Finally

Someone has finally developed an MP3 player that syncs music in time to your workout--in this case, the beating of your heart. I've long been of the opinion that matching up your running pace or other exercise routine with the pace of your music helps motivate you. One of my hare-brained schemes was to start a workout music consultancy with special mix tracks, complete with exhortations from the customer or Mr. T ("run, fool, run!").

Of course, the new Bodibeat does look a BIT like a horrific instrument of torture. But I'm sure it's not that bad once you insert the prongs and constrict the deathbelt around your face. Or whatever it is you're actually supposed to do.

Efficiency Envy

Last year UPS shaved 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, saving about 3 million tons of gas and reducing CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. How? Mostly by eliminating left turns on their routes.

I want them to use their "package flow" software on me. And my Christmas presents (please send presents).

The Best in Life is Free

Actually, having just returned from Hawaii (pictures forthcoming) that subject line is patently false. But a lot of the great stuff really is free. My colleague at Open Culture has made my evening by posting that The New York Times is going completely gratis as of tonight.

As I am a cheap, cheap grad student I've never felt ok about paying for the Times Select premium content...but that hasn't stopped me from wanting to read some of it. Unfortunately, it looks like they plan to keep charging for the crossword. Curses!

Great Moments in Criticism

Two zingers from the July 9 + 16 New Yorker:

Caplan is the sort of economist (are there others? there must be) who engages with the views of non-economists in the way a bulldozer would engage with a picket fence if a bulldozer could express glee.

Louis Menand, reviewing The Myth of the Rational Voter

At last [Michael Bay] has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in "Transformers," his first truly honest work of art. Not that he needs my plaudits; as a passerby exclaims in the midst of the film, "This is easily a hundred times cooler than 'Armageddon'!" To be proud of your achievement is one thing, but to plant film critics inside your movie and review it favorably as you go along: that takes genius. Where it leaves, real critics--rusty old Concepticons, with failing firepower--I hate to think.

Anthony Lane, reviewing Transformers

CheddarVision!

Today we celebrate British webcam boredomporn! Yay CheddarVision.

The Times article is great:

The ur-site was probably the one that showed a coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab in 1991. First displayed on the internal network as a way to show lab workers when the coffee was ready so they would not have to make fruitless journeys to the coffee machine, the site went global in 1993. It had more than two million visitors before being switched off in 2001.

Other dull British sites, helpfully compiled by Oliver Burkeman in a recent article in The Guardian, include one that shows nothing happening on a side street of Neilston, a suburban village near Glasgow. Another one (now defunct) showed a pile of compost in Sussex.

@ your service

I never really thought about the typographical history of the @ symbol...turns out it's quite interesting. Should we be alarmed that HP is the corporate patron of this particular scholarly gem? Perhaps they're hoping to trademark it.

Arizona, den of iniquity?

I just got back from a weekend in Arizona, where Anna and I celebrated our engagement with her grandparents and some relatives. Just now I read this article about identity theft in the Grand Canyon State--apparently one in six residents has had their identity stolen, which is twice the national average. Nice. As someone who has had his stolen twice--I hope you like your $300 shoes, you bastards--and menaced at various points, I can only hope it doesn't happen again. And that's not even getting into the existential identity questions that menace me on a daily basis...

Otherwise, for the record, Arizona's a pretty nice place.

The $100 Laptop

MIT recently revealed their first prototype for a $100 laptop. It looks...oddly squishy. As if it were the laptop equivalent of those inflatable books you read in the tub when you were little. But anyway, a great idea, if they can get it off the ground.

Anna may need one of these soon. The ongoing tragedy of her current laptop will eventually, inevitably, require a fresh staging of the perennial opera favorite, "Tech Support Call to Dell."

Virtual termination with extreme prejudice

I was blown away (yes, to pun is to be alive) by this darkly hilarious description of a mercenary group's months-long infiltration and eventual destruction of a company operating in a virtual world. The group was hired to bump off a prominent figure in the game world, but decided to make revenge complete by utterly wiping out the target's body, possessions, and corporation.

Of course, in some sense games model behavior like this all the time, when the preformatted "mission" calls for a bold strike against the bad guys. But this was unscripted, creative gameplay, involving a "valentine" spy who gained the target's confidence over the course of months, eventually becoming her most trusted lieutenant (and hence, the person in charge of the target's huge battleship when the hit finally went down). Somehow, the whole action seemed to cross the line into the real world, since the effort resulted in the mass looting and destruction of in-game corporate holdings that added up to more than $16,000 of stuff. The assassination of the business leader in question was conducted so that even the virtual "corpse" of the body was disposed of, forcing its owner to lose some unique implants. Not only was this person "killed" in the game, she was totally robbed and violated in a whole variety of senses.

On the other hand, it's fascinating to learn that a virtual world has developed to this level of devious, sophisticated role-playing. The game is that much more compelling because real assets (hundreds of hours of in-game effort, and perhaps even real cash) are on the line, in the sense of deep play. The Machiavellian nastiness also reminded me of Bruce Sterling's Schistmatrix and the ways human societies keep on modeling the backbiting and feces-flinging of our ancestral monkey politics.

When two friends send you the same article

You probably ought to read it. The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a cover story on the Google Print/digitizing libraries/copyright dilemmas story this week, and it's a good read. I was surprised by the article's utopian trend (which makes perfect sense once you realize the author's job title is "senior maverick" at Wired.

So, digitizing books: a good thing?

An inevitable thing, at least for the 15% of extant literature that is actively published or maintained under copyright (according to Kevin Kelly, aforementioned maverick). And for the rest, probably the only way to preserve those documents beyond their lives on a few university shelves. Even rock-star bibliotheques like Princeton and Stanford have exiled many thousands of their volumes to remote storage facilities, and smaller public and private libraries just can't afford to keep books around that haven't been checked out in decades. So digitizing books not only makes them more accessible and useful(can you imagine having the power to ask "show me the first 10 times 'baby boomer' was used within 50 words of 'the beatles'...anywhere!"?)--it also makes them available to millions who don't have access to fancy libraries.

Naturally, traditional publishers are terrified. They want a cut of any new ad revenue Google can turn up by scanning in old books and offering them for free online. But my feeling is, if you can't even figure out what you own, you have no moral ground to stand on when you're suing Google. I'm sorry that the book industry is getting tougher, but it's your own damn fault. It's obvious that people are reading a lot more than they did ten or twenty years ago. You're content providers: make content people want.

Of course, almost nobody has told the literature professors about this (shhhh! we are so happy with our close reading...DO NOT ruin it!). But scholarship is going to change in a big way when all of those complicated empirical questions can no longer be ignored. In twenty years, it won't be enough to provide an inspired reading of a single text because questions of influence, genre and historical change will come with actual data sets.

I doubt we'll ever get anywhere close to a universal library, and the battles for what gets in and what does not (and who runs the databases and who gets to use them and who gets to link stuff together) will rage for generations. Nor are we ever going to stop reading books--but they might become luxury items once again. You just can't beat the heft of a good tome or the richness of a palimpsest. The most obscure and esoteric things will stay the same. It's the mundane, everyday act of reading that will be transformed. Because, as Google has figured out, that's where the money is.

Some more wonderful news

Charmed is getting cancelled!

Perhaps I should start again by explaining that every strong relationship involves compromise, negotiation, give and take--the joyous agony of melding preference with another. In our case, the incredibly annoying witch sisters (are there three? four? did one or more of them die inexplicably? WHO KNOWS.) from the WB form one of those zones of compromise. Anna watches Charmed because it calms her down. Another way of describing this would be to say that when Anna watches Charmed, her stress magically streams out of her, reflects off the artistically null hippy hussies on the TV screen, and is channeled directly into me.

So I can't tell you how excited I am to hear that the show is being canceled this May. Obviously, there's not a lot I can do about reruns, but I can grimly don my headphones and sit at my desk.

Furthermore, in the interests of journalistic evenhandedness, Anna would like to go on the record noting that she watches me play video games. And she also bought me an engagement PSP--infinitely more fabulous than that non-interactive ring.

Oops

By now we've all heard about Dick Cheney's unfortunate little incident. Putting aside the intriguing questions raised by gun-play in the executive branch, this led me to wonder about the whole idea of the Commander in Chief. Has a U.S. president ever led troops into battle? A risky move, you might argue, in the age of gunpowder and projectile weapons which did so much to usher in our young republic and continues to protect it against valiant foes lurking in jungles and deserts around the world. But what a sight! The Commander in Chief would have to get a special uniform, and a very big hat.

Giving us the old SOTU

Not that I got to watch the State of the Union speech, sitting as I was in a basement conference room discussing the sodomitic undertones of religious conversion in early modern England. Moving on. Apparently, we now care about alternative energy. We may find ourselves competing against China and/or India, from time to time. Also, isolationism: NOW BAD.

Topics that didn't make it into the 52 minute address: New Orleans, the whole prescription drug thing, and the bitter issues of conscience driving a wedge between the Pentagon and the family dog.

(Image used without any hint of permission from http://www.iment.com, credited: AP Photo/Ken Lambert)

Hmm....

The Times covers the Bush administration's distressingly cozy relationship with natural gas producers. Is it all true? Well, I hope not.

The Bush administration also took a much more relaxed approach to auditing and fraud prevention. In 2003, the Interior Department's inspector general declared that the auditing process was "ineffective" and "lacked accountability" and that many of the auditors were unqualified.

In one instance, inspectors discovered that auditors had lost the working papers for an important audit and tried to cover up their blunder by creating and back-dating false documents. Rather than punish anybody, the inspector general recounted, the minerals service gave the employee who produced the new documents a financial bonus for "creativity."

Adam Smith and mind-reading brain cells

Once upon a a time, Adam Smith wrote a book called the Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he provided a two-step argument for the evolution of a moral society: 1) We can never really know what anyone else is thinking. 2) Thus, all of our moral sentiments and emotional interactions are second-hand, driven by the empathy and good opinion we imagine that we share with other people.

It just got more interesting. According to a tittilating expose in today's New York Times Science section, there is a whole set of neurons in our brains, "mirror neurons," that fire in the same way when we see someone else do something or when we do it ourselves. "Empathy" isn't just a fuzzy idea, it's a biochemical process that can be identical to a personal experience.

The news is thrilling not only to psychotherapists, but cultural theorists of all stripes. "The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions."

Culture is in our brains! Our brains! Cool.

Slate on college journalism

Bryan Curtis reminisces about the good old days of college journalism before the reign of Google. The article is part of "College Week", a series on higher education, but this snippet in particular caught my fancy:

College newspapers have gone digital, and with that we've lost something vital about college journalism: the privilege to write wretchedly, irresponsibly, and incoherently in relative privacy. "When you screw up now, it's Google-able," says Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI and a veteran of the Yale Daily News. "In the old days, you just had to wait three days and no one would remember."

The Warriors

Rockstar Games is about to release a new title based on The Warriors, a cult classic about a gang-ridden 70's New York that closely resembles some bars I've visited in the East Village. The New York Times ran in a rare interview with one of the company's founders (described as "Pynchonesque" in their secretive influence), and he had some interesting things to say for those of us curious about the continuing evolution of games for grownups. Also, as it turns out, the guy shares my feelings about elves.

"In a lot of films you look at the way the narrative is designed, and the way the focus is so heavily on characters or the period means they wouldn't translate into good video games," Mr. Houser said. "Maybe in 20 years time you can make a game that's more sophisticated at a character level, but we're still at a point in the evolution of games that physical actions are more effective to convey than emotions or conversations."

Perhaps one reason that Rockstar's games have been both so popular and so controversial is that they are set in an approximation of modern reality. Most video games are set in a vastly different time and place, often in a space-faring future where the enemies are slavering aliens, or in a Tolkien-inspired fantasy world of goblins and orcs. "When we started Rockstar, we wanted to make games that we wanted to play and we weren't embarrassed to be playing," Mr. Houser said. "As a grown man, I find playing with an elf a little bit demeaning. You know what I mean?

"We're into gangster movies, car chases, 'The Warriors,' westerns and lots of other things," he said. "But we're not expert in space or science-fiction or elves, and so we couldn't do that well. You know, it wouldn't be fun for me to work on that stuff. And if we can't have fun doing it, then the sheer amount of work that goes into making one of these games and the hideous hours that we have to work would be like being in prison."

The new new great game

The ice caps are melting. Sorry, my White House friends, but I think the evidence is hard to deny, at least according to the 5,000 words the New York Times devoted to the subject today. But don't worry, there's good news for oil companies! The melting of the polar ice cap will expose vast new reserves for exploitation, and expanded access to shipping lanes will allow new ports to open near the North Sea.

In fact, the melting of the ice causes some imperial problems. To whom will the sea belong? The New York Times, source of nearly all my information regarding the outside world, has a great map showing two of the options. The issue will cause rifts between old friends like the U.S. and Russia, and even older friends, like the U.S. and Canada. And who knew Denmark is an Arctic Power? As the article notes, it's going to be a hot time in pole over the next few years:

Already, oil tanker traffic is rising and fishing boats are going farther north. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is concerned that melting seaways could make it easier for narcotics traffickers to reach indigenous communities, and for organized crime to exploit the growing diamond trade. And the United States, which disputes Canada's control over parts of the petroleum-rich Beaufort Sea, has in the past sent vessels unannounced through other Arctic waters that Canada claims.

My meta-news question here is, has the Times just given up so completely on the whole global warming thing that they're trying this instead? I mean, there is not one mention in this lengthy article of what impact the melting ice will have on the rest of the world. Won't there be rising sea levels, floods, desalination, rapine, disrupted migratory patterns, and the wrath of an Ice-Loving God to contend with? I guess the Bush Administration has successfully won its doublespeak campaign (see helpful guide here) against climate change.

Speedy Stanley

A team from Stanford won DARPA's robot car challenge with their self-driving Touareg. It piloted itself across 137 miles of desert, obstacles, cliff-side turns, and the greedy eyes of hundreds of Pentagon planners. Cool.

What will we do with self-driving cars? Will MADD start making ads saying "keep your hands off the wheel--let your car drive you home"? Will Stanley get the groceries for me? How will it decide what kind of salad to buy? I, for one, find the question baffling, but maybe Stanley's laser range-finders and seven Pentium-M computers can do better.

The dangers of sneezing chickens

A lead story in today's New York Times should give us all pause the next time we see an ailing avian wandering the streets. Apparently, the great flu pandemic that killed 50 million people (according to today's article) in 1918 was a virulent strain of avian flu. Before you reach for your sterile mask--or your shotgun--know that the strain of flu scientists reconstructed was far more contagious than anything we've seen recently, and that there are no signs of such a virus in the wild.

Still, just a tad troubling, eh?

On the other hand, I understand the research value of getting the information out there. Apparently, the new data will make it easier for researchers to identify potentially dangerous strains of flu vaccines--i.e. now that we've identified this Armageddon disease, we know to look for the next time someone catches cold from a chicken.

Stupid birds.

What especially worries me (I'm so glad you asked) is that the research team, which is all geared up for the covers of Science and Nature, are going ahead and publishing the full genome of this ubervirus. I mean, they find tissue samples from two soldiers who died 80 years ago, they dig up some woman in Alaska from a MASS GRAVE with 71 other people in it (yep, five survived to bury 'em)...and then they publish the blueprints to this virus.

This reminds me of Parasites Like Us, a book by a Stanford author recently recommended to me by a friend. In the novel, our anthropologist hero unearths mysterious artifacts and, through a combination of gross ineptitude, pedigreed rat-dogs and the ever-meddlesome law, manage to unleash a super-plague that wipes out most of humanity.

In the book, it's almost funny to witness the end of civilization--it's sort of like imagining what would happen if academics ran the world. That quirky anthropological theory about the end of that last pre-Ice Age civilization springs to life in the suburban Midwest. But, reading the article in today's Times, I began to think about how close we really are to such catastrophes.

I mean, what is the barrier of safety? If it's like those federal scientists say and the virus is safely guarded behind big steel doors, bright biohazard signs and a bunch of boys with guns, well, that'd be ok. But what if it's only a sick dictator or a mad scientist away? What if it's only a latex glove and a steady hand away? It's a complicated enough world as it is.

audio gamers

Wow--Wired News has an article about the subculture of audio games for the blind. These started out as the text-menu and puzzle games you'd expect, but apparently you can now play complex interactive titles like Doom and Quake, and even a driving game. I really want to try one--I wonder if I would find the amount of audio input just overwhelming?

Space wars

The Times ran an article today about the Air Force and its dream of militarizing space. The flyboy contingent is "saying it must secure space to protect the nation from attack." Now, call me silly, but as far as I know the Martians are not coming for us. Nobody has weapons in space, no matter how long our friend at RAND have been thinking about them. Not the Chinese, nor the Russians, and especially not the Canadians. But, nevertheless, the Air Force Space Command is keen. And headed up by a guy named General Lord

The Air Force believes "we must establish and maintain space superiority," Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. "Simply put, it's the American way of fighting." Air Force doctrine defines space superiority as "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in space.

Honestly, I think it's mainly about the arcade-style coolness of these weapons (because it sure ain't about the money). Rods from God, huge lasers, orbital space planes....Maybe we could just give the generals some crayons and they could draw them instead. Though apparently we should still let them play with guns.

Coming soon to a battlefield near you

In the New York Times today...Congress has mandated that a third of U.S. "ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military must become robotic within a decade." But they're not going to stop there:

A prototype, about four feet high, with a Cyclops eye and a gun for a right arm, stood in a workshop at the center recently. It readied, aimed and fired at a Pepsi can, performing the basic tasks of hunting and killing. "It's the first robot that I know of that can find targets and shoot them," Mr. Everett said.

Four more years...

Is it just me, or did the inauguration totally sneak up on us this time? According to the Washington Post, Bush took his oath of office "from an ailing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who is critically ill with thyroid cancer and spoke in a hoarse voice." I won't delve into the symbolism, but did the poor man really have to go out there? Apparently he felt the need.
It is interesting to note the second term effect--presidents back in power who suddenly have a mind for their historical legacies. Several papers commented on the soaring rhetoric and cheery worldview Bush adopted for this inaugural speech. And then again, there are the little setbacks:

He strongly defended Secretary Rumsfeld, for instance, saying that the Pentagon chief's use of an auto-pen to sign condolence letters for the families of US troop casualties did not reflect the person he knew.

But I think most people, in the administration and out of it, would agree in saying that it's been a rough few years for the old U.S. of A. Here's hoping things get better.

Microsoft: Spyware or Anti-Spyware?

I'm sure other internet hooligans are getting into the irony of Microsoft announcing its own line of anti-spyware to protect your computer against unwanted observation and meddling. Unless, of course, the observation and meddling originates in Redmond's vast halls of power. What I love the most is the art they have on the new software's homepage, depicting a man pressing his nose to the glass of a computer screen. Is he spying on that computer, or so dumb that he thinks he can see the spyware if he just looks really closely? Either way, I don't think the image is sending the right message for Chairman Bill.
All that being said, let's be honest. I'm going to download the new spyware. So will you, or use a computer with it installed at work, at home, or at a friend's. Making fun of Microsoft is like mocking gravity or the MTA--there's pleasure in the ridicule of stationary targets, but at the end of the day the damn thing is still going to hold you like a vise in its heavy, clammy embrace. And Bill is doing a lot of good in the world with all that money we've paid him. That's more than you can say for some people.

The things we read

Ursula K. Le Guin went house yesterday on the producers of the the new Earthsea TV series, who apparently dissected her books for the parts that would look good in explosions or chain-mail bikinis, leaving the rest to rot. Worse, almost every character on TV is white, in stark contrast to Le Guin's rainbow ethic of racial integration in her fantasy novels.
I feel sorry for her, but what was more shocking to me was to think back about reading the books and realize that the whole race issue completely passed me by. I think I might remember reading once or twice about a character's red-brown skin, and thinking to myself "Huh? Weird. Ok, what's over the bridge? What's he going to do next?"
It amazes me how resilient kids are to the stories we tell them, whether they're eerily blood-thirsty nursery rhymes or Christian epics like the Chronicles of Narnia (loved 'em--but let's just say Jesus isn't a major focus right now). It also amazes me that people campaign against violence in our culture and promote the Bible instead. Not that there's anything violent in there.

The Armies of Buzz

Former Slatester Rob Walker had a great piece in the Dec. 5th New York Times Magazine (is there a way for me to get that without other 10 lbs of paper on the weekend?). The article discussed "guerrilla" marketing agencies that deploy thousands of average Joes and Janes to soft sell their products. The creepy part? People like doing this--many of them don't even cash in the Peon Points the companies offer as rewards to their best operatives. I even got spammed by somebody plugging BzzAgent the other day. The future is now, and it wants you to buy sausage. But hey, if it works for No Puffery, maybe it can work for...other people.

Oooh

Bibleman. The superhero who needs no flashback introduction because everyone knows the book. Our hero is on tour. Shockingly, he is not playing at Pete's Candy Store or, indeed, ANYWHERE in the tri-state area. Thanks, BoingBoing.

Gitmo

New leaks about torture at Guantanamo Bay. The leaked info is from a Red Cross report to the U.S. government. I believe it (or at least some of it) since the Red Cross has no interest in lying to make the torture seem worse than it is--that would only make their confidentiality agreements with the government look even worse.
But the real question here is: what is the point of torturing these poor people? What information could they possibly provide now? The September 11th attacks are no great mystery, and anyone involved in them who hasn't been caught has definitely moved since the Gitmo detainees were captured. Ok, maybe a few new prisoners arrive there, once in a while. But there are hundreds and hundreds of people there. Some get to wear the white outfits for people who cooperate. Others don't.

Ukraine in the brain

Wow. A few months ago, Ukrainian opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was the picture of health. Now, after a "mystery illness" he claims was a poisoning attempt by Ukrainian authorities, he really looks like hell.
Doctors "can neither confirm nor deny" the reports, according to the Toronto Star, but said they treated the man "for several illnesses, including acute pancreatitis, a viral skin disease and nerve paralysis on the left side of his face." Apparently the Austrian docs treating him later asked for help from a bioweapons specialist.
The official Ukrainian government line? Bad sushi. Right. And, um, happy Thanksgiving.

If you're really upset about the election...

You can always head to the White House for a little self-immolation. That is sad and creepy, though arguably not as sad and creepy as the remnants of photographs and families that keep surfacing in the rubble of Fallujah.
In related news, Colin Powell retired today, allegedly to be replaced by Condi Rice. I've always felt a little bad for Powell, since he obviously struggles so deeply between his convictions and his sense of duty. The Times article I linked to above includes a lot of quotes from Powell on the things he's leaving behind. Whoever steps into his job has a very long list of problems to attend to, and if the past four years have been any example, not much support for diplomacy from the Oval Office.

Tired

Well, everyone else has already posted about the election. Anna and I spent it with some folks who really cared, and it was heart-wrenching to watch their faces fall ( made worse by the fact that they were throwing an awesome election party). I got home, crawled into bed, tossed and turned, crawled to work, and spent the day trying to concentrate on something, anything else.
Meanwhile, the world could become a more exciting place to live in if Yasser Arafat kicks the bucket. He's a linchpin to the Israeli-Palestinian situation in so many unfathomable ways that it's hard to imagine what things will be like without him. Hopefully calm, but it's hard to imagine.

Shun Shun

After a bit of poking around, I've finally found a decent voter's guide to what I'll be seeing on my ballot this Tuesday. No word on what propositions, if any, will be appearing. But it is fun to look at the wingman candidates. This district is violently Democratic, and it looks like the Republican contender for State Assemblyman, Adam Shun, is so sure of defeat that he hasn't bothered to say anything about himself or even put up a picture.
Well, actually, he has (or rather, this is the only Adam Shun I could find on Google), on this right-wing blog, joining a chorus lambasting Andy Rooney for making fun of President Bush. If you only need one reason to shun Shun, do it because he agrees with someone who lays the death of Nicholas Berg at the feet of Dan Rather. If you need two, shun him because he condemns "the 'Media'" for reporting the evidence on Abu Ghraib:

We could have reported on this and never aired the pictures. The problem is the "Media" is lazy. This was out there at the end of last year and the people in charge had press conferences in January and investigations were ongoing. Then no one seemed to care because they were too lazy to dig into it. Then the pictures let them make front page without doing any work whatsoever and they publish them.

Human evolution, the continuing saga

This summer I worked on fact-checking a manuscript that took a detailed tour through human evolution. The problem is, the science keeps changing. Now researchers have discovered remains of a new branch of Homo erectus on Flores, an island a long swim east of Bali. The newly minted Homo floresiensis stood a little over one meter tall and hunted all the other strange creatures that made Flores home. Apparently, it's a Lewis Carroll theme park:: species were "subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others." So don't send your kids there unless you're unhappy with their current dimensions.

Fluffy, sans fluff: the hypoallergenic cat

Remember all those times you've complained that we were supposed to have rocket cars and space hotels and where the hell is the future, anyway? Well, it's almost here.
According to CNN, a company in California is taking orders for the world's first hypoallergenic cats. The genetically modified furballs will be on sale in 2007. Being cats, these creatures will almost certainly still enjoy Anna's heartfelt disdain, if not her sneezes and watering eyes.

Slate bares all

Maybe this is only interesting to a former employee, but Slate asked everyone on staff to reveal their ballot choices. Editor Jacob Weisberg has a great explanation for why it's important for Slate to do such crazy things.
The results? Duh, it's Kerry by a landslide. But what's surprising is how many supporters seem to loathe him just a liiiittle bit less than they loathe Bush. I, of course, am fascinated by the hold-outs who will be voting for the B-man. And then there's the true crazy man on deck, Josh Payton, who's going Green:

I'm going to vote for David Cobb. Let's face it. Both Kerry and Bush are liars and they're both on the take. Neither one of them have my best interests in mind. Why should I feel satisfied because I get to pick between one scumbag and another? Democracy in action! No thanks.

Just a little bit of history repeating

2004 has a nice, big-round-number ring to it, which I guess is why everyone is voting in new leaders this year. Or voting for the same leaders, anyway.
It looks like Hamid Karzai has won Afghanistan's first election. That guy won again in Australia. And we're almost ready to hit the polls here. After a brief period of hope, it looks like Bush is pulling ahead again. I blame Hawaii for this, since they are apparently polling for Mr. Marriage Amendment despite their commendable state record on equality. But seriously, who can stay mad at Hawaii for long?
So, if Bush wins in the U.S., the world will be faced with a truly disturbing question. Are we becoming sequel-obsessed? Gulf War II, Bush II, and two-term presidents are becoming the norm. The special effects are gory and explosive, I'll admit, but I'm getting tired of the story line.

Stadiums, factories, and the tough breaks of civic love

The New York Times has a great article today about Galesburg, Illinois, a town that hustled hard for Maytag to keep a factory open there, only to lose 1,600 jobs when the company moved the operation to Mexico. Apparently, this sort of thing happens all the time--municipalities offer all sorts of tax abatements and incentives to lure corporate investment, and then when tax holiday ends, the corporations leave.
The issue is similar for major sports teams, and it all reminds me of New York's dilemma about this new football stadium. There's a huge corporate push to get a stadium built on the West Side, but frankly I'm not convinced. Promoters offer the carrot of the 2012 Olympics--but who knows if cities really make money off the Olympics anyway? Economists aren't sure. In New York's case, I can see a stadium creating maybe 1,000 service jobs to support the stadium and sports apparatus. But most of the big money will flow right through the stadium, from corporate sponsors to corporate owners. Well, according to the New York Jets, it will be a big plus. And the corporate websites are the ones that can afford search engine placement strategists, so those are the websites I've found.

One of the world's great handlebars meets its end

Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, a truly nefarious Indian gangster, met a bloody end late Monday evening in a shoot-out with Indian paramilitary police. The Guardian calls him a "Robin Hood figure to some", but I prefer to think of him as a villanous mustachio first and a man second (check it out at the Guardian link). He earned the people's love the hard way, according to the Toronto Star: "despite his viciousness." Ah, India (the Star continues below):

Efforts to capture Veerappan were stepped up after his gang in August 2000 seized the then 71-year-old matinee idol, holding him captive in the jungle.
Fans rioted at the news of the kidnapping and Rajkumar was set free after three months under circumstances that were never fully explained..

Games of the weird

The Times has a Game Theory article covering the breathtaking bizarre that is Japanese video game design. Just read this description of one unique series:

In a world of giant flowers and lumbering insects, two spacemen search for treasure aided by pikmin - tiny ambulatory flowers. While individual pikmin are weak, 50 of them can knock down a barrier or best a huge bug. Pikmin come in various colors, which denote their speed or special talents. White pikmin, for example, can dig for underground treasure and are poisonous when ingested by enemies.

Pikmin are ingested a lot. They are also burned, stomped on and set afire. It's a little sad, because the pikmin army sings happy marching songs as it travels, and individual pikmin wail as they give up the ghost, but there are always more: flowers and dead bugs can be turned into pikmin seedlings.

The author rounds off his article with a touch of home-grown wackiness: his quest for "the feeling of complete and utter admironishment." Rock on, games and gamers of the weird.

9/11 Report up for a National Book Award

Yes, the judges of the National Book Awards have put the 9/11 Comission Report on their short-list for best nonfiction of 2004. As the Times puts it:

The National Book Awards, whose winners will be announced on Nov. 17, are among the most anticipated commendations of the year for publishers. But the list of finalists is often greeted by a collective "Who?," as the judges often seem to many to go out of their way to avoid books that have garnered critical acclaim and popular attention.

Still, I don't think it could hurt to promote a text the Times called "eminently readable." This has to be the first time that a National Book Award candidate has been available free of charge to anyone who wants to read it online or print it out, on the commission's website. That public domain status is only possible because of its unique origins as a publically mandated document. In fact, I'm warming to the idea more and more as I type this. Imagine: a public document winning an award on its merit as a document, not merely a vehicle for political statements or suggested actions. It would be like giving rewards for great speeches or commending well-crafted Senate debates.
Still, it's a blow to most of the nonfiction authors of 2004, who have been trumped by a document prepared in committee. If the 9/11 Report wins, who will accept the prize? Whom will they thank?

Novel Voters

Slate is running "Book Blitz" this week, and they asked a gaggle of novelists how they'll cast their ballots next month. The most interesting comments, of course, come from the few writers who endorse Bush over Kerry. Here's what they said.

The Bush Bulge

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that Bush listens to a radio voice while he's speaking publicly. Apparently this idea has come into vogue since the last debate, where many people noticed a mysterious rectangular bulge under Bush's jacket. Salon corralled the rumors in this article. "The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing." The New York Times picked up on the idea in this blurb. The Washington Post quoted Bush aides laughing it off as "little green men on the grassy knoll" (they were there, dammit!).
But my favorite coverage is a year and a half old: last year the Village Voice zoomed in on an entirely different Bush bulge--after all, nobody disputes the man's got cojones.

No flu shot for you

You probably won't get a flu shot this year. Slate recycles a piece I wrote for them last year on the making of the flu vaccine, and explains why your immune system will have to fend for itself this winter.
Flu-Shot Shortage - Why can't we just make more?

requiescat Avedon

I only learned today that Richard Avedon passed away last Friday while on assignment for the New Yorker. I've always had a fascination for his pictures--they competed with Anthony Lane's film reviews and the back page to be the first thing I flipped to in a new issue.
What's fascinating is that Avedon's website has elegantly and unintentionally made the transition from self-promotional to memorial. Richard Avedon. Some of his last, best work is up there, at least until somebody works out his estate, I guess.

George Soros: The Blog

GeorgeSoros.com
Yes, the big guy has started a blog, in part to promote his new book, The Bubble of American Supremacy. I haven't read it, but you can download his chapter on Iraq here.
He's got the right idea for this blog; he's using it to respond to reader questions and comments, particularly from people who disagree with him. We need more dialog, and besides, how great is it to have access to a long-running Q&A like this?

Down and Out in India

Seth Stevenson, one of Slate's funniest writers, just wrapped up a week of dispatches from India, a country he's "trying really hard to like." On Friday, Seth met the saddest monkey man in the world:

But other pitches were not as well-crafted. For instance, there was this guy who smiled weakly and asked us, with a halfhearted shrug, "Monkey dance?" Our eyes followed the leash in his hand, which led to the neck of a monkey. The most jaded, world-weary monkey I've ever seen. The Lou Reed of monkeys. He looked like he was about to sit down, pull out his works, and shoot a big syringe full of heroin into his paw. Needless to say, we declined the monkey dance—which I'm guessing would have been some sort of sad, simian death-jig.

Helios, thou art my lord

Xeni Jardin of Wired and BoinBoing has been doing a lot of space travel recently, and she has a great description of watching SpaceShipOne launch in the Mojave with a gaggle of other nerdjournalists yesterday.

In this photo, I'm one of a number of silly-looking reporters all squinting intently at the sky and holding their hands against the sun. We were trying to catch a glimpse of a distant SpaceShipOne during its ascent. Veteran tech and space journalist John Schwartz from the New York Times is there in the blue shirt (here's his story: Link). Right about then, Nihar yells out, "HELIOS, THOU ART MY LORD" really loud, which made everyone crack up because we really did look goofy. Like we were participating in an ancient sun-cult ritual, or at least a Planet of The Apes episode.

What's interesting about the whole idea is whether there's a business to be made out of ferrying people to space. The business model for Burt Rutan and his ship is "space tourism", but I kind of doubt that will be a long-lasting model unless they can build a hotel or something. They're planning to charge $200,000 per ticket at first. Even if they drop that price down to $10,000, the number of people who have that kind of cash to splurge is pretty small. And how many of them would spend it more than once?
A space hotel, sure, and space business (surely some things are easier to manufacture in space--delicate computer components, perhaps). But the real money comes later, when, finally, they build DisneySpace.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The BBC, in its finite wisdom and boundless love, has remade the classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game with some snazzy graphics and a new Flash interface. Like I need another timesuck.
BBC - Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - The Adventure Game

The poor get organized

An interesting article in the Guardian yesterday talked about a "global movement" of the urban poor. Residents of the world's worst slums and shanty-towns are getting together to organize community projects and negotiate with government authorities.

These federations are remarkable for several reasons. They are organised and managed by poor or homeless people. They are funded by community-managed savings schemes that provide members with credit to fund such things as medical treatment or school books. They also teach the savers how to manage money.

According to the article, many of the managers are women who started out running saving exchanges.
I find this story interesting for two reasons. First, it bodes well for the more established concept of microlending, since it seems to have inspired some people to organize on a larger level. And second, it says something interesting about the movement of knowledge through global society that several of these groups internationally have begun to cooperate.
The article notes that several of the groups have realized that providing detailed maps and statistical information about their neighborhoods gives them a bargaining chip with government--for urban officials, these slums are often black holes, and grassroots groups can help fill them in. They're rapidly learning the kind of high-level technocratic savvy it takes to negotiate effectively with government. Axiom of the day: Technology accelerates the newest things fastest.

It started in Chicago

According to the New York Times, police in Chicago, who already have access to over 2,000 live surveillance feeds, will soon be installing 250 new cameras with very special capabilities.

Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it.

I actually don't find this application of the technology so frightening, but where will it lead? The protection of being "lost in the crowd" is evaporating as we develop new and more sophisticated imaging technologies to find needles in haystacks. In a macro sense, being able to create thousands of fictional creatures on screen in films like The Lord of the Rings is not that far from being able to find one individual in a screen with thousands of faces. In a more specific sense, those two technologies are pretty different. The point is that people are spending millions on image processing and analysis, and clearly they're starting to get pretty good at it. Will credit card companies lobby for access to visual records like this as a way to search for clients who skip out on bills? What will your rights to privacy be in a public space? Circling aimlessly is not allowed any more...

Map of The Simpsons' Springfield

Wow. My faith in academia has been wholly restored by this fantastic map of Springfield, home of The Simpsons. The achievement is remarkable because of course there is no consistency in the show to ensure that a storefront doesn't get put in the wrong place in a future episode. (This is in contrast to the Star Wars universe, where an army of fact-checkers review every new book, cartoon and Wookie sex toy to make certain it fits in with facts already set down. Instead, the two creators of the Simpsons map were no doubt fueled a high-octane cocktail involving youthful arrogance, cheetos, and a Pavlovian addiction caused by their penchant for abusing stimulants while watching taped episodes.) Right. Anyway, just listen to these dedicated people:

The mapping of Springfield began in the Spring of 2001 when we realized that no adequate map of Springfield existed either online or in print. Initially the content was collected from the City Profile and Springfield Vacation pages at The Simpsons Archive, but it has since been expanded by numerous viewings of most episodes of The Simpsons.

And to top it all off, they've added the map to the impressive Harvard Map Collection. "I see your map is as big as mine, young Bart..."

economics of recycling

I've made the moral argument for recycling before: Even if it does cost New York more, it's worth setting the example, because if everyone did it the cost efficiencies would improve. But now there are more convincing economic arguments, according to this story on Wired News. It discusses a new analysis of Nova Scotia's extensive recycling program. Turns out that if you just tally the costs of picking up recycling and subtract the revenue of the material you sell back to manufacturers, you tend to lose money. But when you look at all the other factors, like landfills that last longer because they're filling up more slowly, and the fact that it takes less energy to create something with recycled materials than the original--it all adds up.
But I'm still not moving to Nova Scotia.