Cuz We Said So

Firekites

Here's a very nice video showing what you can do with a bunch of chalkboards and about 6 months of time: Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - Chalk animated music video directed by Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg http://vimeo.com/4347460

links for 2009-05-16

• Software Problems with a Breath Alcohol Detector
  "'After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc.' "...[I]t turned out that the code was terrible."
• Aerial Virtual tour of New York
  Fantastic 360 degree panoramas of my favorite city (via Brandopia)
• Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable' | The Onion

Atlantis, Hubble, and Sol

In an impressive bit of photography, amateur astronomer Thierry Legault managed to snap a photo of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope in the 0.8 seconds it took them to pass in front of the sun, traveling at more than 15,000 miles per hour.  It’s a pretty cool picture.  (I like the way that at these shutter speeds, the sun looks more like a child's night light than a the super-massive thermonuclear furnace that it is.)

(Via Laughing Squid )

Here at Last!: Peggle for the iPhone

Call me one happy Peggle Master: as of this moment, Pop Cap Games’ addictive Peggle is finally on the iPhone—and, most importantly, on my iPhone. 

My initial impression after playing with it for just a few minutes: a pretty nice conversion.  The zoom feature works well, and game play is pretty smooth, though I see hints of lag now and then during some of the business non-play moments (e.g. during Extreme Fever) that suggest the game may be taxing the capabilities of the current hardware.  Just another reason to hope Apple will be laying some new hardware on us next month.

Torture and Interrogation

A US Army interrogator writes to Jerry Pournelle about utilitarian arguments against torture (“nonsense on stilts… the only good argument against torture is moral and ethical.” and tells of his experience with the subject during his time in the Army’s Interrogator Basic Course.  To read, click through, then scroll down to the letter that begins:

Dear Jerry,

Though there have been a trio of letters on the efficacy of torture, would you bear with me and possibly post this? I believe I have something of an insight here. …

Summer '09 - Blockbuster #2 - "Star Trek"

This review will contain some minor spoilers, but since the film made $75 million in one weekend, I think it's pretty likely that you, Constant Reader, have already seen the film.

Long story short, I loved it. 

links for 2009-05-08

• "Great Factory Tours in the U.S."
  Pretty good list. Sadly, the best factory tour I've ever been on, of the factory in Rhode Island where Play-Doh was made until the 1990's, isn't an option.
• China Consumer Spending vs. Savings
  "If you want to know whether the China story is sustainable, consider this chart — then imagine what the US version of this looks like." I'd rather not.

You May Find This Blog Post Interesting

Or you may not.  Either way, I’m going to use it to complain a bit about a trend in journalism that annoys me, and which seems to be everywhere these days: the use of the weasel word “may” to manufacture news where there isn’t any.

Here’s an example of what I mean in a headline:

Scientist: H1N1 virus may be no worse than regular flu

Really?  Here’s a second headline—which I just made up—that says essentially the same thing:

Scientist: H1N1 virus may be worse than regular flu

And here’s a third:

Scientist: I don’t know whether H1N1 virus will be worse than regular flu or not, because I can’t see into the future.  I have an opinion, but experts guess wrong, just like everyone else.  But maybe the reporter had a deadline, and in this day and age there has to be a constant flow of news even if there’s nothing newsworthy to report, so here, have an article.

That something may happen isn’t news.  Almost anything you can imagine may happen.  It may rain somewhere in California three weeks from tomorrow.  The Cubs may win the World Series next year.  Aliens may attack the Earth this July 4th.  Or maybe none of those things will happen.  If the article quoted scientists willing to say that they believe the H1N1 virus won’t be be as bad as first thought—that might be news.  If it offered data to support the contention—that might be news, too.  But it doesn’t do either of those things.  It doesn’t even quote any particular scientist advancing the opinion cited in the headline.  This article seems to be nothing more than where several column inches went to die.  Given the much-discussed troubles of the journalism biz, is this really the time to be diluting the value of the news by filling it with airy, outsourced unsourced speculation, about this or anything else?

UPDATE:  My use of outsourced instead of unsourced in the original post above was a typo, but now it’s got me thinking.  In this tight economy, maybe we should be outsourcing speculation.  We could even offshore speculation to low-cost, high-volume pundits overseas.  We can ship them the speculation Americans won’t do, while keeping the skilled high-margin speculation here at home.  In a sense, we’re already doing this—I’m thinking of the BBC here, for example.

Summer '09 - Blockbuster #1 - "Wolverine"

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too impressed with “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”.  Hugh Jackman is fine (as always) as the titular mutant.  Danny Huston does a good job as Stryker, the baddie responsible for Wolverine’s adamantium skeleton.  And Liev Schrieber is having a enjoyable time chewing scenery as Wolverine’s buddy/nemesis Sabretooth.  Sadly, none of the other mutants really shine as characters: a hobbit who can control electricity, a rapper who can teleport, a guy with swords, a guy with guns, a really fat guy whose power is… I’m not quite sure what that guy is for.  It seemed less like a carefully structured, character driven story (as I thought of all the previous X-Men films), and more like a marketing tie-in to remind us of the breadth of the X-Men universe as told through eleven billion comic books.

 

For a tent pole, summer, sci-fi, effects-heavy, action spectacle, it was a little boring in spots.  I appreciate that they managed to maintain the mythology laid down by the previous films… sort of.  (It’s never satisfactorily explained why Sabretooth is such a dim-witted, one-note character by the time “X-Men” rolls around, when he’s a sly one with a complicated back-story here.)  And one enjoyable cameo made me smile.

 

There are a number of very cool action sequences, and I never felt bounced out of the story.  But still, all in all, it was merely good, not great.