|
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 27, 2003
The Spirit of TED
TED is what you wish every conference could be: a delightful and well-produced mixture of lectures, videos, toys and music, where some of the finest minds on the planet are asked to speak or perform. It's great brain food, succour for the spirit. Right now I'm watching Thomas Dolby and Eddi Reader perform on an HDTV feed from the lecture theater upstairs. I'd be there myself, but it's much more fun down here: we get large comfortable chairs, an 18-ft. high inflatable globe, all the computers and Wi-Fi we can eat. There's an interactive projection screen where you can use your shadow to deflect butterflies, bat around colored bubbles or catch streams of sand, and a tilting screen like a table where you get to roll a virtual pinball over markers that, when struck, display the word "peace" in languages like Cherokee and Esperanto.
It is, in short, this wonderful bubble of pure intellectual optimism. One of those rare places, like Google and Amazon and -- dare I mention it in the same breath -- Burning Man, where you can still hang out and watch the white-hot collision of technology and dreams. A carefully-tended flame in the middle of a very dark age.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Do You Know the Way to Monterey?
I'm going back to find/some peace of mind ... or alternatively, for another damn conference. This time, it's TED. I'll keep you posted.
Like a Broken Record
So AOL, owned by the company that writes my paycheck, and its partners launched an expanded version of the MusicNet service. So what? They're still not getting it.
In this new service, you have to pay $18 a month before you can download music in any kind of serious quantity. And your downloads are not MP3s, no sir. You can't even begin to do what you want with them. MusicNet permits you to burn a whole ten of them onto a CD per month. Ten tunes for $18! What a technological innovation! Now imagine your local mall was stuffed with stores selling this kind of overpriced crap ... oh, wait. It is.
I've said it before. I've said it to MusicNet executives. I've said it to everyone I've interviewed in the whole damn industry. I'll say it again. People, there is a way you can combat illegal music downloads. It's very simple. Drop the stupid subscription model. You sell raw, untainted MP3s. You sell them for a dollar each. One buck, one tune. Because they're MP3s, we can burn as many as we want. And you host this service on thousands of speedy servers, so we can have near-instant downloads. The song-swap sites are only successful because there's no reasonable alternative; that doesn't mean we like downloading from them. Who would want to waste all that time on KaZaa if they could have a real thing for a pittance? No doubt you'd end up making more than $18 out of folks like me, who look only at the individual price of purchase and not the cumulative total. People! There's a fortune waiting to be made!
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 25, 2003
South by Southwest
So it turns out I'm a moderately left-leaning libertarian. I'm grateful to The Political Compass for this revelation. Give it a go yourself; you might be surprised.
Fast For George W.!
It has to be a joke, I thought when I saw this site. It can't be true. There can't be thousands of people out there thinking that if they go without food for a day, it will increase our dear President's "holiness."
What next? Wear a hair shirt for George W.? Beat yourself senseless with a brick for George W.? Actually, I'm hoping against hope for a movement that would really hold this administration accountable: refuse to go shopping for George W.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 24, 2003
Doom and Gloom
If you ever think to yourself "you know, I get far too much sleep at night," this article from LA Weekly could help. In terribly graphic detail, it recounts the effects of a fictional anthrax attack on the city of angels -- from the unnoticed spraying of spores by a small Cessna through the subsequent 40,000 deaths.
I have just one question for the author, and for anyone else working on pieces like this. I have as much morbid fascination with doomsday scenarios as the next guy, but don't you think you're increasing the likelihood of some homegrown nut job getting the idea to do this sort of thing so he can blame it on the entire Arab world?
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 20, 2003
Eating Fish at the Aquarium
Here I am in beautiful Monterey for Time's Future of Life conference, marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. Dr. James Watson, one half of the team that made the groundbreaking discovery, is here, as are such luminaries as Bill Joy, Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter (who sequenced the genome). It's fun hanging out with minds of this caliber, but I'm always intrigued by the unspoken ironies of such events. For instance, last night we were all bused over to the city's famous aquarium, a mere mile or so from the conference center -- taking giant gas-guzzling behemoths to an institution devoted to preserving the environment. This was after most conference-goers had been knocking back coffee and cookies all day; they probably would have been glad of the exercise. And once we're there, staring at well-preserved fish behind giant sheets of thick glass, what should be on our buffet tables but fish?
I ate it, of course. My Atkins needs were not being met by the cookies (one of which, I confess, I nibbled at). But I couldn't help thinking how arbitary the glass wall was. The fish on that side are beautiful, so we gawp at them and take pictures (until the Homeland Security folks designate fish a form of transport, that is). The fish on this side are tasty, so we cook them. Some fish, like tuna and anchovies, were on both sides of the glass. Who dies? Who lives? And why do we get to make these arbitary decisions?
At a seminar this morning, Richard Dawkins argued that humans are practically the only mammal on Earth that we haven't genetically modified in some way. We've domesticated cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats. So why, his devil's advocate argument went, should we not make designer babies? Another researcher shot back that when we domesticate animals, they typically have 25% less brain than the wild version. Our track record in advancing species through breeding is not superb. Including our own: it's only very recently in human history that we've decided marrying outside the immediate gene pool is a good idea. Some cultures still haven't figured that one out.
By the way, if you get the chance to see it, the new jellyfish exhibit at the aquarium is absolutely stunning. I don't recommend eating them.
Homework vs. Homeland
America may be the land of the free, but it is gathering an increasing number of exceptions to that freedom. The latest exception: you can't take photographs of trains. A camera-carrying student in Philadelphia was arrested earlier this month for documenting part of the local transit system as part of his homework assignment. He was later released with the stern warning that you can't do such things in a code orange, duct-tape-the-doors state of alert. Now his college has to work to wipe the arrest from the poor lad's police record.
This may seem like something small. But a fascist police state doesn't always spring into being overnight. It's the little changes you have to watch out for.
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 17, 2003
How to Sound Like an 'After' Ad
The Atkins diet continues to work miraculous effects. A pound of fat is peeling off me every day (not literally peeling, but literally every day). My body fat percentage is back down under the 25% barrier which divides the somewhat healthy from the somewhat overweight. And most importantly, I seem to have kicked my sugar addiction. Sugar has such a deleterious effect on me now that I simply don't want it any more.
This was brought home to me on Valentine's Day, when I whisked Petra off to the dining room at the San Francisco Ritz. Most of the meal was Atkins-friendly -- oh, how glad I am that I can still eat foie gras! -- until we got to dessert. This was Valentine's dessert for two, part of the prix fix; a massive plate full of tiny cakes and chocolate fondue. Well, I thought, I'll just have half of this little raspberry cake. Understand, we're talking about a teeny-tiny nouvelle cuisine-sized portion in the first place, and I was dividing that in two. But as soon as I ate it, the effect on my blood sugar was obvious. I felt like a kid who'd eaten too many Twinkies. I couldn't handle so much as another raspberry. There was a plate full of chocolaty deliciousness in front of me, and although my eyes wanted it, my stomach was saying a firm "no." This was an unusual sensation, to say the least.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, February 16, 2003
This Page Brought to You By ...
Google, who just bought out the company that owns Blogger, on which this site and 200,000 other weblogs are written. Good on you, Larry and Sergey. The quest for global domination of cool websites continues. Pretty soon, it's going to be you and Bezos owning everything.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 13, 2003
Jonesing for the Sweet Stuff
I'm now two days' deep into the Atkins diet. The first two weeks are pretty strict, which means I'm able to eat all the protein and vegetables I want but nothing more, and drink nothing but water. The first two days, you're likely to suffer a headache or two as your body shifts from burning carbs to burning fat. And, as the book says, "you might notice symptoms of sugar withdrawl."
Boy, do I ever. It feels like I have two personalities, and one of them is a poor, pathetic sugar junkie. Yesterday I caught him persuading me to have a cup of tea -- just one leeeeeetle cup -- and I realized, just in time, it was because he was expecting me to do what I normally do -- drop two sugar cubes into the cup automatically, without thought. When I said okay, but no sugars in the tea, he had what I guess you would call an inner child temper tantrum. This morning, standing in front of the fridge, looking for some veggies to have with my omelete, I tasted something sweet in my mouth -- and realized I'd snarfed down a couple of grapes that happened to be in the veggie drawer without realizing I was doing it.
This lack of self-control is scary, but instructive. It isn't just a joke: you really can be addicted to sugar, in every meaningful sense of the word. This should not be allowed to stand. There should be no single kind of carbohydrate that you absolutely can't do without, as long as you're getting some (and the best kind is vegetable matter). Millions of human beings have lived happy and healthy lives without ever tasting sugar. It is possible. It should be possible, on principle. Unfortuately, as I noticed today while shopping for special sweet-tasting Atkins bars to mollify the inner junkie, buying food without processed sugar is practically the hardest thing possible in western culture. We're a society of junkies.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Documenting the Alien
I suppose it started when we found a small, green plastic alien in the car. This was last Saturday, when three friends and I went to Mount Diablo State Park in the East Bay. Our initial intention was to do some good, hard cardio-friendly hiking. But we were all in a typically silly mood and, as it turned out, we were all carrying digital cameras with practically limitless storage capacity. So we started documenting our plastic friend's visit to the park: alien admires large tree. Alien casts long shadow in wind cave. Alien gets stuck in barbeque pit. Soon my friend Kaila cunningly decided to take pictures of ourselves taking pictures of the alien -- documenting the documentation. Then, because we are all self-referential children of irony, we scrambled to take pictures of the person taking pictures of the person taking pictures of the alien. There was a mad, confusing outburst of camera flashes. "Ha! I am more postmodern than you," shouted one of us, possibly me. (Of course, now I'm documenting the documentation of the documentation of the documentation. I win!)
All of which terribly childish behavior reminds me of the current Michael Jackson controversy. No, that's not because the embattled king of pop bears a marked resemblence to a small, plastic alien. It's because Jackson, fuming over his treatment at the hands of Martin Bashir as broadcast on ABC, has given the Fox network his own documentary. One that was filmed by Jackson's entourage during the Bashir documentary, and features Bashir praising Jackson's way of interacting children. That's right -- trying desperately to prove a point (or deflect attention from those creepy in-bed-with-kids revelations), Jacko is documenting the documentation of the documentary maker. Now Bashir, who tried in vain to avoid becoming part of the story himself, has issued his own response in the form of an ITV webchat. This in itself becomes a news story, which in turn becomes fodder for blogs, and here we are documenting the documentation of the documentation of the documentation of the original documentary.
My only question is: at what point do we realize how ridiculous this all is? When do we laugh and turn away? When does this feedback loop, this navel-gazing in a hall of mirrors, stop being news?
I don't know, but I can't wait to see someone emerge with a selectively-edited tape of Jackson's team selectively editing their taped evidence of selective editing.
The Ultimate Recovery
Following Drive Savers' spectacular recovery of my diaries (see yesterday), someone at the company just called to ask if I'd heard a rumor that the remains of a laptop from the Shuttle, including hard drive, had been discovered somewhere in the Texas debris zone.
I hadn't, and directed them to NASA. But what a coup that would be, in a grisly kind of way. Drive Savers has already recovered data from computers that were practically liquefied in house fires, sank to the bottom of the Amazon on cruise ships, or were run over by trucks -- cases that have made great publicity. It's a little more difficult to imagine the slogan for this one: "Columbia's crew didn't survive the landing -- but their hard drive did."
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Oscar Musings
The nominations are out, if you haven't noticed. Here's the ballot.
So ... if last year's Lord of the Rings (Fellowship) got 13 nominations and this year's (Two Towers) got only five, does that mean Fellowship is supposed to be the better movie? (It isn't, of course).
Much has been made of the fact that a fictional character has been nominated for writing a screenplay (Charlie Kaufman, along with "brother" Donald, for the fabulous Adaptation). This is wonderful; a long overdue development. So why didn't Gollum get a best supporting actor nod?
Is the Academy trying to ingratiate itself with the rest of America outside LA? We've got zillions of nominations for Chicago and Gangs of New York, both movies with okay (not brilliant) critical acclaim. And Hollywood does seem a little obsessed with telling the Midwest and East Coast that it's not out of touch. What's next: lifetime achievement awards for the casts of Dallas and Miami Vice?
Life Savers
Regulars may remember my griping and grieving a few months back, when a devilish program called Deja Vu took it upon itself to erase dozens of precious diary and fiction files on my G4 Cube's hard drive. Well, last week I happened to be doing interviews at a place up in Novato called Drive Savers that specializes in data recovery and has performed such worthy miracles as rescuing 12 episodes of the Simpsons when the script-writer's laptop went on the fritz (they've also rescued hard drives for Sean Connery, the Rolling Stones and Gerald Ford, who, appropriately enough, dropped his computer). I mentioned the Cube's problems, and that everyone from Apple on down had told me the files were unrecoverable once deleted in OS X. The company insisted I bring it in and gave me what was effectively drive-thru service -- while admitting, of course, that it wouldn't be quite that fast (or free) if I wasn't writing a story about them.
Still, everyone at the firm seemed genuine and friendly. The engineer working on my drive apologized that he wouldn't have my rescued files ready until the next day as his wife was about to go into labor. But rescued they were; I have my diaries back, the engineer has a child, and all's right with the world.
In-Line, Online
The following may come as a surprise to anyone who knows me personally, but I've started learning -- and thoroughly enjoying -- the fine art of rollerblading. This may also come as a surprise to anyone who has a perception of San Francisco as a town of hills, but there are some real rollerblade-friendly areas around here. Fisherman's Wharf, the Embarcadero (where a gigantic bow and arrow seems to have mysteriously sprouted) and, on Sundays, Golden Gate park, the main throughfare of which is blissfully blocked to traffic. Now it's time to stop renting skates and start buying, online or in-store. Any 'bladers out there want to recommend a good skate for a beginner? I've been using the K2 Velocity, but I'm open to other options.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 08, 2003
This Space for Brent
I've now watched three episodes of the exquisitely dark comedy The Office on BBC America. It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion, serialized weekly.
The show masquerades as a TV documentary about a workplace in the turgid town of Slough (think Cleveland). In reality, it's a pitch-perfect satire of life in millions of cookie-cutter, dead-end, pen-pushing, clock-watching, flourescent-lit hell-holes. It's all here: the body language, the ill-fitting suits, the doomed flirtations, the petty practical jokes, the embarassingly shallow conversations and uncomfortable silences. And at the center of it all is David Brent, the middle-manager who believes himself to be the office comedian -- but is utterly unaware of his flaws, his childishness and cowardice. The result is funny, sad and subversively true.
What interests me almost as much as the show is how much my American friends get it. I would have thought the many British culture references and the odd accents would put them off. Not a bit of it. They're laughing in embarassment and groaning in pain even more than I am. Characters like Brent, it seems, are universal.
Of course, one of the American networks has bought the rights to develop a U.S. version of the show. Tim Goodman, the San Francisco Chronicle's wonderfully cranky TV critic, launched a blistering attack on NBC's plan to set the show in Manhattan, a location that of course totally misses the point. He anticipates "beautiful twentysomethings chewing scenery to the deafening sound of a laugh track," and he's probably right. Never mind: we have at least a dozen episodes of the original to go before that happens.
If you're a fan like me and you can't wait to see how it turns out, there's an excellent episode guide here.
Roadmap to Mars
Where should the embattled American space program go now? What should it use to replace the antiquated, disaster-prone Shuttle system? Science fiction author Gregory Benford has the answers here.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, February 06, 2003
Only in San Francisco, Part 2
While out walking with Petra near the Presidio last Sunday, I came across this unusual shop front:
The Personal Excellence Resource Center Self-Improvement Continuum? A religious cult, surely. Nope, it's a darts store. Or rather, a darts store reimagined as a religious cult. Take this little mantra in the window:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love this beautiful nut job of a city.
Size Matters
Interesting that the two final designs for the World Trade Center space would both create the world's tallest structure. This seems fitting, although I can't exactly explain why. Am I -- and the architectural world -- really so hung up on size?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, February 04, 2003
The Major Tom Myth
Okay, I've milked popular culture for ways to get over Columbia. I've watched Capricorn One and felt my heart in my throat when the capsule burns up on re-entry. (Is it too much to wish that NASA secretly faked the astronauts' presence on this mission?) I've listened to Space Oddity -- and just to be comprehensive, the sort-of sequel Ashes to Ashes and the inferior German replica Major Tom. What can we glean from them? Putting on my Joseph Campbell hat for a second, I'll simply note how interesting it is that we have already manufactured a myth involving an astronaut who dies in space and lives on in some transmogrified form. (It's life, but not as we know it.)
Oh, and "tell my wife I love her very much" is a more appropriate choice of last words than "Roger. Uh ... buh ..." That's the trouble with last words. You rarely get to choose them.
Anyone got any other pre-Columbian space death myths?
Daily Blah for... Monday, February 03, 2003
In Defense of Space
What a depressing moment this is for anyone with progressive interests in mankind's future. Here we are, the new century barely dawned, and we're slipping backwards. We're losing interest in exploring the space beyond our own tiny world, and we're gaining interest in new reasons to kill other humans. At the same time that serious and powerful men talk of war, other serious and thoughtful men begin to grumble that we should retire the Shuttle forever -- take a ten-year hiatus from space, abandon the International Space Station. It's just a boondoggle anyway; why should we keep risking lives up there anyway? To give the aerospace industry something to do?
No. In the words of Sir Edmund Hillary: because it's there. Space, that is. The great beyond. Earth orbit, and beyond it, the moon. Mars. The asteroid belt, with enough metallic wealth in just one of its rocks to make everyone on this planet richer than Bill Gates. There are so many good reasons to keep going -- poetic and capitalistic reasons. But the biggest reason is what we might become if we just stuck to the face of one planet and stopped having grand dreams: a small, petty, squabbling little race, intent on tearing itself apart. Then one day, once we've fully forgotten about the universe beyond our broken skies, it'll throw at us the same kind of mass destruction that came to visit the dinosaurs.
And that would really make for a depressing moment.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, February 01, 2003
A Thousand Words and a Picture
Two of the most chilling things I've seen today on the Web: First, a real-time log of the Shuttle's descent. Second, this radar image from the national weather service, with the explosion etched into it like a long red scar.
Just for the Record ...
CNN keeps quoting Ronald Reagan's 1986 speech on the Challenger disaster. "Who can forget those lines ... 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God' ..."
Ahem. These were not Reagan's lines. They belong to Pilot Officer John G. Magee. One would have thought his poem High Flight had a good shot at immortality, especially on a day like today. Evidently that immortality has been co-opted.
Meanwhile, Bush is quoting the seventh century BC prophet Isiah to console us for the loss of Columbia. I don't know how relevant that is supposed to be, but at least he's giving credit where it's due.
Morning Mourning
I wanted to see the Shuttle this morning. Reading the paper late last night, I noted a small item on how it might be visible in the sky above the Bay Area around about 7am. But there was a high chance of clouds -- and besides, you might sooner wake the dead than get me up at 7am on a Saturday.
Now I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to see a Shuttle in the sky again.
Not Again. Not Again. Not Again
First this. Then this. Now this.
Not to mention this year is the hundredth anniversary of the very first flight.
Is someone up there having a sick joke at our expense?
|
|
|
|
