| sneedle flipsock |
18 june 2004: joy-to-stuff ratio |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This week:
StargazingA multimedia tour of the nine planets, a 12-minute wander through space (requires Flash/Shockwave and the timing depends on your Internet connection) and Ian Musgrave's Venus transit report now has pictures and other new stuff. Seanbaby comments that he'd "like to think there’s a secret government prison camp for the type of person who sees 387 ripoffs of All Your Base and decides to make a 388th." Nevertheless, he bravely revisits 10 recent Internet fads guaranteed to make you smile, if only in a wincing way: relive the adventures of web stars like the Star Wars kid, Tourist Guy, Bonsai Kitten, Tron Guy... 18 June 2004 | top of page Closing numbersGoodbye to a good guy: Ray Charles, gonna miss you. More Ray:
Flipsock friend Andrew asks: will somebody ever love George Bush as much as Ronnie Raygun? Sing along with Da Doo Ron Ron and ponder... (requires Shockwave/Flash) thanks Andrew | 17 June 2004 | top of page Mixed bagOne for the programmers among us: how to use SpamAssassin's Bayesian filters with mail.app to continually update your defences against junk e-mail. Man beats horse over 22 miles. Wordspy has lots of new words and phrases for you to play with: information environmentalism, undecorating (the opposite of neglectic decor), joy-to-stuff ratio, rurban, micropolitan, ideopolis, media culpa, bozon (see also cuton), bluejacking, wrackground image...
Seems I'm not alone: actually, I'm one of the 14 per cent (see infographic, right). In five months the new Museum of Modern Art building opens in New York. Already the site has been the scene of one exciting installation created by the FBI in early 2002. Consisting of a listening device in a shed on the construction site, the MOMA installation ran for four months and produced 61 criminal charges against 24 defendants. Dick Wolf will love it. More language: some IT folks from Unseen University (where I work) attended a Microsoft seminar recently and each received a free USB memory stick for their efforts. The schwag came with a manual that includes this section:
17 June 2004 | top of page Glen or Glenda, reduxLook, a person's life is their own business, and I normally don't go in for celebrity gossip. Nevertheless, one story Out There had the power to make me look twice: it certainly could help explain why the Warshowski brothers, writers of "The Matrix" and its sequels, are so media-shy. Here's hoping Linda finds what she's looking for, and that it's worth the trouble of the search. via Doc Searls' blog | 17 June 2004 | top of page Who was that masked child riding a mop?In "the freshly bituminised Canberra suburb of Garran... Zorro fought tyranny and injustice, traversing the lawn on his faithful mop. They were dangerous days. Zorro almost lost his life once, in a shopping mall, when his cape was eaten by an escalator." 16 June 2004 | top of page Dangerous democracy"Democracy is dangerous anywhere," wrote Bernard Lewis. "We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured." 16 June 2004 | top of page Successful afterlifeDeath is no object for a truly successful writer. 16 June 2004 | top of page Making a list and checking it twiceThe Economist (newspaper) recently supported the Copenhagen Consensus project, "an unusual, ambitious and, some have argued, misguided attempt to set priorities among a range of ideas for improving the lives of people living in developing countries." With a notional budget of US$50 billion, a panel of experts came up with a prioritsed list of Things To Do (Urgent). The top four:
Three proposals about global warming were ranked as "bad" project ideas. 16 June 2004 | top of page The importance of... (a recurring Sneedle Flipsock motif)The importance of... quoting in context, with ellipses to indicate where you've left stuff out. Or, how this objection to killing people by a specific method...
...became this generalised endorsement of violence:
Churchill is so often misunderstood. 16 June 2004 | top of page PerksWhat a lurk this 'international visiting scholar' thing is. Recently I attended a web usability seminar by a visiting academic who presented the results of a research project that started with a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between a content inventory and a list of user tasks. (You web people should know what I'm talking about: a content inventory is a list of the different types of text and images (and other stuff) you might find on a web site; a task list is a description of a person's goal that could be accomplished using a web site.) This academic implied that one of his postgrad students had completed a master degree based in part on this flawed research. He also said the results of the research had been passed on to the relevant webmasters at his university, but the recommendations had not been implemented. Yet he seemed to think this was a valid piece of applied, real-world research. Yeesh. Adding insult to injury, this month Flipsock friend Trevor was invited to another computer science seminar given by a visiting academic. The advertising flyer included this gem of a description:
Apart from the paradigm being far from new, what the hell was this woman going to talk about? OK, she would be addressing a specialist audience, but that's no reason to write an advertisement in wafflese. The seminar organisers must have downloaded a copy of Eurosoft's Waffle Magic, pour les enhancements d'Anglais expressionism. thanks Trevor | thanks David Allen via Science Matters | 16 June 2004 | top of page Shutting up now, sirWhat a motormouth I am. Today I had to either shut up or suffer pain and coughing, and it's been quite the strain to behave like a woman of few words. 15 June 2004 | top of page Happy NewSaw a beaut play last week, "Happy New" by Brendan Cowell. Disturbing, funny, provoking and weird. Actors Dai Paterson, Angus Sampson and Jude Beaumont are teriffic, and the writing is both powerful and at times poetic. The two acts are set in a single room, which feels appropriately claustrophobic: clever sound and lighting design allow the external world to push up against, and occasionally encroach upon, this agoraphobic little area of safety. Read Troy's review, then ring up and book yourself some tickets. "Happy New" is showing at the Store Room (North Fitzroy) until 20 June. Thanks to Andrew, Justina and Troy for a great night out :-) 15 June 2004 | top of page TuringIf Alan Turing were alive today, the United States' military intelligence agencies would not employ him. Nor did the British fully appreciate the man with the very big mind. I'm enchanted by the story told by an ex-Bletchley Park employee at an Australian Science Communicators get-together last year. During the war, in those days of air raids and the very real danger of gas attacks, Turing lived in a village a few miles from Bletchley Park. Because he suffered terrible hayfever, he wore a gas mask as he bicycled to work each day. Imagine how the villagers felt! 15 June 2004 | top of page Lord worshipped might he be, what a beard hast thou got!There's still time to grow a modest entry for the World Beard and Moustache Championships to be held in Berlin next year. Before entering, cat owners should consider the latest scientific research into feline reactions to bearded men. 15 June 2004 | top of page Now they tell usOn 26 May 2004 the New York Times published a lengthy editors' note acknowledging that the paper's pre-war coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." Despite journalists Walter Pincus and Bob Woodward having well-placed sources telling them the CIA's evidence was flimsy, the Washington Post did not challenge the government's intention to invade Iraq and search for weapons. Instead the newspapers published all the news that was unfit to print. Hmm. How different would today's world be if the USA had continued north from Kuwait in the Gulf War and invaded Iraq in 1991? This thoughtlet was prompted by the review above and by Flipsock friendster Troy who has been delving into other alternate histories. 15 June 2004 | top of page Creative managementCreative management: How do you measure the creativity of a company? Is creativity management just another fad? Adam Spencer comperes a discussion between Microsoft Australia CEO Steve Vamos, SBS chair Carla Zampatti, Art Gallery of NSW director Edmud Capon, Audi Australia CEO GRaham Hardy, restaurateur Kylie Kwong, and advertiser and self-help author Siimon [sic] Reynolds. Digital news providers let fallacies about convergence and traditional media dominate their thinking. Even the PC/Web-browser-based news delivery model is ill-considered: it simply emulates the old print model of communicating news, and it's a doomed business model. The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) can offer alternatives, as can paying attention to industry trends: news sites that don't offer even a front-page headline RSS feed risk becoming irrelevant not only to bloggers who can drive traffic with a mention of a story but to increasingly savvy news consumers. 15 June 2004 | top of page Michaelangelo's hidden libraryAt Florence's Laurentian Library in 1774, the shelf of desk 74 was overloaded with medical tracts. It broke. While repairing it, workers found a red-and-white geometric terracotta pavement, hidden for 183 years beneath the raised wooden dais under the desks. The author of this essay doesn't know the difference between enormousness (very big) and enormity (very horrible), but otherwise is pretty good at describing the Laurentian paved floor's intricacies and mysteries. 15 June 2004 | top of page Superconductor researcher's PhD withdrawnFired from Bell Laboratories in 2002, Jan Hendrik Schoen has now lost his doctoral title. The doctorate was revoked by the University of Constance in Germany because Schoen had caused "the biggest data fabrication scandal in physics in the last 50 years". A review committee concluded that he made up or altered data 16 times while working in the fields of superconductivity and molecular electronics. Findings including his research were published in Science, Nature and Applied Physics Letters. Following Vice-Chancellor Rory Hume's departure, the Council of the University of NSW has endorsed the findings of the Brennan report, confirming that medical researcher Bruce Hall was guilty of publishing material with "a deliberate intent to deceive or in reckless disregard for the truth". However, the university will take no further action against Hall. thanks to Zero Sum via Science Matters | 15 June 2004 | top of page |
2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
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