Multi Medium

More Credit Where Credit Is Due

Hooray for my representative!

Internet access may not be as important as water. But it’s now right up there with hot water.

Yet given how important broadband is to the future of our economy, our educational system, even our democracy, there is amazingly little public discussion about it.

For too long, that conversation has been happening behind closed doors among self-appointed experts, deep-pocketed lobbyists and politicians who either believe the Internet is “a series of tubes” or don’t use it at all.

A notable exception is U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who’s helping to bring the entire Federal Communications Commission to a public hearing tomorrow at Carnegie Mellon University.

He voted the right way on FISA, too.

For those of you who want to attend:

The FCC hearing on the future of the Internet will start Monday, July 21 at 4 p.m. in McConomy Auditorium at Carnegie Mellon University. For more information: www.savetheinternet.com

Add comment July 20th, 2008 at 04:56pm Posted by Eli

Important And Useful Chart

I don’t know about you, but I have found this flowchart to be very handy on many occasions:

Sometimes I need help keeping this stuff straight.

(From GraphJam)

1 comment July 15th, 2008 at 07:02am Posted by Eli

Holy Cameos, Patman!

Okay, Pat Leahy is officially one of my favorite senators now:

The senator steps forward. “We’re not intimidated by you thugs,” he says. The man, saying, “You remind me of my father — I hated my father,” grabs the senator’s head, and thrusts a knife to his face. The senator freezes, eyes wide.

Not your typical Capitol Hill brouhaha. No, this scene is pure Hollywood, straight out of the new Batman movie, “The Dark Knight.” But that really is the senior senator from Vermont: Patrick J. Leahy — Democrat, Judiciary Committee chairman and lifelong Batman fan — has a cameo in the film and gets to be held at knifepoint by Heath Ledger’s Joker.

(…)

Batman became his favorite superhero because “he has no superpowers,” Mr. Leahy said. “He had to use his own brains and his own knowledge. He could have had an entirely different life. As a billionaire, he could have done anything.”

Mr. Leahy had a nonspeaking cameo in the 1997 film “Batman and Robin,” did a voice-over for the part of a governor in a Batman cartoon, and wrote the prefaces for a “Batman” anthology and a Batman comic book about the danger of land mines. Once he was spotted doing wheelies on his grandson’s toy Batmobile down the long marble hall outside his Senate office.

(…)

The filming of Mr. Leahy’s scene in a Chicago restaurant last summer took “all night long,” he said. Mr. Ledger would “punch or throw me halfway across the room,” and Mr. Leahy was propped up by another actor “with an arm like an oak tree” who was “brandishing a gun in my face.”

It took the senator a couple dozen tries before he got his line right.

“We tried it two different ways — one was authoritative, the other one was with a lot of fear in my voice,” Mr. Leahy said. Ultimately, he was directed to act like the prosecutor he once was, with a take-charge attitude.

So how did Mr. Leahy manage to find his character’s motivation? Was he thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2004 used profanity to curse Mr. Leahy on the Senate floor?

“No, I wasn’t visualizing Dick Cheney,” Mr. Leahy said. “They can’t use that dialogue in a PG-13 movie.”

I think we need more Batman fans in Congress.  Maybe even the White House.

2 comments July 13th, 2008 at 11:36am Posted by Eli

Even Bill Gates Hates Microsoft!

This is great.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Microsoft blogger found an e-mail from Bill Gates to the rest of Microsoft senior management from 2003, complaining about the awful design and total unusability of Windows and the Microsoft website.  Some highlights:

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

(…)

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

(…)

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

(…)

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

(…)

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

(…)

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

(…)

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

On the one hand, I think it’s great that Bill Gates has the same kind of awful, frustrating experiences with Microsoft that the rest of us Windows users do (shut it, Mac & Linux people).  On the other hand, it’s pretty pathetic that five years later hardly anything has changed.

(h/t Engadget)

4 comments June 26th, 2008 at 11:39am Posted by Eli

More Obama Rumors

Christopher Beam at Slate offers up some rumors that Obama should encourage:

Barack Obama wears a FLAG PIN at all times. Even in the shower.

(…)

Barack Obama is a PATRIOTIC AMERICAN. He has one HAND over his HEART at all times. He occasionally switches when one arm gets tired, which is almost never because he is STRONG.

(…)

Barack Obama goes to church every morning. He goes to church every afternoon. He goes to church every evening. He is IN CHURCH RIGHT NOW.

Barack Obama’s new airplane includes a conference room, a kitchen, and a MEGACHURCH.

(…)

Barack Obama buys AMERICAN STUFF. He owns a FORD, a BASEBALL TEAM, and a COMPUTER HE BUILT HIMSELF FROM AMERICAN PARTS. He travels mostly by FORKLIFT.

Barack Obama says that Americans cling to GUNS and RELIGION because they are AWESOME.

It would be irresponsible not to speculate…

(h/t shadowy & mysterious Codename V.)

Add comment June 18th, 2008 at 09:26pm Posted by Eli

Take That, Al Gore!

Damn, what does the NYT Science section have against Al Gore?  First the wankeriffic John Tierney uses the upcoming Inconvenient Truth opera as an excuse to mock him, then they try to claim that the internet was invented years before Al was even born:

In 1934, [Paul] Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

(…)

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work.

Amazing - he conceptualized hyperlinks before there were even computers.

Add comment June 17th, 2008 at 09:44pm Posted by Eli

My New Camera Will Be Teh Awesome

I found some leaked specs for the upcoming Nikon D90, and it sounds amazing:

The new D90 incorporates an optional feature called Universal Vibration Reduction (uVR). This turns all lenses into uVR lenses, and offers a 10-stop advantage.

This means a person using a 500mm lens, who would normally have to shoot at 1/500th of a second, can shoot at 2 seconds when uVR is enabled.

The new uVR system isn’t sensor based, and instead requires… the MB-D90a [battery grip]. This grip provides all the normal controls and extended battery life of a regular grip. It also holds 8 EN-EL4a batteries, along with a step-up transformer.

With uVR enabled, the combined power of the batteries sends a current through the step-up transformer. This then delivers a 110 volt shock through metal pads around the grip. The resulting electrical shock matches the shutter speed (maximum of 10 seconds).

The shock causes a very stable clenching of the photographer’s muscles while the shutter is open, simulating the stability of a tripod.

Nikon advise that people with rubber-soled shoes, heart problems or pacemakers shouldn’t use uVR.

(…)

The new D90 builds on the D80’s popular in-camera editing functions. Rather than cannibalizing yet more features from Capture NX, Nikon decided to include a full working version of Photoshop CS3 in the D90.

We found using Photoshop CS3 on a 3 inch LCD with a 4-way controller much easier than you might imagine. Well done on a great new feature, Nikon.

(…)

The new D90… includes a fully-fledged iPod. This ensures you’re never short of a tune, as long as you have your D90 with you. And it’s switched on. And you’ve uploaded some songs to it.

(…)

They’ve not only included stereo speakers in the camera itself, but also the necessary cabling for a full Dolby 5.1 surround sound setup. What’s more, the D90 is capable of playing movies on the 3 inch LCD via the built-in DVD writer/player found in the second optional battery grip (MB-D90b).

But just before you rush out an get yourself an MB-D90b, you might want to consider the MB-D90c. This version of the grip includes a sub-woofer (fully compatible with the D90’s Dolby surround). That’s right, the optional MB-D90c allows you to play music with unprecedented levels of fidelity for a consumer-level DSLR.

Let’s see Canon top that!

(…)

While the D80 was pretty responsive, your reactions aren’t. By the time you’ve realized you should have pressed the shutter, the moment is lost forever.

The D90 solves this problem thanks to Nikon’s new MindProbe technology. MindProbe scans your brain, looking for those tell-tale low amplitude beta waves that signal an imminent shutter-press. By the time your neurons react, and you actually press the shutter, the D90 has already captured 3 images (or 6 in GTI mode).

That’s right folks, for the first time in the history of photography, the shutter delay is actually measured in negative time. Now that’s progress.

(…)

The D50 and D80 caused some controversy by moving Nikon’s consumer-orientated DSLR models away from CF cards….

In an effort to avoid such distasteful events this time around, and ensure everybody can enjoy a D90, Nikon now supports the following storage formats…

• SD
• CF
• XD
• Memory Stick
• 3.5 inch floppy
• 5.25 inch floppy
• 8 inch floppy (in MB-D90b only)
• CD/DVD (in MB-D90b only)
• High-speed paper tape to maintain compatibility with Colossus
• Punch cards

(…)

One of the complaints about the ML-L3 wireless remote, was that it was line-of-sight. For some reason, you couldn’t set up your camera in Texas, and trigger the shutter from France. Clearly, this should be well within the capabilities of a $15 remote control.

To answer these complaints, Nikon has put a series of satellites in orbit that are dedicated to receiving wireless remote signals from users anywhere on the planet. These are then forwarded to your camera, allowing you to trigger the shutter no matter where you are.

How long have we been waiting for this simple addition to the feature-set? Canon have had this functionality in their DSLRs for years.

I would totally pre-order this as soon as it was announced, except that Nikon plans to start selling it five days before.

And I’ll probably disable the uVR feature.

2 comments June 17th, 2008 at 06:22pm Posted by Eli

Invention Of The Day

Why can’t I ever come up with awesome stuff like this?

‘Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine’ is an interactive sculpture by Yarisal and Kublitz. Experience the most satisfying feeling when a piece of China breaks into million pieces . All you have to do is insert a coin, and a piece of China will Slowly move forwards and fall into the bottom of the machine, breaking, and leaving you happy and relieved of anger.

*rummages around for loose change*

Ahh, I’m feeling better already.  You know, if they had blanketed the country with these during primary season, they would have made a fortune.

(h/t Engadget)

2 comments June 10th, 2008 at 08:52pm Posted by Eli

Whoa.

And I thought I was lucky…

A 21-leaf clover discovered on June 3 by Iwate prefecture farmer Shigeo Obara has shattered the Guinness world record for most leaves on a clover stem (Trifolium repens L.). The current official record is held by an 18-leaf clover that Obara found in his garden in May 2002.

The record-breaking clover’s 21 leaves each measure about 1 centimeter long and overlap each other like rose petals on a 3-centimeter stem.

Obara, a former food crop researcher, has been conducting independent research on clovers in his garden for over 50 years. He first became interested in clover mutations after discovering an unusual patch of 4-leaf clovers in 1951. Since then, Obara has been crossbreeding the plants in his garden to research the genes associated with leaf count, color, pattern and size.

Obara plans to file a new application with Guinness, although he is considering waiting a while. “We are likely to find clovers with more leaves,” he says. Last month, a family member claimed to have found a 27-leaf clover, but the discovery was not confirmed.

While some say that 4-leaf clovers symbolize happiness, 5-leaf clovers symbolize wealth and 6-leaf clovers symbolize fame, it is unclear what 21-leaf clovers symbolize.

Huh.  I have lots of 4-leaf and 5-leaf clovers, maybe a 6, and definitely a 7, but I don’t think I’m unusually healthy, wealthy, or famous.  And all of mine were naturally occurring, and not deliberately bred to be freaks so far as I know.

Add comment June 10th, 2008 at 07:36am Posted by Eli

I May Have Just Coined A New Word

Pwnography.

It’s like Schadenfreude, only dirtier.

Add comment June 8th, 2008 at 11:52pm Posted by Eli

Why Didn’t I Think Of This???

It’s brilliant on so many levels…

If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.

For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when — according to Christian end times dogma — Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.

“You’ve Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ,” reads the website, which is purportedly run “by Christians, for Christians.” The domain name is registered through an anonymous proxy service, presumably to protect the proprietors from the Forces of Darkness, and not because they’re up to anything shady.

The e-mails will be triggered when three of the site’s five Christian staffers “scattered around the U.S.” fail to log in for six days in a row — a system that incorporates a nice margin of safety, should two of the proprietors turn out to be unrepentant sinners or atheists.

Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents, which will be protected by an unidentified encryption algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12 nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you use that storage to house sensitive financial information.

“In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys,” the site says. “There won’t be any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way.”

Of course, some of us would  sooner trust the Antichrist with our stuff than turn it over to a company that hides behind an anonymous domain registration service, and doesn’t list a single corporate officer or employee by name on its website.

The company, You’ve Been Left Behind LLC, didn’t respond to an e-mail query, raising the obvious question of whether the Rapture has already begun. Developing …

Awesome.  They sound totally trustworthy to me.  I’m sure all the security measures are to ensure that no-one unscrupulous kidnaps the staffers to trigger those e-mails prematurely.  Yeah, I’m sure that’s it.

2 comments June 4th, 2008 at 07:03pm Posted by Eli

“Scientists Are Saying The Future Is Going To Be Far More Futuristic Than They Originally Predicted.”

(Quote from Southland Tales)

I was promised flying cars…

Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.

Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.

He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.

Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.

This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)

“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.

(…)

Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

(…)

Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.

He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

I hope he’s right.  I totally can’t wait to become an immortal cyborg.

Add comment June 3rd, 2008 at 07:33am Posted by Eli

Hulloa!

Well, this is pretty cool.  And kinda funny:

The only known edition of the world’s first telephone book has just surfaced in Connecticut.

It will be auctioned along with a collection of noteworthy books and documents covering technology, science, math and philosophy over six centuries.

The 20-page directory was issued in November of 1878, just two years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. The phone book contained information useful to 391 subscribers within the New Haven, Conn., area who were obviously still learning their way around the new communication device.

“Should you wish to speak to another subscriber you should commence the conversation by saying, ‘Hulloa!’” it instructs.

Tom Lecky, who is head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s auction house, which is handling the sale, told Discovery News, “The directions start off by amusingly saying, ‘Never take the telephone off the hook unless you wish to use it…When you are done talking say, ‘That is all,’ and the person spoken to should say, ‘O.K.’”

The book goes on to tell readers they should leave the “lower lip and jaw free.” They were also warned never to “use the wire more than three minutes at a time, or more than twice an hour” without first “obtaining permission from the main office.”

(…)

No phone numbers were printed in the Connecticut city’s milestone book — just the names of subscribers. It did, however, list businesses in a separate section at the end, making it the world’s first yellow pages too. The businesses included local newspapers, grocers, physicians and manufacturers.

Wow.  I can’t even begin to imagine what they would make of my Treo.  Yet another reminder of how far we’ve come technologically.  And how goofy the culture of a technology in its earliest stages can be.

That is all.

*waits patiently for someone to say O.K.*

2 comments May 30th, 2008 at 09:46pm Posted by Eli

Monkeys + Robots = AWESOME, Pt. II

Well, okay, it’s just a robot hand - but it’s still pretty cool:

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

(…)

In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers.

(…)

The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.

After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.

The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.

“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.

“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”

(…)

…Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable.

In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices.

Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”

The potential really is amazing.  And, sadly, we have an ever-increasing group of combat veterans who could really benefit from it.

Add comment May 29th, 2008 at 10:29pm Posted by Eli

Strange-But-Cool

Here’s a little bit of lunchtime coolness/weirdness:

CARRIE DASHOW dropped a large dollop of lemon sorbet into a glass of Guinness, stirred, drank and proclaimed that it tasted like a “chocolate shake.”

Nearby, Yuka Yoneda tilted her head back as her boyfriend, Albert Yuen, drizzled Tabasco sauce onto her tongue. She swallowed and considered the flavor: “Doughnut glaze, hot doughnut glaze!”

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

The host was Franz Aliquo, 32, a lawyer who styles himself Supreme Commander (Supreme for short) when he’s presiding over what he calls “flavor tripping parties.” Mr. Aliquo greeted new arrivals and took their $15 entrance fees. In return, he handed each one a single berry from his jacket pocket.

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.

(…)

[Aliquo] believes that the best way to encounter the fruit is in a group. “You need other people to benchmark the experience,” he said. At his first party, a small gathering at his apartment in January, guests murmured with delight as they tasted citrus wedges and goat cheese. Then things got trippy.

“You kept hearing ‘oh, oh, oh,’ ” he said, and then the guests became “literally like wild animals, tearing apart everything on the table.”

“It was like no holds barred in terms of what people would try to eat, so they opened my fridge and started downing Tabasco and maple syrup,” he said.

(…)

The fruits are available by special order from specialty suppliers in New York, including Baldor Specialty Foods and S. Katzman Produce. Katzman sells the berries for about $2.50 a piece, and has been offering them to chefs.

Mr. Aliquo gets his miracle fruit from Curtis Mozie, 64, a Florida grower who sells thousands of the berries each year through his Web site, www.miraclefruitman.com. (A freezer pack of 30 berries costs about $90 with overnight shipping.) Mr. Mozie, who was in New York for Mr. Gollner’s reading, stopped by the flavor-tripping party.

Mr. Mozie listed his favorite miracle fruit pairings, which included green mangoes and raw aloe. “I like oysters with some lemon juice,” he said. “Usually you just swallow them, but I just chew like it was chewing gum.”

A large group of guests reached its own consensus: limes were candied, vinegar resembled apple juice, goat cheese tasted like cheesecake on the tongue and goat cheese on the throat. Bananas were just bananas.

Amazing, and hard to imagine.  I’m tempted to try this someday.

4 comments May 29th, 2008 at 11:19am Posted by Eli

I Approve.

So there’s this guy in Japan, Ken Ohyama, who takes pictures of highway interchanges, mostly at night.  Damn, I wish I had thought of that.

(I do have some Newark Airport photos which are kind of similar, tho.)

A coupla more of my favorites:

Ooo…

(h/t Pink Tentacle)

2 comments May 24th, 2008 at 11:53am Posted by Eli

Convergence

Typically, in technology circles, the term “convergence” means the eventual combining of the television and the PC into a single device, which, frankly, I kinda have a hard time seeing.  The convergence that I’ve been seeing lately, which I find very intriguing, is between cellphones and computers, as the former get more and more powerful, and the latter get more and more compact.

We are nearing a point where screen and keyboard size will actually be more significant limiting factors than storage or processing power - and I think foldable OLED screens will provide much relief there, especially if they can also function as touchscreen keyboards.

But that’s not the kind of convergence I want to talk about, either.  I was reading Olivia Judson’s NYT blog entry on cytological hybrids, or “cybrids”: a cell from one species implanted whole into an egg cell of another species, becoming its nucleus, and eventually an embryo of the cell “donor” species, and it hit me. This is just like the DIY hackers I read about all the time in Engadget, the people who stick the guts of a Sega Dreamcast into a jewelry case to create a brand-new portable console.

Not only that, but I’m fascinated by DNA’s similarities to computer code: It’s a set of instructions that is both complex and modular - snippets of it can be copied and pasted to perform the same functions in completely different programs!  It’s also bloated with a lot of useless legacy code that no longer serves a function - some of which is actually old viruses that have been defanged and absorbed.  There can even be copying errors, and compatibility issues if the DNA in a transplanted egg nucleus doesn’t mesh with the DNA in the egg’s mitochondria (which is in fact modified bacteria code).

My point is, the most fascinating and important convergence coming down the pike is the one between technology and biology.  Right now, we’re at the novice stage when it comes to DNA and cell biology, copying and pasting and tweaking here and there, but I think there will come a day when we can actually read DNA like any other kind of programming language.  Which means that we could write and edit it, too.  Which would be both cool (we wouldn’t have to go looking for a gene to perform the function we want - we could just write it from scratch) and kinda scary (what happens when a gene programmer screws up, or a bioterrorist writes The Perfect Virus?).

I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to it or dreading it, but the possibilities and threats are wide open.

Add comment May 23rd, 2008 at 10:09pm Posted by Eli

Slightly Less Nonexistent…

Me, last year:

…[I]f I could design the Perfect Portable Device, based on existing or at least plausible/impending technology, what would it be?

(…)

There are devices that can pretty much do all of this already, but they have the absolute constraint that they have to be at least as large as their screens. So large-screen devices are bulky, and compact devices have tiny screens. So here’s my idea: A screen that folds. OLED technology will make it possible to manufacture displays that can bend in half, so why not have a device with the form factor of a book? You open it up, and you have a screen that’s the size of two “pages.” For typing, you could turn it 90 degrees and use one “page” as a touchscreen keyboard - or just use the bottom half of the two-page display (needless to say, it would auto-tilt the screen like on the iPhone). By my calculations, a 4″ X 3″ folding device would have a 7″ display when fully unfolded. At the other extreme, you could fit a 15″ screen on something roughly the size of a hardcover book.

The next-generation OLPC (One Laptop Per Child):

Negroponte didn’t share many details about the XO-2’s hardware, but the new system has two touch-sensitive displays. As you can see from the video and the pictures, the XO-2 will be much smaller than the original machine (half the size, according to the press release) and will have a foldable e-book form factor. “The next generation laptop should be a book,” Negroponte said.

The XO-2 will employ the dual indoor-and-sunlight displays, which was pioneered by former OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen. The design will provide a right and left page in vertical format, a hinged laptop in horizontal format, and a flat, two-screen continuous surface for use in tablet mode.

It’s not exactly what I had in mind - two screens instead of a single foldable OLED one, but it’s the same basic strategy for fitting more screen real estate into a small form factor, and the ability to convert to a laptop mode with one half of the screen turning into a keyboard.

Now I just need one with a 128GB solid-state drive and some PSP-quality gaming capability…

(h/t Engadget)

3 comments May 20th, 2008 at 10:45pm Posted by Eli

Is It Possible To Die From Too Much Awesome?

Terrible album covers are one of my favorite things.  I’ve seen some great sites that make fun of them, and I’ve even taken a small stab at it myself, but New York Newsday, of all places, has actually managed to put together a gallery of truly awful covers that I mostly had never seen before.

Some more of my favorites:

I defy you to deny the awesomeness.  You cannot do it.

2 comments May 20th, 2008 at 07:51am Posted by Eli

Walrus!

Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

I don’t really have a point.  I just like walruses.

Actually, read the story.  Walruses are even smarter and more awesome than I thought.

Add comment May 19th, 2008 at 09:16pm Posted by Eli

Crazy Tech News Of The Day

Spreadable displays/solar panels!

Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket.

The key to the work by Mitsubishi Chemical and Sumitomo Chemical lies in so-called spreadable electronics – liquids containing molecules of the type used in OLED screens.

Engineers like Tokitaro Hoshijima at Mitsubishi Chemical see the possibility of using spreadable electronics to create both ultra-thin displays and solar panels at the same time [subscription link].

Because solar cells and OLEDs work on similar, but opposite, principles, it is possible to make materials that both take light and turn it into electricity and also do the opposite to provide a controllable display.

Hoshijima and many others are working on a molecular soup that can be spread anywhere and then dried to leave a residue layer that is only 100nm thick. This currently forms the basis for their proposed solar cell.

He explains: “What I want to create is a world that does not need power sockets.” He goes on to describe how his paste applied to the back of a phone could be enough to charge the device when exposed to light.

By the same token, researchers at Sumitomo Chemical have created a similar organic solution that can be sprayed onto a surface to create an OLED screen.

Such a display could be on a rollable piece of plastic or even applied directly to a wall. The solar-charging properties described above mean it would never need to be plugged in.

Blue-sky projects like these typically take years to bear fruit, but both companies are looking at getting usable prototype devices ready within the next two years.

Wow.  I really hope they can pull this off. You could paint displays on your clothes - or solar panels to power your iPod and charge your cellphone.  A paintable display could also be pretty much any size and shape you want.  And if you could actually paint your house with solar panel paint, you could seriously cut down on your electric bills.  Amazing.

Probably too good to be true, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.

(h/t OLED Info by way of Engadget)

2 comments May 15th, 2008 at 07:27pm Posted by Eli

Equal Time For Peter O’Toole

Well, since I already did a post on Richard Burton’s rugby reminiscences, I think it’s only fair that Peter O’Toole should get a post as well.  (Hey, if the LAT can write about the candidates’ handwriting, I can write about Peter O’Toole reattaching his own finger.) I was perhaps most surprised to realized that he was 75 - every time I’ve seen him in the past few years, I thought he was much older.  Maybe it was all that drinking.

This was a man who travelled the world yet never wore a watch or carried a wallet. Nor, on leaving his house, did he ever take his keys with him.

“I just hope some bastard’s in,” he’d say.

More than once, when someone was not in, O’Toole found himself having to explain to the police why he was breaking into his own property.

(…)

The neighbourhood where O’Toole grew up was rough, and three of his playmates were later hanged for murder. “I’m not from the working class,” O’Toole liked to say. “I’m from the criminal class.”

Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled in O’Toole a strong sense of literature, by far the biggest influence in his young life was his father, Patrick, a bookie who was often drunk.

One day, Patrick stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: “Jump, boy. I’ll catch you. Trust me.”

When O’Toole jumped, his father withdrew his arms, leaving the boy splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was “never trust any bastard”.

(…)

In 1959, O’Toole was cast as a Cockney sergeant in the play The Long And The Short And The Tall at the Royal Court Theatre.

His understudy was a young Michael Caine, and one Saturday night after the show O’Toole invited him to a restaurant he knew.

Eating a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered, until he woke up in broad daylight in a strange flat.

“What time is it?” he inquired. “Never mind what time it is,” said O’Toole. “What f***ing day is it?”

It turned out that it was five o’clock in the afternoon two days later. Curtain-up was at eight.

Back at the theatre, the stage manager was waiting for them with the news that the restaurant owner had been in and banned them from his establishment for life.

Caine was about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered: “Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.”

Most evenings after the show, O’Toole would enjoy a long walk around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood, he’d scale the wall of Lloyds bank.

The first time he took his future wife, the actress Sian Phillips, on one of these nocturnal jaunts, she was startled when he began his ascent of the north face of the building.

But after a few nights she came to accept that, by O’Toole’s standards anyway, it was quite normal.

(…)

At one after-show party O’Toole held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other containing hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop two pint mugs.

(…)

Lawrence Of Arabia occupied O’Toole for two years, filming in seven different countries.

By the end of it, he’d lost 2st, received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles, torn ligaments in both his hip and thigh, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, sprained his neck and been concussed twice.

But his extraordinary performance made him a star. Lawrence Of Arabia was a world-wide smash when it opened in 1962 and was hailed as one of cinema’s true masterpieces.

“I woke up one morning to find I was famous,” he said. “I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.

“Nobody took any f***ing notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

(…)

The filming of the 1968 historical drama The Lion In Winter, in which O’Toole starred with Katharine Hepburn, was notable for a series of bizarre incidents.

Shooting a scene on a lake one day, O’Toole trapped his finger between two boats. “Bloody agony it was,” he said. “Took the top right off.”

O’Toole carried the tip of his finger back to shore, dipped it into a glass of brandy to sterilise it and then pushed it back on, wrapping it in a poultice.

Three weeks later he unwrapped it and there it was, all crooked and bent.

“I’d put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank,” explained O’Toole.

Another time, he awoke at 4am to discover that his bed was on fire.

“At first I tried to put the thing out myself, but I couldn’t read the small print on the fire extinguisher,” he said.

“By the time the first fireman arrived, I was so glad to see him I kissed him.”

O’Toole didn’t have much luck with fires. During a cottage holiday in Wales with Sian, he had decided to cook, although she had never seen him do so before.

“I can make the best French toast,” he told her. Minutes later the stove exploded into flames.

They tried to extinguish the fire, but it was impossible, and they were driven out into the garden, where they watched in the rain as the kitchen burnt down.

Awesome.  If even half this stuff is true, he’s a complete madman.

Add comment May 13th, 2008 at 11:37am Posted by Eli

THE MOST AWESOME MOVIE EVER MADE OMG

Zombie Strippers!!!

During George W. Bush’s fourth term as president, the administration’s desire for crises and predisposition toward fuck-ups leads to the creation of a zombie virus that the government hopes will help replenish troops for its various overseas conflicts. Infected women become super-strong and maintain their intelligence, but the men remain your typical, shambling, mindless undead. So when the virus leaks into a strip club, the place becomes the most popular illegal joint in town. All too often with horror/cult movies, a catchy title masks a low budget and an even lower level of talent, but director Jay Lee (The Slaughter) delivers absolutely everything you could possibly hope for in a film called Zombie Strippers, with a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of Return of the Living Dead and Showgirls that actually beats out Mark Pirro’s Nudist Colony of the Dead for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever. He even manages some George Romero–style social commentary, with zombie-dom as a metaphor for plastic surgery—that star Jenna Jameson’s plasticized, pre-zombie face is actually scarier than the final monstrous version only proves the point.

I can’t imagine how any movie could possibly be more awesome than this.  The premise is even kind of plausible!

Well, okay - it could be Zombie Strippers On A Plane, but that would be so incredibly super-awesome that you couldn’t watch it without special goggles.

Add comment April 19th, 2008 at 06:48pm Posted by Eli

Must… Take… Deep… Breaths…

I’m trying not to have palpitations at the thought of The Ultimate Awesome Camera That I Will Never, Ever Own:

Some entirely too ingenious hackers have found a reference to the rumored D3X deep within the bowels of Nikon’s D3 firmware. The reference includes a list of resolutions available to the upcoming shooter, and it’s apparently set to max out at a potentially Higgs Boson-inducing 24.4 megapixels. Word has it that this sensor is likely a variant of the megapixel monster behind Sony’s upcoming A900, but since this is all being extrapolated from a few numbers hidden in some firmware, we’re going to try not to get too ahead of ourselves at this point.

You probably can’t hear it, but I’m pining furiously.  If I ever hit the Powerball, this’ll be the first thing I buy. Um, assuming it’s for real, of course.  But it does seem a bit odd that they would stand pat with the D3 having the same megapixels as the D300 (which is pretty awesome in its own right).

Add comment April 15th, 2008 at 10:47pm Posted by Eli

Medical Researchers Doing The Right Thing

Why do they hate America?

With little fanfare, a small number of prominent academic scientists have made a decision that was until recently all but unheard of. They decided to stop accepting payments from food, drug and medical device companies.

No longer will they be paid for speaking at meetings or for sitting on advisory boards. They may still work with companies. It is important, they say, for knowledgeable scientists to help companies draw up and interpret studies. But the work will be pro bono.

The scientists say their decisions were private and made with mixed emotions. In at least one case, the choice resulted in significant financial sacrifice. While the investigators say they do not want to appear superior to their colleagues, they also express relief. At last, they say, when they offer a heartfelt and scientifically reasoned opinion, no one will silently put an asterisk next to their name.

They are part of a group responding to accusations of ethical conflicts inherent in these arrangements, and their decisions repudiate decades of industry influence, says Dr. Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor at the Tufts School of Medicine, who has written a book on conflicts of interest.

Five years ago, “nobody paid any attention to taking money from industry,” he said, adding: “They just took it. In some instances, I think people thought they were suckers if they didn’t.”

(…)

He attributes the change to publicity about conflicts and what can be almost a public shaming when researchers’ conflicts are published. “Finally, it’s gotten to people,” Dr. Kassirer said.

The story then provides three examples of researchers who voluntarily made this decision.  One recoiled after being blasted by the blogosphere; another began to doubt his own objectivity; and the third said he got sick of seeing “Dr. Winer has accepted honoraria”.

I’m not sure it’s enough to make a difference yet, but it’s good to know that there are still some people out there with enough of a conscience to trade money for integrity.  Bravo!

Add comment April 15th, 2008 at 07:13am Posted by Eli

Want!!!

This can’t get here soon enough.

Researchers for [IBM] are working on a technology known as racetrack memory which uses tiny magnetic boundaries to store data.

In a paper in the journal Science, the team at IBM’s Almaden lab in California outline ways to make the building blocks of the novel storage medium.

The capacity of MP3 players could increase 100 times from present levels.

But the IBM team say racetrack memory is still seven to eight years away from commercial use. [NOOO!!!!]

(…)

Hard drives are cheap but their moving parts mean they are not very durable. They are also slow in that they typically take a few milliseconds to find and fetch data.

By contrast flash memory is more reliable and data can be read from it much faster though it has a finite lifespan and is expensive compared to hard drives.

The work being done on racetrack memory by Dr Parkin and colleagues could produce a storage medium that is cheap, durable and fast.

Ultimately, said Dr Parkin, racetrack memory could replace both flash and hard drives in computers and other gadgets.

(…)

The racetrack memory stores data in the boundaries, known as domain walls, between magnetic regions in nanowires.

The medium gets its name because the data races around the wire or track as it is read or written.

The domain walls are read by exploiting the weak magnetic fields generated by the spin of electrons.

The tiny amounts of power needed to exploit these fields means racetrack memory generates far less heat than existing devices.

(…)

If the expected data densities of the technology are realised it could mean gadgets that have about 100 times more memory on board than is possible today. It would mean that a portable MP3 player could hold up to 500,000 songs.

“We are embarking on a path to build a prototype,” said Dr Parkin. He said it could take up to four years to produce that prototype and a further three or four to refine it for commercial use.

We are talking terabyte iPods, people!  And lightning-fast multi-terabyte PC/server drives that don’t crash.  You could use the same memory card in your digital camera for your entire life and never have to delete a single image.

(h/t Engadget)

Add comment April 12th, 2008 at 06:00pm Posted by Eli

And Now, Your Moment Of Ooo…

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Stickney Crater, on the Martian moon Phobos.  Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Wow.

1 comment April 10th, 2008 at 08:12pm Posted by Eli

What Happened To The Anasazi?

NYT surveys the current state of Anasazi research:

Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.

(…)

These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.

“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.

For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?

(…)

“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”

Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”

(…)

Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”

Though the rains returned, the people never did.

“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”

(…)

Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.

By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.

Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.

But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.

Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.

Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.

In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.

Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.

When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.

Fascinating.  Although it still doesn’t explain why they didn’t move back when the drought ended.

1 comment April 8th, 2008 at 07:31am Posted by Eli

Separated At Birth

Okay, so I went to the MyHeritage face recognition page to see which celebrity I look like.  In the past, I have been compared to Jan-Michael Vincent, the creepy burnt-hand Nazi in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Leonard Nimoy, ET, and both Blues Brothers.

So I really didn’t know what to expect when I submitted this picture for comparison…

…But it sure as hell wasn’t Clive Owen.

Must be the glasses.  Yeah, that’s it.

Oh, and the second-closest match was… Wesley Snipes.  Go figure.

2 comments April 6th, 2008 at 03:56pm Posted by Eli

Richard Burton Played Rugby And Lived To Write About It

This is surprisingly hilarious:

…I knew people like a one-armed inside half – he’d lost an arm in the First World War - who played with murderous brilliance for Cwmavon for years when I was a boy. He was particularly adept, this one, at stopping a forward bursting through from the line-out with a shattering iron-hard thrust from his stump as he pulled him on to it with the other. He also used the misplaced sympathy of innocent visiting players who didn’t go at him with the same delivery as they would against a two-armed man, as a ploy to lure them on to concussion and other organic damage. They learned quickly, or were told after the match when they had recovered sufficiently from Jimmy’s ministrations to be able to understand the spoken word, that going easy on Jimmy-One-Arm was first cousin to stepping into a grave and waiting for the shovels to start. A great many people who played unwarily against Jimmy died unexpectedly in their early forties. They were lowered solemnly into the grave with all match honours to the slow version of Sospan Fach. They say that the conductor at these sad affairs was noticeably one-armed but that could be exaggeration again.

As I said, it’s difficult for me to know where to start so I’ll begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I’ll tell you about the last match I ever played in.

I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face….

Apart from wanting to preserve my natural beauty, it would affect continuity, they said, if my nose was straight on Friday in the medium shot and was bent towards my left ear on Monday for the close-up….  So to this day there is a clause in my contracts that forbids me from flying my own plane, skiing and playing the game of rugby football, the inference being that it would be all right to wrestle with a Bengal tiger five thousand miles away, but not to play against, shall we say, Pontypool at home.  I decided that they had some valid arguments after my last game.

It was played against a village whose name is known only to its inhabitants and crippled masochists drooling quietly in kitchen corners, a mining village with all the natural beauty of the valleys of the moon.. and just as welcoming, with a team composed almost entirely of colliers. I hadn’t played for four or five years but was fairly fit, I thought, and the opposition was bottom of the third class and reasonably beatable. Except, of course on their home ground. I should have thought of that…

…Though I was working like a dog at the Vic playing Hamlet, Coriolanus, Caliban, The Bastard in King John, and Toby Belch, it wasn’t the right kind of training for these great knotted gnarled things from the burning bowels of the earth. In my teens I had lived precariously on the lip of first-class rugby by virtue of knowing every trick in the canon, evil and otherwise, by being a bad bad loser, but chiefly, and perhaps only because I was very nippy off the mark…. Genuine class of course doesn’t need size though sometimes I forgot this. Once I played rather condescendingly against a Cambridge college and noted that my opposite number seemed to be shorter than I was and in rugby togs looked like a schoolboy… However this blond stripling gave me a terrible time. He was faster and harder and wordlessly ruthless and it was no consolation to find out his name afterwards because it meant nothing at the time…. This anonymity was called Steele-Bodger and a more onomatopoeic name for its owner would be hard to find. He was, I promise you, steel and he did, I give you my word, bodger. Say his name through clenched teeth and you’ll see what I mean….

In this match, this last match played against troglodytes, burned to the bone by the fury of their work, bow-legged and embittered because they weren’t playing for or hadn’t played for and would never play for Cardiff or Swansea or Neath or Aberavon, men who smiled seldom and when they did it was like scalpels, trained to the last ounce by slashing and hacking away neurotically at the frightened coal face for 7 ½ hours a day, stalactitic, tree-rooted, curved out or granite by a rough and ready sledge hammer and clinker, against these hard volumes of which I was the soft cover paper-back edition. I discovered some truths very soon. I discovered just after the first scrum for instance that it was time I ran for the bus and not for their outside-half. He had red hair, a blue-white face and no chin. Standing up straight his hands were loosely on a level with his calves and when the ball and I arrived exultantly together at his stock-still body, a perfect set-up you would say, and when I realized that I was supine and he was lazily kicking the ball into touch I realized that I had forgotten that trying to intimidate a feller like that was like trying a cow a mandrill, and that he had all the graceful willowy-give and sapling-bend of stressed concrete.

That was only the outside-half.

From then on I was elbowed, gouged, dug, planted, raked, hoed, kicked a great deal, sandwiched, and once humiliatingly taken from behind with nobody in front of me when I had nothing to do but run fifteen yards to score….

(…)

…After being gardened, mown and rolled a little more, I gave that up, asked the Captain of our team if he didn’t think it would be a better idea to hide me deeper in the pack. I had often, I reminded him, played right prop, my neck was strong and my right arm had held its own with most. He gave me a long look, a trifle pitying perhaps but orders were given and in I went to the maelstrom and now the real suffering began. Their prop with whom I was to share cheek and jowl for the next eternity, didn’t believe in razor blades since he grew them on his chin and shaved me thoroughly for the rest of the game taking most of my skin in the process, delicacy not being his strong point. He used his prodigious left arm to paralyze mine and pull my head within an inch or two of the earth, then rolled my head around his, first taking my ear between his fore-finger and thumb, humming “Rock of Ages” under his breath.

(…)

I drank more than my share of beer in the home team’s pub, joined in the singing and found that the enemies were curiously shy and withdrawn until the beer had hit the proper spot. Nobody mentioned my performance on the field.

There was only one moment of wild expectation on my part when a particularly grim sullen and taciturn member of the other side said suddenly with what passed shockingly for a smile splitting the slag heap of his face like an earth tremor,

“Come outside with us will ‘ew?” There was another beauty with him.

“Where to?” I asked.

“Never ‘ew mind,” he said, “you’ll be awright. Jest come with us.”

“O.K.”

We went out into the cruel February night and made our way to the outside Gents - black-painted concrete with one black pipe for flushing, wet to the open sky. We stood side by side in silence. They began to void. So did I. There had been beer enough for all. I waited for a possible compliment on my game that afternoon - I had after all done one or two good things if only by accident. I waited. But there was nothing but the sound of wind and water. I waited and silently followed them back into the bar.

Finally I said: “What did you want to tell me?”

“Nothing,” the talkative one said.

“Well, what did you ask me out there for then?’”

“Well,” the orator said, “Well… us two is brothers and we wanted to tell our mam that we’d ‘ad a…”

…“Well, we jest wanted to tell our mam that we had passed water with Richard Burton” he said with triumphant care.

Great stuff.  I have nothing to add, really…

(h/t Cap’n Goto)

Add comment April 6th, 2008 at 01:40pm Posted by Eli