- If like me you stand amazed at the precision of the English language (which is distinct from the precision of the people who use it, which is all over the map) do visit Obsolete Word of the Day. Many of the citations are old slang and many words do double duty: A slype is slang for a man who talks much about seducing women but lacks the courage to do so. Its formal use is architectural: the connection (often a covered but not enclosed passage) between the chapterhouse and the rest of a church complex. Much more there; you can sink hours on this one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Here’s a gatherum of peculiar or downright gross sodas from around the world. Yogurt-flavored Pepsi, anyone? Or (urrrp) Placenta? Alas, Inca Kola is not mentioned, though it should be. (Thanks to Bob Calverley, via George Ewing.)
- The title on this article is wrong (or perhaps some people understand the term “hyperdrive” differently than I do) but it describes a new twist on an interesting and mostly forgotten 1924 speculation of mathematician David Hilbert: that a stream of particles moving at greater than half the speed of light could accelerate a nearby stationary object without subjecting that object to inertial forces. That wouldn’t be a true hyperdrive, but a genuine inertialess drive would almost seem like one if we limit the frame of reference to the starship. (I.e., we could go from here to sunlike star Zeta Tucanae in a week or so from our perspective, though 28 years from the universe’s perspective.) This is mighty exotic physics, and if there’s anything to it, we may learn more once Felber’s hypothesis is tested using the LHC, or perhaps the Tevatron.
- I saw a trailer on what may be an interesting new film comedy: The Boat That Rocked , which had been originally (and I think more appropriately) titled Pirate Radio. It’s about the 1960’s offshore radio pirates operating just outside the UK’s territorial waters, something that’s always fascinated me. I’ve been taking notes on a novel I call (or called, sigh) Pirate Radio, exploring the notion of untraceable Internet broadcasting through large-scale powerline networking, and that research brought the old UK high seas radio pirates to mind. Probably won’t write the novel, but it’s been a good excuse to read up on things I haven’t looked at since I read them in Popular Electronics in the 1960s.
- Don’t miss the Steampunk Genre Fiction Generator. Stumbling through it with no malice (or anything else) aforethought, I came up with: “In a leather-clad Aztec empire, a young farm boy with dreams stumbles across a talking fish, which spurs him into conflict with murderous robots with the help of a cherubic girl with pigtails and spunk and her discomfort in formal wear, culminating in convoluted nonsense that squanders the reader’s goodwill.” Somebody else write it and I’ll pay a quarter for that!
- The ice melt across Antarctica during this past Antarctic summer (2008-2009) was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite era. I’d worry a little less about rising oceans swallowing New York City, as much as I sometimes find myself wishing for them to do so.
- I used to wonder how corn mazes are made (and still do, for older mazes) but if you’re doing one today, you’re basically going to need a lawnmower and a GPS receiver, and a way to overlay a drawing onto a GPS-enabled map display. Oh, and a large field of corn that you’re willing to seriously mess with.
Odd Lots
Computers Are Basically Free
I keep the tired old PCs at our church running, and I’ve decided that the church office needs something new. Or at any rate, something newer, and more compact. The church office is smaller than most bedrooms I’ve had, and yet includes two desks at which people work, plus file cabinets and many other things. Small is better.
So I’ve been sniffing around for a month or so. As I’ve mentioned here many times, I like the tiny Dell SX270, but it doesn’t support video modes suitable for the widescreen displays that have basically driven 4:3s off the market. Video is done by the mobo chipset, and there is no expansion slot into which a better graphics adapter could be plugged. I bought a newer Dell 2.8 GHz SX280 last week at auction on eBay, and I got a system minus monitor for $90. Mouse, keyboard, power supply (which is a wall brick) and reinstall disk, all for $90. Boy.
And that’s a much nicer machine than the older SX270s. I checked recently completed auctions this morning, and see that a similar SX270 combo (everything but a display) went for the staggering sum of $69.50 last week, after furious last-minute bidding. (The photo above is of that system.) The PC sold at that price is exactly what I have at our condo outside Chicago: A 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive. I’ve been meaning to drop another RAM stick into it but so far, I haven’t seen the system gag on anything I’ve been doing, suggesting that for the time being it has all the RAM it needs.
The Dell ultra-small form factor (USFF) systems like the SX270 and SX280 are pointedly not gamer machines, but most people aren’t gamers. The USFFs do static graphics superbly (Photoshop, InDesign) and play conventional videos without stuttering. I haven’t tested HD video, but DVD video and the videos I take with my Canon camera of the dogs running around play just fine. Spare parts are abundant and cheap on eBay, and anybody who’s ever built a system won’t have trouble swapping things out. The SX280 has better graphics than the SX270 (the chipset for integrated graphics is the Intel 915G Express) and uses the SATA interface for its 2.5″ internal drive. Both have gigabit Ethernet and 6 USB 2.0 ports. The adjustable-speed fans are normally silent, rising to whisper-level only when the machine is doing something intense. The SX270 (and possibly the SX280; don’t know yet) doesn’t require XP activation when you change a hard drive; they’re BIOS-locked to a specific Dell OEM reinstallation disk–which you can get for $20 on eBay, and generally comes with the used machines.
And you can get them now for under $100.
The tech world these days is about specialty devices like smartphones and ebook readers; generic Intel computers are a glut on the market, and basically free. As Joli Ballew and I learned while researching Degunking Windows five years ago, many people send systems to the recycler for being “slow” when the real problem is Windows registry clog and spyware. Do a fresh Windows install (or just be careful not to crap up the system to begin with) and those old machines still glow in the dark. The best way to keep older computers out of our landfills is to keep using them. Saying “that box won’t run Vista” is a little like saying “that petri dish won’t grow a staph infection.” Unless you need a staph sample for research, that doesn’t strike me as much of a problem.
Get The Cunning Blood for 10% Off
In honor of the debut of the TV series FlashForward (based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer) ISFiC Press is having a sale until November 10:
- Buy Sawyer’s collection Relativity and any one other ISFiC Press book direct from the publisher, and deduct 10% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
- Buy Relativity and either two or three other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 25% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
- Buy Relativity and four or more other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 40% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping).
ISFiC Press is, of course, the publisher of my novel The Cunning Blood , and here’s your chance to pick it up at a discount.
About FlashForward I can’t tell you much, since I don’t watch TV, but the concept is intriguing: Everyone on Earth blacks out for 137 seconds, and experiences a kind of timeslip, each seeing visions of his or her own future. The blackout itself causes mayhem on a grand scale (though I wonder if it would be as grand as the premise suggests) and government agents begin searching for Suspect Zero, who was caught on tape awake during the blackout and might, therefore, have had something to do with it.
But about The Cunning Blood I can tell you a lot: It’s a hard SF future action/adventure, featuring a prison planet where electrical devices don’t work, due to the presence of a pervasive bacterium-sized nanomachine that homes in on the magnetic fields around electrical conductors and literally chews the conductors until the circuit fails. Hell’s inmates do all right in spite of not having electricity, as there are a lot of different ways to build a technological civilization, and even a few ways to get around those pesky nanobugs. (Think wires made of liquid mercury flowing through hoses.) But the bugs on Hell are kid stuff compared to what’s lurking in the bloodstreams of selected individuals on Earth: highly intelligent distributed nanocomputers, supposedly under the complete control of the secret societies of engineers that created them–except for The Sangruse Device, which has a slightly different concept of “control.”
I’m guessing that my long-time readers have already heard most of this, but if you’re new here, the novel has reviewed well and might be worth a look. Here’s a sample chapter. And another sample chapter, which I just carved out of the novel to post for the first time. (It will make more sense if you read the older sample first.) If you like action, ideas, and cultures completely unlike our own, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Rant: Chicago’s Escape from Hell
I didn’t have time to say much the other day about my hometown’s narrow escape from Olympian Hell, and a few days’ wait has allowed me to spot some reasonable analysis by other people, especially Andrew Zimbalist, who I’m sure is often called a Sports Benefits Denier. I was a little surprised that our president would fly over there to lobby for his hometown–it seems a bad use of his time when health insurance reform is sinking out of sight–but that’s the sort of thing that presidents do, and I for one won’t hold it against him.
The nature of the ongoing spend-tax-money-on-sports argument is very nicely summarized over on Slate, in this piece by Brad Flora. It’s the same thing we hear again and again when billionaire sports team owners extort publicly financed stadiums from cities by threatening to move the team to a more gullible venue. The strategy virtually always works, though one wonders how or why.
Such deals never make financial sense for the cities and their taxpayers. It’s a strange ballet of spreadsheets vs. hypnotism: The policy wonks (I’m not sure they’re nerds as I define the term) come up with studies and hard numbers to debunk the Civic Pride and Benefits myths, while the jocks simply repeat statements of tribal emotion over and over until the electorate’s eyes glaze over and caves. It’s the same deal with the Olympics, and perhaps worse. Cities are expected to cough up billions of dollars to host an event lasting a few scant weeks, including the construction of substantial stadiums and athlete housing and lord knows what else, and then figure out how to make the facilities useful after the Games are over and everybody disperses to the four winds.
How can this ever make sense? It took Montreal thirty years to pay off the billions it cost to have the Games there in 1976. Few Olympic facilities get much use after the Games. Past Olympic facilities in some cities are crumbling wrecks behind barbed wire fences or already torn down in whole or in part and dumped in landfills. (That was actually Chicago’s plan from the outset.) The vast sums of money required are virtually always steered into politically friendly hands, and sheesh, guys, this is Chicago we’re talking about! (The sport they play best over there is racketball.) The crush of outsiders makes residents flee to the countryside, and in places where an ongoing tourist economy already exists, tourism falls to nothing before the Games and often remains depressed for years afterwards.
All for a mutated megatourney that has gone 180 from its original purpose: to transcend nationalism and glorify the efforts of individual athletes. Instead, we now have a global festival of flag-flavored tribalistic poo-flinging that takes huge advantage of the dazzling young athletes, who work basically for free while insiders and organizers pocket whatever money comes in.
I know, I know, I always come out against sports, heh. Guilty, and unrepentant. Still, not a single person I know in Chicago (and I know lots) came out for the Games, and if anybody was defending them before, I suspect they’re being very quiet now.
My view is pretty simple: The Olympics have long been too big an event to bounce around the world as though they were a spelling bee. They need to go back to Greece and stay there forever. What we used to spend on building whole cities every four years to host the Games, we should now parcel out as prize money to the athletes, so that they can at least get a college education against the (strong) possibility that there isn’t much money in professional biathalon once the last echoes of Leo Arnaud’s “Bugler’s Dream” fade to silence.
Odd Lots
- Here is the entire sky projected on a plane, and zoomable. (LINK REMOVED–SEE COMMENTS.) That doesn’t do it anything like justice. Cruise the image a little and gasp. (Give the site time to refresh; it’s newly slashdotted.) Read the rest of the page too–it’s fascinating, and full of great photos. Chile looks a great deal like Mars in some places.
- There is apparently a correlation between sleep loss and amyloid tangles in the brain, which are a key element in Alzheimer’s Disease. Causation is still a little unclear, but I find it significant that in our era of Anything But Sleep, the incidence of various dementias is exploding. Be in bed by 10:00PM and keep your brain. Now there’s a deal I can live with.
- Wired has an interesting retrospective on tablet computing, which I found worthwhile mostly for the mention of a steampunk-era electromechanical handwriting encode-and-transfer device, which ferdam sounds like what Sherlock Holmes would use to IM Watson.
- Here’s another worthwhile perspective on the Google Books Settlement.
- A chap who calls himself the Jolly Pirate wrote to tell me that the Pirate Party is alive and well in the US (I was under the impression that it was a European thing) and some interesting links may be found on its site, many of which have nothing to do with piracy. Now, would an American instance of the Pirate Party lean left or right? (Or would it be port and starboard?) I’ll be damned if I can decide…
- It’s been a bad season for big-time wine critics, who can’t seem to find a business model and keep getting busted in conflict-of-interest scandals. The Internet allows the crowdsourcing of critique of all sorts of things–why should wine be any different?
- Pertinent to the above: What we need is the wine implementation of the “People who liked this also liked…” mechanism I see (and use) in the book world. I very much like Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel, though the 2007 vintage now in stores is a pale shadow of 2005. What would be a wine similar to that? (If you know of such a system for wine, please share.)
- There are candy Legos.
- The charger for my Kodak pocket camera is a thin little slab with two 110V power plug pins that swivel out to plug into the wall, and then swivel back into hiding when they’re not needed. Why can’t they build that mechanism right into the back of an ebook reader? (I was without my Sony Reader for a couple of months after I lost the charger.)
- After an unexplained absence of several weeks, Fort Carson’s cannon is back. (See my entry for September 15, 2009.) Maybe the cannon was broke and they had to send it back to the factory for repairs…
Holy Faces
I’ve been doing a 50th anniversary commemoration book for our Episcopal parish, and as part of the project I’ve been photographing the Stations of the Cross on the church walls. I’m strictly a hobby photographer, and admit a little sheepishly that I haven’t gone through my camera’s manual yet, page by page. So I found it a little startling when I aimed my new Canon G10 at the first station, and the camera identified Jesus’ face. The Canon G10 identifies faces for a couple of reasons, from eliminating redeye to starting the timer when an additional face (presumably the photographer’s) enters the field of view. It puts brackets around them when it identifies them.
The station depictions at our church are not photorealistic. They are done in the distinctive Mexican primitive style, by the well-known Mexican-American artist Mario Larrinaga, who (among many other things) was a matte artist for the original 1933 film King Kong. The stations are painted icons, deliberately lacking any suggestion of a third dimension (so that they cannot be mistaken for the biblically prohibited “graven images”) and as such they resemble cartoons more than portraits.
It got me thinking about how cameras identify faces. As I worked my way around the church, a pattern began to emerge. For the image above (Station #6, depicting Jesus, Mary, and Veronica) the camera tagged Jesus’ face twice–once in person and once on Veronica’s veil–but did not consistently identify the face of the Blessed Mother. Veronica did better, but not nearly as well as Jesus. The brackets flickered and did not stay on consistently.
When I got home, I tried a few other things. I brought up Google Images and aimed the camera at screen images of the Mona Lisa, various Rembrandt portraits, and a few other things. The camera got most of them. I then pulled out a couple of Lynda Barry’s books, spread them open with bookweights, and tried to get the G10 to recognize Marlys and Maybonne. No deal, but some of their friends were picked up.
These seem to be the criteria:
- Faces need eyeballs. Marlys always has her Far Side glasses on. No eyeballs.
- Big eyes are better than small eyes, all else being equal. This seems to be Mary’s problem in the station image above.
- Faces need to be mostly human-shaped. Funny animals don’t cut it. But then again, neither did any of the characters in PVP. Tycho and Gabe were similarly snubbed. (It was odd to think of Marlys’ brother Freddie as being more “realistic” than Gabe.)
- Faces need to be looking more or less straight at the camera.
This last criterion seemed to be the most significant. Profiles were never recognized, and three-quarter views only about half the time. The closer a face was to dead-on, the better the camera recognized it.
So. Got redeye problems? What Would Jesus Do? Get a G10. And look straight at the camera.
SX270 Windows XP Widescreen Driver Fail
I’ve been using a Samsung 2033sw 20″ widescreen monitor on a Dell Optiplex SX270 machine since February, running Ubuntu 8.10 and later 9.04. I bought another SX270 machine for our church with the intention of putting a Samsung 2033sw on it, and discovered this afternoon that Ubuntu can do something Windows can’t: coax the SX270’s Intel Extreme Graphics 2 subsystem into 1600 X 900 mode.
A 1600 X 900 mode does not appear to exist under Windows, even with the latest version of the Intel 865G graphics drivers. Windows identifies the Samsung monitor and knows that its native mode is 1600 X 900, but it can’t match the monitor. And so Windows uses a different mode and looks smeary, as LCDs do if you don’t hand them pixels at their native resolution.
At this point I’m stuck, and will have to fall back to an older 17″ 4:3 monitor. These are readily available and fairly cheap on eBay, but I already have a brand-new Samsung 2033sw over at the church, and now have nothing to hook it to.
I guess it’s always been true that Linux works better on older PCs than the current version of Windows does, but I’ve never had my nose rubbed in this fact more thoroughly than I did today. I’m open to suggestions, but anything that involves a lot of work and time will be politely declined. For another $50 I can get a used Dell 17″ flat panel to hang on the SX270, and will consider the lesson well-learned.
Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition
A few minutes ago, UPS left my author’s carton of Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition on the front porch. So after ten months of work (and another month of anxious waiting around), it’s really and truly real.
100% Linux. Certified DOS-free. It turned out pretty well, all things considered. And having (finally) held it in my own hands, I think I won’t ask anything more from today.
Odd Lots
- Maybe I thought of it first. I don’t care. This guy did a great job. What He Said.
- I was wrong about the Alice programming environment: There is in fact a version for Linux, though the developers admit it’s a little buggy and largely “proof-of-concept.” (Thanks to xuwande on LiveJournal for the tip.) To me, Alice looks a lot like the primordial Alto-based Smalltalk environment described in the seminal 1977 Xerox publication, Personal Dynamic Media, and I’ll install and explore the product (probably under Windows) as time allows.
- And even though this is mostly a research project (with no promises or even strong hints that it will ever become a product) the Microsoft Courier looks mighty good to me from an ebook reader standpoint. The interface is a little busy for my tastes, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe it would be a waste of the device to use it for nothing but reading ebooks, but I consider it my prerogative to waste whatever part of a device I don’t consider useful.
- Maybe it’s not just me. As much as I like the Kodak EasyShare pocket cameras (Carol and I each have one) the EasyShare software is hideous and has given me nothing but trouble. This seems to be a trend. Can you imagine a new Mac app from a major vendor that still needs PowerPC emulation? Egad.
- I guess it’s better for a church to be full of books than empty of prople, and these guys did not do a bad job.
- Suddenly we have not one but two large sunspots visible at once, a situation not seen for over a year. Alas, I spun the dials earlier this morning, and 15 meters isn’t any livelier than it usually is here, which is to say, dead.
- The Google Books Settlement may well be dead on legal grounds, something that doesn’t surprise me at all. What Google needs to do now is just publish an open invitation: “Anybody who holds rights to a printed work and wants the work to be posted on Google Books under the terms below, fill out this form. We’ll handle the scanning.” I’d be first in line in what I’m pretty sure would be a stampede that would sooner or later bring in all the the stubbornest skeptics. The key: I’m willing to admit that my out-of-print works aren’t worth much. 1% of a loaf is still better than no loaf at all.
- ADDED 9/24/2009: Here’s a guy saying something that isn’t often said: Google Books is a fantastic research tool, and far from being evil, the Google Books settlement was just the first (now aborted) effort at something that simply has to be done.
Tell Me What “Junk Food” Is
Much opprobrium has been heaped on junk food in recent years. I’m willing to listen–but if we’re going to eliminate it from our diets, we first have to know what it is.
So…give me a definition.
The definition must be precise; that is, terms like “empty calories” or “having no nutritional value” are subjective judgments and thus not useful. Specify ingredients, and proportions (as percentages) if necessary. Furthermore, the definition must be about the food itself. Where it’s prepared or served is a separate issue and cannot be part of the definition. If an ingredient is junk, it’s junk whether it’s served at Mickey D’s or at Olive Garden or at the $75-a-plate fancy dinner joint of your choice. (Or at home.)
Methods of preparation may be cited, but again, such citations have to apply across the board, no matter who does it or where. Expensive junk is still junk.
Finally, “the term is meaningless” is a legitimate answer. However, if that’s the case, let’s make it meaningful, by creating a clear definition.
Let’s hear from you.
