such a dork!

Google's new image (search)

2009-06-13T14:58:00.002-04:00

Has anyone else noticed the upgrades to Google's image search? Did this happen months ago and I'm just now catching on?

I'm referring specifically to the dropdowns that now appear in the blue bar at the top. I think they've had the size one for awhile, which is nice but not particularly thrilling. The ones I noticed today, though, are the content and color selectors.

The content selector lets you pick a particular source or style of image—only news images, or only line art, and so on. The color selector lets you pick the predominant color of the images. They're handy ideas, and the work surprisingly well.

For example, do a search for "cake." Then click where it says "all colors" and change it to black. Lots and lots of black cakes (I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that they're this popular—damned emo kids).

The results seem to fall off a bit when you start mixing them ("faces," for example, seems to return more non-cake images when you filter on a color), but I suppose that's to be expected.

Keanu Reeves shits all over sci-fi. Again.

2009-05-23T18:57:00.002-04:00

Universal Studios has apparently decided that we need another remake of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And they have decided that Keanu fucking Reeves is the man for the title role(s).

Now... I'm going to come out and admit that I despise Reeves. It's true that he's done some movies I enjoy (Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the original Matrix) but he's ruined several others I would've enjoyed (A Scanner Darkly, The Day the Earth Stood Still, possibly Constantine). He is not a good actor, and I don't understand how he still gets work.

But I have a theory...

Science fiction has never received the respect it deserves—not in any medium. Therefor, no studio is going to waste the time, money, and talent required to find really good actors. Instead, they're going to look for the sci-fi niche actors, the ones who spring immediately to mind. And, after The Matrix, that's Keanu.

Never mind that he worked as Neo specifically because he was supposed to be sort of lost and bemused the entire time. Never mind that what made that movie special was the Wachowskis' killer idea, truckloads of unique* style, and the utter bad-assness of Laurence Fishburne. Keanu was the leading man of a madly successful science fiction movie, and thus he's a go-to guy for science fiction leading men.

I'm not claiming it's some sort of conspiracy to marginalize sci-fi or anything like that; rather it's the result of sci-fi having already been marginalized because too many people can't be bothered to take it seriously.

Or it could be bunnies.

* Unique for the time. I'm aware that the whole black-leather-and-trenchcoat bit has been done to death since (and admittedly wasn't exactly new then) but it seemed fresh at the time.

Spring Show at the Erie Art Museum

2009-05-08T17:02:00.002-04:00

A couple of coworkers and I wandered over to the Erie Art Museum during lunch to see the annual Spring Show. I don't go to the museum often, but I always enjoy it when I do. I am by no means a discerning art critic, and the following commentary should be taken with a grain of salt.

There were some paintings I really liked by Sarah Burke that had sort of mottled-colored silhouettes of people in various stages of distress or excitement. They were neat images and I think a series of them would look really good together.

An artist from Cleveland (whose name escapes me) had some cityscapes that looked bleak and funky. They kind of looked inked, actually, but the card said it was all paint. In either case, they were really cool and emotive.

The one piece that really grabbed me, though, was called "Under the Bridge" (again, I don't recall the artist's name). It was a mixed-media book that replicated the experience of looking up through a network of girders and supports—I know: hardly a life-changing experience, but interesting to me because it's a visual that can't accurately be replicated in a photo.

Some things simply don't translate to two dimensions. No matter how arresting the real-life, three-dimensional thing is, it loses its luster the moment you flatten it out. If you don't believe me, spend some time looking at pictures of the Grand Canyon and then go check out the real thing.

Each page of this book was a flat image, obviously. It had several criss-crossing beams, all suitably grungy and rusty. The spaces around them were cut out so that you could see multiple pages stacked up together. Each page was also about a quarter-inch thick. The result, when the pages are viewed together, gives you the sense of three-dimensionality you'd have from looking at something like that in real life without losing the scale of it, as you would in a sculpture.

So, bravo to you, artist whose name is hiding in the show pamphlet I left sitting on my desk at work and isn't included for some reason on the website. I have no idea if you were thinking anything remotely like what I got out of it, but I enjoyed it.

Links in Time

2009-05-06T22:10:00.003-04:00

Speaking of Time Magazine, has anyone else noticed the rather bizarre way they cross-link their stories? I'm talking about the sentence-long links peppered throughout the body copy, hawking vaguely related articles.

I'm assuming these are auto-generated by software that scans through the article looking for keywords. It's the same as those hideously intrusive ad links that pop little boxes up from double-underlined words every time your mouse goes anywhere near the text.

I can't decide which version I actually find more intrusive. The Time method is just sneaky enough that you've read half the link before you catch on, whereas the pop-up box leaps out at you and usually obscures what you're trying to read.

In either case, I'd really like them both to go away.

Dealing with drugs

2009-05-06T21:33:00.004-04:00

Time Magazine reported recently that Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalized drugs—all of them, apparently—is showing dramatic decreases in drug use and HIV infection from needles and dramatic increases in people seeking treatment for drug addiction.

It seems that Portugal once had the highest drug use rate in Europe. The country's government, against the urging of its own populace, decided to replace mandatory jail time with voluntary addiction counseling. Large-scale dealing appears to still be illegal, but personal possession and use carries no compulsory penalty.

After five years under this new system, marijuana use plummeted to just 10 percent (compare to just shy of 40 percent in the United States). HIV infections fell by 17 percent and heroin use was more than halved.

Well, cool, I guess...

Now, I've stated before that I support the legalization of drugs. This is born not out of any desire to ever try them myself—my uncle saw to that—but out of a simple belief that it's not the government's job to protect people from their own stupidity.

At the end of the day, the (ab)use of drugs is a personal choice; and a large part of the basis of our country is that people are allowed to make their own choices, even bad ones. Things like drugs become illegal not because they themselves are inherently wrong, but because they become associated with or are assumed to incite other activities. In short, drugs get criminalized as a preventive measure.

I'm all for preventing crime, and I'm all for decreasing the use of drugs in our country. However, I don't think the legal system is the way to do it. It's not what the system was designed to do and it's not what the system is good at. If you want to be successful at prevention, you have to take the much harder road of education, urban development, and community-building.

These are, however, not solutions that fit neatly into an elected term of office.

But wait a minute...

I haven't yet touched on the primary thrust of the Time article: that legalizing drugs lowers—or at least does not increase—the use of drugs. This implies that drug legalization could be an effective measure in combating the drug problem, in much the same way the repealing prohibition made the gangster obsolete.

I've neglected this because the article makes a poor case for it. The argument is built up entirely around one study without reference to its methods or reception in the scientific community. This could just as easily be junk science as it is a legitimate study. It spouts a lot of statistics about how drug use has fallen, but gives no clear picture of how those statistics were derived. All of this makes the source suspect.

Oh yeah: and the study was conducted by the Cato Institute, which the article describes as "a libertarian think tank." In other words, it was conducted by people who were specifically looking to justify the legalization of drugs.

In the article's defense, it does cite a few people unconnected to the study, some of whom even make points against it (one points out that Portugal is so different from the U.S. culturally and politically that they can't realistically be compared). But these are just quotes, rather than facts.

It's a potentially interesting situation, all in all. Drawing any real conclusions from it, however, would require more study from less biased sources.

Hunh.

2009-05-06T00:31:00.002-04:00

Well... shit.

Just like that I have my blog again. Cleaned out some of the Viagra-peddling clutter, and it's all shiny and new again, just like I remember.

And I still have fucking nothing interesting to say.

Told you I was a dork

2006-11-20T17:56:00.000-05:00

This cracked me up. I imagine it is thoroughly incomprehensible to anyone who reads this blog.

Nonetheless, five bonus points for every reference you uncover (barring the Star Wars ones, obviously).

World (Wide Web) War

2006-10-30T18:09:00.000-05:00

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web many years back and then formed the W3C to govern it, has just announced that he's forking the language.

I am hardly in a position to tell Sir Tim his business, but this strikes me as a fantastically bad idea. And I mean "let's smear ourselves with honey and go bear tipping" bad.

As near as I can tell, the move is motivated by two primary factors: the fact that, six years after XHTML 1.0 became a recommendation, the majority of people are still not even meeting HTML 4.01 code standards (a venerable seven years old); and that several very prominent names have recently thrown up their hands in disgust and told the consortium to stick it.

In regards to the second point, it may have been a good move. A lot of those who were discontented were specifically angry at the fact that the W3C hasn't been seen to do much of anything in quite some time. For the first part, though, it will be a disaster.

Down in the trenches

I spend a good amount of time on one of the many Web development forums that can be found in cyberspace, and I can tell you that there are certain questions that tend to crop up time and time again. One of them is, "Should I be using HTML 4, XHTML 1.0, or XHTML 1.1?" It's then followed up with, "Strict or transitional?", "What's frameset do?", "Why does this DOCTYPE thing keep hosing my layout?", and "Why is this worth my time?"

The only reason it doesn't get asked more often is because a lot of the people out there don't even realize that there's a choice to be made.

See, the problem isn't that (X)HTML is outdated and needs to react to changing technologies — at least, that's not the problem yet. The problem is that the average rank-and-file Web developer doesn't see what's broken with the current versions. Because, to be quite honest, it works. People aren't failing to adopt XHTML because it doesn't meet their needs; they're failing to adopt it because HTML does.

Maybe you can lay blame with the browser makers. If the browsers enforced the standards, people would have to fix their code so that their pages worked. Everyone upgrades to XHTML, validates their pages, and the world is happy again.

Except that, as a browser maker, you'd be insane to go that route. The first browser out the gate that enforces standards strictly is going to get killed, because everyone using it will see a browser screwing up pages, not the other way around. It's intuitively nonsensical that the working version is incorrect, even if it happens to be true. Any such browser would disappear inside six months.

Perhaps you can blame the educators for failing to make budding Web developers aware of the issue and its implications. This assumes, though, that all Web developers were taught by someone. In many, if not most, cases they're self-taught by trial and error.

XHTML — and the XML into which it is intended to evolve — offers a variety of benefits, in theory. But theory matters very little to the people actually making the pages.

Triage

So what should Sir Tim have done? I don't have a damned clue.

I think that the only way you're going to get people to adopt anything is either by punishing them for non-compliance or rewarding them for compliance.

The very nature of the Web and browser economics makes punishment out of the question.

Maybe you could convince the search engines to consider code validity in page relevence, effectively demoting anyone with invalid code. That's not really within the operating parameters of a search engine, though.

As for rewards… what? You can throw that little validation badge on your pages, but that doesn't get you anything — and, to be perfectly honest, you can add it whether or not your page is valid.

So I have no answers, which is hardly a surprise. I think that the real issue, though, is in finding a way for proper XHTML to be beneficial enough to the bulk of Web developers that they'll make the switch. Introducing more options that they won't understand, if they're even aware of them, won't solve a thing.

Crusade

2006-10-23T18:41:00.000-04:00

I have at my disposal a very diverse set of religious beliefs and convictions. I would like to ask you all your opinions on a recent Wired article.

My own reactions to it vary, and will be discussed at a later point.

When good language goes bad

2006-10-01T22:11:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Arizona quarterback Kurt Warner was dismembered on the field today. I know this because the commentator during the Seahawks/Bears game said, "He fell apart on the field today — literally."

Literally is one of those idiomatic expressions that has begun wandering far afield of its actual meaning. I can't entirely surmise why Al Michaels thought the word was necessary in that sentence, since Kurt Warner is very much in one piece, even if his pride and career are not. I can only assume that it was used to mean "really badly."

Another such phrase that comes to mind is fighting fire with fire. It tends to be used synonymously with give him a taste of his own medicine. It's very much not the same metaphor.

Picture it: There's a house engulfed in flames. You show up, intent on saving the building. So you whip out your trusty flamethrower...

The meaning of the phrase is that you're using tactics that will only aggravate the situation, much like hitting a burning house with fire is going to make it burn faster.

All of this leads me to one question, to which I do not know the answer: Is this definition creep part of the natural process of a living language, or is it symptomatic of something going on specifically in our country?

What, no Jurassic Park reference?

2006-10-01T21:59:00.000-04:00

Paleontologists have recovered soft tissue from a t-rex. I don't really have anything to add to this, other than: awesome!

As the article mentions, this has the potential to solve some huge questions about dinosaurs. It's not likely to produce any tyrannosaurus clones, though, which is a shame (how would environmentalists feel about reintroducing a species that went extinct 65 million years ago?).

On a side note, I applaud the article for avoiding the obvious Jurassic Park reference, although the choice of a Sears commercial reference is curious.

The Devil gets his due

2006-09-20T18:16:00.000-04:00

On the day Shel Silverstein died, I commenced to scouring the Web for every scrap of writing he'd ever done. That was the night I discovered one of my three favorite poems of all time: "The Devil and Billy Markham, Part I."

Turns out old Shel, the much-loved icon of my youth, had quite a lengthy career in much more mature writing before a friend ever convinced him that children's poetry was his last chance to escape eternal poverty (and a hearty thank-you to that friend). I had the fortune that night of stumbling across a site that presented the full catalog of Silverstein's adult work, mostly published in Playboy.

Since that time, I've discovered that Silverstein is a bit more obscure than I thought. The usual response when I mention him is "Shel who?" which is just strange to me. A Light in the Attic is right up there with the Cat in the Hat for me, as far as children's literature goes.

So I was very happy to make another Silverstein discovery on the Web today: a video reading of "Billy Markham" on YouTube.

The Web is full of one-armed men

2006-09-16T17:45:00.000-04:00

Part of me wants to be outraged at this new trend to blame websites for the criminal activities of some of their users. Part of me realizes that this is not a new trend.

Joining MySpace, the poster boy for scapegoat websites, are YouTube and VampireFreaks.com, the latter of which is undoubtedly giddy at the attention spike. There's also a ridiculous bill working its way through Congress that would ban the access from school computers of any site allowing users to have profiles.

The problem with all of this if very simple: these sites have done nothing wrong. If someone posts a copyrighted video on YouTube, YouTube has not committed copyright infringement; the user who uploaded the video has committed copyright infringement.

Has YouTube provided a vehicle for the user to commit copyright infringement? Yes. And so have the group of people who got together back in the '60s to make a distributed computer network. And so has DARPA. And so have the people who created the hardware and software the person used to make the bootleg duplicate. And so on.

But each of these entities acted well within accordance of the law. The only law-breaker is the idiot user.

The VampireFreaks thing is even more ridiculous, and ZDNet ought to be ashamed for even running the story. The only "news" in this is that someone who went crazy and shot up a bunch of people happened to have a profile there. Oh! But so did some other couple (he was 23, she was 12) who shot up some people.

Of course the fact that the site's 624,307* other members have not shot anyone is deemed irrelevent.

It's the same argument — and the same flaw in the argument — brought against video games (those Columbine kids played Grand Theft Auto, you see), Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, and even movies when they were the new thing. And, like YouTube and MySpace, it always comes back to the same thing: it's the idiots who committed the crimes that require punishment, not their hobbies.

What I don't get is why it's become so easy for us to shift blame from the people who commit the acts. Is it because there's money to be made in it? Are the lawyers to blame? Is it because modern psychology makes it easier to accept that we are not in control of our own actions? Or is it simply that we refuse to believe our friends and family could actually be capable of such things?

* Figure based on the site's reported member base on its homepage as of 5:29 pm, Sept. 16, 2006.

Required reading for web developers

2006-09-12T18:52:00.000-04:00

I keep a binder at work of articles that I reference frequently. It's called "Everything I Need to Know about Web Design I Learned on the Internet" (I know, it's a stupid title).

I have a markedly different approach to web development from that of my colleagues, and a lot of that comes from the articles in that binder, and their cousins that I haven't printed out.

And a lot of those articles come from A List Apart.

Although the articles presented in their ALA Primer will be slightly beyond most of my intended audience, they represent some of the best thinking around in standards-based web design and development. Many of the ones they mention are the ones in my binder.

So, if you're at all interested in learning web design and/or development, take a look through the primer. Make being able to understand and evaluate the articles presented there your first goal.

As a bonus, they're going to soon publish a part 2 of the list focusing on resources for beginners.

Some favorite articles highlighted in the primer:

"Usability Experts are from Mars, Graphic Designers are from Venus" – a discussion of the then-growing and currently ongoing philosophical war between designers and usability experts
"CSS Design: Taming Lists" – lists are one of the most useful elements in (X)HTML and, until this article, one of the least utilized (see also "Suckerfish Dropdowns" for lists relating to navigation)
"CSS Design: Going To Print" – still one of the least utilized aspects of CSS, and the reason I cringe every time I see a "printable version" button
"Faux Columns" – answers one of the most frequently asked questions about CSS design: making multiple columns of the same length
"Sliding Doors of CSS Part I and Part II" – one of the tricks that enabled me to convince my boss that CSS had value

Fuck the book burners

2006-09-12T18:42:00.000-04:00

I've stated before that there are certains situations in which I can see the point of censorship. None of these situations involve forcing one's own morality on others by denying the presentation of contrary views or ideas.

Admittedly, this doesn't leave much room, and I'm okay with that.

Google Books has just published a list of 42 books that have been banned in the past or are somewhere threatened with banishment now. There are a number of books on there that I really like (Brave New World, Slaughterhouse Five, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, etc.), and many more that I really want to read.

Blogtrotting

2006-09-12T01:21:00.000-04:00

I've recently taken to wandering through random blogs. I rarely actually read anything, but one or two tend to catch my attention, at least for a little while.

There are many strange things on Blogger. For example:

In addition, there are some very strange general trends.

The majority of the blogs are in languages I do not understand. I don't know if this is actually a strange trend, or if I'm just a bit too insular.

There are many blogs for people who are traveling. Apparently there's a vast army of people quitting their jobs and packing off to Tibet. Who knew?

There are people who make blogs for their pets. Some of them are just about the pets — mostly posting pictures — but some actually masquerade as their pets. I don't get it. There are also people who do this with their infant children.

And I haven't even started on the sexual diarists yet.

Lions and tigers and bear-steaks

2006-09-10T01:07:00.000-04:00

There are, it seems, scientists currently engaged in the process of trying to grow meat in vats, outside of the animals in which it'd normally be found. It's like cloning, except without all those pesky organs and such.

Now, there are several obvious implications of this. If meat no longer requires animals*, the vegetarians can sit down and shut up. If in vitro meat turns out to be cheaper and easier to produce, and not dependent on arable land or other such resources, we have a viable means of feeding a lot of people who aren't currently fed.

But the Wikipedia article points out one I hadn't considered: without the need to actually feed or grow the animals in question, many more varieties of meat become viable culinary options. You can finally try lion steak. Or filet of humpback. Porpoise pie, maybe?

Being an avid carnivore, I find that a very interesting thought.

Of course, the article goes on to mention that another type of meat, freed from its source animal, might become acceptable as food: human. I'm not sure if long pigs in a blanket holds the same appeal for me.

* More accurately, I suppose: "If meat no longer requires the death of animals..." Since you still need source animals for the stem cells from which the meat is grown, assuming that's the method that proves viable.

'Elvis made me do it!'

2006-09-09T14:34:00.000-04:00

If the record label's press release is to be believed, easy listening fans across the country are in danger of spontaneously losing the ability to regulate their drivings speeds.

This has caused thousands of speeding tickets. In at least eleven states.

Right...

Now, I'm the recipient of more speeding tickets than I care to admit. I hardly constitute a representative sample, but my own experience suggests that speeding is caused by one thing, and one thing alone: a conscious decision to drive faster than the speed limit.

If you're so suggestable that a simple guitar riff can send you hurtling down the road at NASCAR speeds, then I pray to whatever gods might be inclined to listen that you never discover System of a Down.

Or eat a Big Mac. Because we all know the damage suffered by the unwitting victims of cow crack.

Of course, the more astute members of the audience might've noticed something at the very beginning here: I said "press release," not "news story." Which means that this tale of traffic troubles was most likely created by the record label in question, possibly from one or two inciting incidents.

By the way, if you'd like to hear the demon riff, it's playing on their oh-so-professional web page.

Oh, and those thousands of claims across eleven states? Here's the really funny part.

It states in the press release that the company will "pay for some of the fines as a courtesy." Not all fines will be paid, and no guidelines are set forth as to how this determination will be made.

So, if you get a ticket, claim you were listening to this song in the hopes of getting out of the fine while simultaneously boosting their silly PR stunt. And, if no one's watching too closely, they never have to pay any fines, because they can just say that you didn't meet their criteria.

Bonus points, I suppose, for finding a way to recruit the masses of idiots nationwide into your army of willing marketing zombies.

Cartoons of doom

2006-09-07T19:18:00.000-04:00

Someone's working on a containment facility for nuclear waste that will be clearly marked as dangerous waste, regardless of language or time period. The intention is that when our distant descendents dig it up, they'll know they shouldn't crack it open, even without the benefit of a dead languages scholar.

They'll use a variety of languages — a lá the Rosetta Stone — and universal pictograms to convey the meaning. Which makes sense, really; but begs one very intriguing question...

What does a pictogram for "danger of horrible, blistering death" look like?

Wiki Wacky

2006-09-07T18:31:00.000-04:00

Wikis* seem to be the preferred 'Net experiment these days. The most recent colossal failure belongs to the British.

The British Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs decided to try a wiki to encourage discussion about environmental issues. After a couple of weeks, it was crushed under the weight of vandalism. The L.A. Times achieved a similar result last year, when they made a wiki of an article about the Iraq war. Wikipedia itself has come under fire several times — most famously for a malicious edit in the biography of John Seigenthaler — and its owners have been frequently forced to implement new ways to keep the wolves at bay.

Wired Online, though, managed to pull off a more or less successful experiment with an article about — appropriately enough — wikis. And there has been at least one study published in Nature defending Wikipedia's accuracy and placing it on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica.

So they can work, if you can hit the very narrow channel between finding enough people to make use of the collective intelligence and avoiding attracting the attention of the terminally bored.

Or...

Did the DERFA and L.A. Times wikis actually fail? They didn't accomplish precisely what the creators intended, that's for sure. But if the vandals outweigh the legitimate contributors, is that failure or a commentary on the subject matter? Or presentation? Or implementation?

* A quick explanation: Wikis are websites that can be edited by the public. The idea is that the collective intelligence of the audience will outweigh, or at least provide a useful couterpoint to, the intelligence of one or two designated experts. Consensus is achieved through the interplay of conflicting viewpoints, and inaccuracy is weeded out by an army of invested editors.

Distraction

2006-09-01T18:05:00.000-04:00

I love a really unique puzzle game. The more it makes my brain hurt, the happier I am (not that you'd know it from the swearing, snarling, and hurling of nearby objects).

So I was very happy when Wired's Table of Malcontents lead me over to this thing.

Here's what I like about it:

You have absolutely no idea what to do. The puzzle starts from the moment you load it, because there are no instructions and no obvious course of action. It just looks at you and says, "play!"

I've never seen a game like it. The closest analogue is something like Contraption, but that's not quite it. It's a very original idea.

It's well designed. Gameplay aside, it just looks nice. It's nothing really earth-shattering, but it's a fairly professional package. The sound is nice, although sparse.

I was kind of bummed to discover that it's just the one puzzle, so it's not more than a short distraction (I think it took me about half an hour), but it's really good for what it is.

'Now we can censor ourselves!' crows New York Times

2006-08-31T17:43:00.000-04:00

Note: not an actual quote from anyone

A couple of days ago, the New York Times posted an article describing the method by which they prevented British citizens from reading an article about the alleged terrorist plot that was recently foiled.

The short version is that they modified software used to localize advertising to localize their content, preventing the story from appearing to anyone with a British IP address. Their reasoning was that British law prevents the media from revealing details about cases prior to trial.

Now, the purpose of this law is clear, and rather admirable: they don't want people tried by the public before they can be properly tried with all the evidence. Just think of how many publications had been shouting recently that they'd found Jon Benet Ramsey's killer, only to discover that — oops! — the DNA didn't match.

But something like this just gives me an uncomfortable feeling in my gut. I react with guarded displeasure to censorship of any kind, although I can admit that there are circumstances where it can be justified.

Keith Olberman bitch-slapping Donald Rumsfeld, although not about censorship, is a very eloquent reminder of why governments shouldn't be allowed to restrict speech. Tony Long, the copy chief for Wired News, makes several additional points on the same topic.

Editor Jill Abramson's assertion that "this was preferable to not having it on the Web at all" smacks of Google's justification for censoring search results in China, a position which Google co-creator Sergey Brin later suggested may not have been wise (no link handy for that, sorry).

Preventing the Brits from seeing a story about terror plots is certainly a far cry from kangaroo courts and people disappearing in the middle of the night. But you can see it on a map from here — especially in our current political climate — and that scares me.

They do get one point, though.

At least the Times posted the article explaining what they'd done (again, much like Google openly admitting they were censoring results, especially to those receiving the results). I can certainly give them some credit for that.

Gonzo-a-go-go

2006-08-26T23:27:00.000-04:00

I've always been a bit disappointed that the world isn't stranger than it is.

There are weird things in the world; don't get me wrong. But day-to-day living contains few, if any, real surprises. When you go to work, you pretty much know what to expect. When you get together with your friends, you pretty much know what to expect. When you walk into a store, you pretty much know what to expect.

And pretty soon it all starts to blend together, because it's largely the same every time. How many really memorable store visits have you had in your life?

I ask this because a bunch of people apparently decided about a week ago that the world needed to be a bit stranger. So they invaded a Home Depot in slow motion.

It was a flash mob: a large group of strangers organized over the Internet to meet at a specific place and time, where they'll receive instructions to do something weird. In this case, that involved going to the local Home Depot and spending five minutes in slow motion, and five minutes frozen.

Reactions from the employees varied from the curmudgeony to the edge of hysterics, with most of them simply finding it very funny.

I think this happened in New York, but I find it encouraging. The world isn't very strange, but that doesn't mean we can't make it stranger. More people need to do things like this.

Think we could get a flash mob going in Erie?

The evolution will be televised

2006-08-26T23:13:00.000-04:00

I had a very uncomfortable moment some months ago when I realized that my sister does not believe in evolution.

Now, I'm certainly aware that there are people in the world who hold this view, and — to an extent — I can understand why they would. I just think they're being a bit dense about it. Of course, my perspective is somewhat colored by having actually held some of the physical evidence in my hands.

My sister's objection, at least, is based on her religion, and I can see that. The ones I really don't get are the people who simply refuse to believe it because it doesn't seem to make sense. "I just don't see how you get a cow from a whale," they observe.

Well, no. That's because you haven't had some three billion years to observe the progression. What we can observe are the tiny changes that occur within our limited span of time, so-called microevolution. In a lot of instances, these are changes that we've caused through selective breeding. We've even created new species.

All of which is a far cry from turning a water creature into a cud-chewing methane factory, I'll admit. But again, it's a question of time. We can make a new species in a matter of years; imagine what we could accomplish in even 100,000 years — an eyeblink on the evolutionary time scale.

Hell, it probably didn't take us more than 10,000 years to make the housecat, the domesticated dog, and the cow. And that was before we even knew what we were doing.

One objection my sister has voiced, however, is that evolution is "just a theory." She's not the first to make the argument, and far from the last. This always seemed to be a really silly argument to me, because the person making it obviously doesn't understand what a scientific theory really means. I've never been terribly great at explaining it, however.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled across this today. It's easily the clearest and best explanation I've ever seen about how evolution being a theory, rather than a law, is thoroughly immaterial as an argument against it.

Read it, if you doubt me. I'll take your questions later.

Plutonic Love

2006-08-23T17:19:00.000-04:00

Looks like the great Pluto debate will soon be decided. If you're not aware, the astronomical community has been arguing for years now over whether or not Pluto is, in fact, a planet.

The problem stems from the fact that, if Pluto's a planet, so are a number of other objects. There is no formal definition of the word "planet" that leaves us with exactly nine in our solar system. The two front-runner theories put us either at eight by excluding Pluto from the mix, or twelve by adding Pluto's moon Charon, an asteroid named Ceres — which was considered a planet when it was first discovered — and another celestial body nicknamed Xena (yes, after the warrior princess).

Apparently, this all gets decided tomorrow. Grade school book publishers, I imagine, are in a frenzy.

What's really interesting about this, aside from the altering of one of the fundamental facts of our early education, is the personal stake people assume in this issue (something first brought to my attention by my friend J.R.). Look at some of the quotes from this article:

'Opponents "smell blood, and I think they're going to get it," Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., said on the eve of a vote by members of the International Astronomical Union.'

'Suddenly, the future looks dim for much-maligned Pluto, which is smaller than Earth's moon.'

'"Some say, 'No, Pluto is a nice planet'" and should remain one, Watanabe said.'

"Smell blood"? "Much-maligned"? "Nice planet"? It's a tiny, cold rock spinning erratically through space, farther out than any of us can hope to travel in our lifetime.

What's even crazier, though, is that I sort of get it. Pluto's small, and cold, and alone, and weird. Well, okay, having a moon sort of kills the "alone" part, but you catch my drift: it's the cosmic underdog. The Little Planet that Could (even though a planet doesn't really do anything, other than spin). And, if you're given to personification, it's the planet that's the most like any particular person who's geeky enough to care about the issue.

Sis, add "I am Pluto" to the list of t-shirts I will one day make for my own amusement. Perhaps with a graphic of tiny little Pluto, dwarfed by his bigger brothers, giving them all the finger.

Of course, having said all of this, I now have to admit that I actually favor dropping it as a planet. I don't know why, but it makes more sense to me to have eight planets than it does to have twelve. It seems tidier. Or maybe it seems like, once we start calling moons and asteroids planets, the door's open to start planetmaking all willy-nilly, and eventually it won't be anything special to be a planet anymore.

And again: why this emotional investment in the solar system?

I don't really have an answer. But tomorrow — for good, ill, or indifference — our universe changes.

The Caribbean Tales?

2006-08-22T17:41:00.000-04:00

It probably says nothing good about me that this is the funniest damned thing I've seen in a long time.

I nearly stopped breathing at this:

And then Sir Neville made hym redy, wyth one spere he smote hem downe al thre over ther horses croups. This kynde of thynge was ful yn his style, for hys verye wallet hath ‘bad motherswyvere’ on it ywrit.

Of course, what do you expect from a dork who's proud of the fact that he owns the complete works of Chaucer in the original Middle English?

No tag soup for you!

2006-08-21T19:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, no more composing posts in Word for me. It's nice that Blogger's composing window picks up on the HTML embedded in the document, so that things like links are carried over easily, but it also picks up all the crap HTML for which Word is infamous.

I still have no idea what an <o:p> tag is supposed to be.

Might be time to give Open Office another go.

The Krakatoa Can Can

2006-08-21T17:47:00.000-04:00

The head of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry wants to fill the sky with sulfur.

The intention, I guess, is to form a kind of second ozone layer; the sulfur particles will reflect the sun’s heat back out into space, preventing a good bit of it from reaching the Earth and accelerating the global temperature. The article linked above cites evidence (volcanic eruptions) that suggests this would actually work.

It’s a temporary solution, since the sulfur particles would only last a few years. Presumably, they could be replenished, although I imagine the cost would make it impractical in any great frequency.

I have nowhere near enough scientific acumen to argue with someone who’s been in the field for over fifty years. Hell, I don’t have the legs to argue with someone who’s got a hard science bachelor’s degree. But this just seems like a bad idea.

As one commenter on the article points out, volcanic eruptions — and the proposed measure here is, essentially, an artificial volcanic eruption without the flaming chunks of rock and lava falling from the sky — carry a variety of unpleasant after-effects, like acid rain.

But the Earth has survived massive eruptions before, some with climatic effects severe enough to drop snow on Hawaii in July (I’d pull up a reference for that one, but my sister stole the Childcraft books for her daughter). The fact that this is a very temporary move, then, could actually work in its favor.

Crutzen’s not proposing it as the solution, merely something to stave off bad Kevin Costner movies for a few more years. If nothing else, maybe it’d give Florida and Louisiana a year or two to catch their breath.

I hesitate to say that it’s worth a shot, but… well… maybe it is.

Now I've gone and done it...

2006-08-19T17:46:00.000-04:00

Well, after talking about this silly thing for months, I've finally decided to sit down and do it.

And, as is my nature, I overthought it nearly to death. I already had a title and a purpose, so those weren't sticking points. No, the real question was this: where to host it?

The obvious choice would be LiveJournal. Several friends and at least one sibling have LiveJournal accounts, and posting it there would enable me to make use of the social features they have (I could finally be on somebody's friends list, and wouldn't that be a thrill?).

But I'm not particularly fond of LiveJournal (despite having claimed to be in a cover letter I once sent them; I am nothing if not mercenary). Their pages are -- and my apologies to those friends who have them -- rather ugly most of the time. For reasons I still don't understand, comment threading doesn't work in Firefox. And the code... it's just hideous.

I'm something of a code nazi, you see. Ask my coworkers. Few things make me happier than being able to fit the code for an entire web page on a single screen because it's that clean and concise. Every time I look at a new site, I hit "view source." It's a compulsion; I can't help it. Half the time, I haven't even consciously decided to do it.

So therein lay my criteria: I have to like the look, and I have to like the code.

It would suite the rigorous logician in me to state that I investigated many options, compared features, and maybe even went so far as to interview satisfied and dissatisfied users. I am, however, supremely lazy and did none of these things. Fortunately, I had encountered a number of Blogger pages before, and always liked the look of them.

So I checked out the code. The pages have an XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype (which I'll likely explain in a later post somewhere), which is good. They're technically not valid XHTML -- meaning they're not correctly written -- but only because the JavaScript included in the pages hasn't been correctly marked as character data (again, something I'll attempt to expain at a later point). So I figured I'd give it a go.

When I got to the part where you select your blog's template, I noticed that they listed the designers for each template. Jeffrey Zeldman. Dave Shea. Douglas Bowman. The very people whose articles I read when I'm trying to figure out how to make my own code better.

And that's all I needed.