At last, one of our classic sci fi tropes becomes real. Albeit for mice.
Bring on the personal jetpacks.
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Thanks to everyone who joined us at Pete's Candy Store last night for their weekly trivia contest -- and to celebrate the birthday of yours truly. Thanks Emily, Chris, David, Liz, Andrea, Jay, Jim, Matt, Lisa, Billy, and of course my darling Debbie, who organized the whole thing as a surprise. Our combined knowledge of hot peppers, 10cc, Texas wildflowers, pirate movies, McCarthyism, lacrosse, history and geography vaulted "Mike's Mauraders" into third place, winning the coveted Pete's Candy Store sandwich. (For the record, if we had only listened to Liz telling us that Turkey bordered an awful lot of countries, we would have tied for second.) Afterward, a subset of us decamped to Plant Thailand for yummy food.
I had a great time. Isn't Debbie the best? She's the best.
Oh, and happy birthday to Liz md H!
| CNN | Spam | Snails | Animals | Weird Science |
"If we were going to devise a formula for wrecking the country, it would be difficult to improve on this one. We might as well call this portion of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 the Osama Bin Laden Support Fund."
| Tax Policy | SUVs |
Looks like some more fodder for the Curious Bookshelf. What would be on your list?
| The Curious Bookshelf |
A bit like the Ishbadiddle / IMDB Author Relevance Index. Shakespeare wins again.
| Lists |
Professional Wrestler "The Ultimate Warrior" (legal name: Warrior) has a new career -- apparently wrestling doesn't quite work out if you keep leaving the federations, are reponsible for "one of the dumbest angles in WWF's history", and are "too crazy" to run your own "Warrior University." He's a conservative pundit! Recently the College Republicans at UConn brought him to speak on matters such as homosexuality ("queering don't make the world work") and Arabs (he told an Iranian girl to "get a towel.") Let's just say the audience didn't take it well, since the campus police had to get involved. An example of Mr. Warrior's delightful rhetoric, from his UConn Retort -Cowardly College Republicans:
As for the College Republicans who brought me in, well, I can only tell you that I have an apology to make. I apologize for having just gotten over a small cold as I came on your campus and that I was not capable of smelling your rudeness and cowardice out so that I could have taken you to task for your hypocrisy, phoniness and disrespect in person - right there - to set an even more incredible example of leadership and principled behavior.
It gets better from there, really. Something Awful linked to him as the "Awful Site of the Day," calling him a "crazy racist." OMG! Someone called him a bad name on the internets!! I guess it's time for the ultimate weapon in the wrestler's hands -- I refer not to the metal folding chair, or the piledriver, but the threat of a lawsuit! Says the Something Awful guy:
I thought I had seen it all. In my nearly eight years of using the Internet, I've been threatened by lawsuits from webmasters, psychotic game developers, heavy metal bands, adult men who wear diapers, and even more psychotic game developers. I had never, in my entire life, thought I would eventually receive a lawsuit from THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR. Well, not exactly the Ultimate Warrior, but his "Director of Communications," whatever that means. I guess that's the guy who picks up the phone when it rings and then turns it around the correct way so Mr. Ultimate Warrior is speaking into the correct end.
You really should read the entire thread, in which the "Director of Communications" swings between name-calling, lawsuit-threatening, and stalking, before finally giving up. The SA guy taunts him better than any pro wrestler would. Ah, it is to laugh for, this internet.
(There's also a Metafilter thread on the subject.)
| Law |
I especially liked The Amazing Amazon.com.
| Remix Culture |
We must have spent days, all told, playing Mao in college. Many late nights in Durfee's, eating Chris' Flurries and shouting "penalty!" At some point, fortunately, my obsession with the game turned into an obsession with one of the regular players. But despite the game's place in our relationship, Debbie and I haven't played really since then. It's a game with a maddening learning curve, as you aren't allowed to know the rules, which moreover keep mutating. I am sorely tempted to edit this Wikipedia article to include a reference to the "ooh baby baby" rule. However for the sake of Wikimedia I shall refrain.
| Cards |
I've been meaning to implement this for a while, but I've finally created Ishbadiddle's own community calendar, right over There. It lists holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc., of interest to our posters and regulars, as well as suggestions for stuff to do, for the next two weeks. So you can use this to promote concerts, shows, parties, etc. to the larger Ishbadiddle-reading public.
If you have suggestions for any recurring holidays, leave them in comments below. I've put the current list of holidays below the fold, so if I've left off your birthday, or have it on and you don't want it there, let me know. I'm missing a bunch, I know! Consider this the first draft.
If you're an Ishbadiddle poster, adding future events to the calendar is simple. Give an entry about the event the category "Our Events" and save it in draft form. After you save a draft, you'll see an "Authored On" box on the bottom of the screen. (If you don't see it, hit the "Customize the display of this page" link below the Save button, select "Custom," and make sure "Editable Authored On Date (Edit Entry screen only)" is checked.) Just change that date to the future date of the event. (The time doesn't matter.) Any information you write about the event in the Entry Body won't show up in the main blog, to save space and reduce clutter, but a » will indicate that there's more to read on the subject. You can tag the event in the Keywords field and give it multiple categories, just like any other entry.
If you're not a poster, but have an event you think would be of interest, you can email me with details at ishbadiddle -at- triptronix.net.
Mad props to Kevin Shays, who not only wrote the DateTags plugin that makes this possible, but also was very patient in helping me figure out the coding for this.
Continue reading "Synch This!" » | Movable Type |
The latest addition to the blogroll: Geertzian. Who is Geertzian? A student at Valdosta State University and a fellow reader of pesky'. Welcome and thanks for the link to Ishbadiddle!
Another neat mapping tool (we're all about maps these days, it seems) is the interactive 2000 Census Map over at Social Explorer, the brainchild of Andrew Beveridge, Professor of Sociology at Queens College. Now sure, you can look at maps of boring things like ancestry, education, immigration, etc., and make your fancy reports and such. But the most interesting thing about the map: it's a National Gaydar System. That's right, you can find out just where the (self-reported) gays and lesbians are. At least the ones who are in couples.
Now, the usual places are on there (San Francisco New York Vermont blah blah lesbian blah blah gay blah), but I'm more interested in the rural areas. You know, Red States, the places that are (in David Brook's World) the antithesis of all things gay.
Now, there are some interesting patterns outside the major cities. (This is based, by the way, on percentage of the population, not absolute numbers.) Lesbians prefer Portland, ME, while Maine gays are attracted to Somerset. You'll find a higher concentration of gays in Forest, PA, but the nearest hotbed of lesbianism is Tompkins, NY. Georgia? Webster: gay. Lanier: lesbian. Nearly everyone in Hampshire, MA seems to be a lesbian, while Massachusetts gays are mostly in Boston. Idaho? Not many pockets of lesbianism, but you'll find gays in, um, Benewah. Gays are in Goshen, WY, and La Paz, AZ. Lesbians are in Keweenaw, MI, Piute, UT, Allendale, SC, McClean, ND, Dewey, SD, and Pushmataha, OK.
The one place I'm really curious about is Hudspeth County, TX. Southern Hudspeth County is lesbian country. Northern Hudspeth County is gay. Who decided that one? Do they meet in the middle and brawl?
(See now if I were David Brooks, I could write an entire uninformed column out of this, and you'd read it in the New York Times.)
| Maps | LGBT | New York | Massachusetts | Idaho | South Dakota | North Dakota | Texas | Wyomiing | Utah | Oklahoma | Arizona | Pennsylvania | Maine | Michigan |
You may have read about the new food pyramid recently unveiled by the USDA. It's customized! It emphasizes exercise! (There's a little guy running up the side of it!) There are 12 of them!
The pyramid has come under fire by nutritionists who complain that it doesn't really encourage anyone to eat less of anything. But what bothers me about it is that it's not really a pyramid.
OK, so here's the old pyramid:
The meaning of it is immediately clear: eat more of the stuff at the base, eat less of the stuff at the top. That's how a pyramid graphic should work. Here's the new one:
By turning the sections on their side, there's no longer any relationship to the pyramid shape. Other than the guy running up the side of it. The amount of foods recommended still relate to the area covered, but the reader can't immediately grasp which foods to eat more of and which to eat less of. You could get the same information out of a stacked bar chart:
Bad graphics. Someone get Tufte on the phone. Stat.
| USDA | Tufte Alert | Design |
| Crime | Tomatoes |
There's a big hole in the ground on 35th Street, and it's being filled with a building by non-union labor. I know this because I pass by the large Inflatable Union Rat most every morning. I remember Jack telling me that in New Jersey, strikers had to remain in motion, but I guess the rules are different in New York, because the union guys are mostly standing around.
So this morning I came up with the perfect nickname for the Inflatable Union Rat: Scabbers. Get it? It's so perfect I'm going to have to suppress laughter every time I see the Rat.
I'm so dang clever!
| Midtown | Unions | Balloons | Rats | Harry Potter |
Sweat Ship: Team Plans Offshore Assault on L.A. Coders
Of all the dystopian futures imagined for Los Angeles, none have been stranger than the truth. Get a load of this horror:
Three San Diego entrepreneurs plan to start a cut-rate outsourcing plant for software development three miles off the coast of Los Angeles aboard a used cruise ship moored in international waters.
Wired with a fat T3 pipe fed by microwave, SeaCode would employ 600 developers - the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens - who could crank out code around the clock at a lower cost and higher rate of efficiency than their American counterparts.
The beauty part (at least according to the proponents) is that business would be booming, the headquarters could change sail wherever business took it, and RnR would be just a half-hour water-taxi ride away. In your neighborhood.
EXTREME OUTSOURCING! Query: do off-shore oil rig crews have to be legal, or do they come under the same loophole?
| Programming | Law | Los Angeles |
OK, I admit, I had fanboy excitement going in to see Sin City. Frank Miller's comic is amazing hypernoir. As long as he's not doing a sequel, Rodriguez is a fine director. And it promised to look amazing, with a panel-to-screen translation unseen before, capturing the look and feel of Miller's black-and-white-with-splashes-of-color comic. Plus, you know, eye candy.
So, what's the word I'm looking for? Disappointment. Yeah, that's it.
Sin City is this year's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It looks great, it's a terrific homage -- and it's just not very exciting. As a movie. "Sin City" (the comic) has great characters. Their movie versions (with the exception of an unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as Marv) are just sort of bland, style with no attitude. Clive Owen's Dwight is the worst, and the middle story is kind of boring because of it. I think part of the problem is that we only get part of Dwight's story, so his victory doesn't mean much; nor does his relationship with Gail et al. make much sense. Bruce Willis as Hartigan is somewhat better, but please, can we just tell Michael Madsen to stay out of acting for a while? Watching him chew the scenery is not my kind of fun.
The other problem, I think, is the translation. What works on the page doesn't necessarily work on the screen. The violence, for instance, seems much gorier. I was reminded of this interview with Alan Moore, talking about the translation of comics to films:
Personally, I tend to think [The Watchmen is] unfilmable, and it would only lose something. But there, again, I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. Sometimes the transition can be easier. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic. So I generally tend to be pessimistic, although I could sometimes be wrong. You'll occasionally get a film that is a wonderful adaptation of a book, and maybe does add something to it.
Comics-to-movie adaptations tend to be worse than book-to-movie adaptations, and unfortunately, Sin City fares no better.
Oh, and some funny SC-themed Photoshops from Something Awful, below the fold.
Continue reading "Sin City" » | Robert Rodriguez | Alan Moore | Comics | Photoshop |
You can always count on Wodehouse, just as Bertie can always count on Jeeves. This farce contains the best example of zeugma I've ever come across; one thinks that PGW thought it up first and then wrote the entire book around it. Also recently read Joy In The Morning which was good, but not quite as good.
| Zeugma |
So The Guardian asked a number of scientists to rate their favorite doomsday scenarios. Their Eschatonathon ranges from genetic decay to super-volcanos to the earth being swallowed by a black hole.
Afterwards we estimate each threat in two ways: first, the chance of it occurring in our lifetime (the next 70 years); and, second, the danger that it would pose to the human race if it did happen (10 = making humans extinct, to one = barely having an impact on our lives).
Now what this article lacks is two things: one, a threat matrix, and two, a handy chart. Having a few minutes on my hands, I decided to address this lack:
Print it out, and put it on your fridge!
How it's done stuff, and Top Eschatons To Watch Out For This Century, below the fold.
Continue reading "The End Of The World (Now In Handy Chart Form!)" » | Tufte Alert | Excel | Robots | Nuclear War | Environment | Global Warming | Volcanos | Genetics | Eschatology |
I read on Boing Boing that Bruce Schneier had launched a new symbol: Individual-i:
Today, the rights of individuals are being eroded: by government, by corporations, by society itself. This icon — the Individual-i — represents the rights of the individual.
It represents the right to privacy and anonymity in the information age. It represents the rights to an open government, due process, and equal protection under the law. It represents the right to live surveillance free, and not to be marked as "suspicious" for wanting these other rights.
It recognizes that a free society is a safe society, and that freedom is founded upon individual rights.
The battle for individual rights is just beginning; our side needs a symbol.
We hope to see this symbol displayed proudly wherever individual rights are valued.
Here it is:
Will such symbol-making work? On the plus side, it's an easy symbol to make (only seven pen strokes) and recognize (its anthropomorphic shape helps). On the negative, its meaning is somewhat tied to language. The "I" stands for "Individual" -- but will that meaning translate in non-English speaking (and non-Roman alphabetic) contexts?
Also, I kinda see this, but that's just the Pollyanna in me:
So I figured that any good meme needs its own 80 x 15 blog button so I quickly threw two together, the better of which graces Ishbadiddle even now. And now they're both up on the Individual-i site, how 'bout that, along with some actually professional looking ones.
| Rights | Design | Bruce Schneier | Individual-i | Human Rights | Privacy | Symbols | Logos |
Ennis sent over this link to a superhero seder parody, featuring Magneto, Spock, and ... The Thing? I had no idea he was Jewish, but indeed Benjamin Jacob Grimm is a Member of the Tribe. (Another article at Beliefnet.)
He's a golem, see?
And in case you needed it, a list of all the Jewish Supers. Iceman? Shadowcat? Harley Quinn? Who knew? I guess this two-fisted rabbi has been reading up on his comics.
| Fantastic Four | Religion | Judaism |
things magazine is a memestream I Read Solely Syndicatedly. They've been offline for a while, but just burst a core dump of links on us. A few of interest to some of us:
Aaron: Why Architects Give Me the Willies
Colin: OtherPower
Andrea: Location, location, location.
Chris: The internet DJ.
Jay: Really early compression techniques.
Note: you can click on the links even if your name isn't next to it!
| Maps | New York City | Real Estate | MP3 | History | Telegraphy | Compression | Cryptography | Energy | DIY |
"I think so, Brain, but Zero Mostel times anything will still give you Zero Mostel." The Animaniacs were awesome, esp. Pinky and the Brain (until they brought in that stupid girl.) Read through to the Pinky Paradox at the end.
| Animaniacs | Pinky and the Brain | Logic | Reference |
The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?
Found on Josh Rubin.
| Amazon.com | New York Times |
Fred Korematsu passed away March 30, 2005 at his daughter's home of respiratory illness. He is known for having challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II in the court case Korematsu v. United States (1944), where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the internment was justified due to "military necessity."
Continue reading ""He had a quiet courage."" » | WWII | Internment | Race & Ethnicity | Korematsu | Michelle Malkin |
I was recently going through Ishbadiddle's server logs, for reasons tangential to everything important. I haven't looked at them for a while (gone are the days when I checked our logs on an obsessive basis!) but was interested to see what Google searches have brought people here. And, hopped up on caffeine as I currently am, I found there was a strange sort of poetry to it.
I've been interested, in an on and off kind of a way, in "found poetry." In high school I mucked about with programming computer-generated poetry. I never did submit it to Facets, but that would have made for an interesting literary Turing test. (Considering the poetry they did print...) I have a poem "object" made up of clips from one day's New York Times I did in college. So here's another experiment in found poetry, this one entirely made from Google search requests for Ishbadiddle on 4/7/05. Only punctuation changes have been made. Poem is below the fold, so lovers of actual poetry can avoid reading it.
Continue reading "Speaking At A Funeral" » | Google | Found Art | Disturbing Search Requests |
Scramble To Destroy Deadly Flu
Scientists around the world were scrambling to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus was sent to thousands of labs....The germ, the 1957 H2N2 "Asian flu" strain, killed between 1 million and 4 million people, 70,000 in the U.S. alone. It has not been included in flu vaccines since 1968, and anyone born after that date has little or no immunity to it.....Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies kits used for quality control tests.....The WHO said Tuesday that there have been no reports of infections in laboratory workers associated with the distribution of the samples and that "the risk for the general population is also considered low." Still, the decision to send out the strain was described by Stohr as "unwise" and "unfortunate."
"Unwise and unfortunate." Well, there's your understatement for the day. Since when did "unfortunate" become the word for "colossal foulup that no one will be held accounatable for?" I see it used all the time in this context. That and "we regret the error."
| Disease | SNAFU |
Quickly, now because I'm off to dinner. Found on A&LD, this essay by Michael Walzer on the left and American politics. Yes, it's another essay dissecting what happened in the 2004 election, but I think Walzer's got something here.
Liberals and leftists are engaged on many fronts, but we are not coherently engaged. No one on the left has succeeded in telling a story that brings together the different values to which we are committed and connects them to some general picture of what the modern world is like and what our country should be like. The right, by contrast, has a general picture. I don't think that its parts actually fit together in a coherent way, but they appear to do so. And in politics, despite the common view that all politicians pander to their constituencies, saying one thing here and its opposite there, the appearance of coherence is the name of the game.Scattershot doesn't work, not in arguments and not in campaigns; you need a coordinated barrage. And somehow, right-wing intellectuals and activists have managed to convince themselves and a lot of other people that the free market, individual self-reliance, the crusade for democracy, the war against terrorism, heterosexual marriage, conventional sex and gender roles, religious faith, and patriotic sentimentality all hang together. They are a coherent set, and together they constitute the American Way. And then the defense of "values," even if it's narrowly and weirdly focused-say, on sexual license in Hollywood movies-calls to mind everything else. Well, I guess it's not entirely weird; there is a recognizable picture of America here, even if it's a nostalgic picture, and even if a lot of Americans (maybe, today, most Americans) are left out of it.
Much more to it, of course, and I'm just beginning to think about it. But go read.
| Michael Walzer | 2004 Election | Liberalism | Conservatism | Crusaders |
I've been staring at maps all day today. Specifically, I've been mapping schools in one of Computers for Youth's potential new cities. The software I'm using is MapInfo. I've spent much of the day trying to figure out how to map addresses to the city streets. When I did this for NYC, it was (relatively) easy. There are street files available for each borough. Load them up and geocoding is pretty straightforward. But no such files exist (at least that I could find through extensive Googling) for this other city. Sure, I could get the grid of city streets (the "Tiger" file, free download). Sure, that grid table includes data on the na