NPR’s Planet Money (which I have been known to describe – without hyperbole – as “the best journalism on any topic in any media, in the entire existence of journalism”) published an interesting blog posting. A reporter goes to the Treasury Department to find out that the US government is going to lend billions of dollars to the IMF, but will do it in an off-books deal (you know, like Enron). The killer is the last two sentences: ...
I’ve finished Anathem, and I’m happy to report that it’s not just Hogwarts with math. There’s a whole lot of other stuff going on in there, and it’s fun. You have to like Stephenson’s style, and you have to enjoy learning and thinking about a whole new planet. Luckily, the planet is based on principles of cultural evolution familiar to anyone who has studied the history of technology, media, and religion on planet Earth. So it’s not too hard to understand what’s happening. ...
This article includes some interesting analysis of passwords found in the wild. A reasonable first impression would be, “good god, those people are sure stupid”. But I had another idea… isn’t it interesting that a lot of people prefer pattern-based passwords, i.e. pressing the buttons in a certain order, without respect to the semantic meaning of the password. That means they are thinking visually, storing their password as a picture of the keys, and a mental model of the shape and direction their fingers will go to enter the code. ...
My friend Curtis writes 512 Words of fiction every week, then posts both the story and a reading of the story every Friday. Today’s story was his best ever, even better than Ghosts of Earth my previous favorite (though hard to choose, really…) Be sure to listen to the reading of this week’s story, entitled “Better”. Today’s story really profits from the ambiance of the great music Curtis chose and his deep voice. ...
Something really amazing happened to me the other night. Marina was brain-fried from a long day at school, and she said, “I wish I could just sit in front of the TV and zone out to TSI1 (Italian Switzerland’s public TV station)”. I said, let me see what I can find… I searched on the net, and struck out pretty thouroughly finding a live stream for TSI1, but I did find some British TV on Zattoo. My laptop was booted in Linux at the time, so as I was grumbling about rebooting, I noticed they have a Linux player. So then I grumbled about how nothing ever works right in Linux while it downloaded and installed. It told me it wanted some more codecs, so I grumbled about how the state of video encoding is so complicated that nothing ever works without 1000 plugins while they automatically downloaded and installed with no intervention from me (save the grumbling). ...
Here’s a new feature on Google News: Quotes. If you search for someone by name, and Google noticed that they’ve been quoted, then one of their quotes will be on top of the results. Then you can click for more. Here’s an example from a quotable politician.
Marina and I saw Slumdog Millionaire a few days ago, and it was really excellent. Curtis agrees. Go see it. That is all.
Check out this picture of the FBI mobile command center that’s been deployed for the inauguration: And this picture from inside: WTF? Carebears on the video screen of our nation’s most elite mobile command center? Perhaps this photo is counter-FBI propaganda promulgated by the Secret Service… inter-agency rivalry is a bitch!
I am reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and it’s pretty darn good. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s basically “Hogwarts with Math”, but that’s not Stephenson’s fault… he’s telling a perfectly good story, it just happens that Rowling was also telling a perfectly good story and the two seem a bit the same. There are some really excellent one-liners, and some great “no one understands my audience like I do” things in the book. This is something Stephenson is really good at, and though it is pandering, it is pandering to me, and that’s OK, of course. ...
The Guardian carried a really scary article recently about the new face of the insurgency in Iraq. One quote that surprised me was this one: Black soldiers are a particular target. ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation,’ Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism prevalent in much of the Middle East. ‘Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.’ Wow. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me to find racism here too, as I’ve found it in Europe and the US too. ...