What happens when Bob Thompson, a writer who grew up in a house without a television and lives a TV-free life to this day, decides to find out what he's been missing, with his namesake the Professor of Television as Virgil to his Dante?

[...] all in all, I was having a pretty good time. So I decided to keep going and watch "Friends," which was the very first show my girls mentioned when I asked what TV their sixth- and seventh-grade pals talked about.

It turned out to be about a dorky college professor having an affair with a beautiful young student, ho ho ho, who groped him in his office, hee hee hee, and then bought herself a teeny-weeny bikini for spring break, heh heh heh, which made the dorky professor jealous, especially after one of his gal pals informed him that "spring break is doing frat guys," hah hah hah ...

Aiee! I didn't run screaming from the room, but the impulse was there.

ProfQuotes: think of it as In Passing for college students.

So, yes, Mother Teresa is a moral freak.

...and it was a circuit just like this that failed in the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. When I worked for GE, I designed quite a few of these. Oh, did you know that GE did the Three Mile Island plant?

Unfortunate banner ads: number 1,453 in a never-ending series. Look Honey, No Hands!

[Via NTK]

As we await a decision on whether the government will back a London bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, Catherine Bennett has come up with 20 reasons Why London should go for gold:

1 It would finally put Britain on the map. As Ken Livingstone, perhaps the most ardent campaigner for the games, has suggested, it's time everyone else discovered the United Kingdom, one of the world's best kept secrets, previously known only to asylum seekers, George Bush and millions of French schoolchildren. "Boosting our country's profile abroad," he says, "would be an essential element of a London bid."

Charlie Stross interviews Cory Doctorow about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, reputation economies, sociopathic weasels and what he's working on next:

The second book is "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town," which is an urban fantasy/magic realist novel about the eldest of ten brothers who are the offspring of a mountain in Northern Ontario and a washing machine. The brothers are as strange as their parents: one is procognitive, three nest like Russian dolls, one is an animated corpse, one is an island, and so on. The animated corpse was actually murdered by the other brothers, but bootstrapped himself back to life and made his way back to the mountain to complain to their parents. Alan, the eldest moved to Toronto and became a successful serial entrepreneur, finally retiring to Kensington Market to write a short story that is to be discovered after his death. While there, he falls in with crusty-punk dumpster-diver community wireless activists who are unwiring all of Toronto with a meshed network built out of junk hardware salvaged from suburban industrial parks. Alan wants to help, but he's distracted by his corpse brother, who is hunting down the remaining brothers one at a time and murdering them, possibly abetted by his neighbor, Kirshna, whose girlfriend, Mimi, has mysterious wings that Krishna saws off once a month, but which keep growing back. It's pretty strange techno-utopian stuff, and very optimistic in tone.

You may think that you've seen The Two Towers, but until you've seen this subtitled version you really haven't seen The Two Towers.

I do hope that when the official DVD is released they can find room for some Engrish subtitles alongside the English ones.

[Via MetaFilter]

Rachael Oliveck, animal rights activist and vegetarian turned omnivore, seems uncommonly happy to have abandoned vegetarianism after fourteen years.

Neil Gaiman would like to apologise for his presumption in writing American Gods:

Nobody's asked the question I've been dreading, so far, the question I have been hoping that no-one would ask. So I'm going to ask it myself, and try to answer it myself.

And the question is this: How dare you?

Or, in its expanded form,

How dare you, an Englishman, try and write a book about America, about American myths and the American soul? How dare you try and write about what makes America special, as a country, as a nation, as an idea?

And, being English, my immediate impulse is to shrug my shoulders and promise it won't happen again.

The Sith Academy is an utterly wonderful collection of Star Wars fanfic. Where else could you find out what happens when Darth Maul mans the technical support lines at Software Industry Technical Help, Coruscant's #1 technical support service.

"A Sith Lord does not need to see his victims in order to destroy them, my apprentice," hissed Lord Sidious. "You must be able to wreak havoc from a distance."

"I understand, my master."

"Good. Now, find the one who has been on hold the longest."

Staring intently at the blinking operator's board, Maul reached out with the Force. So many anxious people waiting, full of anger and frustration. So many tiny minds, worrying about their insignificant futures. They were all at his mercy.

"This one has been waiting for nearly thirty-five minutes. He has an important meeting tomorrow and can't get his presentation software to work."

"Excellent. How would you deal with him?"

Maul activated the vidphone and purred, "Thank you for calling Software Industry Technical Help, Coruscant's #1 technical support service. Your call is very important to us, and will be answered by the next available operator. If you would like to continue holding, press 1. If you would like to try our automated voice mail system, press 2. If you would like to find out what time the movie starts, press 3. If you would like to leave a message with our answering service, press 42597398. If you would like to dial another number, press 10-10-321. If you would like to be connected with an operator immediately, press Q." Before the befuddled caller could reply, Maul placed him on hold again.

Sidious observed the operator's board. "Well done, my apprentice. He's still holding. You offered him the tiniest sliver of hope that he might get through to a live person. It will be all the sweeter for us when his hopes are crushed." He pronounced "crushed" with such glee that Maul shivered in anticipation.

"Ah, but he is only one man," continued Sidious. "What are the rest of them doing?"

"They're listening to hold music, my master." Maul held up a CD case. The bright pink label identified it as The Best of Ewok Party Music, Volume 2.

Spider Robinson, who once wrote a short story called Melancholy Elephants about the need to limit copyright terms, has decided to slag off Lawrence Lessig:

[...] I suspect what really got on Prof. Lessig's wick was that a major lobbying force behind the Sono Buoni Act . . . I mean the Sonny Corleone Act . . . I'll have it under control in a minute . . . that one of the biggest supporters of the Sonny Bono Act was none other than Mordor itself: the evil empire men call Disney.

I've never understood exactly what's so vile about Disney. Every time I've ever given them a dollar, I got back a buck and a half of value. If the Sonny Boy Williamson . . . I say, if the Sonny Bono Act hadn't passed, Steamboat Willie (the Mouse himself!) would have slipped into the public domain.

Naturally, the Disney corporation pressured Congress. If it hadn't, today we'd probably be paying half a buck for cut-rate Mickey Mouse gear that isn't worth a dime, and wondering why nothing good ever seems to last.

Granted: As far as I know, precious few of those who are currently major players at Disney are relatives, loved ones, friends, or even associates of Walt himself any more. I wonder how many people getting rich on his genius today ever met the man. And I'll bet they all wear better clothes, drive better cars, and have more aerobic sex than the average Stanford law professor. I'm not disputing that they're scum.

Have you ever wondered what William Gibson thought of The Matrix? He liked it, though he thought it was more akin to Dick's work than his own.

I'm now going to lose several million brownie points by admitting that I've never made it to the end of Neuromancer. I've enjoyed some of Gibson's other work, but somehow I just bounce off Neuromancer every time. Perhaps reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash first spoiled me for Gibson.

I know a visit to an art gallery isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it never occurred to me that modern art could be an effective instrument of torture.

[Via burnt toast]

One for the biker in your life: a motorcycle hearse, to transport them to their final resting place in style.

Never let it be said that day of the great English eccentric has passed...

[Via Boing Boing]

Parking Spots is a very, very strange site. Nicely done, to be sure, but definitely a bit odd...

[Via I Love Everything]

I think it's safe to say that Tom is not at all impressed with Trackback:

"How Trackback works in a nutshell: So linky article links to linked article then the linky thing sends a little note to the linked thing saying I'm trying to link to you and the linked thing goes So the fuck what? and the linky thing asks Didn't I do this right? and the linked thing goes No, you don't use the actual URL you use a magic different one that you don't know and can't easily find automatically unless you understand weird magic code and the linky thing goes You're shitting me and the linky thing says No."

This collection of Japanese Facemarks (a.k.a. Smileys) is impressive, but I can't help thinking that smileys like ((((((^_^;) - which means "Leave secretly: he moves from left side to right side stealthily" - aren't something I can imagine myself using terribly often.

[Via Jejune.net]

Exploring The Waste Land is a tremendous piece of work. The text of the poem is flanked by frames containing annotations, cross-references and half a dozen other types of supplementary material.

My only qualm about the design of the site is that the colour and typography are fairly garish and don't do much to distinguish between different classes of text, or to make the poem's text stand out as the focus for the page. However, that's fixable without too much work. Give it a bit of a tidy up and it'd be a killer proof-of-concept.

One day all annotation sites will be made this way.

[Via MetaFilter]

At last, the answer to a vital question: Is Windows Ready for the Desktop?

We've heard it year after year after year: "This is the year Windows is for the masses on the desktop." Well, then another version comes out and still "Joe Longkneck" can't use it. I would love to see Windows on the desktop for the newbie. It's just it's going to take some effort.

First off is, "Why?" Well, here's why:

1. It supports not only those common win32 apps, but also those many dos and OS/2 programs now. What other operating system can run OS/2 software? Heck, there's even a few Java VM's for it.

[...]

4. Security. Bill Gates is really trying here. And security is only getting better. Soon, you won't have to worry about your ATM not functioning because of some SQL worm. I want that amount of security on my desktop!

[...]

6. Signed drivers. Let's say there are many drivers for one device, but only one official driver. Now, that official driver may not be the best, but you still should use it so that you can tell the company about it. If it were not for signed drivers, you might use an older or different driver that does not have all the bugs, and then how are you supposed to report the bugs if you're using a good driver? Nobody will know about them and they'll never get updated.

Over in rec.arts.sf.written, Sea Wasp knows what it'll take to rid Usenet of spammers. Sometimes only the harshest measures will do the job.

The Fly UI should definitely win some sort of prize for Best Use of an Icon in a Non-Computer Context. Very clever.

Jann has posted a very ... err ... impressive Penthouse Picture.

(NB/- definitely work-safe, despite the title.)

Check out the fourth picture in this week's MSNBC The Week in Pictures, the one with the snowballing Mexican nuns. Quite, quite wonderful.

Wise words from historian David Cannadine, interviewed in The Atlantic:

My view is that the historical process is a very complicated thing, and the older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, "No! It's very complicated."

Where Are They Now: Q*Bert.

A sad, sad story:

He was on top of the world. Happy for the first time in his life, he purchased an estate with a reinforced swimming pool which would satisfy his increasingly insatiable cocaine addiction. Unfortunately, with Q*Bert’s recreation of choice, it was only a matter of time before tragedy would come knocking.

Riding high on both the success of the video game, and the coconut sized chunks of cocaine he inhaled, Q*Bert was totally unaware of a worsening health condition. Despite the fact that the septum of his nose had once been the size of a small child’s arm, he was oblivious to its virtual disintegration, and his diagnosis with Paranasal Sinus Cancer caught him completely unaware.

The second season of The Book Group started on Channel 4 earlier this evening. The first episode felt a little disjointed, as writer/director Annie Griffin spent most of the time showing us her characters in their daily lives rather than putting the focus on the book group meeting. (I think I noticed this more than I might have because I'd watched the repeat run of the first season over the last three weeks. The change seemed more abrupt than would have been the case if I'd gone several months without seeing the show.)

Not that this rendered the season opener any less funny. In particular, the sex scene between an indifferent Claire and a painfully eager Lachlan had me giggling from beginning to end.

To sum up: it's good to have The Book Group back on our screens, and next Friday can't come too soon.

Gollum at the Golden Globes. I wonder what he'll wear to the Oscars.

[Via Anita's LOL]

Looks as if that consultation scheme on "entitlement" cards isn't going as smoothly as the Home Office - not to mention certain IT industry lobbyists - had hoped. The Register suggests that even with 7,000 responses after Stand got involved the numbers involved would barely swing the average marginal parliamentary constituency, but that's not entirely fair. This wasn't a referendum and it wasn't much publicised in the mainstream press. Having several thousand people respond, particularly in a relatively short space of time, is very significant.

The question is, what lessons will the lobbyists take from this. Will they make sure than next time round their clients "encourage" their employees to support proposals like this as being "vital to safeguard jobs" in the UK?

When I posted about the Bloggies yesterday I thought about adding a sentence or two to the effect that ultimately it's all a bit of fun and should be seen first and foremost as a source of links to sites worth reading. But after writing that addendum I deleted it, thinking it too obvious to be worth posting. It turns out that some people take the Bloggies seriously enough to think it's worth trying to steer the shortlist in the right direction.

Michele has withdrawn her site from the competition in the wake of allegations of conspiracies among the judges and a qualified confirmation from one judge that she and her four friends - that is, 10% of the judging panel - agreed to vote en bloc for sites they liked.

I'm not naive enough to think that any online award is free from the possibility of multiple votes being cast, and goodness knows when it comes to deciding something as subjective as the "Best [insert category here] Weblog" there's no guarantee that personal preferences won't get in the way. Which is fine: if enough people bother to nominate the sites they like, the long list should reflect enough different sets of preferences to be somewhat representative of the field as a whole.

My problem is with the proposition that it's OK for some of the fifty volunteers whose job was to sift the long list to treat their position as an opportunity to push their personal favourites onto the shortlist. It's all very well for a judge to say "The bottom line. I believe in every single site I voted for. Period.", but if you volunteer to act as a judge don't you have a obligation to the people whose sites you're considering to be as impartial as possible, and in particular to come to your own conclusions about which sites should be on the shortlist? Remember, for every site you and your friends push onto the shortlist someone else's site gets pushed off. Five judges out of fifty may not be able to control who ends up on the shortlist in every case, but in a close vote where the other forty-five votes are spread among, say, a dozen sites a bloc of five votes can easily be decisive. That's unfair, and those who behave that way deserve to be called on it regardless of the fact that the real-world consequences of their actions are minimal.

The real pity of it is that because the award process is now seen as tainted a prolific and talented weblogger like Michele who has blogged up a storm this last year and certainly should have been in with a chance of some recognition in a fair competition feels compelled to withdraw her site from the awards. Which shows a lot more class than a certain bloc of five judges did.

The shortlists are up for the Third Annual Weblog Awards, a.k.a. The Bloggies.

Could this be the year Michele takes over the world, what with A Small Victory contesting the Best Weblog About Politics, Best American Weblog and Weblog of the Year categories?

Not one, but two tremendous links from extenuating circumstances today:

James Bond meets the OSI Seven Layer Model.

An image guaranteed to make your eyes water.

January Magazine reviews For Spacious Skies, an autobiographical collaboration between Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter and his daughter. Sounds like one to keep an eye out for.

For Spacious Skies ends beautifully and cryptically. It's cryptic enough that I can share that ending with you here without fear of giving anything away, and it's a lovely passage, one that somehow captures that spirit of Carpenter's book:

The space race is over. Men have walked on the moon. Old friends and pioneers are gone. Still, a frontier's cardinal rules remain unchanged: be ready in trouble, endeavor to be a jolly companion, and, tell good and true stories around lonely campfires.

It is said the nights on Mars are cold and long.

I'm painfully aware that I've been neglecting the comments over the last few days. Tonight's cinema trip has left me even further behind, but I promise that I have been reading them all and I'll catch up over the next couple of days.

I really do appreciate that readers take the trouble to comment on what I write here - even when it's to point out that I really shouldn't be so gullible when it comes to acronyms. :-)

No links tonight, as I went to see Star Trek: Nemesis this evening.

My expectations were pretty low after the critical panning the film got in the States, but I was pleasantly surprised. But then, I liked Insurrection more than most: I don't mind a more adventure-oriented storyline like that in First Contact, but it wasn't the sort of thoughtful tale that made The Next Generation worthwhile. Critics often note that Trek films featuring the Next Generation crew are more like two-part TV episodes than proper films, but I don't see that as a problem. My only argument with the recent films is that they haven't given some of the regulars as much to do as I'd like, but that's inevitable when you've got half a dozen or more major characters plus another half dozen recurring characters and you're confined to two hours or so rather than a 22-week season.

Nemesis was clearly intended as a farewell to the cast who've carried the last four films, with characters getting married, moving on to a new command and otherwise saying goodbye. There was less forced humour than in Insurrection, with no childish jokes about Klingon acne or women's breasts, thank $DEITY, and Data's role was mostly serious with none of that emotion chip nonsense. What humour there were arose naturally from the situation, as with Picard's comment that he'd be in the gym if anyone needed him. (It'll make sense if you see the film, honest.)

The plot of Nemesis was serviceable, if a tad predictable - Picard and crew take on yet another arrogant bad guy with a superweapon and a grudge - but all the regulars who actually got more than two lines acquitted themselves admirably. Tom Hardy and Ron Perlman (still recognisable under a lot of makeup) gave decent performances as Picard's adversaries. Most importantly, director Stuart Baird did a better job than Jonathan Frakes did in the last couple of films, particularly with an extended space battle sequence that takes up much of the last quarter of the film. Happily, the writer avoided the temptation to press the Reset Button at the end by "reviving" a character who'd died in action, ending the film instead on a hopeful note but one which acknowledged just how much had changed.

I do have two criticisms of the film. First, the unpleasant ordeal they put Troi through was poorly handled and not terribly necessary to the larger story. Second, it was a shame to finally see the Romulans on the big screen but have them be bit players. They were always good bad guys, and really should have been a lot scarier. However, neither of these was enough to spoil the film for me. It's not the best Trek feature film - that would be The Wrath of Khan, obviously - but it's a perfectly sound piece of work which would have been regarded as a pretty good two-parter if it had shown up in season 7.

In the light of the film's very poor box office performance in the States and the ageing cast, it's been suggested that this might well be the last Trek feature film for some time. If the Next Generation crew won't be back - and I don't think they should - I find it difficult to imagine any of the other shows' casts making the transition to the big screen. Deep Space Nine is my favourite of the modern series, but it's been too long since the show's departure from the small screen, and in any case the large cast of regulars and rich story arcs which were so effective on the small screen would get short shrift in a two hour feature film. Voyager was the biggest waste of a good setup in Trek history, and in any case now that we know they made it home it's hard to see what story they'd find to tell in a feature film. Enterprise might one day turn into a series which could support a feature film, but based on season 1 that day is a long way off. Perhaps the best bet is to leave the franchise alone for five years or more and then hand it to a new set of writers and directors to play with.

SBC Communications claims to hold a patent on, essentially, the use of a frame containing navigational tabs which can be used to access sections of your web site.

It's not quite as stupid as BT's attempt to charge web sites for using hyperlinks, but it's not far off either. Why do companies still try to pull this nonsense?

[Via Techdirt]

The finalists in the Everyman Photo Contest 2002 are very impressive. My favourite was "Arron", which came joint third.

Also, the winner of Best Title is simply terrific. Before you go to the site, see if you can imagine what sort of picture would merit the title "Ginny and Lola don't work on Thursdays. Sorry, sugar." I doubt you'll guess correctly.

[Via kottke.org]

San Francisco zoo keepers are plagued by rebellious penguins:

"We've lost complete control," said Jane Tollini, the zoos penguin keeper. "It's a free-for-all in here. After 18 years of doing this job, these birds are making mincemeat of me."

Every January 19th, a mysterious cloaked man visits the grave of Edgar Allen Poe, makes a birthday toast to the author, and leaves behind three roses and the remainder of a bottle of cognac.

And nobody knows - or wants to know - the identity of the stranger.

[Via Bookslut]

The BBC has a transcript of a recent online chat with Anthony Head about all things Buffy.

(NB: there are some spoilers for BBC viewers, but they're in a section on the last page which is clearly marked.)

Head suggests that the Ripper spin-off is still a possibility, but from what he says it's still not moved beyond the "wouldn't it be nice if we could do it?" stage, so we probably shouldn't hold our breath.

Naturally, someone had to ask him about fanfic:

From Sally Goldsmith: Have you ever read the Buffy and Giles fan fiction written about you and Buffy on the web? If not, why? If yes, what do you think?

Tony Head: I did actually read some fairly purple... I thought - 'my God' - it was very flattering, that's all I could say really! I thought, good grief! But perhaps there's similar stuff about Captain Picard! They coupled me with Willow once which I found a bit disturbing. I think it's good - it encourages people to write. Somewhere down the line they may use that to propel them to something else.

LA Weekly has a good article about David Rees, creator of Get Your War On, following the launch of the print collection of his memorably sarcastic strips.

[Via Bookslut]

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a tremendous article about the phenomenon of animal hoarding.

This started when I read one too many stories about some recluse who, when their neighbors finally got the city to act on repeated complaints about noxious odors, turned out to be living in filth and squalor with 137 live cats, all of them in pitiable condition, plus the rotting or mummified or partly cannibalized or refrigerated carcasses of an indeterminate number of dead cats.

It came to me that I'd seen a great many of these stories and that they were all of a pattern. What was going on there? I went googling for it to find out.

Take a deep breath.

[...]

Ever fancied running a nuclear power plant? Go and try out the Nuclear Power Plant Simulator and see how many meltdowns you cause before you manage to survive an entire shift.

[Via 3 Bruces]

In honour of The Simpsons having been renewed, Michele invited her readers to indulge themselves in an orgy of favourite quotes from the show.

I think my personal favourite is probably:

"Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins."
"Homer Simpson, smiling politely."

"Oh, so Mother Nature needs a favor? Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys. Nature started the fight for survival and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, hard cheese."

"Oh, an overweight Star Trek fan! You must be a killer with the ladies!"

Buzz: With all due respect, Mr. Taylor, this isn't the best time for your unique brand of bittersweet folk rock. We have a potentially critical situation here. I'm sure you'll understand.

Taylor: Listen, Aldrin, I'm not as laid back as people think. Now here's the deal: I'm going to play, and you're going to float there and like it.

Do you know why the Odeon cinema chain is so named?

I always assumed it was someone's surname, but according to Scalloblog (see posting for 17 Jan 2003) it's an acronym:

Oscar
Deutsch
Entertains
Our
Nation.

The Lavajunkie Gallery is host to an array of striking pictures of lava flows.

My favourites are the pictures showing lava flows meeting the ocean, and especially the shot on this page entitled Dawn on the Bench.

[Via User Friendly Link of the Day]

Royal Academy president Lord May, speaking about a proposal to find and name as many species as possible over the next 25 years:

"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the pieces."

Steven Johnson reckons that if video game companies want to continue to grow they need to find a way to persuade thirtysomethings that playing a demo isn't enough. No easy task.

I think the gaming companies might do better to direct their efforts towards pushing as many twentysomething gamers in the direction of online gaming as possible. In return for a very reasonable monthly subscription fee, obviously.

A US production company has floated the idea of making a reality TV show based on preparing a member of the public to fight Mike Tyson.

Somehow I can't see anyone trying to do a British version of this show. I'm sure they could get Frank Bruno or Chris Eubanks, but somehow it just wouldn't be the same...

Jamie Oliver is planning to open branches of Fifteen, the not for profit restaurant-cum-youth training scheme which featured in Jamie's Kitchen, in New York and Sydney, as well as a couple more in the UK.

What impresses me is how genuinely enthusiastic Oliver is about the whole thing. Even if this started out as a PR exercise for a ubiquitous TV chef with image problems - not that I see any evidence of that, but before the TV documentary aired it seemed to be the most likely explanation - it's clear that the project has turned into something far more meaningful.

It'd be funny if twenty years from now Jamie Oliver turns out to be better known as a social entrepreneur than a chef.

Lawrence Lessig is understandably downhearted at the news that the US Supreme Court has rejected his arguments against ever-increasing copyright terms in Eldred vs Ashcroft 7-2.

The Disney Corporation and their allies will be celebrating, but they should be worried. Take a look at the comments on Lessig's post, and you'll see that his campaign has helped raise consciousness on intellectual property issues and that the war is far from over.

In case you're thinking that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is purely an American concern, consider that next time the US and the EU discuss copyright harmonisation US negotiators will doubtless suggest that the Bono act would be a useful model for the EU's intellectual property legislation.

[Via rc3.org]

There's bibliophilia, and then there's obsession. Book collector John Baxter on public libraries:

Baxter is at his most scathing when talking about libraries and librarians and the things they do to books. "Collectors abominate lending libraries," he writes. "They are graveyards of good books. Everything a librarian does to prepare a book for lending disqualifies it as collectable. Stamps are slammed on the title page, label pockets gummed to the rear pastedown, dust wrappers discarded, covers vulcanised in plastic - or, in those days, a toffee-brown buckram tough enough to withstand acid. Restoring a library book to collectable condition is like trying to return a Kentucky Fried Chicken to the state of health where it can lay an egg."

"If you lived as a child in the 70s or the 80s [...] looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have..."

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Our baby cots were covered with brightly coloured lead-based paint. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors! We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill only to find out we'd forgotten the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No mobile phones. Unthinkable.
[...]

A question for my British readers: do you want to be required to carry an Identity Card? The Home Office is canvassing views on the introduction of "entitlement cards", and according to Lord Falconer the majority of responses has been in favour of such cards.

The thing is, the "overwhelming response" to the consultation only amounted to somewhere around 1,500 responses. Stand suspects that this may not amount to a true reflection of the views of the British populace on this topic, so they've put together a A Cynic's Guide To Entitlement (*cough* ID *cough*) Cards, which not only lays out the arguments against "entitlement" cards but makes it easy to email a response to the relevant Home Office department but also to fax a copy of your comments to your MP.

Since 10 January 3,400 or so responses have been submitted via the Stand site, so it'll be interesting to see whether Lord Falconer changes his tune when the consultation period ends later this month.

Palm have decided to drop the Graffiti handwriting recognition system which they've been building into their PDAs ever since the first Palm Pilot.

Regardless of Palm Inc's protestations to the contrary, it's hard to see this as anything but an admission of defeat in their legal battle with Xerox. I just hope that they're right that Jot, the handwriting system Palm are going to license in future, is easy to learn. I'm very used to Graffiti after getting on for three years use of my Palm IIIx, so I'd hate to think that I might have to look elsewhere for my next PDA.

[Via rc3.org]

I took a trip to the cinema to see The Tuxedo this evening. Not one of my better decisions.

Part of the problem was an uncertainty of tone: did it want to be a spoof of James Bond, an action movie with a few laughs or a buddy comedy with a hint of romance thrown in? I've just sat through it and I'm still none the wiser, and I suspect the writers and directors may not have been too sure either.

To their credit, Jackie Chan and Jennifer Love Hewitt tried hard to make something of a sow's ear of a script, but sometimes there's only so much you can do when the script fails to provide you with a coherent character or plot.

Annelizabeth has a gallery of her photographs up at PhotographyTips.com. I think my favourite is probably Shattered, just ahead of Rusty spring.

If you like Annelizabeth's work, you should definitely check out ae:pictures or her DeviantART site.

Stephen Phelan reviews a selection of self-help books.

HOW TO MAKE ANYONE LIKE YOU

Leil Lowndes

Floating through the bookshop like a ghost, looking for a quiet place to weep, I happened upon this self-help manual, with its sunny yellow cover and its title of overwhelming, almost impossible promise. Scarcely daring to hope, I fell to my knees in the aisle and began to read.

Now, if I'm being absolutely honest with myself, I do not wake up every morning feeling 'like the little choo-choo train who knows he can do it', like Leil says I should. (Well, one particular part of me does, but for some reason my own plucky little engine has never really contributed to my popularity.) Actually, Leil says a lot of things.

Many of them are tiny single servings of wisdom that she accrued in her years as a flight attendant, or sentimentalised anecdotes concerning her friends, like Stan the sports psychologist and Dale, the ten-gallon Texan who carries a 'pocketful of sunshine for everyone'. All of them end in exclamation marks -- 'I let the smile s-l-o-w-l-y erupt from my heart!', 'Shyness stinks!' etc. I must be reading this book incorrectly because by the end of it I hate myself even more, and I've somehow got the impression that Leil is an insufferably perky emotional fascist and her friends are obviously over-compensating for sick, dark compulsions they can barely contain.

Brad DeLong on The Non-Work Side of the American Economic Association's Annual Meeting. Think of it as In Passing... for economists. Some examples:

"I was supposed to meet him here at two forty-five." "I was supposed to meet him here at two o'clock." "Well, it's three fifteen now. Are you saying that there is a sense in which you 'win'?"

[...]

"You must have done a bunch of research to learn that much about the connections between Lord Dalhousie's 'Doctrine of Lapse' and the Anti-British Revolt of 1857." "Well... Sort of... It was in the distant past, and only if reading pulp historical fiction novels by George McDonald Fraser counts as 'research'."

[...]

"If he'd had that diagram, it would have made things much clearer." "If he'd had that diagram, the seminar would have been over in five minutes, and then what would he have done with the rest of his time?" "But it would have been a really impressive five minutes."

Whilst reading soc.history.what-if this afternoon, I came across a rather wonderful Dan Quayle quote I'd somehow missed back when he was a heartbeat away from the presidency.

"Bank failures are caused by depositors who don't deposit enough
money to cover losses due to mismanagement."

The Return of the King Protest. Very, very silly. But in a good way.

From the FAQ:

What are the benefits to be gained by renaming "The Return of the King" movie to something more appropriate?

There are various benefits, one of them being showing increased sensitivity towards Elvis Presley and those who were so affected by his life and music. The main one however is the fact that it makes us feel very self-important and boosts our egos to no end. We're hoping this will help us get chicks.

You learn something new every day.

I had no idea that Netscape once implemented MilSpec BLINKing.

Fans of The Lord of the Rings of a nervous disposition should probably not follow this link. For those who are wondering whether they really want to follow the link, I'll quote one line of dialogue which should settle the matter one way or the other: "Yousa steala precious from meesa!"

Need I say more?

On the other hand, anyone who, like me, just can't wait until the advance publicity starts for The Return of the King to assuage their thirst for all things Middle Earth will want to take a look at this page of images from the third film, taken from an as-yet unpublished calendar.

Cory "Boing Boing" Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has just been published by Tor Books. He's made the entire text available for download for free under a Creative Commons license in a variety of formats. (He's even produced one in .pdb format, so I can load it into my Palm to read on the bus to work tomorrow morning.)

Needless to say, if I enjoy the book half as much as I expect to I'll be paying a visit to Amazon to pay cold hard cash for a paper copy. It's a pretty gutsy move to allow your first novel to be released simultaneously online and on paper like this, so here's hoping that Doctorow receives his just reward and in the process provides yet another strong hint to the publishing industry that online distribution of books in a format which is neither crippled, platform-specific nor proprietary helps build a paying audience rather than losing one.

Happily, it seems to be working out that way for authors who publish with Baen Books via Webscriptions and the Baen Free Library. I'm not a fan of most of Baen's authors myself, but that's by the bye: they're doing excellent work, demonstrating that the internet can be a safe place to publish commercially.

I've just noticed that Channel 4 are broadcasting a repeat run of the utterly brilliant The Book Group on Thursday nights, starting tonight at 22.35.

If you're based in the UK and missed this series first time round I strongly urge you to give it a try. It was far and away the best British debut of 2002 on any channel, and one of the highlights of my viewing year.

(Come to think of it, The Book Group and Faking It were the only British shows I mentioned when discussing 2002's TV highlights in a comment thread over at More a way of life.... the other week.)

Clay Shirky reckons that 2003 is going to be the year when telecoms companies find that their most serious rivals are their own customers.

According to Shirky, companies and private individuals are going to end up using simple consumer-level technologies to build their own wireless internet access network: "the WiFi extension to the internet will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it will not be built by a few companies with deep pockets. It will be built by millions of individual customers, a hundred bucks at a time."

Shirky's comparison with the way the fax network developed in the mid-1980s is fascinating, but I'm not at all sure this is all going to happen as quickly as he thinks. Eventually I've no doubt that it will - but then, I've been reading for years about how "eventually" home internet users will have access to more bandwidth than they can use, and I for one am still waiting. As Shirky acknowledges, Voice over IP (the other technology driving the fall of the telcos) has been "coming soon" for five or six years now. Why will WiFi be any different?

The thing is, ultimately the people who operate wireless access points have to pass all that traffic off to an ISP of some description, and nowadays a lot of those ISPs are owner by telcos. I think in the short and medium term we'll see more and more telcos getting serious about enforcing Terms of Service which prohibit private customers from sharing the bandwidth they're buying, or else using other contractual terms (such as restrictions on the use of their network for the distribution of copyrighted material) as a means of harassing those who share their bandwidth indiscriminately. If your telco threatens to hold you liable for all content travelling via your wireless access point, will you still be so keen to open it up to total strangers?

I'm not saying the telcos will be able to stop WiFi in its tracks, but obstructionist tactics and a bit of lobbying to ensure that regulators don't intervene can go a long way towards stopping WiFi becoming a broadly based consumer phenomenon any time soon.

Another point to bear in mind is that at the moment most of the people sharing their bandwidth wirelessly are techies who understand about wireless security (or the lack thereof) and know about firewalls and what have you. It strikes me that in practice WiFi is about where modem-based internet access was in 1993-5: if you were lucky, the modem you'd bought would work as soon as you plugged it into your phone jack and serial port, but if it didn't then you'd better hope you knew someone who understood the AT command set, RS-232 ports and how to write a Dial-Up Networking script.

I'd like to be proven wrong about this, I really would. In the long run I probably am wrong. And Ghu knows I have little sympathy for telcos who are desperate to keep screwing every penny out of customers even as technology has permitted them to reduce their network's running costs significantly. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting to do my weblogging wirelessly.

K A Dilday suggests that female viewers are attracted to Oz, Tom Fontana's excellent but very bloody picture of life in a maximum security prison because the show quietly reverses gender roles, placing women in positions of power. (NB:- New York Times article - free registration required.)

In Oswald State Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison that is the setting of "Oz," the inmates have virtually all been male. The only women they have contact with are non-inmates, and thus these women are in positions of power: they are free to come and go, they have favors to dispense and they can offer safe harbors. The men, constantly fearing attack, seek out protective relationships with them. In general, the inmates act as women are often forced to act in the world outside.

"I don't care how women try to intellectualize it," said Kirk Acevedo, who plays the inmate Miguel Alvarez. "They watch 'Oz' for the full-frontal nudity."

NB/- The article contains one very minor spoiler for Channel viewers, insofar as it reveals that two characters survive into the fifth season and briefly describes a scene between them.

William Gibson has added a weblog to his site. There's not a lot of content there yet, but if he can keep updating the site even as he does publicity for his new novel this should be well worth a look.

In the meantime, I was taken with his biographical essay elsewhere on his site:

Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free. I did avoid the Internet, but only until the advent of the Web turned it into such a magnificent opportunity to waste time that I could no longer resist. Today I probably spend as much time there as I do anywhere, although the really peculiar thing about me, demographically, is that I probably watch less than twelve hours of television in a given year, and have watched that little since age fifteen. (An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.) I have no idea how that happened. It wasn't a decision.

[...]

I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.

In Praise of Clutter. Preach on, brother!

Leave my desk alone. It works

ON THE six square feet next to the computer on which this article is being written, a complex ecology has developed. There are approximately (it is impossible to be precise without disturbing the natural order) 100 assorted print-outs (e-mails, web pages, newspaper articles), 12 books, ten academic articles, six pamphlets, five notebooks, three newspapers, two magazines, two faxes, two telephone books, one file containing further faxes and print-outs, six pens, one box of matches, one key (origin unknown) and one handheld organiser. Some of this is being used in the writing of this article. Some of it will be used in the writing of future articles. Some of it will never be used at all, but will eventually, when the reason why this correspondent originally thought it so interesting has faded, be thrown in the bin.

The internet is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

What if George Bush asked various prominent scientists and intellectuals "What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?"

Edge posed the question, and published the answers.

Marvin Minsky:

Mr. President:

My idea is that the whole "Homeland Defense" thing is too cost-ineffective to be plausible. The lifetime cost of, for example, preventing each airplane-crash fatality will be the order of $100,000,000—and we could save a thousand times as many lives at the same cost by various simple public-health measures.

Conclusion: what we really need is a "Homeland Arithmetic" reorganization.

Yours truly,

Marvin Minsky
Mathematician and computer scientist

Dear Mr. President,

I think there may have been a terrible mistake. I'm not a scientist.

Worse than that, I'm an actor. So, I don't know how I got recommended to you as a candidate for science advisor. Possibly, someone felt that if we could let an actor be president without major damage beyond a trillion or two, why not science advisor? But, I'm also a writer who has a lifelong interest in science, and I host the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers, and I have played Richard Feynman on the stage, so I can see where the confusion might have arisen.

[...]

The commencement speaker at Caltech this past year said,

"We live in a time when massive means of destruction are right here in our hands. We're probably the first species capable of doing this much damage to our planet. We can make the birds stop singing; we can still the fish and make the insects fall from the trees like black rain. And ironically we've been brought here by reason, by rationality. We cannot afford to live in a culture that doesn't use the power in its hands with the kind of rationality that produced it in the first place."

Actually, I was the commencement speaker who said that, but I thought you'd pay more attention if I put the Caltech part first.

The problem is that, although we're all entitled to our beliefs, our culture increasingly holds that science is just another belief. Maybe this is because it's easier to believe something—anything—than not to know.

We don't like uncertainty—so we gravitate back to the last comfortable solution we had, and in this way we elevate belief to the status of fact.

The Chris Foss Picture Gallery takes me right back to my teens, when I was discovering new worlds by the week. In the 70s and early 80s it seemed as if about 50% of the science fiction books I bought featured the huge, colourful machines visualised by Chris Foss on their cover. Not that I was complaining: Foss got to me at an impressionable age and pretty well defined my notion of what a properly futuristic spaceship should look like.

I'd really like to see Chris Foss do a set of covers for Iain M Banks' Culture novels. There's nothing wrong with the covers on the UK editions, but in my book (so to speak) Foss was born to depict a GSV.

Following up my post about Internet Explorer breaking the rules when fetching a web page, further investigation suggests that the issue might be more a case of Microsoft making some not entirely accurate assumptions about what facilities the web server IE is connecting to will offer, rather than a deliberate attempt to break non-Microsoft web servers.

Roy Jenkins, consummate liberal politician and insightful political biographer, died this morning.

It's easy to say that Jenkins is just one of yesterday's men, another prime minister who never was. He may never have made it to Number 10, but in his long career he had an enormous impact on everyday life in Britain. As Home Secretary he legalised homosexuality and abortion and made divorce easier. As Chancellor he resisted the temptation to play politics with the economy when the pressure was on.

Second only to Edward Heath as a consistent promoter of closer ties with Europe, Jenkins returned from a spell running the European Commission to form the SDP. The new party may not have "broken the mould of British politics" but it certainly gave the Labour and Conservative parties a hell of a fright, demonstrating that the British public would vote for a party of the centre-left even as the two biggest parties deserted the centre ground.

Space Shuttle Atlantis describes a fiery arc as it heads up to the International Space Station.

Damn, that's lovely.

It arrived a little late, but the Freaky Trigger Christmas Joke was worth the wait.

ITV are even worse than Channel 4 when it comes to their treatment of US shows. Last year they ran Now & Again, a charming mix of action and comedy set in the present day but with a distinctly science fictional premise from the pen of Moonlighting creator Glenn Gordon Caron, in a post-midnight time slot. Just to make sure the show wouldn't build any sort of audience, they changed the show's transmission day every few weeks and occasionally made the show disappear for three or four weeks at a time.

What with the schedule changes and what have you, I didn't get a chance to see all the episodes first time round. Which means I was pleased to see that according to DigiGuide Tyne-Tees, my local ITV franchise, are repeating Now & Again at around 1 a.m. on Fridays, commencing with the second episode.

Now & Again was cancelled after just the one season because, like so many worthwhile shows in the speculative fiction genre (see also Cupid), it failed to find a big enough audience. As you'll have gathered by now, I think Now & Again deserved better. The writers juggled a nice mix of comedy, drama and romance pretty well, only occasionally stumbling into gooey sentimentality. Co-stars Eric Close and Dennis Haysbert (who 24 addicts will remember from his very different role as Senator Palmer) made an appealing double act as unwilling government agent-cum-research subject and doctor turned spy boss respectively, and the supporting cast - especially Margaret Colin as Close's character's wife and Heather Matarazzo as his daughter - was very good indeed. The show's science fictional premise was really just a pretext for putting Close's character in a particularly awkward position and (occasionally) for helping him get out of one. The core of the show's appeal was in the relationships between the characters and the witty writing.

In short, what I'm trying to say is that Now & Again is well worth a look. I'm certainly going to try to catch every episode this time round, assuming that is that Tyne-Tees bother to keep broadcasting the show beyond DigiGuide's two week horizon.

BBC News reports on advertising trade journal Marketing's Ten Most Irritating Commercials of 2002.

I'd have put the Samuel L Jackson ads first, closely followed by Orange's 'Your Plan' ad, the Tampax ad and the Billy Connolly series. The Jackson ads were simply baffling, the Orange ad was juvenile, the Tampax ad somehow omitted the last shot of the boyfriend in the local casualty department choking to death, and the Connolly ads were just loud and witless.

I'd also nominate the car ad (I'm not sure which make - a Citroen perhaps?) which featured the car and the military jet flying inverted overhead with the pilot making eyes through the sunroof at the woman travelling in the car. It was at once really elaborate yet strangely unclear as to the message it was trying to get across. Were we supposed to think that the car driver had 'won' because he could drive on under the bridge while the pilot his wife/partner was smiling at had to pull up and fly over it? If so, it's not as if you need to buy a Citroen to pull that particular trick off. A bit of a weak message if you ask me...

Dork Tower on The Two Towers.

Following some gentle prodding from Simon, I've added another section to the sidebar. There's now a list of the 10 most recently-posted comments, with a link which will take you to the posting in question. (My thanks to the estimable Lynda at scriptygoddess for posting details of how to implement this feature with Movable Type. And to Ben and Mena Trott for making Movable Type such a wonderfully flexible piece of software in the first place, obviously.)

There are a couple of features I might want to add to the section - most obviously, as it stands now it only takes you to the posting that prompted the comment thread, rather than to the particular comment - but it's a start.

If anyone has any features they'd like me to add to Sore Eyes please let me know either in comments or by emailing me.

Kris raises a good question: should Gollum get an Oscar?

My knee-jerk reaction was to say "Yes" - or at any rate that actor Andy Serkis should certainly be eligible for an acting award in his own right. But then I had second thoughts. Here's how I put it in my comment on Kris' site:

My initial reaction was to say that of course he should, but on reflection I'm not so sure.

The problem is that the comparison with a performance like that of John Hurt as the Elephant Man isn't entirely valid.

In Hurt's case the makeup was applied and whatever emotions he managed to get across were due to a combination of his voice, his body language, his eyes and as much of his face as could be discerned, and the script. Andy Serkis did as much with his voice and body language, and was also aided by a terrific script. However, Serkis also had plenty of help from the CGI team who created the facial expressions on Gollum's face. Basically, I think any award should go to Serkis and the WETA SFX team, because you can't easily draw a line between Serkis' performance and that of the SFX team.

Since we're definitely going to see more of this sort of half-actor, half-CGI role in future, perhaps it's time that Academy introduced a category of Best Unseen Performance to cover everything from motion-capture CGI to voice-over work on purely animated stories, the award being shared between the SFX house and the actor.

Over at Peeve Farm, an explanation has been found for Internet Explorer's odd mix of tremendous speed on some sites combined with oddly sluggish performance elsewhere.

To sum up for non-techies: IE assumes it's talking to IIS (a Microsoft web server program) when you type in the address of a web site and sends out a non-standard request for the web page you've asked for which will either work more quickly (if sent to an IIS-based server) or make no sense at all to anyone else's web server software. If the server doesn't play ball, IE sends out a normal request for a web page and everything starts working again.

Why would they do this? Quoth Peeve Farm's Brian Tiemann:

[...] in the grand scheme of things, this probably makes sense to Microsoft's network engineers. After all, eventually all clients will be Windows platforms running IE, and all servers will be Windows platforms running IIS. And then we can break all kinds of rules! Rules are only there to hold us back and force us to play nice with other vendors. Well, once the other vendors are all gone, who cares about some stupid RFC?

Just in time for Channel 4's China Season, Ian Buruma reminds us of the forgotten democrats.

Tinka passes on a friend's musings about how differently The Lord of the Rings might have turned out:

A good male friend of mine pondered a bit about the film's cast during our New Year's Eve dinner: "Imagine Winona Ryder playing Arwen.. at the Council of Elrond they'd have a real problem on their hands: "Where did the ring go?.. Aaarwen!! I thought I'd told you..".."

The Third Annual Weblog Awards (a.k.a. the Bloggies) are now open for nominations.

I don't suppose I'll vote in more than about a third of the categories, but I'll certainly not be short of sites to nominate in most of those categories. It's a shame there's not a UK-specific category, so we could compare the result with that of the Guardian's highly controversial Best British Blog competition.

If somebody wrote a science fiction story featuring an asteroid with an orbit as strange as that of asteroid 2002 AA29 I wouldn't believe it for a minute. I haven't come across an orbit that bizarre since Larry Niven introduced me to the concept of the Klemperer Rosette.

If you're having problems visualising asteroid AA29's horseshoe-shaped orbit - I know I did! - this page contains some helpful diagrams.

The other week I wondered whether putting Samuel Pepys' diary online in weblog format was barmy. Now that I've seen how many people are adding helpful annotations (see, for example, the annotations for 1 January 1660) I understand why I was wrong to doubt that this is indeed - as Kris pointed out at the time - a work of genius.

My one caveat would be that the project could be spoiled by lengthy, irrelevant annotations like the one about locomotive numbering systems posted earlier this afternoon by someone called "trainspotter". I understand the desire to keep the project as open as possible, but I hope that Phil Gyford will edit out annotations which serve no useful purpose whatsoever rather than let the project be devalued.

Incidentally, there's a good article by Phil Gyford about the project on BBC News Online today.

Lawrence Lessig provides a timely reminder that the Disney Corporation wasn't always so picky about people borrowing other people's intellectual property.

Did you know that today is the 20th Anniversary of the Internet?

For non-techies, what all this means is that twenty years ago today the computers which made up ARPANET (the forerunner of the internet as we know it) switched over to using a language called TCP/IP to send information to one another. TCP/IP is still what is used to send you email messages and web pages even as I type this.

The interesting question is this: if a similar switch to a new technology had to be made today, how on earth could anyone manage it? Back in 1983 ARPANET was a much smaller network, and all users were effectively bound to follow the instructions of whichever college, government institution or employer provided their ARPANET access. Nowadays, with thousands (probably tens of thousands) of Internet Service Providers and a few hundred million internet users around the world, many with no idea how to update or replace the TCP/IP software that came with their PC or their ISP's setup disk, it would be almost impossible to have someone name a date and manage an orderly transition to a new protocol. Not to mention the likelihood that lawsuits would fly, as organisations that found the changeover too challenging decided it was better to try to shoot the messenger than get on with updating their systems.

If such a transition happens again it'll be a gradual process, with ISPs implementing the changes at their end and acting as gateways between the old and new protocols until such time as most of their users replace or upgrade their PCs. Or until users are forced to upgrade in order to gain access to whatever new or improved services the new internetworking protocol provides.