The Brunch Table

Here’s a pointed dissection of the war-oriented part of the recent state of the union address. Good points, though I wish that the author provided sources for the facts that he used.

While we will never see a finished cut of Terry Gilliam’s doomed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, there is a documentary about it, which is opening this weekend to positive reviews. I guess this is the logical conclusion of the DVD “bonus materials” trend–the “making-of” documentary finally just flat-out replaces the “feature presentation” at the cineplex.

Keeping children tied down for several hours a day is considered normal these days–so long as it’s done in a motor vehicle, and not at home.

The Boston Globe reports that the Romney administration is taking a more critical look at their transportation policies. Measures under consideration include giving higher-ranking employees Ford Tauruses rather than SUVs, giving lower-level employees Zipcar accounts instead of dedicated vehicles, and encouraging the placement of government offices near transit nodes rather than in strip malls or office parks. These would be welcome moves; not only would they be setting a better example, but they’d also be making more effective use of my tax dollars.

This has got a solemnity and a sense of pacing to it that you rarely see in such flash cartoons.

Gene Healy wrote an interesting article about the history of military domestic surveillance in this country. Apparently, Operation TIPS isn’t such a new idea. The book that Healy name-checks, Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980, looks interesting, if a bit on the pricey side.

It’s just so cheerful, and it’s kind of like nostalgia for our own youth plus meta-nostalgia for somebody else’s. (Like Dazed and Confused…that came on TV the other night; I like it, but I always thought it had this really sour, depressing undercurrent to it, like “Take heed, Martian archaologists, this was as good as it ever got.”)

Here’s a quick link to an article by Jon Udell which provides a straightforward discussion of a lot of ideas that have been bouncing around my head, like links-as-currency and addresses-as-identification.

The Guardian Special Report: Oil and Petrol

Incredible stuff, and they update it every couple days…it’s breaking news on how the world’s oil companies are preparing for war. (Of course, you’ve got to go to Britain to get it).

Like some pulp sci-fi character, I’m now trapped in the paradoxical position of having hijacked my own identity.

At some point in the past few weeks, instead of logging into my existing Amazon.com account, I somehow accidentally created a new account with the same email address, and probably the same password. I first noticed that something was up when the site stopped chummily calling me “Joe Hughes” and started using my email address. Furthermore, when I tried to add something to my wish list, I discovered that it was now empty. (I can still view, but not alter, my proper wish list by searching for myself.) In fact, this new account contains almost nothing besides my email address and password. After my first exchange with their customer service, I asked:

Why is it possible to have two accounts on one email address? In any case, could you delete the account which doesn’t have a wish list?

Their response:

Unfortunately, at this time, we will not be able to close the duplicate accounts under your email address because this extra account has no verifiable information on it.

I suppose I’ll have to have a little chat with them. I’d be tempted to just give up on them entirely, but I have some gift certificates from Christmas that I still need to cash in.

In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying my recent purchases from CD Baby immensely.

This story about a strip mall built as part of what was originally intended to be a human-scale redevelopment plan for the old Denver airport ends with this stinger:

What’s more, streets run through the project’s center. When it decays in seven to 15 years, the city plans to replace the big boxes with densely packed houses, [project manager] Aldrete said.

Wow. Occasionally I run across something like this that reminds me how flippant we’ve become about our built environment (and its legacy) over the past 50 years. I can only hope that the local government is getting the tear-down money up front, as planners in Charlotte, NC have proposed.

This one has already been blogged to death, but in case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, William Gibson has a weblog now, and his entries to date have been uniformly excellent. Let’s hope he can keep it up in the long run…

The New Scientist brings us the sci-fi story of the day, about long-term information storage using bacterial DNA. Apparently, they encoded the lyrics to “It’s a Small World” as a DNA sequence and stuck it into a particularly hardy strain of bacteria. 100 generations later, the message was still there. I would hope that my own cells would reject such tripe out of hand…

A recent article at Wired News about solar energy initiatives in San Francisco linked to this interesting dataset concerning the amount of sunlight that makes it through the everpresent fog in various areas of the city. Unfortunately, none of the links to the actual data files that I tried actually worked. Update: The contact listed on the site had this to say about the data:

The data files are currently under revision will not be reposted until corrections are completed.

Clay Shirky has written an article about the LazyWeb.org site, which collects feature and application requests from bloggers and other random passers-by. At least he does name-check some of the site’s predecessors, such as ShouldExist, and the wonderfully-named halfbakery. However, he also makes some rather dubious statements, such as:

However, nearly a decade of experimentation with single-purpose portals shows that most of them fail.

What of Google or Weather.com or Dictionary.com? I don’t think being “single-purpose” necessarily hurts a site; rather, I would say that it’s difficult for any one site to garner a critical mass of traffic. Therefore, the problem with upstart sites that depend on user-generated content is that there’s less incentive for users to contribute, given that their audience will probably be small. (This is why Amazon.com is practically the only ecommerce site that has a significant number of customer reviews for a given book or album.) There’s also the specter of CDDB-like foul play, in which the company could later try to charge the users for access to the content that they had contributed.

Here is where the LazyWeb site, and other sites that make central use of TrackBack-type mechanisms, have a clear advantage. The actual user-generated content resides on the users’ own blogs, which allows them to retain control over their own content, and makes the core audience more of a known quantity. The TrackBack mechanism allows distributed discussions on a particular topic to be brought together in one location on the web, without requiring much effort from the bloggers or the owner of the TrackBacked site.

As for the idea of the “imperative” LazyWeb, wherein talking about an idea actually causes it to happen, rather than merely discovering that it’s already happened, I have my doubts. There are infinite numbers of people who would like someone else to do things for them for free. Shirky does identify the social aspect of implementing a LazyWeb idea:

Furthermore, LazyWeb etiquette involves publicizing any solution that does arise, meaning that the developer gets free public attention, even if only to a select group.

I would attribute much of the early success of the LazyWeb meme to the fact that those who’ve invoked it have been relatively well-known in the blogosphere (i.e. Steven Johnson, Cory Doctorow). They have large audiences, which means that they’re more likely to find a taker, because more people see the request, and they have more fame to offer the taker. Without this “star power”, I don’t think that LazyWeb requests will be substantially more successful than requests posted to ShouldExist.

According to this AP story, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the Capitol building have all been 3D-scanned. Presumably, this would make it easier to reconstruct them accurately if they were damaged by an attack. (It’s not clear to me whether the project was prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks, or whether this angle is just spin.)

Apple certainly gave us an action-packed keynote today. Among other things, they finally unveiled their much-rumored native web browser, Safari. First impressions are below:
(more…)

Decasia is the kind of film that would incite riots in Paris in the ’20s, the kind of thing that I would aspire to if I was making movies. Director Bill Morrison brought together a set of physically decaying celluloid images from the not-so-distant past, set them to a jarring, discordant score by Michael Gordon, and ended up with something like a post-apocalyptic answer to Koyaanisqatsi. (The Qatsi crew are credited at the end.) Morrison has unearthed truly haunting images: a screenful of rot slowly resolves into a geisha standing in front of a sun-drenched window; microscopic organisms share the frame with specks of missing celluloid; a boxer appears to pummel a swirling cloud of decay into submission. I could go on, but Lawrence Weschler has saved me the trouble by gushing over it in the New York Times Magazine.

The film uses its tortured images to tell stories that I’m having difficulty putting into words: celluloid flypaper trapping stray photons in its coil; ephemeral moments shot, stuffed, and left mounted on the basement wall; a flickering window into the past, slowly given over to the mists of time.

Even though it’s only 67 minutes long, it’s exhausting to watch–afterwards, Justina literally had to take a nap, while I was tempted to follow it up with the lush images and soothing soundtrack of Baraka. Even so, it’s a journey well worth taking. It’ll be showing on the Sundance Channel several times this month, and at my place upon request.

How many of the images that we’re capturing today will even come close to being this decipherable in 2080? I’ll bet that some of the source footage for Decasia will still be viable long after the videotape that I watched it from has faded into snow.