Daily Blah

Get thee behind me, coffee?

2010-03-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

Ever since I came to the states, I've been slowly turning into a coffee snob. This country -- the coasts especially -- will do that to you. And now, ever since I renounced lattes and a couple of friends bought us a coffee grinder as a wedding gift, I've been making black coffee from fresh beans first thing in the morning. Just like a real American.

This seems to be a good thing. After all, prior to my morning coffee, my brain tends to resemble cotton wool that has, after millennia of evolution, only just achieved sentience. Post-Joe, I'm ready to bend steel girders to my will. I couldn't give it up and expect to function, right?

Wrong, according to this blog post and (limited) self-study. Robin Barooah has been drinking coffee since age 10, and after he quit, it didn't take him too long to achieve increased productivity. So I should follow suit, right? Right. Let me brew a cup and think about that one.

Referendum

2010-02-16T21:27:00.000-08:00

"We came to spread democracy across Earth," announced the alien commander.

"That's my goal too," replied the President, grinning broadly.

"Wonderful! So, which species have the vote?"

"What? Just mankind. Animals can't --"

"They can. They did. This is the result." The commander sighed, and whispered the fateful order to his ship. "Sic semper tyrannis!"

Origin Story

2010-02-01T01:16:00.000-08:00

"Gotcha," said Fido, panting. (He rarely got this much exercise.)

"I think not," said the fox. "Love your coloring, by the way. Very London Fog."

"Shut it, mudbag. Look, you're cornered. How can you escape?"

"In a manner that will make me famous forever. Watch."

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy grey dog.

The Time Machine, Part 2

2010-01-30T20:07:00.000-08:00

The Time Traveler never returned. His machine did.

I set the dial to 802,701AD, and found the Eloi. Weena, his girl, was smiling and cooking something.

Did they still fear the monsters? Weena just laughed. I asked what was for dinner.

"Morlock soup," she leered. "Tastes great with Time Traveler."

What Matters

2010-01-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

I died. Woke in a vat of fluid. Digits blinked on a screen. Recognized them immediately: my bank balance.

A tech guy unplugged my wires. Chuckled at the numbers. "Pretty low score. Your first Lifegame?"

"Everyone said money didn't matter," I protested, still groggy.

He snorted. "Jeez. You must be a newbie. Wanna play again?"

This is the first in a series of occasional 55-word short stories. Why 55 words? See here.

2001-9 Do-Over

2009-12-13T20:10:00.000-08:00

David Rakoff at Newsweek takes a stab at alternate history with this essay on what would have happened under a two-term Gore presidency. It's quite an amusing take, but suffers from exactly what you'd expect in a mainstream pub: too much prodding us in the ribs and winking. The torturous route Rakoff takes to get Gore to say "heckuva job, Brownie" in a similar context to Bush is a typical example. Nevertheless, I'd like to read more stuff like this -- and needless to say, we need repeated reminders of just how much of a nightmare the last eight years were.

More Mad Science

2009-06-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Could we fix the climate crisis via absurdly cheap geo-engineering, such as filling the skies with sulphur (and turning them red in the process)? Yes we can -- and someone may do it soon, warns the Atlantic.

Ants on Stilts!

2009-06-23T23:19:00.001-07:00

Did you know scientists have attached stilts to ants' legs, in order to prove that ants are able to count their steps? (They overshot their nests in proportion to the length of the stilts.) Did you know there's a giant colony of fire ants that now covers pretty much of the southern US? Neither did I, until I read this excellent piece on superorganisms. Well worth your time.

And thanks to a colleague's pop-inspired wit, I will never again be able to hear the Duran Duran track "Girls on Film" without hearing the line "Ants on Stilts."

Speaking of the Hyper-Organized

2009-06-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

The NYT's David Pogue shares his productivity tips in this online-only column. I normally find Pogue a bit overbearing -- he has too much of the musical theater fanatic in him -- but in this piece he's a man after my own heart.

Why Can't We Concentrate?

2009-06-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

Salon says it has the answer. Then again, GTD guy David Allen thinks the question is bogus -- it's okay for our minds to flit around, because that's how creativity happens.

The Writing on the Page

2009-06-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

It's official: on-demand publishing is the future. Last year was the first that the number of self-published titles outweighed the number distributed by traditional publishers, large and small. Meanwhile, the mighty Amazon is dipping a toe in the waters with its new on-demand imprint, AmazonEncore. True, the publishing industry still sells the most copies overall, by far. But if there's anything we have learned over the last decade about digital trends, it's that they ramp up fast. Little, Brown et al should savor their last couple of years of three-martini lunches.

This is New

2009-06-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

This has been setting the Internets abuzz for a few weeks now: An album's worth of mashups from YouTube, created by Israeli artist Kutiman. And no wonder. Watching them is like being present at the birth of a new art form. This is the flashy opener that's been getting a lot of blogosphere love, "The Mother of All Funk Chords":

But for sheer listenability, I think, nothing beats Track 3, "I Am New":

Cartography of Feeling

2009-06-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

An interesting idea, but a little too muddy to be of any use: The San Francisco Emotion map.

Tweet-alism

2009-06-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Not only an interesting series of Tweets here on how to save journalism, but an interesting example of how writing on Twitter might work:

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 1. Do custom small print runs targeted to neighborhoods and interests. Not daily. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 2. Become support for local writers, reporters and bloggers; help market them, sell their ads; decentralize operation 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 3. Replace circ, printing, print production staff with tech, SEO, community managers 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 4. Find out what the community wants in real face to face meetings, not focus groups. Then do what they want. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 5. Utilize pro-am methods. Include community contributed content edited and vetted by pros. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 6. Smart multimedia. Don't do it just to do it. Use the right medium to tell the right story. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 7. Promiscuous revenues. From ads, niche paid content, donations, non-profit grants, to directory listings. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 8. Produce mapping and database projects. Employ or train journalist-hackers. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 9. Meet regularly with local businesses to gauge their needs. Create online directories of local businesses. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

mediatwit Saving newspapers: 10. Create a bottom-up organization where innovation is encouraged and rewarded at the edges. Use good ideas from anyone. 06 Jun 2009 from Tweetie

-- this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Slim Pickings

2009-06-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

The most interesting people are cropping up on video on the Interwebs these days. Take this guy presenting a show on Boing Boing:

And this guy being interviewed for Burncast:

Total Eclipse of the ... Wuh?

2009-05-31T08:54:00.000-07:00

Best literal video yet:

When Will Space Tourism Be Cheap?

2009-05-08T17:01:00.001-07:00

The answer, according to Virgin Galactic, is never.

I Think, Therefore I Twitter

2009-05-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

A researcher in Wisconsin has been able to send a tweet using nothing but his thoughts, and a skullcap full of electrodes. (It was all external brain-pattern reading -- no nasty cerebral implants required.) Can the first blog by word of thought be far behind? We'd better get training an extra private inside voice, one that won't give away our innermost thoughts to every electrode that happens to be passing by.

Antarctica After Ice

2009-05-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

We all know the ice at the North Pole will be gone (in summer, if not year round) within a few decades. But what about the South Pole? If the ice vanishes completely there too, we won't have as large a continent as we thought -- we'll have a series of islands at the bottom of the world. Check out this map, which shows how much of Antarctica is below sea level (and that's not counting the many extra inches of sea level we'll get from all that melting landbound ice). Those penguins had better get used to swimming a lot further, no?

My Latest Hero ...

2009-05-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

literally latest, as in the late Father Theodore Heck, who died at the end of April at the age of 108. Why is he my hero? Because, according to this report, he set out to learn something new every year:

"Every year, he would take up a subject and read about it," DuVall said. "When he was 99, he decided he should learn Spanish, and when he was 100, he took up the computer."

Plus he didn't look half bad for 108, either.

Best Web video of 2009, May entry

2009-05-08T14:51:00.000-07:00

Again, it's Star Wars-related. (See a pattern developing here?) The premise this time: what if you took James Earl Jones dialog from other movies and put them in Darth Vader's mouth? The result: brilliantly executed.

A Curmudgeon's View of San Francisco

2009-03-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

I came across Rudyard Kipling's American notes (1899) after Googling the Bret Harte quote that adorns a mural in my house:

San Francisco: Serene, indifferent of fate, thou sittest at the Western gate

And now I know, the next lines are:

Thou seest the white seas fold their tents, Oh, warder of two continents; Thou drawest all things, small and great, To thee, beside the Western Gate.

Kipling, however, hated the city. He arrives on a steamer, and his first impression is that Fort Point could be handily destroyed by a couple of gunboats from Hong Kong -- in other words, the city is defenseless against British invasion. He then wanders around, being wowed by the cable cars, but like a lot of tourists looks for reasons to hate the locals. He even refuses to accept the beauty of the hills, deriding them as sand dunes pegged down by houses "today." Money quote:

"San Francisco is a mad city--inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty."

Old School Sites

2009-03-26T17:02:00.000-07:00

The wonderfully snarky Vintage Web picks out those sites that are still partying like it's 1995 (html design-wise).

To Watch

2009-03-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Yahoo's list of 100 movies to see before you die. I've seen 74, and as for the remaining 26 -- well, apparently I need to get much more into French cinema before I kick the bucket.

Fairy Tale as Infographic

2009-03-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

There's no link here to the previous blog. Absolutely no connection between the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the financial crisis. My, Citigroup, what big collateralized teeth you have!

Slagsm�lsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

And yes, if you think this looks a lot like Royksopp's "Remind Me" video, it's an intentional homage.