Category: Uncategorized

So the Red Sox managed to pull out a win in Game Five, and I was in a good mood. Then I went upstairs to complete my upgrade to Movable Type 3.1, and in the process I became convinced that I had completely hosed my entire site and database. Then I was in a bad mood. In fact, I was very nearly frantic, and it was in this state of near despair that I decided I really needed to read the directions very very carefully. For those of you following along from home, here is the important passage:

“If you are upgrading from version 2.6, 2.61, 2.62, 2.63, 2.64, 2.65, 2.66 or 2.661: Run mt-upgrade30.cgi, then mt-upgrade31.cgi.”

It did NOT go on to say that “if you don’t do this, you will become wedged in a most horrifying and spectacularly nonlinear fashion and your account will seem to vanish until you jolly well go back and get it right, you enormous butthead.” I may suggest they add this passage to the documentation for sensible though occasionally impatient folk like me. Good night.

Alas, Game One was not a success for the Red Sox. Still, the seventh inning was a balm to the damaged pride of any Boston fan. Want to show your support for Johnny Damon and company? From megnut I came across this purveyor of fine sporting goods: The Red Seat. The Red Seat website is a labor of love put together by True Believers who happen to have made some fun t-shirts. Personal favorite: Fenway. Building character since 1912. I like their attitude. Here’s their take on one popular t-shirt that sells in and around the Old Yard.

Enlightenment #2. Any shirt that has that New York team’s name on it is a shirt about them. Doesn’t matter if it says that they suck. You’re thinking about them, aren’t you? Our stuff is a little different.

I completely agree. Incidentally, the actual red seat is literally a seat painted red in the bleachers at Fenway where Ted Williams planted a 502 foot home run way back in 1946. I imagine he’s sitting there in the dark right now, waiting for the lights to come up on Game Three. Go Sox!

The Vice Presidential debate is old news by now, but Rob ‘n’ Lisa of CoffeeCzar.com fame have put together a dandy page comparing Dick Cheney to Old Man Potter of Potterville Bedford Falls from “It’s A Wonderful Life.” The physical resemblance is uncanny, you have to admit.

I thought watching the debate was like watching the puppeteer come out from behind his box and speak directly to the audience. You could almost see W. quietly hanging from his peg in the dark backstage area. As my friend Eric says, the debate reminded him that we’re all just a heart attack away from George W. Bush being president of the United States.

Oops, I almost forgot You forgot Poland.

Discover magazine has a particularly good article this month on the bacteria that hitch rides on planetary exploration missions like the recent Mars rover. Titled “Seeding the Universe,” it is unfortunately not available for free reading. Here’s the basic idea: try as we might, we just can’t completely sterilize the probes that we send to other planets. In the short term, this means that a hypersensitive life-detection machine on the probe might accidentally detect something that came along for the ride, the equivalent of mistaking your reflection for somebody else. The long term prospect is much more interesting: Suppose the imported bacteria grow and thrive in their new environment? And suppose the next probe you send detects life left behind from your last visit? These issues alarm astrobiologists (that’s the fancy new word for scientists who look for life on other planets) enough to make them extra careful when assembling new spacecraft. They clean the facility often and wear surgical scrubs when they go inside. But it’s hopeless. Bacteria are everywhere. One astrobiologist in the article went looking for bugs in the “clean room” and discovered that not only are there plenty of bacteria there, but the ultraclean environment is ideally suited to select for hardy bacteria that can survive the rigors of spaceflight! In other words, the clean room is like combat training for troops getting ready to board the ships for Normandy.

If your goal is to prevent the spread of terrestrial life, you really can’t win. The only way not to infect our neighboring planets is not to go there, and hey! it’s too late for that now. I used to think it would be cool to introduce bacteria to places like Venus and Mars and watch what happens. But more and more I have become convinced this process has already begun. Like the fly that spits on you whenever he lands, we’re busy dirtying everyplace we alight. Of course if life originated on Mars, as some have suggested, then all we’re really doing is visiting the old homestead.

Bonus link: Astrobiology, “the only peer-reviewed journal that explores the secrets of life’s origin, evolution, distribution, and destiny in the universe.” Subscribe and read articles like Discrimination of Aqueous and Aeolian Paleoenvironments by Atomic Force Microscopy – A Database for the Characterization of Martian Sediments

Last February (back when he still updated his blog) the Coffee Czar predicted that everybody would soon be talking about Flickr. I don’t how he got wise to Flickr, but a recommendation from the Coffee Czar is good enough for me, so I padded down the wire to Flickr and signed up for a free account. Even so, for a while I didn’t get what the big deal was. There are plenty of free photo sites out there. I’m already signed up for Ofoto. Why is this one different?

It’s different because they understand their model and they’ve done their usability homework. The model is sharing photos to build communities. They’re not trying to sell you photographic prints. They want you to use pictures as a means of interacting with others. This means making it easy to upload, tag, and share images is one of their most important objectives. Sure enough, it’s dead simple to do these things with Flickr.

Here’s a good example of the kind of fun thing you can do easily with Flickr. I can’t think of any other online photo service that would make this so pleasant:
London bus ticket machine, plus bus and bus user (to help explain the whole arcane process). Read all the little text boxes and you’ll get a whole story about life in London.

Now if we can only get the Coffee Czar to come out of blog limbo, maybe he’ll explain how he came across Flickr in the first place.

With a 3-D printer rapid prototyping machine, you can now create just about anything you can mathematically describe. It doesn’t have to be practical or easy to machine. If you can picture it, you can build it. (If you’re wondering how in the world 3-D printers work, Z Corp has a nifty animated explanation.)

But what about unreal, unphysical things? What about all that weird stuff that M.C. Escher drew, the endless staircases and impossible buildings, can you make those? That’s what some folks at Technion University were wondering. Armed with some funky blueprints and a machine from Z Corp, they actually built some objects they collectively call Escher for Real. They’ve also published some nice animations that show how these “impossible” objects are made possible by some grotesque contortions that vanish magically if you look at them from exactly the right angle. Rotating them from the magic viewing position reveals the trick and can be oddly disorienting, like walking around the famous Ames Room illusion.

Yesterday while I was at Tower Records in Harvard Square I noticed they were playing some fun reggae/dance hall music. “What album is that?” I asked the cashier. He showed me the album: Beenie Man: Back to Basics. I like Beenie Man. I have a few of his albums. Why not buy it? I found the album on the shelves, which took a while, and discovered it cost $18.99 (although I see it’s only $14.99 on the Tower site). That was too much for me to make a spontaneous purchase. If it was available on Apple’s iTunes store, I could get all 15 tracks for $15.

In fact, you can get it from Apple. And there’s a fair amount of added value too. It’s easy to preview all the songs. You don’t have to buy every song. You get related music recommendations. Much more music is available.

We’re always hearing how freeloading teenagers are stealing music and ripping off struggling artists. The sad part of my story is that I was happy to spend some money on music today, but it was way too easy for Apple to get it instead of Tower. In other words, a place like Tower gets whacked both by freeloaders and casual buyers. I’ll be sorry to see them go (they have a good magazine rack!) but I can’t imagine that they’ll last much longer.

Incidentally, I think Apple is missing a big opportunity by sequestering their music store inside their iTunes software. When I went to make a link to Beenie Man’s latest album, I couldn’t find a URL to link to. My first thought was actually to link to Amazon, but then I decided to throw some traffic Tower’s way.

For a long time I have been an admirer and occasional purchaser of The Comics Journal, an improbably entertaining critical journal of the comics industry published by Fantagraphics. I enjoy reading about the how the world looks from the artist’s viewpoint, the problems they face, the way they go about solving them, the dirt they dish on other artists. The interviews in the Comics Journal are often extraordinarily intimate. And long! I find myself reading and thinking: this must be a labor of love… it is absurdly impractical any other way you look at it. The journal is thick, well-produced, crowded with dangerously long articles, interviews, and harangues. It must sell in tiny quantities. But what great stuff. In addition to the Journal, Fantagraphics publishes comics. The single fact that they publish Chris Ware’s weird and wonderful Quimby the Mouse is enough to justify their place of greatness among comics publishers.

I have wondered what kind of operation could hold this enterprise together, so I was pleased to find this article about Fantagraphics in the Seattle Weekly: Saved by the Beagle. The title refers to the fact that, in securing the rights to publish the Complete Peanuts, Fantagraphics should be able to bank on steady revenues for the next ten years. I’m glad to hear that.

The biological analogy for computer viruses gets ever stronger. It used to be that “virus” was somewhat over-the-top as a description for the simple software hacks that passed for malware. As the world of software grows more complex, however, the description gets ever more apt. Now we begin to see that there are computer-health public policy issues associated with mass immunizations just as there are with “real” viruses. If you don’t get vaccinated for polio, not only are you at risk yourself, but you endanger other unvaccinated people. You are not simply foolish; you are a public health menace. Many vaccines are thus mandated under penalty of law.

Now we find that viruses are being used to infect and enslave (zombify) unprotected computers across cyberspace. Gangs of zombie computers can then be harnessed to do serious mischief. See this article in New Scientist for a discussion of zombie computers: Thousands of zombie PCs created daily.

Ben Hammersley has also written on the concept of two emerging cultures. One part of society knows how to prevent spam, stop time-wasting hoaxes, and eliminate computer virus infections. The other part is woefully ignorant of these things, and, here’s the new part, can now make the smug clever folk very sick. My sick computer can now do you real harm. Are federally mandated computer vaccines far behind?

Maybe you remember Chris Lydon from his days as the wise voice of the Connection on NPR. He’s an excellent interviewer and an entertaining prose stylist, but he’s also enough of a curmudgeon to get himself tossed out of his Connection job at WBUR. It’s too bad, because he’s still doing great stuff, but I don’t know how many people notice. As far as I can tell, one of the principal outlets for his journalism (in addition to his MP3 interviews) is his blog over at the Harvard Law School. I think he got the blog religion from Dave Winer some time back. He may well be regarded some day as one of the vanguard of the new wave of journalism, but I imagine it gets a little lonely on the frontier…

Anyway, I enjoyed his dissection of the Republican National Convention. His words about the building of a Roman-style American Empire both amused and disturbed. Is Bush, as Susan Sontag says, the Augustus to Clinton’s Julius Caesar? Here’s what Chris Lydon has to say about it.

There’s more than a whiff of Caesarism in mid-town this week, and a lot of the convention Republicans are high on it. You catch some of it on TV: the rigid scripting, the air of reverence around Bushes young and old, the endless strumming of war themes, the laugh-out-loud foolishness of the rhetorical over-reaching–First Lady Laura Bush’s remark, for example, that her husband had liberated 50-million people around the world… that the happy schoolgirls of Afghanistan are now safely back at their desks.

Being the world’s only superpower sounded like such a good gig at the time.