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Entries for August 2003
Pumping Iron
Pumping Iron reveals Arnold Schwarzenegger to be unusually suited for a career in politics…which makes for a fascinating documentary and which should scare the hell out of everyone currently living in California.
Will the “real press” make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
Will the “real press” make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s past catch up with him?. Fan of Hitler, steroid user, cheats on wife, all-around jackass, and owner of the world’s biggest inferiority complex
suck.com illustrator Terry Colon rides again at Lafftracker
suck.com illustrator Terry Colon rides again at Lafftracker. Collaborative comics
BMW trying to cease and desist their
BMW trying to cease and desist their Mini Cooper fans into submission. BMW, next time save some trees and just send a letter saying, “Hi, we’re a big dumb company that hates our customers.”
And now we go to the man on the street
In reviewing S.W.A.T., Yahoo! member rufffryder22 blasts the movie critics who’ve given the film some not-so-good marks:
Let me start by criticizing the critics! They are an assorted bunch of failed writers or something who probably said the original Terminator sucked because it was too shallow and gave you only bang for your bucks….and look how popular Terminator is today! Dont believe these guys because these are the sort who would probably give a completely USELESS sleeper of a movie like Titanic(which had nothing to do with the REAL titanic sotry by the way)an A rating and yet find it hard to do so for an entertaining, action packed yarn.
I for one dont want REALITY per-se in my movies…I can get that outside in the real world. I have always gone to the movies to be entertained, to forget the world outside and hopefully always have the good guys win…THATS entertainment for me and if others have different opinions, fine.
Clint eastwood’s spaghetti western’s , bruce lee’s first movies all had this same kind of crap written about them, which leads me to believe that its always been only probably boring old or middle aged white guys (who couldnt enjoy a movie unless it had sean connery and classical music in it or something) write these *****ty reviews.
With all the spelling mistakes, sketchy grammar and poor argument, it’s easy to make fun of rufffryder22’s review and side with the critics in saying Hollywood is producing a lot of crap these days. But the truth is Hollywood knows their audience very well (a cynic might say, “they should know their audience well, they created it,” and that’s probably true) and rufffryder22 represents a significant chunk of it. He’s unknowingly quoting from slide #1 of the Hollywood Movie Producer’s Powerpoint presentation:
Attributes of a Successful Blockbuster Movie
1. Entertaining
2. Make people forget the outside world
3. Always have the good guys win
When your audience is parroting your prime directive back at you without any prompting, you know you’re doing something right.
BBC article on Julian Dibbell’s effort to
BBC article on Julian Dibbell’s effort to make money exclusively from playing Ultima Online.
Death to Smoochy
This movie could have been great, but it’s just average. Skip to the end to see the Nazi figure skating thing. Now that’s comedy gold!
The Alto and, how you say, Graphics Mouse
A September 1981 article in Byte magazine describes the “Graphics Mouse” component of the Alto personal computer:
The mouse is a small box with three buttons on the top and several ball bearings on the bottom. A slender cable connects the mouse to the Alto keyboard (see photo 4). The buttons are named red, yellow, and blue, although the physical buttons are all black. The mouse is typically held in the user’s right hand and rolled along the table on a soft piece of plastic that provides traction for the ball bearings.
Movement is detected by the motion of one of the ball bearings. The mouse reports changes in position to the Alto. From this, a cursor on the Alto display can be positioned. The physical position of the mouse on the table is unimportant, since only the change in position is reported. The mouse graphics interface is considerably more flexible and comfortable than a bit pad, joystick, or trackball. Many Alto programs can be controlled with the mouse alone independent of a keyboard.
And then there’s this prescient bit at the end:
A stand-alone Alto is usable, but the best configuration is a group of Altos connected by an Ethernet system. Since the Ethernet system is a local network, a special device called a gateway was developed to allow local Ethernet networks to speak to other Ethernet networks or packet networks of other types. Many companies are researching network schemes that would allow packet transmission across cable-television lines. Since these cables are currently installed in many homes and buildings, it is not difficult to imagine a city with an “information grid,” analogous to the electric-power grid that exists today. Combined with an electronic mail system (a prototype called Laurel is used on Altos today) the possibilities are staggering.
Staggering indeed. (via Muxway)
Dave Gorman does comedy show called “Googlewhack Adventure”
Dave Gorman does comedy show called “Googlewhack Adventure”.
This guy’s recording his penis enlargement attempts on this weblog
This guy’s recording his penis enlargement attempts on this weblog. Kinda disappointed that he didn’t get the pills via a spam
Digitally retouching a bikini model’s photo
Digitally retouching a bikini model’s photo. Check out the archive for more examples and don’t believe anything you see in magazines
Bush signs Executive Order that gives U.
Bush signs Executive Order that gives U.S. oil companies free reign in Iraq. i.e. immunity from any sort of prosecution
Movie of someone solving the Rubik’s Cube in 18 seconds
Movie of someone solving the Rubik’s Cube in 18 seconds. Quicktime
Google and the Fabulous Googlettes
This Craigslist job posting (via Anil) describes a new initiative within Google called Googlettes:
What is a Googlette? It’s a new business inside of Google that is just getting started – the start-up within the start-up. We’re looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial manager capable of offering direction to a team of PMs working on a wide array of Googlettes. You will define Google’s innovation engine and grow the leaders of our next generation of businesses.
From the description, it looks like Google is building a little Skunkworks to generate business ideas and leaders internally instead of relying so heavily on outside hires and ideas. Which is a fine idea.
But when I first read the description, I thought they might be doing something else that is potentially more interesting. Instead of generating ideas and people for internal use, what if they’re incubating start-ups to spin off into companies of their own? Fast forward five years and instead of being a big huge company, Google is a big huge company at the center of a network of 10-20 large to medium-sized companies with similar goals, values, and business practices. Most of these spin-offs would be engaged in businesses similiar (and probably complementary) to each other and the Google Mother Ship, some of them maybe even directly competing with each other.
With the right balance of mutual effort and competition, the Google collective would be a formidable adversary for its competition — a team of companies against single companies — and would at the same time create an open business environment (say, the opposite of the current business environment in film, music, television, and radio) where competition creates more opportunities, value for customers, jobs, business, and innovation for everyone in that environment.
Again, I don’t think that’s Google’s plan, but maybe it should be.
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace
Sweet howling fantods! It’s a new book by David Foster Wallace called Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity:
One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math’s most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.
Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor’s answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor’s counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology.
Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace’s tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.
It’s from a new series of books called Great Discoveries that aims to “[bring] together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughs”. I’ll take more of that, please.
STD-ster, figure out where that awful rash came from
STD-ster, figure out where that awful rash came from. Friendster parody
kottke.org is the #1 result for “netscape ipo” Google search
kottke.org is the #1 result for “netscape ipo” Google search.
Refined RSS feeds
I took a few minutes recently to make sure the RSS feeds for kottke.org are correct, validate, and such. In addition to a problem that Brent noted in my remaindered links feed, I’ve received several emails lately about my feeds not working in some RSS readers and aggregators. The MT RSS templates I was using predated the xml_encode attribute, so there was most of my problem right there (well, along with a lack of understanding of the intricacies of RSS on my part). So, with help from the RSS 1.0 spec, the RSS 2.0 spec, the default MT templates, and Brad Choate’s Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template, here are the RSS files for kottke.org for your enjoyment, approval, perusal, applause, and jeers:
RSS 1.0 with short excerpts
RSS 1.0 with medium-length excerpts
RSS 1.0 with full posts
RSS 2.0 with medium-length excerpts
RSS 1.0 feed of kottke.org remaindered links
As of right this minute, all of these feeds validate. When I get the chance to play around with a newsreader (I don’t use them), I’ll tinker a bit more to improve feed usability.
In the process of repairing my RSS files, I’ve gained a new understanding of the ongoing battle over RSS that has been going on since forever (it’s the web version of the Hundred Years War). I’d never really looked at the RSS code or read the specs before, and I was struck by how much more human readable an RSS 2.0 file was compared to an RSS 1.0 file. Reading and then writing my RSS files, I “got” the 2.0 file right away, but I still don’t really understand what the 1.0 file is all about…it felt a little kludgy and inelegant. I also got the sense that the 1.0 format is more usefully complex (powerful?) by default than the 2.0 format.
Obstensibly, RSS files are meant to be written by machines to be read by machines (robot to robot) so human readability shouldn’t matter. But looking at the bigger picture, human readability of something like RSS can be important in developing new RSS-related memes (I’m using meme here in the traditional sense, not in the “it’s on Daypop Top 40” sense that seems to have taken over the blogger mindspace). If hardcore developers of RSS readers and authoring tools are the only ones technically savvy enough to understand RSS files, the pool of potential memes is limited by the size and narrow focus (not to mention, for the most part, gender) of that group. But if the format is fairly human readable (more like HTML 3.2 markup than, say, Perl code), you’re going to get more people from different backgrounds hacking away at it, coming up with new memes that could be useful in the long run.** From that standpoint, RSS 2.0 has the advantage over the more powerful but less readable RSS 1.0.
And just to keep completely rambling on and on, the above is what Dave was getting at with his comment about XML as a literary space (I think). Ben’s rebuttal about namespaces and literature is an important point as well, but namespaces could be seen as locking things down too tightly: poetry only for poets, writing only for writers, code only for coders, etc. And if Shakespeare had been constrained by namespaces, how could he have made all those wonderfully bawdy puns? (
** For an example of what I’m talking about, look no further than HTML. Like RSS, HTML started out as a fairly simple robot to robot markup language…there was no reason to be able to “view source” or edit the code by hand. It should have worked like:
human -> interface -> HTML markup -> browser -> human
with users never needing to see the HTML at all. Instead, browsers exposed the markup, because it was fairly human readable all sorts of people learned HTML by viewing source, those people hacked away at the code by hand, readers became writers, it got messy, and the web *exploded* in almost every way conceivable.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
I’ve read so much about science that I was reluctant to pick up Bryson’s book, but I’m a sucker for good but accessible science writing, so I forged ahead anyway. The beginning of the book was interesting but nothing I hadn’t heard before, but once Bryson got to the more recent developments in everything from physics to evolutionary biology, I was hooked. I try to keep up with where science stands today by reading magazine and newspaper articles, but the big picture is hard to visualize that way. Bryson painted that big picture…the last few chapters of the book should be required reading for high school science students who may have learned that protons, neutrons, and electrons are indivisible or that Darwin had the first and final say on how evolution works.
The genetics that create tightly-coupled beehives and
The genetics that create tightly-coupled beehives and ant nests can also form lazy anarchies.
The Way New Yorker
Don’t look now, but the New Yorker is quietly developing something of an internet beat with Rebecca Mead leading the way. Back in Nov 2000, she scooped many fine national publications with much shorter lead times with a story about weblogs. In a June 2003 Talk of the Town piece called The Way We Are, Mead profiled NY Daily News intern and Chinese native Simon Song, who — until the publication of said piece quieted him — posted his photos and observations of American life on his weblog. In the most recent issue (Aug 11), she mines convicted ImClone founder Sam Waksal’s Amazon Wish List for another Talk of the Town piece speculating on his prison reading list. The New Yorker also covered Salam Pax’s weblog (no article link available) shortly after the beginning of the Iraq war.
Shouldn’t Wired, the New Yorker’s sister publication at Conde Nast, be covering stuff like this? Seems to me that the NYer is doing a better job of uncovering the social aspects (you know, the important bit) of the internet and technology.
Spam killing turns into competition
Spam killing turns into competition. Has anyone determined the theoretical maximum point value for an email message and what would that message look like?
Terminator 3
T3 was better than any movie made specifically for paying Arnold Schwarzenegger a lot of money has a right to be. And Claire Danes was in it, so that’s good as well.
Topics on which Google thinks I am an expert
Matrix Reloaded (#14)
Matrix Reloaded discussion (#1)
addicting games (#2)
Christopher Guest (#7)
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint (#2)
Gaetan Dugas (#1)
The Incredibles (#6)
September 11th photos (#3)
earthquake in Japan (#1)
Tom Hanks filmography (#2)
Calvin Klein dinnerware (#1)
NYC subway (#5)
Where is Raed (#4)
Daniel Pearl execution (#4)
Moby Eminem (#3)
The clearest evidence yet that Google is busted.
Somehow, MetaFilter is still capable of producing really great threads
Somehow, MetaFilter is still capable of producing really great threads.
Socials & More