By Cory Doctorow at 7:21 am Friday, Sep 3
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Someone is ebaying a giant prop rollerblade from an episode of Father Ted.
Link
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Thanks, Alfie)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:17 am Friday, Sep 3
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These breathtaking visualizations of the decision-tree explored by a chess-playing computer are great.
A view into the workings of a chess-playing program that must make millions of decisions in each game. In this piece we explore the notion that our lives consist of a vast sequence of choices.
PNG Link 1,
PNG Link 2,
PNG Link 3
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via Oblomovka)
By Xeni Jardin at 6:54 am Friday, Sep 3
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In Wired News today, a report I filed on Microsoft's new music download service:
A help page on the beta site provides instructions describing how users can enable MSN Music downloads to play on their iPods.Microsoft's recent criticism of Apple for not licensing iPod functionality to third-party tech companies is not without irony, given past accusations of anticompetitive behavior that resulted in Microsoft agreeing last year to pay out $1.8 billion to settle consumer antitrust suits. Just last Friday, six California municipalities sued Microsoft over claims it overcharged government customers because of its effective monopoly in computer operating systems.
The company's new war against iTunes and the iPod is seen by some industry watchers as not unlike its earlier war for market share against the Netscape browser -- which Internet Explorer won. In light of the fact that Microsoft claims its MSN hub attracts more than 350 million monthly unique users, sheer reach -- rather than product feature details -- may ultimately determine who wins this war.
Open-format activists like Jason Schultz, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ask why the company doesn't simply strip DRM altogether, and lament the fact that Microsoft's service launch makes it all the more likely that two opposing proprietary systems -- Microsoft's and Apple's -- will now dominate a marketplace some feel would be better served by open standards such as MP3.
"Microsoft's music launch is just the latest effort to 'bring music to the masses' by, ironically, setting up a new, separate, incompatible DRM fiefdom," said Schultz. "The thing people love about the internet is that you can send e-mail to anyone in the world with any e-mail client. In the digital music world, however, we're seeing an increasing trend toward technological balkanization.
Link to story, and
Link to MSN Music. More of Jason Schultz's comments on the service launch are
here.
By Cory Doctorow at 5:49 am Friday, Sep 3
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Febreeze "Scent Stories" is a smellovision player that loads in discs charged with smelly compounds that are slowly rotated through, a new stink every 30 minutes. Shania Twain is the official spokesnashvillean for the product.
Link
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via Gizmodo)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:46 am Friday, Sep 3
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Here are syndicated
RSS and
Atom feeds of pictures uploaded to the Flickr image-sharing site with the tag "Worldcon." Right now it's just a few undistinguished shots I took yesterday, but if you're at Worldcon snapping photos (and really, who isn't?) put 'em on Flickr and we'll get a bleeding-edge snapshot feed. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Ludicorp, the company that makes Flickr).
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 4:08 am Friday, Sep 3
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Paul Ford has written an article for XML.com about his plan to scrape all the information he can about the Senate and convert it into searchable, structured data (much like the UK's brilliant
They Work For You project, which does the same for Parliament). He's planning to document his process of converting the Senate's sloppy html into clean XML, and turn the process into a tutorial on how to make the Semantic Web come alive.
Of course screen-scraping is itself a dubious process. When the Senate decides to change its page design, moves the page, or alters the suffix, I'm out of luck. At the same time, it's hard to argue against the fact that the Senate's own web site is a definitive source for up-to-date, reliable information about the current composition of the Senate. This is a situation that we're likely to encounter again: the best, most reliable site to get some information is the worst place to get useful data. Hopefully, as we go forward, we'll have multiple sources of information on various members of the government, and can use them all together.
Link
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via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:00 am Friday, Sep 3
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Remember the Lying Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who made up a bunch of base smears about John Kerry's military record and aired them in a TV spot? They even published an open letter in which they lied some more, claiming to have served with Kerry when they hadn't.
Well, it turns out that some of the swift boat veterans whose name appeared at the bottom of that open letter never saw it, never signed it, and don't agree with it. Those Lying Swift Boat Veterans For Truth! Whacky.
"It's kind of like stealing my identity," said Anderson, who spent a year on a swift boat as an engine man and gunner.
The letter, which was posted on the Swift Boat Veter-ans for Truth Web site, claims the Demo-cratic presidential candidate has "grossly and knowingly distorted the conduct of the American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen of that (Vietnam) war."...
"After reading the letter," Anderson said, "it kind of got under my skin. I had never come across a situation where someone used my name without my support or approval. It's not a very comforting feeling."
What's worse, he said, he disagrees with the letter.
"Had they asked me to use my name, I wouldn't have allowed them to," he said...
Anderson does not know how the Swift Boat Vets for Truth got his name, but it appears exactly as it has appeared on rosters at swift boat vet reunions. He suspects the list was pulled from the Swift Boat Sailors Association, a nonpolitical, not-for-profit organization linking swift boat veterans.
Link
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via Atrios)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:57 am Friday, Sep 3
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This magnetic fridge-mounted bottle-opener is way cool.
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via Engadget)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:54 am Friday, Sep 3
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The Daily Show aired a fantastic spoof RNC video meant to parody a George Bush reelecation spot. George Bush: Words Speak Louder Than Facts. Funny, vicious and absurdist.
Link6.2MB Quicktime Link
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Thanks, j2323!)
By David Pescovitz at 2:15 am Friday, Sep 3
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SETI@home has turned up an unexplained radio signal from 1000 light years away that's, well, unexplained. From New Scientist:
“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
Link
Update: The BBC followed up with a report quoting researchers who say that the news above was blown out of proportion and there is no signal. Nothing to hear here. Move along. (cue X-Files theme)
Link
By David Pescovitz at 2:00 am Friday, Sep 3
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Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body is a book about the genetics behind human oddities. It's the companion to a Channel 4 documentary of the same title that aired this summer. The author,
Armand Marie Leroi, is a biologist and lecturer at Imperial College London. From a review in The Guardian a few months back:
"There are three things that lift this book above mere exploitation: the seriousness of Leroi's scientific investigations; the humane concern he manifests for the suffering other; and the sensitivity of his aesthetic appreciation of the wonders of nature. "Beautiful" is a term frequently used to describe some bottled monster. This aesthetic appreciation extends to previous writers on the subject. He describes an account of the progress of a deer embryo by the 17th-century natural philosopher William Harvey (more famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood) as "one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written".
I'll be in the UK next week and I'm definitely going to pick up a copy!
Link
Update: BB reader Nolandda points out that the
Mutants book is also available in the US with a slightly different title.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 1:34 am Friday, Sep 3
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Our apartment in Paris didn't have any ice trays but Kelly found these at the supermarket. Cub Facil are disposable plastic bags that are divided into cube-size compartments. You just fill a bag with water, tie it closed, freeze, and then tear out the cubes as you need them. Each box is about US$2 and contains ten bags. (Click on the photo for a better view.)
Update: Thanks to the dozens of readers who responded that these ice cube bags are old hat in most countries outside the United States. News to me!
