung Fu movies. A great deal of leeway is afforded here. Jean Reno on the otherhand? A grisly parody of the familiar actor. It's only when the virtual and real meet. Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid is a natural fit in his virtual world and exists, in my mind, seemlessly within it. Had he been created in the likeness of Kurt Russell I don't think I could resolve the two. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: EMAIL: IP: 80.60.194.41 URL: DATE: 06/10/2004 03:44:45 PM I suggest to look here: http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brian Shapiro EMAIL: brian_shapiro@hotmail.com IP: 209.179.216.128 URL: DATE: 06/10/2004 06:55:28 PM I forgot to note, although in traditional art, the practice of idealization was the norm, towards the end of the 19th century there was some experimentation in ultra-realism that did end up looking eerie, particularly so in sculpture. The sculptor Max Klinger intentionally used this to create Symbolist scultpures. Just the addition of pupils to the eyes makes realistic sculpture look more creepy; he did this, plus ad multiple tones to the skin. Another sculptor who pushed ultra-realism, though its uncertain whether he realized the effect was creepy, was Jean-Leon Gerome, an academic. His sculptures have no intended symbolist content, but the degree of realism make them appear like actual people frozen in marble. There is also a contemporary British artist who creates sculptures out of wax to resemble actual people with full realism. Except in many of his works he distorts the features somewhat to make them more cartoonish; and the existence of such a real looking person with cartoonish features is creepy in its own way. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Gabriel Law EMAIL: gabriel@netamin.com IP: 192.216.126.30 URL: http://www.ultimatebaseballonline.com DATE: 06/10/2004 07:06:09 PM This worthy topic should be studied from a gaming business angle too. Starting from the mid-90's, there has been much fewer new genres of games coming from developers. As the industry matures, it grows more like the movie industry, where the studio/publisher wants more sure-win title to counter the inherent financial risk of making a game. Creative and financial resources shift to the most observable improvement: graphics. Undeniably, the market in general demands better eye-candy, but when that single factor dominates the whole industry, it becomes an indication that maybe soon the market will be fed up. Afterall, isn't that the reason we laugh at the later Rockies and First Bloods -- the audience can only take so much of Rambo killing another foreign soldiers or Rocky taking another punch? So, what if the CG character in Alias looks more Garner than the real Garner? Another point I would like to make is that we have to remember when we say "real", we usually mean the characters acting "real" in the cut-scenes, which are thoroughly computer-animated. Another fight and action scene in which a player is able to control the movement of a character is stil very far away from anything being life-like, or as life-like as the library of motion capture allows it. GL ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Joshua Mostafa EMAIL: josh__NO__SPAM__@mirtec.net IP: 211.26.145.177 URL: http://www.mirtec.net DATE: 06/10/2004 07:59:04 PM Thanks for an interesting read. I guess this might be a reason for the current resurgence of interest in 'retro' games .. after the initial novelty of 3D wore off, a lot of people realised they preferred the simplicity of the older, less realistic games; since they were less lifelike, the brain is perhaps more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and suspend disbelief, rather than being like "Look at that sprite walking, that's ridiculous, no one walks like that". This is also perhaps another reason people didn't buy into a full CGI film like Final Fantasy, whereas, for instance, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies is a huge success: he's sufficiently far removed from a real human that, although a creepy character, doesn't have the shudder-factor of the almost-human. Actually this macabre effect can work positively too. I remember, in the days when I would waste countless hours playing a certain popular 3D shooting game in head-to-head mode, the faces of the characters (including my friends' avatars that I was trying to kill) would have that same uncanny almost-human look about them. I think the loathing I felt towards these creatures made me play the game better. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 12.217.66.154 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/10/2004 09:25:18 PM These are all extremely cool comments! Excellent points about the history of art and abstraction vs. realism. Also, yes, there's definitely a difference between the quality of cutscenes and the quality of in-game animation -- though I personally think even most *cutscenes*, which benefit from hours and hours of patient construction, are still pretty ugly and un-human-looking -- when it comes to faces, at least. Alfred, by the way, yes, I'd blogged about this before -- but never written about it journalistically! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: JP EMAIL: IP: 209.6.155.19 URL: DATE: 06/11/2004 01:21:47 PM Good article, good comments. The naturalist portraiture of the Renaissance proves that illusionism is definitely possible, but it takes a lifetime of hard work to attain the craft skills necessary to pull it off consistently. Games are still a ways from achieving that because: A) We need more good artists. A lot of visual artists in the game industry are here simply because they couldn't get work in a CG house like ILM or Pixar, and don't really care much about the medium of games and about working with its unique strengths and weaknesses. B) The aesthetic stupidity that has conditioned developers and consumers alike to get more excited about bump mapping and higher polygon counts than more expressive, compelling, or generally higher quality art content. C) Illusionism is even harder in three dimensions. The Greeks of the Hellenic period and the Renaissance guys did amazing work, but the unpainted, uniformly textured nature of the marble gives them a remote feeling (sort of like black and white photography) that steers them clear of the Uncanny Valley (although some of the classical Greek statues were originally painted). Only a few modern day wax sculptors are able to make something that doesn't end up looking like a creepyass Real Doll (link is not safe for work!). Interestingly, illusionism in painting was at its peak right up until the point when photography was invented. Suddenly there was a machine that was capable of more or less the same depictive accuracy as a grand master. After some resistance, painting began to redefine its role in the visual arts, and the results were Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism. Games need to stop confusing fidelity (more pixels, more polys) with quality if they're to become more than technological curiosities and marketing tools for other media. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Brian Shapiro EMAIL: brian_shapiro@hotmail.com IP: 209.179.56.148 URL: DATE: 06/11/2004 06:10:22 PM Jp, I just want to clarify some of the arguments I made with some visual aids I found. Fully photographic depictions of people were never sought after in the Western tradition, there was always a push to idealize since the Renaissance, and during the ancient era. In fact, Rembrandt was dismissed as a realist, and was all but forgotten until his works were rediscovered in the 19th century. The aim was to come to a Platonic ideal, a generalized form where features were geometrically simplified and harmonized, plus one where the line and color was manipulated to support the theme of the art. Here is an illustration, showing the 19th century artist Bouguereau painting from a live nude: http://www.xs4all.nl/~frqnc23/images/ph_4.jpg It becomes obvious how much the form was altered and abstracted from the real person. This can be realized more simply: you could never mistake a traditional painting for a photograph, no matter how much inclined you are to say its like life. In fact, the Realist movement which arose in the 19th century, exemplified by Courbet among others, had the goal of going against all of these academic conventions to show what things actually looked like in real life (in addition to abandoning the mythological subject matter). The academic methods were found to create a slick surface and unreal imagery which the Realists sought to work against. Realists were as unwelcomed by the conservatives in the art world, as much as was later modern art. Their artworks were found ugly, lacking poetry or beauty in their depictions. Similar things were said about Impressionism, and later movements. But the avant garde pushed in this direction to rid art of what they found as sentimental and what was often clichéd by relying on classical or religious themes. They believed using literary motifs in art caused these problems and eventually wanted art to focus on pure form, like music. Photography had a very limited role in the development of modern art, although it by no doubt was used as an argument. But, after all, figurative art started to become reappreciated in the 1970s to a position where its respected again today, and not thought of as mere human-made photography. I also wanted to show some examples of art at the end of the century which pushed towards ultra-realism. A very fleshy sculpture by Gerome: http://www.artrenewal.org/images/artists/g/Gerome_Jean-Leon/small/museum/The_Ballplayer.jpg And a sculpture by Max Klinger: http://www.pinakothek.de/images/13173_1187-l.jpg I do agree though that part of the reason that video games have problems like this is because few people who work on them have a real sense of aesthetic. A lot of the 3d graphics just looks ugly ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: JP EMAIL: IP: 209.6.155.19 URL: DATE: 06/14/2004 11:09:43 AM Hmm, very good points Brian. I'd like to make a distinction, and please correct me if this is off-base as you are clearly very well-informed, between realism as a method of rendering and realism as an approach to artistic depiction. As far as technical quality of the depiction goes, the Renaissance masters aren't too different from the 19th century Realists. The perspective is perfectly observed, the treatment of light and texture are highly competent, and details are rendered more or less (depending on the artist) to an extent that the image is what you might call "believable" (and yeah Rembrandt was ahead of his time in the attention he devoted to those details). Where they differ is in how much they idealize their subject matter. Realism in art was/is about stripping away the falseness and pretention of classical art and showing the Actual rather than the Platonic Ideal. Videogame artists generally *do* want to idealize (nobody in videogame land has love handles or zits or a weak chin), but they try to achieve that with 19th century Realist methods, concentrating on the pores and nose hairs. They understand and capture the minutiae of the subject but not the essence, and you need both to create a good likeness. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Uncle Rob EMAIL: IP: 66.185.85.81 URL: DATE: 06/14/2004 10:02:38 PM Hey Clive, are you a journalist or a writer? Jo and I can't decide..... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/15/2004 12:22:38 AM Ah, I use 'em interchangeably. "Writer" connotes a more lofty profession -- i.e. it's a wider term that includes everything from novelists to playwrights to poets to journalists. "Journalist" designates you specifically as a guy who cranks out stuff for newspapers and magazines or TV or whatever, and thus seems less like a *calling* and more like a *job*. Me, I couldn't care less. I usually use "journalist" because "writer" sounds kind of pretentious. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Charlie EMAIL: charlie@stickybuffalo.com IP: 208.243.54.38 URL: http://www.stickybuffalo.com DATE: 06/15/2004 07:17:04 PM You wrote this whole article and the fail to look at this issue with a focus on what's to come. "Mouths and eyes don't move in synch. It's as if all the characters have been shot up with some ungodly amount of Botox and are no longer able to make Earthlike expressions." Have you seen the Half Life 2 G-Man videos? http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=3279 If you get the creepy feeling from watching this it's because you are supposed to feel that way about someone as freaky sounding as this. :) My ultimate issue is that you seem to be pushing for "No CG human can ever look real enough to fool the human eye/brain." I don't find that to be the case, and this sort of graphics development is not on a linear path, hence we should see better looking, better synched humans sooner. It also means that the next ten years will bring us the high definition displays and pure number crunching power to make you wonder if you are watching an episode of The Sopranos you missed, or a whole new series made with virtual actors. The newest Nvidia card, which isn't even testing at the top of the heap, has roughly the same real-time rendering quality as Toy Story, and still fits inside your home pc. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we've got a bit to go before Toy Story is considered photo-realistic, though at the time much of what was shown on screen seemed very real. Most of the issues you raise are a function of the viewer knowing that none of the video was ever real, and that has nothing to do with the code. Kuma:War is taking baby steps in blurring the "when is it a game?" situation, putting players in real-world events (though they fail horribly by not having a better engine, graphics included). I'd guess the other major hurdle to bypassing the "reality check" will be user interface. When you have a 3-D world "painted" on to the back of your eye so you can't divert your attention, and you're finally commanding the character in the game purely through natural movements of your own body, another piece in the puzzle of making virtual humans real will be in place. p.s. "Lara Croft is another good example. Even as her games became more graphically precise, the designers left Croft as a very stylized figure, the better to have players identify with her." To borrow from an abused political motto: "It's the chest, stupid." Who's going to dial down the boob-o-meter (thereby making the charcter more "graphically precise") when most of the gaming population is only playing this tired platformer to see the new breast physics? P.P.S. I totally agree that the large majority of game designers have taken gameplay and strapped it behind them into the child seat between the other two gaming children, "online play" and "massively multiplayer." I think there are at least a few titles every year that really are using high-end graphics to bring gameplay to the forefront. It's only going to get better as realistic physics engines and high poly count models are the norm. Perhaps you should get away from the Xbox as the developer community for that console seems to be the worst to date. (Though the phantom may give them a run for their money.) The good games for the next 12-18 months are going to be on the PC, and the graphics cards / processors that will lead to the game developments I'm focusing on are only hitting shelves this summer. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: JP EMAIL: IP: 209.6.155.19 URL: DATE: 06/16/2004 10:30:33 AM "The newest Nvidia card, which isn't even testing at the top of the heap, has roughly the same real-time rendering quality as Toy Story, and still fits inside your home pc." And it's worthless without Pixar-quality animators and artists making content for it. Solving artistic problems with technology NEVER, EVER WORKS! ----- PING: TITLE: Better Graphics Highlight Artifice URL: http://www.clickableculture.com/index.php?id=P1989 IP: 216.201.96.71 BLOG NAME: Clickable Culture DATE: 06/10/2004 01:27:48 PM Clive Thompson's latest piece for Slate, "The Undead Zone," argues that game graphics have gotten a little too good for comfort: "...when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike—so close ----- PING: TITLE: The Uncanny Valley URL: http://snarkmarket.com/blog/snarkives/video_games/the_uncanny_valley/index.html IP: 64.14.68.27 BLOG NAME: Snarkmarket DATE: 06/10/2004 06:23:49 PM Snarkmarket favorite Clive Thompson has a new piece up (it's on Slate, actually) about simulated humans that look so realistic they look unrealistic. 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Lego has been called the ultimate geek toy because it's so deeply mathematical. Any kid that messes around with Lego quickly learns interesting aspects of division, multiplication, and even calculus-like ratio shifting and fractal concepts of internal self-replication. That's because when you try to assemble complex 3D figures, you have to do a lot of subtle counting -- particularly if you're attempting to create a curved angle using square-edged bricks.
Of course, any kid who hacks away at this stuff soon realizes the similarity between pixels on a screen and Lego blocks. Computer icons are created from zillions of teensy blocks, and this is precisely what's given birth to the enormous community of Lego artists who replicate famous pixellated images -- from Mario to the Macintosh boot-screen design -- using Lego bricks.
Now a company called Pixelblocks has gone one step further. They've engineered one-centimeter cubes that click together on all six sides, with different levels of gradation, to allow for ever more subtle curves. (I'm not explaining this well, but check out the animation that shows how it works.) Even cooler, the blocks are transluscent, so anything you make can be backlit -- precisely like an on-screen pixellated image, or perhaps a stained glass window. Indeed, the company itself refers to Pixelblock creations as "digital stained glass," which nicely closes the historic loop: It reminds us that some of the the core graphical technologies of today's computers were borrowed directly from the techniques of ancient artists. Antialiasing, for example, was originally invented by medieval tapestry makers, and is a regular part of today's needlepoint designs.
Pixelblocks has even created a little online application you can use to process a digital photo and create a block-plan you can print up that will let you render the picture in Pixelblocks. Ian of Water Cooler Games bought a set of the blocks and used it to render a Pacman ghost in "vulnerable" mode! Imagine taking a picture of your spouse's head and rendering it as a three-foot-tall translucent Pixelblock image.
Actually, who am I kidding. The first thing people are gonna use this for is to generate enormous pixellated versions of Jenna Jameson.
(Thanks to Ian for this one!)
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Ian Bogost
EMAIL: ian@persuasivegames.com
IP: 68.10.32.19
URL: http://www.watercoolergames.org
DATE: 06/06/2004 03:45:47 PM
Thanks, Clive. I guess technically it's not in vulnerable mode, cos it doesn't have the squiggly mouth. I didn't have enough light blue pixelblocks to make Inky.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/06/2004 09:04:40 PM
Ah! You're right! Also, his eyes would be yellow.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: clew
EMAIL: attenhand@example.com
IP: 216.231.44.89
URL: http://www.tenhand.com/clew/blog
DATE: 06/17/2004 04:32:15 PM
Hm. Surely Meccano has all the geeky aspects Lego does, and more principles of physics, besides?
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Clive
EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net
IP: 66.108.82.10
URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net
DATE: 06/17/2004 04:36:44 PM
Yes indeed! But, because it relies on bolts and screws and tools to assemble the metal parts, it's never quite amassed the cultural force of Lego, with its snap-and-click simplicity.
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COMMENT:
AUTHOR: clew
EMAIL: attenhand@example.com
IP: 216.231.44.89
URL: http://www.tenhand.com/clew/blog
DATE: 06/17/2004 06:28:01 PM
So... Lego is geeky like HTML and Star Wars: The Movie, an Meccano is geeky like Big-Oh notation and Sojourner, the mission?
I'm OK with that, but it does conflate a useful distinction into one word.
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AUTHOR: Clive Thompson
TITLE: Dance Dance Metabolism
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 06/03/2004 11:52:17 PM
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BODY:
I think this has been blogged about before, but there's a big trend afoot amongst geeks to use the game Dance Dance Revolution -- where you bounce around on a dance pad -- as a form of exercise. Now there's even a web site devoted to people using it thusly, called Get Up Move. Check out the testimonial from Matt Keene, a 6'5" guy who shed enormous amounts of poundage:
I lost about 140-150lbs with the help of DDR and a weight bench. But before I found DDR I tried walking and a weight bench and I only lost 20lbs, then after DDR it melted off in under a year. So the main factor of my weight loss is the intensive cardio workout that is DDR. I played about 4-5 times a week with about… 18 songs a day. I now play like everyday.I don't exercise, other than walking a lot in my everyday life. And one reason the gym holds no allure for me is that it's deadly boring. Sports -- since they're games -- would be a terrific motivating force for me, but it's hard to participate in team sports in Manhattan becuase green space is at a premium. So the idea of having a physical, game sport that can be played in your living room is insanely brilliant. (Thanks to Slashdot for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: maura EMAIL: maura.johnston@REMOVE.gmail.com IP: 66.192.34.8 URL: http://maura.com/ DATE: 06/04/2004 01:22:27 AM i knew it!! i played ddr for the first time in a while the other night, and i was totally winded afterwards. i wish i could get a machine in my apartment. when do you think gyms will start stocking free-play versions? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 208.54.15.3 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/04/2004 01:27:17 AM Well, you can can always just get a used PS2, which are like $100, and then get a $50 dancepad and -- presto -- your own home machine! If ya really wanna go nuts, they also sell hardcore metal-framed home dance pads. They're like a couple of hundred bucks, but they're much more durable and like the arcade version. I have decided I'm going to get a cheapo dance pad when I get home, get the game, and see if I can't get more aerobic exercise into my life. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: maura EMAIL: maura.johnston@REMOVEgmail.com IP: 66.192.34.8 URL: http://maura.com DATE: 06/04/2004 01:35:20 AM dude. i'll totally FACE OFF against you!! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Robin EMAIL: robin@snarkmarket.com IP: 65.127.186.225 URL: http://snarkmarket.com DATE: 06/04/2004 11:22:33 AM Deja vu! A couple of months ago (after an evening at Gameworks) I spent an hour on eBay figuring out just how much it would cost to get a PS2 and one of the slightly-sturdier DDR dance pads. (The flexible ones seem too 'NES PowerPad' to me. And that thing never worked right.) I'll admit it, I also spent much of that hour searching for these videos that people post of their insane 'perfect' DDR performances. Have you seen these things? Craaaazy. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ian Bogost EMAIL: ian@persuasivegames.com IP: 68.10.32.19 URL: http://www.watercoolergames.org DATE: 06/04/2004 06:00:29 PM So funny, I was just thinking about getting one for exactly the same reason. I think you can also get it for XBox now. On a related note, friend and game researcher William Huber and I saw a number of other videogame-cum-exercise devices at E3. See William's report here: http://www.ludonauts.com/archives/000048.shtml (By the way Clive, you're "Remember info" box doesn't work) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Emily EMAIL: IP: 198.31.57.6 URL: DATE: 06/04/2004 07:03:12 PM I am freaked out at the idea of Clive and Maura having a DDR faceoff in the apartment. Will there be trash talking? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ian Bogost EMAIL: ian@persuasivegames.com IP: 68.10.32.19 URL: http://www.watercoolergames.org DATE: 06/05/2004 06:37:02 PM Ok, here we go. I got my new PS2 and dance mat today. Here's the scoop on the current marketplace. You can get a used PS2 for $120 at EB Games and GameSpt, but for $150 you can get a brand new PS2 with the new network adapter and an ATV racing game. The ATV racing game supports online play and all that, but what you really want it for is the uncanny ATV Hockey mode. Then you can get a dance mat for $20 (a totally respectable one) and add DDR for $40 or so, maybe $30 if you find it used. So, that's a layout of somewhere between $170 and $210, depending on which way you go. Not bad considering you can still play other games on it, and what does a gym membership cost these days, $60/mo? It's sort of embarrassing that I didn't own a PS2, but now I have all the consoles, PS2, XBox, GameCube, and of course my trusty GBA SP. Which leads me to ask... Have you seen the new retro-styled GBA SP that looks just like an NES controller? Too cool! I almost bought one even though I already have a GBA SP. And, in another brilliant retro gaming moment, Nintendo has released the early NES games on their own GBA carts, in boxes that look just like the original NES boxes. Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Zelda, etc. The brilliant part? They're charging $19.99 for them. Hoo-ha! Okay, I'm off to make a fool of myself on DDR while I get much needed aerobic exercise. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/05/2004 10:29:51 PM Dude, I can't believe you actually got the equipment! That rocks! You have inspired me -- tomorrow I'm going over to buy a dance mat and join the Dance Dance Revolution exercise craze that is SWEEPING THE NATION. You only got a PS2 now? You held out for a long time! On the other hand, the nice thing about waiting this long to buy a system is that they're waaaay cheaper than if you bought one two years ago. I bought an Xbox about two months ago at full price, only to watch the price drop to $179 a few weeks later. Sigh. Yes, I saw that SNES-themed Game Boy Advance. Holy moses do I want one. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: marc EMAIL: marc@squidlink.com IP: 65.93.167.96 URL: http://www.squidlink.com DATE: 06/05/2004 11:05:54 PM Man, it's weird how memes get started. Two weeks ago, I had no idea what DDR was. Last Saturday, I saw a piece on CBC about it. Then these articles about it being healthy and whatnot started showing up on Boingboing and here and other sites. Now, I'm also at the point where I'm considering buying a PS2 so I can pick up this game so I can get a good aerobic workout each day. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ian Bogost EMAIL: ian@persuasivegames.com IP: 68.10.32.19 URL: http://www.watercoolergames.org DATE: 06/06/2004 12:31:25 AM I'd been thinking about this for a while. I cover the whole medical games stuff over at Water Cooler Games, and I think i posted a few months ago about this girl who lost something like 140 pounds playing DDR. Meanwhile, I KNOW that the reason I don't have more energy is because I don't get enough exercise. So, I figured I'd have a go. Here's another reason I got it: we have two small kids. The only time I seem to have free to work out is in the evening, after they go to bed. And my wife and I can't very well leave them alone to go for a jog. So, this is a perfect stay-in workout: we already have the TV and consoles, so it's not like buying and storing an exercise bike, and the mat folds up and goes in a drawer. Clive, you should totally get it and we can do some coop blogging on our combined experiences. I'm already working on some thoughts... One thing potential DDR Aerobic folks should know: the game is NOT easy. You really do have to learn how to play. It doesn't take long, especially if you do the tutorial, but it has the potential to frustrate for some. About the PS2, yeah I know I waited a long time. We had one in the office for a while and so I didn't need one. I have had the GC and XBox for a while though, so that covered almost all of the game marketplace, save those few PS2-only games (which are often the best, I guess). ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeff EMAIL: jeff@osoft.us IP: 68.92.77.194 URL: http://jrhicks.net DATE: 06/06/2004 03:07:50 PM Below is an Open Source version of the game. Has anyone heard anything about this? Their site translates into like 8 languages. http://www.stepmania.com/stepmania/getstarted.php ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Alfred O. Cloutier EMAIL: IP: 66.126.233.134 URL: http://www.blaulb.com DATE: 06/08/2004 07:33:52 PM Re: Memes. The day you posted about it, I went to lunch with a friend who started talking about DDR, and I was like, do you read Clive's Blog. She was like omigod you are such a nerd, NOOOOO, I didn't "read 'Clive's' 'blog'", I saw it on the morning talkshow. I was like 'weird'. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 12.217.66.154 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/10/2004 09:29:05 PM Yes, this has clearly reached some sort of meme combustion level! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dave EMAIL: IP: 64.42.228.30 URL: DATE: 06/24/2004 11:17:29 PM DDR, while fun, is not good exercise. Everyday there are thousands of testimonials from people doing all sorts of weird dances and so-called "cardiovascular" activities while supposedly shedding pounds like crazy.....just like this guy in the original post. However, if you calculate the actual calories expended during exercise, of any sort, they are minimal when contrasted with the time invested. Since there is 3500 calories in a pound of fat, even if you were burning 500 calories an hour (which is doubtful), that would be seven hours for a single pound of fat. Not very efficient. People constantly confuse the actual energy-expending "merits" of activity providing the weight loss rather than the real cause...continued preoccupation. 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I've discussed the weirdly high intelligence of parrots before, but here's more evidence that birds can be quite brilliant -- and even have a "theory of mind". A theory of mind is the ability to understand that other beings are sentient and have their own personal thoughts. Children generally develop this at 18 months, and you can because they learn to follow the gaze of another person and understand something about the gazer's thoughts and internal state. Pretty sophisticated, eh? Except that a couple of British scientists recently did "theory of mind" experiments with ravens and found that they, too, seemed to be able to grok complex stuff about a human gazer. More interestingly, raven seem to know when other ravens are checking them out, and are able to dissemble and deceive. As The Economist reports, one scientist noticed a particularly weird interaction between two ravens, one dominant and one subordinate:
The task was to work out which colour-coded film containers held some bits of cheese, then prise the containers open and eat the contents. The subordinate male was far better at this task than the dominant. However, he never managed to gulp down more than a few pieces of the reward before the dominant raven, Munin, was hustling him on his way. Clearly (and not unexpectedly) ravens are able to learn about food sources from one another. They are also able to bully each other to gain access to that food. But then something unexpected happened. Hugin, the subordinate, tried a new strategy. As soon as Munin bullied him, he headed over to a set of empty containers, prised the lids off them enthusiastically, and pretended to eat. Munin followed, whereupon Hugin returned to the loaded containers and ate his fill. At first Dr Bugnyar could not believe what he was seeing. He was anxious about sharing his observation, for fear that no one would believe him. But Hugin, he is convinced, was clearly misleading Munin.(Thanks to Robots.net for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dennis T Cheung EMAIL: dtc@pobox.com IP: 207.46.125.16 URL: http://www.dennistcheung.com/blog DATE: 06/03/2004 11:14:15 PM When I was living in Baltimore, I'd see ravens do all sorts of wacky things. I don't doubt this a bit! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 208.54.15.3 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/04/2004 12:42:01 AM Yeah, they've always struck me as crazily smart birds. Almost *scarily* smart. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Francis EMAIL: f_heaney@yahoo.com IP: 24.29.155.79 URL: http://www.yarnivore.com/francis DATE: 06/04/2004 07:11:43 AM Well, and they wouldn't serve Odin very well if they were stupid. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: debcha EMAIL: debbie.chachra@olin.edu IP: 4.21.173.8 URL: DATE: 06/04/2004 08:05:17 AM Francis - yeah, I thought that the names of the ravens were deeply cool too. Especially that the 'smarter' raven was Hugin. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: debcha EMAIL: debbie.chachra@olin.edu IP: 4.21.173.8 URL: DATE: 06/04/2004 08:12:00 AM Sorry - if you are not up on your Norse mythology or a devoted Neil Gaiman/Sandman fan, Odin's Thought and Memory are personified (or should that be ravenified?) as Huginn and Muninn, respectively. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: june EMAIL: junemiller31@hotmail.com IP: 206.40.41.253 URL: http://louveciennes.diaryland.com DATE: 06/04/2004 11:59:12 AM We have ravens in our neighborhood and I always half expect them to start talking to me, or at least croak "Nevermore!". They are spooky-smart. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/06/2004 01:43:45 PM Okay, that totally rocks about their Norse names! I did not pick that up at all. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: clew EMAIL: attenhand@example.com IP: 216.231.44.89 URL: http://www.tenhand.com/clew/blog DATE: 06/06/2004 07:29:01 PM Observers of ravens in the wild have been reporting this for a long time. (Bernd Heinrich writes good books about it, for instance.) It's true that naturalist observation can be vulnerable to "Mr. Ed" errors, but not conclusive. The other problem with lab environments is that any smart lab animal has probably gone crazy with boredom. (Someone recently did new experiments to suggest that the old 'lab data' that brain cells die off with age is really only true for lab rats in the most unvaried, sterile conditions.) New Zealand corvids make tools - out of wire, if it's available - and as early as WWII there was lab evidence that crows have a concept of number, in the single digits at least. I'm too lazy too look up sources, sorry; the NZ tools is easy to find, the counting crows are in a four-volume Encyclopedia of mathematics published in, mm, the '60s? It has Σ notation on the spines. I'll go downstairs and name it if anyone is curious. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 12.217.66.154 URL: http://clive@collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/10/2004 09:34:35 PM That's interesting about the boredom! That makes good sense. And yes, I've blogged before about crazy-smart crow behavior. They rule. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: clew EMAIL: attenhand@example.com IP: 216.231.44.89 URL: http://www.tenhand.com/clew/blog DATE: 06/10/2004 11:32:54 PM Well, apparently *my* brain cells are dying off, I should have remembered that you'd written about crow smarts right here. ----- PING: TITLE: Cool Experiment URL: http://www.dennistcheung.com/blog/archives/000502.html IP: 128.220.223.65 BLOG NAME: TomorrowYesterday - A Dennis T Cheung Blog DATE: 06/03/2004 11:12:17 PM collision detection: Bird brained But then something unexpected happened. Hugin, the subordinate, tried a new strategy. As soon as Munin bullied him, he headed over to a set of empty containers, prised the lids off them enthusiastically, and pretended ... ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Saturnian travel literature STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/01/2004 12:30:14 PM ----- BODY:
The Cassini space probe has entered the "Saturn planetary system" -- the zone in which Saturn's enormous field of gravity is so huge that it becomes a mini solar system, with a gazillion of its own moons. Scientists are most interested in the huge moon Titan, and NASA Cassini imaging expert Carolyn Porco has written a short essay describing Titan. I kind of cracked up when I read it, because it's superb example of a genre I like to call "astronomer travel literature": Floridly metaphoric evocations of extraterrestrial destinations, which feel as though they'd been excerpted from a Fodor's travel guide in the 23rd century:
Patchy methane clouds float several miles above the icy ground. In places, large, slow-moving droplets of methane mixed with other liquid organics fall to the surface in cold but gentle rains, cutting gullies, forming rivers and cataracts, carving canyons, and filling basins, craters and other surface depressions. Imagine Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. Above the methane clouds and rain lies two hundred kilometers worth of globe-enveloping red smog, making the Titan nights starless and the days eerie dark, where high noon is as dim as deep Earth twilight. Over eons, smog particles have drifted downwards, growing as they fell, to coat the surface in a blanket of organic matter. On high, steep slopes, methane rains have washed away this sludge, revealing the bright bedrock of ice. Could Xanadu, the brightest feature on Titan, be a high, methane-washed, mountain range of ice?Man alive, they actually call that outcropping "Xanadu". I love NASA nerds. (Thanks to Slashdot for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: John Anderson EMAIL: teqjack@wowmail.com IP: 64.223.51.63 URL: DATE: 06/01/2004 01:32:27 PM It does read like the guide Ferd may have used in the [now-ancient] "Ferdinand Feghoot's Travels" series... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/01/2004 06:00:53 PM Yes! Or Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", from whence the Xanadu meme itself doth flow. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Scott EMAIL: scott_j@spymac.com IP: 213.122.111.144 URL: DATE: 06/02/2004 09:05:08 AM I can almost hear the double-neck guitar solo and the insane Neil Peart drum fills... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/02/2004 10:55:14 AM Ahahahaha! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Buy Ultracet EMAIL: shannyn@bmaster3.com IP: 207.150.162.20 URL: http://www.ultracet-web.com DATE: 07/26/2004 11:54:00 PM each as Buy Ultracet http://www.ultracet-web.com medicine. better system may lower together either opioid pain used get medicine the to than acetaminophen used such tramadol medicines Combination acts nervous and used (CNS) with to In relieve central some containing opioid and cases, of relief provide pain. in alone. are relieve analgesics analgesic Ultracet An pain. acetaminophen relief may doses you ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: maya EMAIL: mayavaness@yahoo.com IP: 62.245.104.50 URL: DATE: 12/16/2004 04:17:05 PM http://www.matthowell.com/blog/archives/2003/06/about_this_blog.php ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Soma EMAIL: djfhd@ier.com IP: 70.48.116.153 URL: http://soma-pills.com DATE: 02/08/2005 07:57:51 PM Soma Carisoprodol I love this site, Muscle relaxant carisoprodol soma ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cialis EMAIL: dfgfg@retgfd.com IP: 67.68.245.226 URL: http://cialis-tadalafil.biz DATE: 02/21/2005 11:01:41 PM Cialis cialis soft tabs erectile dysfunction ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Generic Cialis EMAIL: dfgfg@retgfd.com IP: 67.68.245.226 URL: http://cialis-tadalafil.biz DATE: 02/21/2005 11:54:10 PM Generic Cialis cialis soft tabs erectile dysfunction ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Tadalafil EMAIL: dfgfg@retgfd.com IP: 67.68.245.226 URL: http://cialis-tadalafil.biz DATE: 02/22/2005 12:45:12 AM tadalafil cialis soft tabs erectile dysfunction ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Soma EMAIL: sdfgrg@dfgtdgdv.com IP: 70.48.220.136 URL: http://soma-pills.com DATE: 02/22/2005 08:31:07 PM soma muscle relaxant soma ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Generic Soma EMAIL: sdfgrg@dfgtdgdv.com IP: 70.48.220.136 URL: http://soma-pills.com DATE: 02/22/2005 09:19:27 PM generic soma muscle relaxant generic soma ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Generic Cialis EMAIL: sdfgrg@dfgtdgdv.com IP: 70.48.118.219 URL: http://cialis.pharmacydiscounts.biz DATE: 02/23/2005 08:37:10 AM Generic Cialis Cure impotence with generic cialis ----- PING: TITLE: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003132.html URL: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003132.html IP: 66.33.213.5 BLOG NAME: linkage DATE: 06/01/2004 03:40:27 PM collision detection: Saturnian travel literature... ----- PING: TITLE: texas hold em URL: http://texas-hold-em.fearcrow.com/ IP: 216.68.128.196 BLOG NAME: texas hold em DATE: 03/18/2005 01:48:02 AM Please visit the pages about party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Airtexting STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/01/2004 12:18:58 PM ----- BODY:
Nokia has just announced a phone that can send "airtexts" -- messages that are displayed in the air by a set of LEDs. As their press release notes:
By waving the Nokia 3220 from side to side, the LED lights of the Nokia Xpress-on(TM) Fun Shell light up to "write" a message that appears to float in mid-air. Exchanging messages across a crowded room or at open-air concerts will never be the same.Blogger Joi Ito speculated on the possibility of this being used for some hilariously aggressive heckling at conferences. Imagine some stuffed shirt giving a speech -- and looking up to see the words "YOU SUCK" floating in the middle of the audience. Heh. And speakers thought the backchannel was bad. (Thanks to Boing Boing for this one!) ----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Donald Melanson EMAIL: donald@mindjack.com IP: 207.179.137.87 URL: http://www.melanson.ca DATE: 06/01/2004 08:18:44 PM Man, and you thought a cell phone ringing in a theatre was annoying. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ian Bogost EMAIL: ian@persuasivegames.com IP: 68.10.32.19 URL: http://www.watercoolergames.org DATE: 06/01/2004 09:04:39 PM This isn't really new. Wildseed (http://www.wildseed.com) had a "smart skin" phone that Kyocera was going to market, which also had airtexting. I saw a prototype when I was doing some work for Kyocera. It's *lame*. I mean, seriously lame. The cognitive dissonance associated with using that feature is simply *massive*. It's like popping a whitehead at a prom dinner. Who would do it? ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/02/2004 10:57:05 AM Gaaaaaaaaaaah Now I can't get that image out of my head. Yeah, I rather agree, it does seem like an impossibly dorky thing to do. And you're quite correct about the previous Kyocera phone that attempted this app; I read about that when I did a mobile-phone story for MTV last fall. I'll be interested to see if *anyone* uses 'em. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pat Winchell EMAIL: IP: 68.77.15.175 URL: DATE: 06/02/2004 12:12:00 PM "I must use this power only to annoy!"-bart simpson so there really doesn't seem to be any practical usage for this that regular text messaging or just talking wouldn't be better/less annoying for. I'm sure many people will end up using this feature, though I doubt anyone will pay extra for it. this is a good reason to invent new ways to shut off people's phones through bluetooth or somesuch. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Dawn EMAIL: tdrumgool@earthlink.net IP: 66.12.60.238 URL: DATE: 06/11/2004 03:27:52 PM They could sell a ton to Red Sox fans in Boston. Imagine the entire stadium waving "Yankees Suck" in unison. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Carl Ross EMAIL: johny_b@gmx.de IP: 66.98.178.227 URL: http://www.blogman.biz/ DATE: 07/01/2004 12:33:08 AM And this is my homepage. Carl Ross o ----- PING: TITLE: air texting URL: http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com/archives/006057.html IP: 69.93.129.4 BLOG NAME: boynton DATE: 06/01/2004 11:58:30 PM My first thought on reading about air texting - phones with LED floating messages - was a sense of despair. Here comes the litter... Not enough to hear the duck quack of dumb curses everywhere, now we'll have to see... ----- PING: TITLE: Words Not Spoken URL: http://www.all-baseball.com/willcarroll/archives/2004_06.html#013884 IP: 209.68.1.83 BLOG NAME: Will Carroll Weblog DATE: 06/10/2004 05:38:53 PM How long do you think it will take before a fan and an athlete get into a fight because of one of these?... ----- PING: TITLE: online poker URL: http://online-poker.fearcrow.com/ IP: 202.88.149.72 BLOG NAME: online poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:58:33 AM Please visit some information about party poker online poker texas hold em ----- -------- AUTHOR: Clive Thompson TITLE: Just not kosher STATUS: Publish ALLOW COMMENTS: 1 CONVERT BREAKS: __default__ ALLOW PINGS: 1 DATE: 06/01/2004 11:57:51 AM ----- BODY:
Here's one for the philosophers: Is New York's water kosher? You'd imagine so, but recent tests have discovered that codepods -- tiny, half-millimeter-long creatures -- are surviving through the city's filtration process. I just had a glass of water with breakfast, and for all I know I drank a couple of these things. The problem is, codepods are crustaceans, and that means they're not kosher. ("And they're ugly," as one Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn noted.) Ingesting insects, too, is against Talmudic law. The codepods have thus triggered a huge debate amongst those who keep strictly kosher in New York, because as the New York Times points out, the tiny critters raise some weird religious questions:
What defines an insect? Does seeing one through a microscope constitute seeing one for the purposes of kosher law? And, perhaps most confoundedly, can a person legitimately claim not to see a copepod with the naked eye after looking through a microscope and learning what one looks like?I love it. Religion has always had to grapple with the corporeal world, and it's not getting any easier, given that modern technology actually changes the nature of reality. Last fall I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine pointing out that mobile phones have reshaped our notions of time and space, and, as a result, the geography of religious life:
Muslims in other countries -- like Britain -- have begun using a service that tells them the prayer times in Mecca, which means they essentially live in two time zones at once: local time for their professional lives and Saudi time for their spiritual lives. ''They're existing in two countries simultaneously,'' Bell notes.----- EXTENDED BODY: ----- EXCERPT: ----- KEYWORDS: ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jonathan Korman EMAIL: GGbridge@earthlink.net IP: 209.213.214.226 URL: http://miniver.blogspot.com/ DATE: 06/01/2004 05:48:54 PM Hmmmnn. They say that the bagels are better in NYC because of something about the water ... ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 66.108.82.10 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/02/2004 10:57:49 AM Ahahahh -- excellent point! ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: dl EMAIL: danielrluke@prodigy.net IP: 67.160.165.197 URL: DATE: 06/03/2004 10:04:20 PM I read the thing about the copepods, and it made me not want to drink the water in NYC. I'm not a germ phobic, especially, but there is something really disgusting about these small animals. They look like miniature roaches. I don't think the orthodox community is being unreasonable at all. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Andrew EMAIL: griffiar@mcmaster.ca IP: 216.8.162.181 URL: DATE: 06/04/2004 12:06:31 AM I have a question: What word did the Orthodox Jewish rulemakers use when they said that "crustaceans" weren't kosher? I imagine that they weren't Linnean taxonomists so the idea of a "crustacean" is a neat little historical translation and it involves, like Clive says, a total reorganization of reality. But in the case of this taxonomy, it's not technology (microscopes, etc.) that changes our perception of the world: the way that we organize the world into species seems to change the very nature of the thing that New Yorkers are drinking. These little monsters certainly don't resemble tasty mullosks unless we're assuming the same bizarre, counterintuitive framework which tells me that robins are related to velociraptors *and* penguins. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Clive EMAIL: clive@collisiondetection.net IP: 208.54.15.3 URL: http://www.collisiondetection.net DATE: 06/04/2004 12:48:39 AM That's a really, *really* good point. Intellectual constructs are as powerful as technologies -- or even more so -- in reshaping how we think about the reality around us. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: brettporzio EMAIL: brettporzio@hotmail.com IP: 68.174.8.88 URL: DATE: 06/06/2004 12:47:19 PM ew!!!! nasty ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Aharon EMAIL: aharon@simpletone.com IP: 65.27.145.56 URL: http://simpletone.com/cdi/aharon DATE: 07/29/2004 12:32:51 PM The rules of Kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) only apply to creatures visible with the naked eye. The only permissable sea creatures to eat are those with fins and scales. This is why eels, lampreys, catfish, oysters, and lobster are all not acceptable for Jews to eat according to traditional observance. If these creatures were visible with the naked eye, then they would certainly be a cause for concern (I think), but if not, this is simply the case of some worrying beyond the letter of the law -- a common hobby among religious folk of all backgrounds. ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: mature gallery nude mature women EMAIL: 4@mqgoujoqao.com IP: 24.251.45.133 URL: http://www.geocities.com/gematureqrst/mature-gallery.html DATE: 01/08/2005 11:13:35 AM Mature swingers mature videos, mature girls mature fucking. Mature pussy mature tits, sexy mature amateur mature. Old granny women naked pictures mature video, mature stories mature asian. Mature pictures mature amateurs, naked mature women free mature thumbs. Mature videos mature mom, mature women sex mature mom. Sexy mature free mature gallery, mature pantyhose mature women nude. Mature free sex sites mature black women, mature lady mature tgp. mature gallery mature nudes. ----- PING: TITLE: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003130.html URL: http://www.abstractdynamics.org/linkage/archives/003130.html IP: 66.33.213.5 BLOG NAME: linkage DATE: 06/01/2004 01:06:54 PM Is NYC water kosher?... ----- PING: TITLE: NYC Tap Water: Non-Veg? URL: http://souljerky.com/archives/000374.html IP: 69.49.161.131 BLOG NAME: Sri Ganesha Tea & Book Stall DATE: 06/03/2004 07:29:12 AM "...recent tests have discovered that codepods -- tiny, half-millimeter-long creatures -- are surviving through the city's filtration process... The problem... ----- PING: TITLE: party poker URL: http://party-poker.vpshs.com/ IP: 83.211.141.178 BLOG NAME: party poker DATE: 03/18/2005 01:54:14 AM Please check out the sites about party poker online poker texas hold em ----- --------
