On the Road with Wally: Travel Tips from India

Only 31 years ago this week, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were standing on the moon, representing our species on the moon for the first time in history. If you are lucky, some day you will get a chance to read about the moonshot in the best book about it yet written, Apollo: Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. In fact, it’s just one of the several books you can get at the newly-opened Paracelsus Bookshop (catchy name, eh?).

Actually, I overstate my case a little. The Apollo book is out of print now, but it is a great book, and one day it will be back in print and you will be glad I told you about it. Plus, there really is a Paracelsus Bookshop, powered by Amazon, ready to recommend only the highest quality paper-and-ink products for your high quality paper-and-ink needs.

It’s been a busy week here at Star Chamber World Headquarters, because we’re also launching the new Paracelsus Rambles weblog, powered by the friendly folks at Blogger.com. The weblog scene is very big and very entertaining, and if you haven’t heard about it anywhere else yet, then you heard about it here first.

Finally, and as if that weren’t enough, our correspondent from the field, Bendy Wally, has just returned from India, and we have secured for the Star Chamber the exclusive coverage of his trip. Don’t look for it anywhere else on the web, because you just won’t find it. And besides you only have to scroll down the page a little bit to find it here.

Continue reading “On the Road with Wally: Travel Tips from India”

Here are some nifty

Here

are some nifty applets by an Italian gentleman named Fabio Ciucci. These things are usually incredibly annoying, but his are well enough done to be compelling, particularly the ones that pick apart images pixel by pixel, like the water applet.

Two useful free services: QuickTopic and Spyonit. QuickTopic is the new name for the extremely useful service formerly called TakeItOffline. Within seconds, you can spawn a free discussion group. Spyonit watches websites, among other things, so that you don’t have to visit a site often in order to find out that it’s changed. Somebody else watches and then tells you.

Bewitching applets

Many of the applets at bewitched are beautiful, but
the shortcut wins the prize. It’s visual treat that keeps you watching till the very end. Incidentally, the guy behind the work (Martin Wattenberg) also does the SmartMoney Map of the Market visualization, which is an honest-to-goodness jewel of interface design.

Along the same lines as the bewitched.com site, here are some of my favorite visual dynamic toys:
Motion Sketch and
Gravilux, both by Scott Snibbe, and the ever popular
sodaconstructor.

Almost Shakespeare’s Complete Works

HOST: Good afternoon, and welcome to “Good Books,” a show for and about people who like good books. I’m delighted to say that we have a special treat for today’s program. You’ve all heard the old story that a million monkeys, if given enough time randomly banging on typewriters, could reproduce Shakespeare’s complete works. Of course, that’s just a myth to illustrate the nature of randomness, right? Not anymore, apparently, because in our studio today is the spokesmonkey for a million monkey effort that has just published “Almost Shakespeare’s Complete Works.” Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Miles, the Talking Monkey!

[Camera pans to Miles. He is wearing tiny carpal tunnel wrist supports]

MILES: Just Miles, please.

HOST: I’m sorry?

MILES: My name is Miles. Not Miles the Talking Monkey, or Miles the Speaking Simian or anything like that. Just Miles. And thank you for having me on your show.

HOST: Oh yes, I see. Well Miles, this book of yours is causing quite a stir at the bookstore. How long has this been in the works?

MILES: It all started years ago with that New Yorker cartoon. You know the one where the dog is using the Internet? I’d been thinking about the whole “million monkeys” problem, and when I saw that cartoon, I thought to myself, this is it.

HOST: So the Internet was critical to your success in replicating this four hundred year old opus?

MILES: Absolutely. I’d been working as a web consultant in the DC area, so I was keenly aware of the potential of distributed computing. After a few months and some funding from George Soros we had monkeys of every species typing away: squirrel monkeys, spider monkeys, capuchins, macaques, howlers, …

HOST: Chimpanzees?

MILES: Please. Those arrogant bastards and their superior no-tails attitude. They’re not real monkeys, and frankly, I don’t need the hassle.

HOST: Gorillas?

MILES: Also not monkeys. At any rate, a gorilla couldn’t type his way out of a paper bag, randomly or otherwise. This is a 100% monkey effort.

HOST: I see. Now perhaps you can tell us about the title: “Almost Shakespeare’s Complete Works.” Why “almost”?

MILES: There simply wasn’t enough time to get every last comma in place. We had hundreds of thousands of monkeys pounding keyboards, thousands of copy editors, and an ambitious publishing schedule. I’m satisfied that, given a few hundred more years, we’d have nailed the Bard from beginning to end. Nevertheless, I think it’s a very creditable rendition of his work. Beyond that, our little interstitial peccadillos bring a certain arch nature to the work, an insouciant monkey sensibility that, frankly, I believe improves on the original.

HOST: Improves on Shakespeare?

MILES: Just so.

HOST: Let’s look at an example or two to see what we’re talking about. Let’s see: “To be or not to bee, tHat is the question.” So far so good, but then, “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the soilings annd arfrgub bahbah ba shgjckj festivvfalc hot coeds await yourr callsxhjtyp alkss.” It goes on for pages and pages like this. Would you call this an improvement?

MILES: You happen to have picked a bad example.

HOST: It’s the single most well-known passage in the English language!

MILES: And as a result, horribly clichéd, no? I see this as a sort of Dada-esque arpeggio, a riff on the expectations of the cultural elite.

HOST: Yes, but fifteen pages of nonsense sprinkled with obscenities and 1-800 numbers strains a reader’s patience. Some of these differences seem a little less than random. For instance, this is from act five, scene one of The Tempest. Miranda is speaking, and she says: “O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! O brave new world, that has such monkeys in’t!” Or this, from the witches’ scene, in act four of Macbeth: “Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat banana banana banannabanana bananas banana banana…” and so on.

MILES: [smiling, eyes closed]Sheer poetry! I tell you, those monkeys can write.

HOST: Tell me, Miles, were you part of a government experiment that made you really smart?

MILES: Sadly I’ve come to expect this last question of yours. This is my sixteenth stop on this interminable book tour, and would you believe every last goddamned interviewer has asked me about the government experiment. There was no experiment! I’m just a typical monkey web consultant with literary aspirations. Is that so odd?

HOST: I wouldn’t expect you could talk about it.

MILES: There was NO experiment! Can we please talk about the book…

HOST: Of course there wasn’t. Now I admit this book or yours is pretty close to what Shakespeare wrote, but who’s to say that you didn’t just start with the original and work backwards? [Miles scampers off to the left] Miles… Miles! Come down from the lighting supports please. Come down from there.

MILES: [muffled, off camera] You’re as bad as those insufferable chimps! Nothing good enough from a monkey, eh? Go on with your “monkey business” jokes and your goddamned Ebola virus slander. I’ve had enough. Take that!

[monkey waste comes winging in from the top left of the screen, narrowly missing the host]

HOST: JESUS CHRIST! I have never…! [Bobbing and dodging] That’s all the time we have this week. Join us next week on “Good Books” when we interview the extraordinarily prolific author Anonymous.

[End of broadcast]