I liked this video from Neal Stephenson promoting a kickstarter project to finance better sword-fighting in computer games.
Clang!
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Category Archives: Life
Double-Necked Guitar
Speaks for itself: Rush backstage.
Too Much Pizza
If you saw the ads for Taco Town on SNL, this won’t be anything new to you. But if you didn’t, you might enjoy this over-the-top pizza ad (via vanderleun).
(Sadly, the language in that ad is NSFW. It’s a shame that so many people lack the vocabulary, wit, and subtlety to express themselves without resorting to profanity. They do with their language what they accuse Pizza Hut of doing with food. There’s more to communicating than intensity.)
If those aren’t enough, you might also like the (slightly less vulgar) South Park Chipotle Away commercial.
Reading is Probably Good
What’s with this poster?
Is it supposed to encourage kids to read? Then why talk to their parents (“your kids on books”)? Is there anything that would turn kids off quicker than telling them their parents want them to do it?
Is the poster supposed to encourage parents to allow their kids to read? But is that really a problem? Are there still a lot of parents out there who don’t want their kids reading?
Let’s assume there are such parents. Who are they?
From the poster, I’d guess they’re not conservatives. One of the children is shown with a witch’s hat and wand, a la Harry Potter.
Is that an outcome that would encourage conservatives to permit their kids to read? Not if the stereotypes are correct.
Also, note that while there are four children, the two girls are inspired to imagine more macho roles: an underwater explorer and a knight in armor. The boys become … well, I think it’s a pirate, but it might be a colonial American or possibly someone from the old west. The other is the aforementioned witch. Again, if the target of this ad is a stereotypical conservative, those are probably outcomes to be avoided.
I’m all for kids reading (Harry Potter and all). But this poster seems to be a plea for liberals to allow their kids to read, which makes me wonder if it’s a sort of Freudian slip.
Alaska Note: Exxon Valdez Still Around
The Exxon Valdez (now known as the Oriental Nicety) is still around. It was headed to Gujarat, India, to be broken up. That’s on hold while the authorities determine whether it contains toxic materials. The Amoco Cadiz avoided this fate by doing its oil spill and breaking up at the same time.
Brain and Brain. What is Brain?
A new hypothesis says that humans are so clever because our brain cells are the result of a copying error, or, really two copying errors:
The second, more recent, duplication seems to be incomplete, with only part of the gene being duplicated. The researchers think this partially duplicated gene is able to interfere with the actions of the original, ancestral copy of SRGAP2. When the researchers added the partially duplicated gene copy to the mouse genome (mice don’t normally have it) it seemed to speed the migration of brain cells during development, which makes brain organization more efficient.
Do It to Julia
The Obama campaign introduced a new message showing how Obama policies—interestingly, they’re calling the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” now—have benefitted an everywoman they call “Julia.”
Good luck finding it on the website. Julia seems to have been disappeared, probably because it has drawn fire from both sides of the aisle. An example from the left is the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” explanation of its “misleading” “campaign trick” on Social Security. Still, it’s worthwhile to look at the campaign yourself.
Even more worth looking at, however, is Iowahawk’s send-up of the Julia messaging. My favorite line is the last one.
Out for a Jog
News reports say that even a little jogging can make your life longer. Except if you do it on a street in Saudi Arabia, as this bird found out:
I don’t know precisely where in Saudi Arabia this video was taken. Google Translate appears to say it was on King Fahd Street in Abha Abha(?). Since I’m not a Muslim, I guess I’ll never have the opportunity to check it out first hand, but actually it looks like a pretty squalid place. The streets are paved, but only just barely, and the buildings all look like they should say “Checks Cashed Here” or (ironically) “Liquor.”
(The video link comes from JWZ, who titles it “buzzard bait.” Judging from how careful the drivers are to avoid the ostrich, he may be right. But it’s fun to watch the bird just trotting along. Wikipedia says they can run up to 43 mph. Based on that, I’d guess the bird in the video isn’t even breaking a sweat.)
Tab Sweep
Here, with minimal comments, are some things I ran across on the internet that I thought were amusing or interesting.
Depressed Darth: Stay on Target.
Alternate History: What if “Star Wars Episode 1” was good?
Top voice talents: 5 Guys in a Limo.
The Lives of Others. (I’ve seen this. A great movie. It’s my favorite German-language film, except possibly Downfall.)
Joss Whedon: why does he kill the characters we love? And what does that forebode about Tony Stark in The Avengers?
Tripp and Tyler’s Rad Sk8 (featuring Tony Hawk).
Life on earth prospers during certain seasons in the galactic year. When the solar system passes through regions with a lot of star formation going on, things get better here:
[The fossil records] tended to be richest in their variety when continents were drifting apart and sea levels were high and less varied when the land masses gathered 250 million years ago into the supercontinent called Pangaea and the sea-level was lower. But this geophysical effect was not the whole story. When it is removed from the record of biodiversity, what remains corresponds closely to the changing rate of nearby stellar explosions, with the variety of life being greatest when supernovae are plentiful.—via /.
Kindle and the DOJ
Since I’m talking about the Kindle, I should give my opinion about the Department of Justice lawsuit against the big publishers. (Like you asked.) (So what? Who’s blog is this?)
Here’s the deal. The DOJ alleges that the big publishers colluded with Apple to develop an “Agency” pricing model that allowed them to raise prices on eBook titles beyond the $9.99 that Amazon was trying to establish as the normative price for new titles in its Kindle market.
The lawsuit will establish whether or not such collusion took place. But it doesn’t matter, according to people like the New York Times‘ David Carr:
Let’s stipulate that there may have been some manner of price-fixing here…. But … [f]rom the very beginning and with increasingly regularity, Amazon has used its market power to bully and dictate.
The Atlantic‘s Jordan Weissman agrees that guilt or innocence is missing the point:
The publishers come off as a smidgen less than sympathetic in this tale. The government’s filings are filled, for instance, with descriptions of hush hush dinners…. But…Amazon isn’t simply a garden variety retailer, or a helpless, well-meaning innovator. It’s the dominant force in books, and especially digital publishing.
It might be true they broke the law, in other words, but! since it’s Amazon, then it’s okay. (Remember the image of Lady Justice on courthouses with a special blindfold that lets her see whether the victim is Amazon?)
Nonsense. The reason Amazon has a near monopoly in the market is that its Kindle reads documents packaged in a proprietary format. Once I buy a couple of books published in Amazon’s Kindle format, I’m less and less inclined to buy books in Barnes and Noble’s competing format.
In the real world, we don’t have this problem because all books come in the same, nonproprietary format: words printed on paper. I can buy a book the Friends of the Library’s book sale and take go read it in the nice chairs at Barnes and Noble, or I can buy a book at Title Wave here in Anchorage and sell it on the Amazon used-book market when I’m done.
We could have that kind of flexibility in eBooks too, except that the publishers don’t want us too. So they put their books in formats that provide DRM (digital rights management) or copy protection. They don’t want you to be able to make copies of your books. That’s why the Kindle app on your computer can search (yay!) but can’t cut and paste even the smallest excerpt of a book.
The publishers are terrified that, if they sell you an eBook in an open format, you’ll make copies of it for all your friends.
Now, from the world of digital music, we have abundant evidence that there isn’t much market for pirated works when the variety and price of legitimate works is low enough. When CDs used to cost $17, people ripped them and passed USB drives full of MP3s around the dorm. But when you can buy the one song on the CD that you actually want, and it plays on all kinds of players, and it only costs a buck, most people are okay with just buying it.
For that matter, there’s evidence from the world of paper-and-ink books that people don’t make bootleg copies unless either the price (think: college textbooks) or the variety (think: out of print books) is a problem.
So the publishers could solve the problem immediately by offering their books through Barnes and Noble and Apple in an open format unencumbered with DRM. People would switch readers, and Amazon would have to provide support for the open format. That’s what Charlie Stross says, and he’s right.
But the publishing-industry dinosaurs are too stupid and greedy to act in their own best interest. That’s what John Gruber—who has been following on this, and whose links were my entry point into this controversy—says, and Gruber’s right, too.
But…there is no “but.” This is a problem the publishers made and they can unmake it whenever they want. In the meantime, they need to play by the rules.
God knows it would be easy enough for the publishers to get the rules changed: Congre$$ is alway$ ready to hop into bed with their old-media sugar-daddies and impose ever more restrictive imaginary property regimes, First Amendment be damned. Publishers could buy legislation that makes a mess of eBooks as readily as broadcasters did screwed up video.
We’re asked to look the other way while publishers collude to keep prices artificially high and the user experience and versatility low. We have to do that, you see, or Amazon might do to publishing what Steve Jobs did to the music business: drag it, kicking and squealing, into the 21st century.