The Brunch Table

“Kennedy Kirk Krist.” One of Dick Cheney’s oil-magnate pals is actually named Kennedy Kirk Krist.

Dear Lord.

I just came across (in a conversation of spoken words–no link) an important distinction in forms of digital art–generated work vs. sampled work. The film industry muddles it a bit by referring to everything as “CGI,” and of course there’s plenty of gray area (a generated 3D geometric form that uses a sampled photographic texture, for example) but the difference between the two is striking. For the time being, anyway, sampled stuff just tends to contain more information that’s relevant to our human senses–the minute details that the physical world offers up for free.

People quickly (although temporarily, as it turns out) abandoned generating music synthesizers when sampling technology became cheap enough. And a ten-year-old kid (I checked on this) knows that Gladiator looks “more real” then Phantom Menace. (Both used lots of digital effects, but the first movie started with sampled footage of real actors and real tigers; the second movies’s effects were primarily generated.)

Incidentally, speaking of those gray areas…how about the philosphical problems posed by Gollum’s try for an Oscar nomination?

“We have been doing tests for weeks now in the world’s best laboratories and we still do not know whether it is a virus or bacteria,” the spokesman added.

So Steven Frank (of Panic, purveyors of fine Mac software) has this crazy gleam in his eye, thinking about the possibilities of SDL and Lua (a lightweight scripting language) to create easily-tweakable cross-platform applications. Specifically, after attempting to live with “modern” PDAs, he’s obsessed with the possibility of creating a Newton-analog environment to run on modern hardware. He’s whipped up a tiny mockup for OS X.

It’s kinda nifty. Doesn’t do that much, but you can pop open the package and easily tweak the small scripts that describe all the behavior. I think that things like this and PyObjC are creating an interesting middle ground of first-class GUI applications that are easy for end-users to hack without installing crazy heavyweight environments or development tools. Konfabulator is also interesting in a similar way (easy to hack), though its apps aren’t first-class, and the user has to buy and install the platform, which is an annoying barrier to entry.

Hydrogen didn’t destroy the Hindenburg, according to a new analysis by a UCLA engineering professor. Hydrogen flames are colorless; the fire is clearly visible in newsreel footage and photographs.

His report suggests that the paint coating the airship’s fabric skin was to blame, freakishly flammable stuff that “might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant.” (Immediately after the Hindenburg exploded, the paint’s manufacturer stopped using that particular formula.)

“The public must be made aware that hydrogen may be used as a fuel with the same degree of safety as gasoline,” he said.

Why is everyone so hard on the guy who said “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons?” He was right, wasn’t he?

This morning, I talked to my stepbrother on the phone; he told me that “they” found an exploded North Korean missile in the Alaskan outback. I went to my window, but I didn’t hear the screams of any fighter jets taking off from L.A. Air Force Base (I bet they stencil that name in pink cursive script). So I calmly turned to Google to settle things.

By the way, if I understand right, any missile that exceeds the specs for “short-range” becomes a “long-range missile”–there’s no “medium” class. Iraq, for example, has long-range missiles that can travel all of 20 miles farther than the short-range limit. (That’s not far enough to reach Israel, in case anybody was wondering.) Anyway, back to the North Korean menace:

“The only test of a longer range missile occurred in August 1998, when the three-stage Taepo Dong 1 (TD-1) missile was launched in an attempt to place a small satellite in orbit. This effort was not successful due to a failure of the missile’s third stage…the missile cannot be considered operational without further testing…Even if the TD-1 were successfully tested in the future, it would have limited capability and could at best deliver a small payload as far as Alaska or Hawaii…Moreover, North Korea has not flight tested a reentry heat shield for a long-range missile, and would need to do so before it could use it to deliver a warhead.”

Of course, the Alaskan press takes this a bit more seriously.

The English word Hell, referring to the Christian afterlife of eternal punishment, comes from the Old English Hel, a borrowed Norse word for the land of the dead.

The Greek originals of the Christian Testaments use Hades, the land of the dead in Greek mythology, where their Old English descendants use Hel. The very earliest Greek Christian writings, though, use the Hebrew word Gehenna instead.

In the original Hebrew of the Torah, the Christian Old Testament’s references to Gehenna are mostly replaced by a different Hebrew word, sheol. Although Jewish oral tradition has various theories on the rewards and punishments awaiting souls in the afterlife, the Torah itself doesn’t offer much of an explanation on the matter.

Sheol is not an explicitly religious term. In ancient Judea, when a city garbage dump grew too large, the authorities would have it burned down to make room for more. The resulting fiery mess was called a sheol. In ancient Judean literature, a sheol, a mountain of fire, was used as a poetic metaphor for earthly death.

Gehenna, or Ge-Hinnom, was the name of ancient Jerusalem’s municipal landfill.

Source: Wikipedia

Google News makes it much easier to find interesting news coverage from around the world, which is (unfortunately for us) often more comprehensive than the American coverage. For example, most U.S. news outlets only gave brief excerpts of Bush’s press conference last night; over in the U.K., The Guardian printed the full transcript. There were many good questions, and few satisfying answers. For example:

Question: … If all these nations, all of them our normal allies, have access to the same intelligence information, why is it that they are reluctant to think that the threat is so real, so imminent that we need to move to the brink of war now? …

Bush: … You asked about sharing of intelligence, and I appreciate that, because we do share a lot of intelligence with nations which may or may not agree with us in the security council as to how to deal with Saddam Hussein and his threats. We have got roughly 90 countries engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, chasing down the terrorists.

We do communicate a lot, and we will continue to communicate a lot. We must communicate. We must share intelligence; we must share — we must cut off money together; we must smoke these al-Qaida types out one at a time. It’s in our national interest, as well, that we deal with Saddam Hussein.

But America is not alone in this sentiment. There are a lot of countries who fully understand the threat of Saddam Hussein. A lot of countries realise that the credibility of the security council is at stake — a lot of countries, like America, who hope that he would have disarmed, and a lot of countries which realise that it may require force — may require force — to disarm him.

He’s full of al-Qaeda non-sequiturs, but never actually answers the question, other than to say that there are “a lot of countries” that believe Iraq is a threat. (They must not be important ones, if the administration has been trying to entice the likes of Angola and Cameroon with promises of aid.) If the U.S. actions are in the right, why is it such a hard sell to the rest of the world?

Also: transcript analysis, and 13 questions that should’ve been asked.