Relevant History

Sarah Silverman... um, duet with Matt Damon

I'm not a huge Sarah Silverman fan, but I love this.

Technorati Tags: humor

What a way to go

This was crazy dumb:

A man nearly died from alcohol poisoning after quaffing a liter (two pints) of vodka at an airport security check instead of handing it over to comply with new carry-on rules, police said Wednesday.

Technorati Tags: airport, travel

Best Onion headline ever?

"Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Honors Tuskegee Air Guitarists." In this week's podcast.

Yeek!

This is why I almost never go to New York.

The big city is scary....

Shaving cream after all

I hate when that happens.

Technorati Tags: humor

Great moments in branding

Huh?

via flickr, taken by christine.corbett

[via Robot Chant]

The street finds its own use for things

Find the lesson about technology and innovation in this New York Times article:

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.

In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species....

The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course....

[It is]... the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

Technorati Tags: innovation, mobility

Summer of Love

Paris Hilton is engaged to Greek shipping heir Paris Latsis, AND Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are tying the knot.

Truly, it's the Summer of Love, all over again. Though what will the tabloids call Paris and Paris, since there's no chance of a cute "Bennifer" like mashup of their names?

And does this engagement mean that Paris is our generation's Jackie O?

Clearly I need more coffee. That damned Markoff book is keeping me up. Curse you, interesting reading!

[To the tune of Natalie Merchant, "Wonder," from the album "Tigerlily".]

So much for going to Canada

A surprisingly funny article from Harper's about how difficult it is to give up American citizenship and emigrate. Who knew the State Department could just say, "No, you're still a citizen"?

Spam gets weirder and weirder

Previously, I was getting spam that claimed I was a money-laundering child pornographer. Now, apparently I'm-- well, I'm not sure what:

Travel and fly on planes under any name!

Get job at preschool if convicted molester!

(This is not spam. You signed up as Arab decent person looking for new identity information for new mission.)

This from a company that says they "specialize in spam and child porn hosting." It's so weird.

Science marches on

In a week notable for its scientific announcements-- Nobel prizes handed out, the People's Republic of China announcing plans to put a man on the moon by 2010, and the first election of a cyborg to higher office-- you'd expect The Onion to come through with news of Celine Dion Secluded In Lab Developing New Perfume

Sequestered in her private laboratory near Goodsprings, Celine Dion has demanded that no one disturb her until the next scent in her perfume line is complete, her manager and husband Ren Angelil announced Monday.

Child care is tough in California

The L. A. Times (available to those who've registered) reports that:

Marine biologists have discovered an unusual underwater nursery nearly a mile under the ocean on the crest of the Gorda Escarpment off Northern California.

Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have found two different types of deep-sea creatures fish and octopuses brooding their eggs like chickens in a henhouse.

One of these things is not like the other

Go to the Tripod tools page. Scroll down. Look at the bottom left-hand side of the page, at the list of "Offsite Resources." Notice anything weird?

I know I go on about how the Internet and the physical world are starting to merge, but this is absurd....

[thanks to Heather, who has only now stopped laughing]

New meaning to the term "hostile takeover"

NPR's Marketplace had a piece today about the growing cost of the reconstruction of Iraq, and had this interesting tidbit: apparently some in the government are proposing accelerating the schedule to privatize state-owned enterprises-- i.e., sell off Iraqi government assets-- to cover those costs. (Among the architects of the occupation, privatization is self-evidently a good thing: SecDef Rumsfeld talked about it in May, and one advisor to the interim government said in June, "Privatization is the right direction for 21st century Iraq.") War as the pursuit of economics by other means....

Fiction? Reality?

One of those pieces from The Onion that skirts the line between fiction and reality:

GENEVA, SWITZERLANDAn international peace-crimes tribunal commenced legal proceedings against former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for alleged crimes against inhumanity Monday.

"Jimmy Carter's political career includes a laundry list of anti-war-making offenses," said chief prosecutor Charles B. Simmons. "Carter's record of benevolence, diplomacy, and respect for human life is unrivaled in recent geopolitical history. For millions, the very sight of his face evokes memories of his administration's reign of tolerance."...

"Carter is one of the worst enemies the forces of destruction have known since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his non-violent rampages of the '50s and '60s," Simmons said. "Even today, in his capacity as an ex-president, [Carter] continues his pursuit of non-aggression. He must be stopped now, before another terrible war is avoided and more lives are saved."

Why doesn't THIS get on OLN?

Anyone who's been following the Tour de France will like this article that looks behind the scenes at the commercial displays (the "junk train") that proceed before the race, the growth of Tour-related corporate junkets (sort of like mobile skyboxes), and the like.

Maybe there should be a cable channel devoted to nothing but the advertising and entertainment stuff SURROUNDING major sports events: the junk trains, the halftime shows, the pre-game "sink the ball from the other end zone and win a million dollars" contests, the races between different kinds of sausages (which got bloody a couple weeks ago in Milwaukee).

May the Force, and punitive damages, be with you

The parents of Star Wars Kid are going to court. Wired says:

His parents are claiming damages of $160,000 from the families of the four classmates who digitized and published the video... [and that] their son was so humiliated, he is undergoing psychiatric care and may be marked for life by the experience.

According to the Globe and Mail,

In a statement of claim filed last week in their home town of Trois-Rivires, the Razas say that Ghyslain was so widely mocked at his private high school that he dropped out.

He had to finish the session at Pavillon Arc-en-ciel, a ward specializing in child psychiatry at the Trois-Rivi res Regional Hospital Centre.

Ghyslain "will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time," the statement of claim says.

Since the video was distributed via Kazaa, maybe the RIAA can use the case in their argument that file sharing is evil....

Go Scott!

A friend of mine has gotten involved in the California governor's recall debate. I'm very proud.

Dave Barry on princesses

For those of you who don't have children-- specifically, the form of children known as "girls"-- Dave Barry's latest column offers a frighteningly accurate look inside the world of the 3 year-old, which he's been thrown into because his wife is covering the Tour de France:

Here we drink juice in little boxes decorated with pictures of licensed characters. We drink juice a lot! It is 287 percent sugar. So we have lots of energy! We wake up at 5:45 a.m. no matter what time Daddy got to sleep. Then we watch kids' TV shows starring licensed characters. They learn good lessons: Share! Be nice! Work together! Drink juice!

Daddy wishes there were an early morning kids' TV show called: Let's Go Back To Bed. The licensed characters would yawn a lot and say: ''I'm tired! Let's all lie down and be very quiet until at least 7:45 a.m.!'' Wouldn't that be great? Daddy would send money to that show.

Not much today

I'm in a meeting with clients most of the day, so won't be doing much in the blogosophere. Turn on your RSS feed to check back later!

Breaking up is hard to do

Just another of the growing number of things you shouldn't do by e-mail: breaking up with your girlfriend. In addition to it being cowardly, you can accidentally send the message to a very large number of people, and cause some humiliation to your boss-- in this case, a U. S. senator.

Bad intern! Bad, bad, bad!

But he goes to Amherst, so what can you expect....

And shouldn't a breakup letter be proofread first?

[via Jeff Macintyre]

You got here how?

In the course of looking for an "American Gladiator" site (see the next, or depending on how you think about it, last, post), I ran across this search request, which is part of Disturbing Search Requests.

For those of you who don't have blogs, one of the things you can do with some systems is see what search terms people have used to find your blog. (Don't ask me how it works, I have no idea.) Someone was smart enough to create a site for people to share the, well, disturbing search requests-- disturbing not just because they can be really weird, or just strange, or completely confusing-- but because they led to someone's blog.

I don't have anything so bizarre in my log files. Why the search "largest yacht in the world" points to this site is beyond me; ditto for "asphalt finisher illustration," and "getting into mit." As for "computer photo early mouse -embryo," I've got to wonder what they were really looking for. But in the case of "diabetic machine in akihabara tokyo," I really hope they found it.

Robotica

We just got digital cable installed, mainly so we could watch the Tour de France and BBC America. But I've just stumbled on Robotica, which is like a cross between Comdex and the 1990s show "American Gladiators." Too strange.

Update: This article traces the rise of the genre.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About

My sister-in-law pointed out Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, as if I don't already have enough to read. But do check it out. It's very long, but screamingly funny:

Nothing keeps a relationship on its toes so much as lively debate. Fortunate, then, that my girlfriend and I agree on absolutely nothing. At all.

Combine utter, polar disagreement on everything, ever, with the fact that I am a text-book Only Child, and she is a violent psychopath, and we're warming up. Then factor in my being English while she is German, which not only makes each one of us personally and absolutely responsible for the history, and the social and cultural mores of our respective countries, but also opens up a whole field of sub-arguments grounded in grammatical and semantic disputes and, well, just try saying anything and walking away.

Examples? Okey-dokey. We have argued about:...

• I eat two-fingered Kit-Kats like I'd eat any other chocolate bars of that size, i.e., without feeling the need to snap them into two individual fingers first. Margret accused me of doing this, 'deliberately to annoy her'....

• Shortly after every single time Margret touches my computer, for any reason whatsoever, I have to spend twenty minutes trying to fix crashes, locked systems, data loses, jammed drives, bizarre re-configurations and things stuck in the keyboard. There then follows a free and frank exchange of views with, in my corner, 'It's your fault,' and, in hers, 'It's a curious statistical anomaly.'

• Margret enters the room. The television is showing Baywatch. Margret says, 'Uh-huh, you're watching Baywatch again.' I say, 'I'm not watching, it's just on.' Repeat. For the duration of the programme.
  

Despite all this, somehow I come away feeling more sympathetic toward Margaret than to the author....

[thanks to Nancy]

Somewhat offline

I'm heads-down on some projects at the Institute, so will probably not be posting very much for the rest of the week. However, I'll be back to working on the book review this weekend, so expect more rambling then.

Return of the Conditteri*

This is truly amazing:

A consortium of mercenary groups has made the UN a deceptively simple proposal: give us $200 million, and we'll help bring an end to the war in the Congo.

I suppose the bright side is, they're offering to end the war in the Congo, not start a second one.

*Okay, quick history lesson: the conditteri were Italian mercenaries in the 15th and 16th centuries, responsible for a "Revolution in Military Affairs" in the early modern period. For more, read William McNeill's Pursuit of Power.

Accept no substitute e-mail scams

I get a lot of those Nigerian scam e-mails, which makes it so hard to tell when you're really being written to by the widow of an ex-dictator for help smuggling money out of various safe deposit boxes in European cities.

This morning I got one from "Mariam Abacha, wife of the late Nigerian head of state, General Sani Abacha," asking my help in retrieving $50 million, which she assures me "is not an ill-gotten wealth rather; it was generated from my organization - family support program."

Given how many generals-turned-presidents-for-life considered the national economy their own personal "family support program," this is less than completely reassuring. Still, it concludes:

At this Jucture I want to forwarn you of the many scams that go on in my name and names of other dignitries in the country as I have even recieved emails bearing my name.

When spam starts hurting the illegal activities of REAL criminals, you know things have gotten out of hand!

Invisible infrastructures

Sewers and plumbing have to count as the paradigmatic examples of technologies that you never pay any attention to, unless they're broken. Well, we get to pay some serious attention to ours now. I blogged an earlier appearance by a plumber who had to make a late-night house call, and promised a picture. Here it is.

Going up on the roof to get underground. Don't ask

Today, we got a fuller diagnosis of the probem. It turns out that during the postwar suburban housing construction boom, many builders eschewed old-fashioned iron pipes connecting their houses to sewer mains in favor of pipes made from, basically, tar paper. Needless to say, these don't last forever.

So, we now get to deal with the whole drama-- logistical and financial-- of getting a new sewer line installed. Since the last major project we did with the house-- laundry room-- turned out to be about as complex as the Great Wall of China, I can't wait for this.... Still, I expect it to take less time that it would to get my cell phone repaired!

The new glasses (dum de DUM)

By popular demand, here are what my new glasses look like:

Not exactly the kind of thing Elton John wore in the 1970s, but then again, I don't have the mohair suit and electric boots to go with giant rhinstone-studded glasses.

Great time-saver

Busybusybusy provides single-line summaries of editorials in the New York Times and elsewhere, for those days when you're too busy to read Krugman, Goldberg, et al for yourself.

[via unfogged]

Since I'm pretty busy these next couple days, I'm likely to rely to it myself. But as I'm in extremely high dudgeon about my latest collision with my cell phone company, I'll at least be writing about THAT, and how it represents a danger to the evolution of ubiquitous computing.

Must... connect... everything... to... Rheingold and Clark.

The power of the social sciences!

This piece from the Globe and Mail reminds me of those dense social histories, complete with regression analyses of birth records and estate inventories, that proved that people in early modern Europe tended to marry people in their same social class, or that incomes rose in the 19th century:

Dan Hess, vice-president of Reston, Va.-based comScore Networks Inc., says Web traffic slows down as summer approaches because people turn to more active and outdoor pursuits.

He also sees a decline in Web traffic during holidays, such as long weekends, or when Internet surfers go on vacation because they're away from the workplace where so much on-line activity occurs, he said.

You mean, when people are away from their computers, they tend to use their computers less... but when they are at their computers, they use their computers for things that interest them.

Hmmmm.....

The Great Rebate Scam

Slate has a piece by Carol Vinzant on The Great Rebate Scam, which details how retailers now offer rebates-- but then make it hard for you to collect on them.

When I read the piece, I started thinking of stores that I could imagine pulling these kinds of stunts. Before I could finish the article, I had a mental list of about ten places I shop at (or in the case of my cell phone service, interact with) regularly. Scary.

New picture

Yes, I've swapped out my old picture of myself at a 16th-century Confucian school in Korea with a picture of my daughter, Elizabeth. I thought a little change, for at least a little while, was in order. And I spend all this time taking pictures of my kids and managing a blog about them, I feel like I should leverage a little of that.

Read what?

My promise to you, the reader: I'll NEVER do this, for-- well, I was about to say obvious reasons, but now that I think about it, there are so MANY obvious reasons....

Update, 23 June 2003: It appears from this Slate article that the "topless and marketing" meme may be taking off. Just in time for summer....

Back to work

Elizabeth was sick yesterday, and I stayed home with her. She's much better now, and so I'm back at the Institute.

I'm glad she's better, both because it's no fun for her to be sick, but also because there's a very interesting meeting about the sociology of blogging at the Institute this morning that I didn't want to miss.

Home alone

My wife is in the greater Washington DC area for the week, leading a school field trip. So it's me and the children for the week. Blogging likely to be impaired by the heavy presence of small people in my life.

With Elizabeth at a birthday party on Saturday

Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare!

Meanwhile, outside the Matrix, "Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare:"

Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will produce a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word....

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in-- not quite literature.

Phillips said the project-- funded by England's Arts Council rather than by scientific bodies-- was intended more as performance art than scientific experiment.

Thanks to Nancy for the citation!

Amazon.com's customer help number

I spent a good part of the late afternoon searching for a customer service number for Amazon.com. It turns out that they do exist, but they're just not on the Amazon site-- which I scoured thoroughly. It turns out that someone else has had the same problem, and posted The Amazon.Com Customer Service Page.

It's amazing that they have a number, but don't put it up on the site. I can only guess that there's a law saying that they have to have customer service, but no rule about making the number known. Regardless of the reason, it's a pretty unbecoming move on their part.

The number, by the way, is (800) 201-7575.

Bill Bennett doubles down

For those friends of mine who don't keep up with the news, several articles appeared on Friday and over the weekend about virtue guru Bill Bennett's gambling habit. The story was broken in Washington Monthly and Newsweek, but I read about it in Talking Points Memo. Josh Mitchell, who I always find worth reading, has quite a bit on the controversy, though when he says he can't grok the attractiveness of gambling,

because I spent most of my twenties as a starving graduate student and couldn't understand parting with money without the guarantee of getting something in return...

I think: graduate school is the perfect example of "parting with money without the guarantee of getting something in return." Afterthought: The real question is, why couldn't he just play video games like the rest of us? Is a $500-a-turn slot machine really more pleasant and diverting than Descent 3?

The paper of record

I'm back from my trip. It turns out I was in Brea. Wherever that is.

The New York Times article that I was quoted in last month has yielded an interesting lesson in the degree to which the Times is the global paper of record. When I've written pieces for the Los Angeles Times or Atlantic Monthly, I'm lucky to get one or two messages about them.

In contrast, I get a two-line quote in a John Markoff piece, and hear from friends I've not talked to in years, including someone in Mauritius, a graduate school friend in India, and today a friend from my freshman dormitory who's been in Israel for the last several years.

I need to bug the Times Book Review people to see if they're ever going to publish that review I wrote for them months ago.

Buy those books!

The hardcover edition of my book Empire and the Sun is ranked 2,243,493 on Amazon today. The paperback is doing better: it's soared to 895,175. I notice that if they'll give you a deal if you buy it with Alan Hirshfeld's Parallax, and that in the "Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought" list, there are actual books listed, suggesting that someone did in fact buy it.

Not like I'm at all interested in how the book is doing, of course.

A quote making its way around

I got this today from a friend who put it on his list:

"You know the world's gone mad when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the USA of arrogance and the Germans don't want to go to war!"

I know this is a joke from somewhere, and is making the rounds in various permutations: the last time I saw it, it ended with the reference Yao Ming.

Though speaking for myself, I'm perfectly happy with a Germany that refuses to go to war. They made a notable contribution to military history in the twentieth century, and if they want to sit out the twenty-first, I think we should all applaud.

Barn raising

I spent most of the day working on a play structure for the backyard. Most of my in-laws came over, despite morning drizzle: what with the various college sweatshirts and small talk about who's company was doing what, it was somewhat like a yuppie barn raising. But nothing brings us all out like the opportunity to do something for the children.

Photo courtesy of Nancy Allen; I'm too lazy to upload my own this evening.

More on this in the children's blog.

What to expect when you're expecting

This diary series shows why Dahlia Lithwick is one of my favorite writers. It's required reading for anyone with children.

Miguel, Ma Belle

Dahlia Lithwick is one of the best writers on legal matters today, as she demonstrates once again with her piece on the argument over the Miguel Estrada nomination.

Moving to Moveable

I've now got Moveable Type installed on my Web site, and will be migrating to it shortly. Bwahahahaha!

Still. Must. Stop. Tweaking

Anyone who's a return visitor to this site will doubtless see that there are some changes. I decided that the metadata this was just too much of a pain, and I'd just use H2s instead.

Of course, having made that decision, I couldn't just leave the old ones there....

Back from Apple

Last night's talk at the CEO Technology Institute went reasonably well. I should make myself available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Talk talk

Doing a keynote address today at the CEO Technology Institute, sponsored by the Community College Foundation. This is one of those odd moments when several threads of your life come together: I'm speaking to a bunch of college and university IT and administrative types (my past life as an academic) about emerging technology and the future of teaching (my present life as a futurist), and will be doing so at Apple corporate headquarters (a company I've written about). It's like having an old flame, your third-grade teacher, and your boss in the same room. But more fun.

Total Information Awareness

John Markoff, the New York Times' man in Silicon Valley, has been on a roll: his articles on efforts by the (wonderfully-titled) Office of Information Awareness to create a database full of information on-- well, practically everyone-- got lots of notice last week. His article in today's Times on a proposal to essentially rework the structure of the Internet to make it impossible for people to visit certain areas without leaving traces of their activities-- traces which would be used by the government to track people online-- is fascinating, and more than a little chilling.

And to think it was done at SRI, which is in my neighborhood. I'm so proud....

[Full disclosure: I have a slightly more than passing acquaintance with Markoff, but I still like his work anyway.]