Liveblogging from the John Scalzi appearance pimping his book The Last Colony. Aside from being a helluva writer, he’s also an engaging speaker. Unfortunately, you can only catch him live in Richmond as this is the tail end of his tour, but the fine folks at Google have immortalized his speech there.
Also, based on the number of attractive, literate women standing in the book-signing line, I’m definitely recommitted to finishing my novel one of these years.
Best sports-related geek humor ever.
This might alter the perception that polar bears are cute and cuddly.
Fascinating video from NPR [1] about social space in Second Life. Most fascinating to me: gender rules apply, even though the avatar’s gender has no connection to actual gender. (Makes me wonder if this is way to determine if the person you’re talking to is who s/he says s/he is.)
[1] Who knew NPR did video? Or as the Rocky Horror audience script puts it, “what the f*** is a radio picture?”
Spinal Tap reunites (for the 26th time in 25 years) for a global warming benefit; Marty DeBergi (aka Rob Reiner) debuts a 15 minute where-are-they-now video.
Here’s how you can own your very own integer, just like the people who make DVDs.
or, How to Blatantly Steal Ideas from the iPhone
It will come as no surprise to anyone that I’ve got a minor case of geeklust for the iPhone. It might be a surprise that I’m not expecting to be an early adopter. For one thing, I can’t have one yet, and there’s nothing like delayed gratification to kill off the geek libido. For another, there’s a very long list of specifications that makes me drool quite a bit more over the Nokia N95, at least the next time I feel like dropping nearly a grand on a phone.
But this post isn’t about that. It’s about one feature of the iPhone that I wanted immediately when I saw it demoed: visual voicemail.
My relationship with voice communications is rather strained, especially for a guy who’s had around a dozen cell phones and two dozen phone numbers (including a 500 and 700 number, if anyone remembers those services). I’m horrible about keeping up with voice messages. I hate having to skip through 12 messages to get to the one I know I need. And it drives me nuts that I have yet one more nonfungible bucket collecting important messages, when 95% of everything else is routed to my email.
Enter GrandCentral, currently in public beta. Sign up with them and they give you a free phone number in an area code of your choosing. Then plug in all of your other phone numbers. When someone calls your GrandCentral number, all of your phones simultaneously ring. That by itself is fairly nifty, but since I’ve been a cell-phone only guy for ten years, I’m interested in their other services.
You can record incoming calls. You can drop someone into voicemail and listen to the message live, then pick up if you decide you want to talk to them. You can switch a call from one phone to another (i.e., off a landline and onto your cell). And you can get all of your voice messages stored on a website that’s accessible with mechanisms similar to visual voicemail.
But hey, that’s not all. Hook up GrandCentral with a free Gizmo Project account, and you can have your calls ring through to your computer. Or you could use Skype’s SkypeIn service. The difference is that SkypeIn is $38 a year, but Gizmo will give you a 775 area code for free. (Gizmo charges $35 if you want to pick your area code like you can with Skype.) And unlike SkypeIn, Gizmo 775 calls show up on the recipient’s caller ID. Last time I checked, SkypeOut calls instead provide the rather disturbing 1-000-012-3456 as your phone number.
I’ve been doing my experimenting with this at 2 AM, so I haven’t yet run many tests on voice quality. (Except for the guy in Italy whom I dialed up by mistake. Sorry about that.) But so far it’s been peachy keen enough for me to recommend it, and I’ve been giving out my GrandCentral number for the last week. The most fun I’ve had so far: in order to run a ring test, I used SkypeOut to call GrandCentral to ring through to my cell phone and Gizmo accounts simultaneously. I was somewhat amazed when it worked perfectly, although I was careful not to say anything, lest I created an echo that ripped a hole in the space-time continuum.
What I’m looking forward to doing is switching my calls over to Gizmo when I’m communing with my laptop. This puts incoming caller ID onscreen, and I can use my MacBook’s audio to take the call. This also means fewer cell minutes burned, and I can shut off the phone to save battery power. Finally, I’ve rigged my cell phone to stop using T-Mobile’s voicemail, so anyone calling my old number will still get fed into my GrandCentral visual voicemail system.
(Check with your cellular provider before you do this; they charge different rates for forwarded minutes and regular minutes. I discovered this years ago when AT&T billed me $300 for usage over my regular plan, which was unlimited minutes. I spent hours on the phone asking customer service reps how I exceeded an infinite number.)
So, for those of you who have my phone number already, drop me a line to get my new numbers. You can still reach me on the cell number you have, but I’ll prefer to take calls on the new GrandCentral number. (And of course, hang onto my cell in case GrandCentral goes kablooey.) You only need the 775 number if you want to know it’s me when that number pops up on your caller ID; call me there and you’re quite likely to miss me.
For those of you who don’t have my number, check out this nifty widget.
This post replies to Brian Greenberg’s review of An Inconvenient Truth.
I think we can also agree that this is true: “It is difficult to make a man believe that a problem has been solved when his salary depends on him working to solve it.”
I’d be willing to bet a very large sum of money, at attractive odds, that there is not a single environmentalist working today who is afraid of being put out of work by an effective solution to global warming. The problem is simply too huge, and even given massive public investment in reversing the trends, there’s at least another decade or two of work to be done. (And of course, any activist who draws a salary from his cause will always be able to find new employment on a different problem later, should he be lucky enough to obsolesce himself.)
He needs to be dramatic as well, even to the point of twisting the facts to do it. This, I believe, is what ultimately sunk him in his 2000 election bid, and it’s presence here is palpable.
Ugh. No, I’m not going to debate 2000 with you (again). But there has been tons of media analysis that basically established that in 2000, nearly every instance of “Al Gore exaggerates” was actually attributable to what the media reported he said, and not what he said. Compared to the sweetheart coverage of GWB’s malapropisms, the effect was really quite stunning.
First, there are the truly inexplicable asides about the hardships he has endured in his life.
Agreed that I didn’t much care for this, but I suspect this was done for movie production values rather than to sell the argument.
I had to laugh at the various scenes of Al Gore “studying” global warming data on his laptop. A closer look at the machine clearly shows that he’s working in whatever the Mac’s equivalent of PowerPoint is, and he’s editing slides, not studying data. Setting aside the fact that he says he’s given this slide show over 1,000 times, so the slides are probably already set, I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money on the fact that Gore didn’t create any of these slides himself.
Ooooo, how much money? Because I’d win that bet. Gore uses Keynote (the Apple branded competitor to PowerPoint), and is fairly famous for authoring both his presentations and the words that appear in books under his name. It might not be 100%, but it’s not ghost-written either.
Furthermore, the slides are updated on a regular basis (there are reports of people seeing him working on it on the plane), and people who have seen him live in consecutive appearances report that whole sections can be dropped or amended, to suit the current state of research, the audience, and the length of the speech.
Everything else becomes a function of how many of us there are, and since no one is advocating for killing off 7 billion people, we almost have to look at ways to adapt to this new reality, rather than ways to stop/reverse it.
Not entirely true. For one thing, we’ve known about population growth for nearly 100 years, and there have been movements to slow it for that entire time (the most legitimate of which is Zero Population Growth). But it makes a huge difference now that large swaths of the developing world are industrializing. It’s not just a function of raw numbers. (And there are interesting philosophical debates going on about the implications of having a population of nine billion; twice as many mouths to feed, but also twice as many Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Gores to address it.)
Two examples caught my eye: Holland and the World Trade Center memorial site…. These are ironic because both sites are currently below sea level, and both have been protected by technology that was invented decades ago.
Yes, but both would be in pretty bad shape if changes in sea level started fluctuating rapidly, yes? One might also point out Venice, which despite centuries of engineering to fight back the sea, is still losing.
his criticism about our rejection of the Kyoto treaty, despite the fact that the economic impact on the US was so severe that the Senate rejected it by a vote of 99-0
You are seriously misrepresenting both the Treaty and the reasons for that Senate vote. Suffice to say that there are any number of people and websites who will explain to you their proposals for reaching Kyoto Protocol levels with a net economic gain for the United States.
Think of it this way: pollution is waste. Green re-engineering lowers waste. In what other area do otherwise intelligent analysts think that maintaining current levels of waste is cheaper and better?
The current strategy seems to be purely political – disparaging everyone who disagrees with anything Gore says, rather than discussing reasonable alternatives (or even, heaven forbid, market opportunities) for how to deal with the issue.
This is pretty much the diametric opposite of the message of the environmental groups that I’m familiar with. It is, however, repeated so frequently on Fox News and other media that I’m not surprised you believe this.
I’ve compared global warming to Y2K before, and I remain convinced they are similar.
That would be nice, but it’s not the case. A better example is nuclear waste products, and coming up with a storage system that will be safe for 100,000 years. Y2K required a large investment of time and money, but the “waste product” that it fixed was not cumulative. Global warming precursors, on the other hand, are very much cumulative and subject to tipping point behaviors.
According to Wikipedia, Y2K cost $300 billion. The numbers I’ve heard for reversing carbon load can go much higher; I recall one proposal for atmospheric scrubbers that would go for $1 trillion. (The design was such that individuals and businesses could buy their own; the system was many small-scale and cheap devices.) Likewise, just turning on the scrubber, or insert your solution here, requires a period of time (usually decades) before the reversal is evident.
My personal expectation is the opposite: the United States (and to a much lesser extent, the rest of the wealthy nations of the world) will continue to ignore this problem until it has reached crisis proportions at home, which will be after adverse effects hit billions of people in poorer nations. Americans have a tremendous capacity to not pay attention to such things, until it comes time to ship a billion dollars in tsunami relief. New Orleans was an opportunity for Americans to grasp that Mother Nature is still a very dangerous bitch—but thanks to the cheerleading for oil and coal from the Bush administration, and the near-complete abdication of responsibility by the Democrats, that window was shut.
Until food, water, and climate security hit us where we live, we’re not going to care, and billions will pay the price for that. Many already are. It will be interesting to see if the first, inevitable examples of political terrorism by ethnic groups threatened by genocide through lack of access to potable water will be seen as a military or political problem. I’m not hopeful on that score.
Garrison Keillor on the chosen president:
An ancient Republican dropped by my house on Monday to sun himself on my porch and announce over coffee that he is now an independent. The problem is that his party has become the Calvinist party and he is Episcopalian. In his church, faith and doubt sit side by side: It’s fear that we must cast out. But in the Republican Party, fear is the fuel that runs the car.
Kryptonite is real. Or at least, white kryptonite is real, but it doesn’t appear to have the ability to destroy all plant life.
Ohio 2004 election results were hosted on RNC-linked servers, with opportunities in the chain to tamper with the tallies.
This alarm clock could be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. And you can actually buy one.
eFax customer service representatives fail the Turing test. (This page is a must-view for the illustration.)
Bill Moyers on Democracy Now:
I almost didn’t come back to PBS; I really wanted to be a correspondent on The Daily Show, but I wasn’t funny enough.
I’m looking forward to tonight’s broadcast of Moyers’ first Journal on PBS: Buying the War.
For some reason, the top two searches that get people here are “4×4” and “tuning”, with “4×4 tuning” not far afterwards. Apparently I’m now a light truck expert. Variations on rigged PowerBall are a close second.
Two lists today: searches that amuse me, and searches that amaze me (by giving me such a high Google rank).
Amusing:
Amazing:
This cartoon might be a great reason to start waking up on Saturday mornings again.
I wrote about Quinn Norton after I met her at CFP2006 last year—specifically, after I met her while she was taking telephoto pictures of NSA headquarters through a chainlink fence. I just found a video of a fantastic speech she gave on functional body modification at Chaos Congress in Berlin, but I’ll warn you that it’s a 184 meg M4V download before I link to it.
Hey, did you know that the FBI has lost 75% of the documents that were requested under FOIA in 2006? No wonder Alberto has so much trouble remembering things; he has so little to read.
Tomorrow is the deadline to register a complaint with the FDA over their plan to redefine chocolate to include all sorts of crap. Yes, there is a difference between what can be called chocolate, chocolate-flavored, or chocolatey. If you think this matters, then let your government know. Reminds me of my favorite George Carlin quote: “You know what ‘real chocolatey goodness’ means? No fucking chocolate.”
I’m a fan of creative displays of quantitative data, but this one takes the cake: this graph of home values since 1890, adjusted for inflation—as a roller coaster.
Hey, did you know that approximately 100,000 people (Jeff estimate) can look up what prescriptions you’re taking, pretty much whenever they feel like it? It’s all to make sure you’re not getting stoned with your meds, which is amusing, since it looks like marijuana is a great way to slow cancer, and you can’t have any.
Aside from showing how to peel an egg in eight seconds, this has gotta be the greatest kitchen hack I’ve ever seen. Plus, you can also peel a raw egg.
Daylight Saving Time erroneously puts a kid in jail for two weeks.
Curious to know whether your headache and nausea is a hangover or bird flu? Go ahead and track your symptoms to see if this is self-inflicted or epidemiological.
It’s official, I have one more reason to hate people who drive cars.
I just ran several of my blog entries through Gender Genie, and the results were 4 out of 4: I am a girly blogger. Even my TidBits article is eligible for Lifetime Channel broadcast. The only entry that came up male (and that was borderline) was my post here that was a copy of a comment I left on I Should Be Sleeping.
I guess arguing raises my testosterone just enough.
The New York Times with a graphical accounting of deaths by gun, on a daily basis.
Somehow I managed to miss this until I heard about it from Bill Maher:
Take Monica Goodling, who, before she resigned last week, because she’s smack in the middle of the U.S. Attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She’s 33 years old. And though she never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 93 U.S. Attorneys.
How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College. You know, Messiah, home of the Fighting Christ-ies? And then went on to attend Pat Robertson’s law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said that the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor, has a law school.
Announcing my latest cockamamie idea: EOTD, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In blog format. One entry a day. With snarky commentary. Suitable for RSS feeding.
As of this writing, you too can become a postbellum whore in New Orleans (it’s surprisingly easy), engage in sleazy stock transactions, read about a town in Germany named “town” (I think), and read about three random 19th-century Europeans.
Why am I doing this? I wrote about that, too.
Hat tip to MacDevCenter: check out the driving directions to get, for example, from one major world capital to another.
I don’t keep kosher for Passover, but tonight as I was shopping for my usual bagels, pasta, and popcorn, I suddenly had a hankering for matzoh. Unfortunately, this being the first night of Passover and an hour or so after most seders have concluded, every Jew in the tri-state area with an ounce of sense had already purchased their Pesach supply and my supermarket was sold out.
In the Passover aisle, that is. A few aisles over in Ethnic, they had the regular matzoh, the stuff that’s available year-round, that’s marked on the side NOT FOR PASSOVER USE.
And I stood there for something like ten minutes, looking back and forth from my bagels to my ersatz matzoh, thinking that there was Just Something Wrong with buying it. Knowing for a fact that I was being very silly. I’m still not entirely sure why I’m silly, but I’m definitely sure about it.
It’s simply cruel that this is a hoax. I’d probably buy it with this clock to save shipping.
The BBC wants to know if you can smell cheese?
Windows insecurities exploited that can truly invade your privacy.
If you need a new ISP, I’m hearing good things about this one.
A small error imperils an upcoming poker tournament.
Threat Alert Jesus. I’d buy this, and I’m Jewish.
Giles Turnbull on the great new productivity app coming its way to Macs.
Google finally goes analog, and it’s about damn time.
A good history of April 1st hijinks, dating back centuries. There’s even a meta-prank courtesy of Boston University. Turns out that some pranks have been superceded by actual events.
And I’ve gotta say, I’ve been to Providence. If they closed for the day, who would notice? Although I did make the mistake once of going to Belgium on the day it closed.
It’s on my perennial list of things to do to get a daily feed of The Daily Show and Colbert Report into my regular media schedule. In the meantime, I rely on web clips like this one.
What Jon didn’t mention is that the McCain website wasn’t “hacked” — instead, McCain’s campaign pulled something sleazy. They had a response button on their page that was completely lifted from someone else’s code; the license for the code said it was kosher to do this, provided they kept his authorship intact. The campaign instead stripped his authorship, and pulled the code each time from the author’s site, whacking him with the bandwidth fees.
So the author, Mike Davidson, swapped in the image with the new McCain platform. No hack at all, as the campaign itself had said, “go get that image from the other guy’s site.” I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the actions of the campaign reflect poorly on McCain himself.
My local forecast:
New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.
In other words, “You’ll get a little rain, unless it’s really raining where you are, in which case you’ll get more.” Which I guess has the advantage of being accurate.
…turn a fishtank into a deep fryer. With the fish still in it. Also demonstrates how to blow up a glass of water.
…be certain that you’re hiring a good designer.
…create art from construction paper and OCD.
…treat your skull like a word processor. Or, as the case may be, a food processor.
…make the American South even more medieval for the women unfortunate enough to live there.
…have sex. No, really.
 Finally, incendiary device manufacturers have reached out to an untapped market.
I have a new hero. (And while it’s true that my laptop is named Starbuck, that’s actually a Battlestar Galactica reference, not a coffee reference.) Yes, I am aware of what’s going on in Dilbert this week, thank you very much. |