Did you know that an overturned swan can’t right itself and so subsequently drowns?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan
It’s in Wikipedia, therefore it must be true (now)!
Digi-Shakespeare buys a sandwich!
taste luck taken opened book.
better changed studied across?
inside carefully steps met stopping. stopping respect matter sandwich worthy choose.
pay appear twenty-one may taste.
sorry advantage studied appearance fail.
After being away for a while, DS strikes back with a bold five line poem about buying a sandwich. Hm. Not really one of his/her classics, is it? I think the three-line ones are better.
Advertising treats us like we’re sixteen
I came across an interesting term today while writing part of my thesis: ‘Aspirational age’.
This is a marketing term that indicates advertising to one age group can have an impact on a wider range of ages. By targetting 16-17 year olds they get those that are younger and long for percieved maturity and older people who long for the time of youthful freedom and health (even if these are false ideals).
I find this especially interesting, because the whole idea of teenage years being any different from any other time is a relatively modern concept, only really coming about with rock’n’roll in the twentieth century. Is it a coincidence that advertising was really getting into the swing of things at around the same time? We invent a concept of freedom, tell people they have it until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, then tell everyone else that it was the best time of their life to market products to them.
It’s a Möbius strip of marketing logic, and I find the idea fascinating!
The importance of applying consistent rules in a thesis: A Brit Professor defends Intelligent Design
The irony of this is that his basic premise has a flaw.
Last night I went to a discussion up at my university about the final presentation of PhD theses. I was told about the worst-case scenario of a thesis. This happened to a young mathematician. Imagine spending at least three years, often several more, working on a hypothesis, writing it up, and analysing its meaning. In maths everything is laid on a solid foundation of calculation and then you work upwards from there. At the end of your studies you present your thesis, its read by a committee (aside: I like the word ‘committee’, it has three double-letters in it :)) and then the committee gives you an interview, called a viva, about your study. This usually takes about an hour, although some places don’t restrict this and the viva can go on for up to six hours!
This mathematician had chosen his review committee, and things were looking good; however, the chairman fell ill and unfortunately had to be replaced at a late stage. The new chairman walked into the viva, pointed out a flaw in the maths on page five and the whole thesis was decreditted and it failed.
Ouch.
So, do you remember I mentioned a little while ago about there being a trial in America where a group of parents had taken a school to court because the school wanted to teach Intelligent Design theory as a legitimate rival to the theory of evolution? A British sociologist professor has testified in defence of ID claiming:
that because scientists have inferred the existence of a designer from observations of biological phenomena, it should count as scientific.
(Sourcehere.)
As much as this is a lovely idea, using the same logic as ‘it’s art because it was made by an artist’, it’s just not an accurate statement. This is the same as the mathematician’s mistake on page five: if their basic assumptions are not good science then anything built of them still is a victim to the initial difficulties in logic. Assuming that complexity can only be explained by supernatural phenomena/aliens is not a scientific proposition because it is fundamentally unverifiable. The argument ‘X did it, therefore it is a product with X’s attributes’ is acceptable for art where the product does not have to maintain conformity with rigidly logical rules and deductions, but that’s just not the same for scientists. A scientist could claim that the internal organs of a duck in flight transform into helium, but that wouldn’t make it good science; the proposition that some scientists like the idea of ID and therefore ID is scientific is a classic page five mistake.
A one-molecule car!
Crikey, a car made up of only one molecule, I can think of no beginning of the practical applications for that…
There’s a nice article explaining clearly how they did it:
Ultimately the team decided to synthesize the axle and chassis via palladium-catalyzed coupling reactions.
I’m sure I would have chosen to do the same thing.
I love nanotech. There’s some great work being done to replicate solar panels that are energy-efficient to produce, and I can see why that kind of thing is useful, but I’m really lost as to the point of this exercise. I guess maybe it’s one of those things that people do as a proof of concept, so that when they do work out something to make with a practical application then they’ll have more of an idea of how to go about doing it, but for the moment this seems exceptionally pointless.
More, including a diagram which tells you very little, here.
I’ll leave the last, inconclusive, words to the writers of the article, who clearly also have no idea what a one-molecule car is for:
The development bodes opening new vistas.
Dead at the wheel in Croydon
The story is simple: a man in Australia was given a parking ticket despite being in his car at the time. The attendant didn’t notice him, having approached the car from the rear, and put the ticket on the passenger windscreen.
The twist is that the man in the car was dead, and it was nine days since he had been reported missing. Apparently the parking officer is ‘extremely distressed to have learned of the situation’, which is understandable because it must be quite a nasty thing to find that you missed.
So, an oddity but not beyond belief by any means, what really astonishes me is that this took place in an area of Melbourne called ‘Croydon Market’.
Many of you reading this will probably not know of Croydon, but it’s generally regarded as one of the most dreary, miserable, soulless places in the UK. I grew up there and I have a peculiar fondness for its monolithic 1960s architecture. For some reason I like the huge lumps of concrete looming into the sky. I find it particularly amusing that the council, in an effort to make the place appear nicer, decided to set up coloured lights to shine on the buildings at night. Now, instead of huge dark rectangles in the night they have eerie spectral-hued buildings lurching like forgotten geometric gods in the sky. Fantastic! That perks the place up! Of all the places in the world that you could name your location after, why choose Croydon? I realise it was probably some home-sick convict long ago who named it, but even then I find the idea quite amusing.
To give some perspective to people who don’t know Croydon or its reputation here’s an example. The BBC cult TV series Red Dwarf is set three million years in the future. The human race is reduced to one man who is stranded a massive distance from earth. This man has extremely low standards of hygiene and etiquette, and even he thinks that Croydon is a dump. Yep, that’s the place that I called home. It probably shaped a lot of my attitude to cities and the bizarre sense of humour, because I think you’ve got to have a bit of a laugh if you live there otherwise you’ll turn into a psycho and start attacking church goers with a sword while naked (which happened a little while ago just outside Croydon).
Now sing along with me (to the tune of ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’:
Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner,
That I think the human race is doomed!
Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner,
That I love buildings that loom.
I get a funny feeling inside of me
Just walking up and down. (Which could be a knife)
Maybe it’s because I’m a Croydoner
That I love Croydon Town.
I’m giving away free corsets! + Halloween anim. update
Due to a massive lack of funds caused by international trade issues out of my hands, the economic slowdown in the UK, and goodness knows how many other things, I’m re-opening my on-site shop.
http://www.matazone.co.uk/shop
At the moment I’ve only got corsets by Snobz in there and some badges left from the last time I was running the shop. Little Goth Girl bags and T-shirts will turn up at some point in the next two weeks, but I’m not sure when.
I’m really pleased with the deal I’ve got on the corsets. They’re really good ones and I’ve got them for 10% cheaper than you’ll find (decent ones) elsewhere, plus there’s the chance that you won’t even have to pay for it…
I’ve decided that after every twenty corsets that I sell the next person will get theirs free, so I’ll refund the money for the corset and pop it in the post to them. You’ll never know if it’s going to be you, but you won’t find other websites giving away free corsets!
As usual, I’m pretty sure that I’ve got it all tested, but if you do have any problems with the shop please let me know as soon as possible!
In other news: I’ve got the Halloween animation written, and so I’m going to try and allocate some time to making it over the next few days. I’m really pleased with the way the story has panned out, so I hope that I can give it at least reasonable graphics in time for Halloween. It may end up with a lot of static shots: they also take up a lot of time to draw, but they’re usually faster than animation.
Bill Gates possibly wrong shock!
Okay, so this is just my personal opinion, but I’m pretty sure that Bill Gates is getting way ahead of his market.
Speaking at Harvard University, Bill Gates has picked the hard drive and streaming over the Internet as the likely death knell for disc formats. Gates branded high-capacity discs like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray “the last physical format we’ll ever have.” With Live on Xbox 360 set to deliver full games as well as demos, videos and music, Gates’ comments appear to explain why Microsoft hasn’t embraced the HD-DVD for the Xbox 360.
I know how much of a pain it is to have to move data from one hard-drive to the next, but when I had to buy a new computer I didn’t need to do anything with my DVD collection. It was still there. When my hard-drive died from a mechanical fault and most data was utterly irretrievable the DVDs on my shelf didn’t mind. When I pay for a film I want to be able to know that I own it for as long as I look after it, rather than hoping that the data on the drive doesn’t corrupt because a kid in Brazil worked out a clever way to get past my firewall and anti-virus software. Some of the videos I own I’ve had for well over a decade, in the meantime I’ve seen countless computing platforms disappear beneath the wave of progress, but that video is still there, ready to be watched without me needing to work to upkeep it (other than perhaps giving it a bit of a dust occasionally!).
I don’t deny that in maybe ten or fifteen years that data will have become so fluid that these issues are finally outdated, that the memory of the average computer will be sufficient to carry every film I’ve ever owned without blinking an eye, and that this data will be as secure as a physical media but as easily transferable as lending a DVD to a friend or putting the box on a shelf in a new house, but we’re not there yet.
Perhaps the most important thing that I think Bill Gates is overlooking is the fondness people have for physical formats. We have lived for millennia with the idea of physical ownership and I don’t think it’s going to entirely vanish overnight, especially not without a major rethink in the way that entertainment media operates. To give an example, I’ve got an original copy of Fight Club, a great film that I thoroughly enjoy, but somehow the DVD has become scratched. This is the first time that this has happened to a disk that I own and it’s pretty frustrating (yes, physical media definitely has its risks too!) but I don’t want to pay for it again, so I might get a friend to run off a copy of the one he owns. I’ve paid for it, so why shouldn’t I own it? In the future of Bill Gates there will be no physical evidence of ownership to justify replacement and if one film becomes damaged the whole collection could go.
It’s the job of people like Bill Gates to be optimistic about the future, but I think on this one he’s underestimated people’s attachment to physical media. To use another paradigm, electronic ink may be the future of newspapers, but I can’t see books disappearing in our lifetimes.
ATM fraud that could have destroyed banks
During the 1990s the ATM system (hole-in-the-wall cash machines) had a massive critical flaw in the way that PIN numbers were generated, and the one barrister who could force the banks to take action was taken off the case.
This sounds like a pretty dull read, but it’s weirdly gripping. If you’ve got a few minutes on a break I highly suggest going through this article just to see how unsecure our financial institutions were for over a decade and how little they did about it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/21/phantoms_and_rogues/
Interesting stuff.
Handy computer tips
I know this is very un-geek chic of me, but like many people the foibles of Microsoft Word frequently escape my understanding. Things that I set one day seem to vanish, other times it will constantly decide to print everything in blue with flowers instead of dots on the ‘i’s.* This chap has worked on The Daily Telegraph for many years, sorting out those simple but niggling problems with computers and now he’s started a blog:
It’s only been going for a little while, but it’s already got some nice tips on there, like how to create a desktop shortcut to shutdown Windoze XP. It’s not life changing stuff, but it’s the little things that make the difference sometimes.
*may not be entirely true
Are my details worth a free Jesus T-shirt?
It’s a tough choice: do I give my details to countless rubbish firms I don’t want to hear from in return for a very funky Jesus T-shirt?
Tricky. I’m not sure if they supply to the UK, so it’s probably not a real dilemma. The design is pretty cool though…
I suspect that they don’t really intend to be linked to by people who enjoy kitsch Christian merchandise!
Parp!
Dual Screen bricks! – Nintendo DS gets hacked too
Anything $ony can do, Ninten-cando too.
Do you remember little while ago I wrote about a trojan that could turn your PSP into a very nicely designed brick? Well, not to be outdone, Nintendo’s DS has got a couple of its own too.
The first one is getting in the same way as the PSP trojan, using home-brew creation/playing software to trick people into putting the software onto your machine. Dubbed the ‘DSBrick’ trojan, it works to turn your lovely fun toy into a lump of unusable plastic and components. More about that one here.
The second one apparently gets in through downloads of applications to show hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography of women) on your machine. This is a more common approach for hackers. Pornography has always been a good way of launching attacks on people’s machines because the user is less likely to report what they were trying to do to authorities. It’s sneaky, but nothing new, other than the fact that it’s attacking hand-held machines. Source here.
I really fail to see how anyone other than Nintendo stands to benefit from this, all that happens is that a load of strangers end up scared to use non-commercially produced products, putting users off from experimenting with new software on their machines. That certainly doesn’t do any favours for small software designers, who are the kind of people who have the jobs that many of these malicious programmers would one day like to get.
To look at this from another point of view, the PSP’s curved corners make it a difficult building block, but the DS has straight edges. Out of the two, the DS is ultimately going to prove the most useful building material, so if you own both and fancy turning one of your machines into a brick then I suggest that the DS with give the best results.
New Doctor Who spinoff ‘Torchwood’
After the massively successful recent series of Doctor Who there will be a new series next year. After that series has finished there will be a new 13 episode series called Torchwood starring the Captain Jack character.
It will be shown on BBC3, a slightly off-mainstream branch of BBC television that generally aims its programming at a slightly more cult audience. The programme is described as being aimed at adults so it will be shown after 9pm. Unlike Doctor Who, that travels around many locations, Torchwood will be set in Cardiff, keeping the same location each week. “The drama features investigators solving human and alien crime.” Who would have thought that so much alien crime happens in Cardiff?
Actually, having met a few people from Cardiff… 😉
“It’s going to be a dark, wild and sexy roller-coaster ride…I can’t wait to explore Captain Jack even more,” says John Barrowman, the chap who plays Captain Jack. Given Jack’s flirting with the Doctor and the writer Russel T. Davies’ history of writing scripts about gay issues (Queer As Folk, for example) I’m going to be very interested to see how this turns out. It should be a good laugh, and Davies hasn’t done anything bad yet. Even his very early work on the children’s sci-fi series Dark Season was fantastic.
Torchwood should be on screens at the end of 2006 after next year’s Doctor Who series has been shown. More details here (BBC News) and here (official announcement with links to interviews).
British horror is looking good*
*although I’m not sure if ‘blood soaked’ counts as ‘looking good’, but you get the drift.
Last year we had the fantastic Shaun of the Dead UK link
Earlier this year I eventually got around to watching the 2002 British horror film 28 Days Later UK link
This weekend I saw Creep UK link
British horror really does seem to be doing very well at the moment. I’m looking forward to what happens next!
On a side-note: I can imagine approaching Franke Potente with a script-
Mata: Hi Franke, I’m making a film about a young woman who is struggling to regain her memories of the past.
Franke: Uh huh.
M: She meets people who all seem familiar, but they all pretend not to recognise her…
F: I’m not sure.
M: So she has to sprint between them against the clock to
F: I’M IN!
She certainly does like running in films, that lady.
The BRI
I used to work in an off-licence (a liquor store, in the US) and on Sundays it would be very quiet. I invented a method to rate the busy-ness of the day: the Bohemian Rhapsody Index (BRI). Essentially, this was the number of times I could sing the Bohemian Rhapsody in full before the next customer came in. An average Sunday would round out at around two or three on the index. I think one day had a rating of seven, which needless to say was pretty high even for that shop.
I would like to say that such things are useful for keeping you sane when working by yourself in a really boring job, but I suspect that even taking the idea seriously indicates a slight slippage in the levels of sanity.
Microwaved food for microwaved passengers
They’ve been in science fiction books for many years, but now they are finally practical models. Microwave scanners are coming to an airport near you!
Using a 3mm microwave, the equipment builds up a three dimensional map of the space in front of it. Different objects return the beam at different fequencies, so you can tell what things are made of. This is a pretty cool gadget, although it does seem slightly pervy because cloth has almost no microwave return signal so look like they’re naked. Actually, that alone is probably enough to ensure that it goes on the market eventually, because any technology that can be applied to pornographic use has ever failed to sell. Now all they need to do is work out how to make the technology tie in to Star Trek and they won’t be able to keep them on the shelves.
Of course, anyone who’s read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (UK link
More about the scanner here.
New James Bond about to be confirmed
Tomorrow the new Bond will be announced as being Daniel Craig.
If, like me, your first reaction was ‘who?’ you might want to click here for the IMDB file and here for some pictures.
Perhaps it says a lot that the only thing I’ve seen him in is the first Tomb Raider movie, where he played Lara’s boyfriend-ish bloke Alex West (and you also get to see him naked in a shower). UK link
Trivia buffs might also like to know that the screenplay for the next Bond film, Casino Royale, has been written by Paul Haggis, who wrote the brilliant Canadian mountie comedy/drama Due South. UK link
Narnia marketing: Christians as a turn-off?
Here’s an interesting thing: Disney are having trouble pitching the new Narnia film’s soundtrack/s because of the religious content of the movie. They’ve released a Christian soundtrack, but they may release another one too, to try and not put off whole sections of the market.
The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis are roughly based on Christian stories and morality, and Disney has been trying its hardest to capitalise on the religious market that did so well for Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ. They’ve been marketing hard at Christians, showing trailers at Christian conventions and suchlike, and have released a soundtrack album for the film of songs ‘inspired by’ the story, all by Christian performers and treating the material from a Christian perspective. The problem that they’re facing is that they don’t want to turn off the secular (non-religous) parts of society from buying the music and watching the film. Equally they’re scared that Disney might become seen as a Christian-film maker (although after The Lion King I’m amazed they’re not already). Disney is hoping to release a non-Christian soundtrack album too, but currently isn’t sure if it’s going to manage this because music for the film hasn’t been fully settled on yet.
I find this a little weird. I don’t think I’ve heard of a soundtrack album being released targetted specifically at a group based on its religion before. Is this something we’re going to see more of in the future: I’d love to see the ‘Blade 4: The Christian Rock Original Motion Picture Soundtrack’, featuring songs about the Christian metaphor of a man with supernatural powers, born from death and to deliver humanity from evil. How about having whole different soundtrack options on films, so you’d have one version of the film with the secular soundtrack, and another one with Christian folk singers chirping uplifting ballads between actors’ lines?
But why stop there? ‘Lord of the Rings: The Bollywood Edition’ would be great. You could do a George Lucas style remake of the film’s special effects, having Gollum dance on, twirling his wrists, and sing in Hindi about the need for understanding of the balance between the physical incarnation of the body and spiritual fulfillment.
Should Christians be insulted that their religion is now just a marketing tool? Or are they expected to simply enjoy the idea of celebrating Christ through their consumer choices? It all smacks of buying redemption to me. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that people have tried to buy their way into heaven (the medieval church became massively rich selling pardons) but it’s certainly an interesting manifestation of late-stage capitalism’s interpretation of religion’s position in society.
More (in a slightly more serious tone) here.
Can you or someone you know read X-ray/CT scans?
The black helicopters are circling!
There’s a chap on my forums who believes that he has alien-technology implants in his neck. He believes that they were put there 35 years ago by the Australian Navy. He also claims to be part of a cover-up of the murder of the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, who, mainstream reports say, drowned. His website can be seen here.
We’ve been as polite as possible to this chap and his one defender (a conveniently timed new forum member), but without medical training we’re just working on logic and observation, so I need your help:
Do you or a friend know how to read X-rays or CT scans?
On this page there are scans that the person claims to show alien-technology implants in his neck. To me they look remarkably like organic structures, possibly scar tissue, or maybe a hardening of ligaments from some damage to the neck. I think my favourite bit on that page is the third page of the letter which talks about the need to ‘expose the TRUTH’ about the operation on his neck. I’ve seen the Truth, the truth, but rarely do I see the TRUTH. I love this kind of stuff!
I would like to hear from anyone with experience in the field who can make a judgement on the pictures, either way. It would be especially useful if they are currently working in a verifiable position in a hospital – this is all about checkable evidence, so being able to confirm that the person saying it does have a medical background would be useful! Surely someone or a friend must be able to help with this?
I would really love for it all to be true. I think it would be great if some massive governmental/corporate/alien conspiracy were to be behind all this, but I just don’t think it is, which is a shame. Still, I’d like to find someone with medical experience of looking at scans who can say that the shadows on the scans are seen on thousands of other ones every day (or that they aren’t).
The thing that I find the strangest out of all of this is that this man claims to have been involved in an internationally mandated assassination of his country’s prime minister but then he waffles on about alien-technology neck implants and almost completely forgets the initial claim. Such an assassination is far more believable than the implant story, but he doesn’t give any details about it.
You can see the full forum thread here. It’s quite entertaining!