Archives for December 2007
I’m thinking of taking on this project in 2008: taking a photo every day for a year. Kathleen should be interested in this photo project.
Merry Christmas!
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It’s @319 and I should go to bed
Swatch Internet Time. Reminds me of the exciting times in the late 90s when it truly started becoming apparent that distance is meaningless. Wikipedia:
Internet Time is a concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. … Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called “.beats”[.]
The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation; as an example, “@248″ would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight … or 4:57:07.2 UTC.
Despite the ridiculous trailing dot and the fact that there were no units smaller than a .beat, his eminence Nicholas Negroponte endorsed the system: “Internet Time is absolute time for everybody. Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.”
A testament to the success of this marketing ploy: “The clock applet in the GNOME desktop can be set to display time in this manner. PHP’s date() function has a format specifier ‘B’ which returns the Swatch Internet Time notation for a given time stamp. It is also used as a time reference on ICQ[.]”
I’m digging the idea of edited aggregation lately. Here is fabsearch.com, which compiles hotspots featured in a set of hip media outlets. “Think of us as your private secretary who reads glossy magazines, speaks with local trend setters, then reports valuable info to you.”
France’s high court ruled today that Amazon must stop offering free delivery of books. “Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France.” Not charging for delivery meant that Amazon was offering a discount above the allowed 5 percent. If you’re unclear how this is terrible for consumers and an insane public policy, you can read about price controls here.
Today comes news that the new Jackass movie will be released on the web for free and then later sold on DVD. Also today, and unrelated to the Jackass announcement, the NYT runs an article about books and comics that began life as free content on the web (think postsecret, Tucker Max, and the Julie/Julia Project). Most of this content is still available for free on the web, but folks nevertheless want to own the book.
Would you fall all the way through a theoretical hole in the earth? According to physicist Mark Shegelski, “The simple answer is, theoretically, yes.” He explains:
First, let us ignore friction, the rotation of the earth, and other complications, and focus on the case of a hole or tunnel entering the earth at one point, going straight through its center, and coming back to the surface at the opposite side of the planet. If we treat the mass distribution in the earth as uniform, one would fall into the tunnel and then come back up to the surface on the other side in a manner much like the motion of a pendulum swinging down and up again. Assuming that the journey began with zero initial speed (simply dropping into the hole), your speed would increase and reach a maximum at the center of the earth, and then decrease until you reached the surface, at which point the speed would again be zero. The gravitational force exerted on the traveler would be proportional to his distance from the center of the earth: it’s at a maximum at the surface and zero at the center. The total time required for this trip would be about 42 minutes.Apparently you’d then fall back down the hole and this would repeat endlessly.
How have I not heard of scribd.com before? It looks like the Napster of books. Here is a full copy of Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great. Here is Getting Things Done by David Allen.
Marjoe Gortner: Huckster or hero?
Recently I saw the terrific 1972 documentary Marjoe recommended by Christopher Hitchens in God is not Great. It tells the story of Marjoe Gortman, a child preacher who since the age of four was trotted around by his parents at tent revivals to much (lucrative) fanfare. As Hitchens explains,
A decade or so later, Mr. Gortner exacted the best possible revenge for his stolen and empty childhood, and decided to do the general public a favor in order to make up for his conscious fraudulence. He invited a film crew to follow him as he ostensibly “returned” to preach the gospel, and took the trouble to explain how all the tricks are pulled. This is how you induce motherly women (he was a handsome lad) to part with their savings. This is how you time the music to create an ecstatic effect. This is when you speak of how Jesus visited you personally. Here is how you put invisible ink on your forehead, in the shape of a cross, so that it will suddenly show up when you start perspiring. This is when you really move in for the kill. He keeps all his promises, telling the film’s director in advance what he can and will do and then going out into the auditorium to enact it with absolute conviction. People weep and yell, and collapse in spasms and fits, shrieking their savior’s name. Cynical, coarse, brutish old men and women wait for the psychological moment to demand money, and start counting it gleefully before the charade of the “service” is even over. … The film Marjoe won an Academy Award in 1972, and has made absolutely no difference at all. The mills of the TV preachers continue to grind, and the poor continue to finance the rich, just as if the glittering temples and palaces of Las Vegas had been built by the money of those who won rather than those who lost.
I’m not sure on whom exactly Hitchens thinks Gortman exacted his revenge. I pity his marks as much as I pity him. Related to Hitchens’s point that the film made no difference, I was most interested in the evangelical’s reaction once Gortner’s true self was revealed. Unfortunately that isn’t in the film. The only info on Wikipedia is this: “At the time of the film’s release he generated considerable press, but the movie was never shown in theaters in the Southern United States, based on the fears of the distributor over the outrage it would cause in the Bible Belt.” I can’t find much else, even on Westlaw.
After he left the preaching circuit, he recorded an unsuccessful album and portrayed a series of minor characters in TV and the movies, including stints on Kojak, Fantasy Island, and The A-Team. After the 1995 entry on his IMDB page, the trail goes cold, and one of the top Google results for his name is a page titled “Dead or Alive? - Marjoe Gortner,” which doesn’t have any answers. If anyone has any information, I’d be curious to learn more. Here are some excerpts from the documentary:
Facebook gets its first lobbyist in DC. Well that didn’t take long.
I live-blogged the Senate hearing on e-government and transparency today over at TLF.
Can a church get too popular?
The Washington Post had a long piece yesterday on the Apple Store phenomena and its possible decline.
Not 18 months ago, cultural essayists and architecture critics would wander into flagship Apple Stores around the world (SoHo! Fifth Avenue! Regent Street!) and go long and poetic about Apple’s revolution in hipster elegance, the clean lines, the retail frontier. And indeed, these are beautiful places, pluralistic to the point that you can use their bathroom, and check your e-mail on their display Macs, and be among friends you always dreamed of having, somewhere. It was a glimpse at a world where everyone is smart, and agreeably diverse, and able to spend lots of money. Now you have to brace yourself to walk into the Apple Store. The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?
Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?
Can you smother a store to death?
Very much worth a read if you’re a fanboy or interested in commercial culture. I love how the essayist, Hank Stuever, works in the Apple-as-religion meme:
The specialists and geniuses are in their black Apple T-shirts, wearing name tags (Adam, Matt, Luis and the endless supply of Ryans, and an occasional Jen).
And talkingrillyfast. Rillyrlyfst. Allfthem. Glare-eyed, too happy with themselves, like Jesus people holding up one finger on 1970s street corners. They know you aren’t One of Them, but they forgive you. Nothing expresses both virtue and contempt like forgiveness. That’s life in church. They know what Steve Jobs wants of them, and they live to serve.
Should Facebook members be able to sell their own ads?
The NYT Bits blog has a post about Weblo, a service that lets Facebook members place and make money from ads on their profile pages. According to Weblo, it’s a moral right.But Weblo’s chief executive Rocky Mirza says that people should be able to sell space on their pages on Facebook (and a variety of other sites like MySpace and YouTube) because they are the content creators on those sites. Facebook would have no content if not for its users, he said, which makes it different from media organizations, for example, that have content because they pay reporters. … “Obviously Facebook is providing the infrastructure, so they can place ads on the left side,” Mr. Mirza said. “But users should be getting paid for the time they spend on the Internet and the friends they draw to their pages.”
Generous of him to let Facebook have the left-hand side of their own site. Isn’t this a matter of contract? If you use Facebook, it’s because you’ve accepted their terms. Even as a moral matter, aren’t you getting something in return from Facebook already? Namely the free networking service.
Posthumous E-Mail. Several services that will email your friends with a personal message when you die. I wonder if there’s a service that will let you set up a trust fund to keep your website running perpetually.
RonPaulBlimp.com - Seriously. “We must receive $200,000 in sponsorships by midnight on Friday for the blimp to be in Boston by December 15th!!! Please sponsor the Ron Paul Blimp Tour now!” It gets better: “Imagine.. the mainstream media is mesmerized as the image of the Ron Paul blimp is shown to tens of millions of Americans throughout the day (and throughout the month).” I’m already mesmerized.
Update: Brad Smith, former FEC commissioner and a Romney adviser, is on the Ron Paul Blimp legal defense team. According to Politico: “Smith is among the leading opponents of campaign finance laws, and the blimp plan offers common cause on that front with Paul’s anti-regulation supporters, as well as an opportunity to set potentially far-reaching FEC precedent.”
Yojimbo rant
Bare Bones software recently released a new version of Yojimbo. It’s been described as having “[t]ons of new features and improvements[.]” That’s true and it’s really a great application, but I’m sad to see that what I think is a very needed feature is still missing. I’m talking about truly smart collections to take advantage of Yojimbo’s tagging power.
Apart from filetype folders (that are called “Smart Collections” in the app), Yojimbo lets users create two other kinds of file “collections.” The first type is a regular “collection,” which is basically just a folder into which you can drop any of your files. The second is a “tag collection.” These are akin to smart folders because they display any file tagged with the keywords you choose. Here’s what creating a new “tag collection” looks like:
The problem here is that you can only make collections that contain all tags you list. There is no way for you to get a collection with any of the tags you list. This almost makes the program useless to me.
As an academic research, I use Yojimbo to keep track of source material. One topic I study are spectrum commons. In my research I have turned up many articles relevant to my work that deal with commons, though not necessarily spectrum commons (i.e. land or water commons). I tag these with the keyword “commons.” I’ve also turned up relevant papers that are about spectrum but have nothing to do with commons, so I tag these “spectrum.” Now, you’d think that I’d be able to create a smart tag collection that would display everything tagged either “spectrum” or “commons,” or both “spectrum” and “commons,” but no dice.
Over a year ago I sent a feature request to Bare Bones and they replied saying that they were working on this. The issue was also brought up on the Yojimbo discussion list last November. It’s been ten months since the last time Bare Bones software updated Yojimbo, and the new 1.5 update is the first point upgrade in almost a year. Please, Bare Bones, throw me a bone.
Amazon Kindle a private spectrum commons?
I’m updating my spectrum commons paper and came across the suggestion I’ve made that you could have a spectrum commons emerge in a regime of property rights in spectrum. The most obvious way this could happen is if a device manufacturer bought a band of spectrum and let anyone use it so long as they used a device made by the manufacturer. It’s sort of the reverse of the more common approach where you’re given a device for free and you pay for using the spectrum. The key thing about a private commons is that the owner of the spectrum manages its use, what technology is employed, how, etc.So this is all to say that I think there’s a great new example of this private commons principle at work: the Amazon Kindle. Buy it for the one-time price of $400 and you get anytime anywhere access to its EVDO data network. Of course, there’s always this:
Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to, (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.
Allez cuisine!
One of my favorite things about Iron Chef America (and there are many) is the ham that is The Chairman. Each time after he’s on screen I ask Kathleen, “Who is that guy?” and I inform her of my intention to find out and start a fan club. Consider this the first step.Turns out he’s Mark Dacascos, an actor and martial arts dude. Of his extensive action and kung-fu film repertoire I can’t say I’ve heard, let alone seen any of them. Interestingly he played the lead in a short-lived TV version of The Crow. Here is the official Mark Dacascos website. Here he is in the trailer for “I Am Omega,” which looks way more fun than the new Will Smith remake.
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This is the personal site of Jerry Brito, a lawyer and writer in Washington, D.C. He’s an academic researcher and the creator of Unclutterer and several other blogs. More »
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