Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

The Little Comet that Could

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Ah, the Internet, with its almost magical ability to give you what you’re looking for — even if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Through a series of links that started with a Web comic, I learned of a little comet that just played chicken with the sun and lived to tell about it.

The best summary is on this page, which at the top says “it’ll be interesting watching this comet flame out as it passes through the million-degree corona of the sun.” As it gets close the discussion talks about new and interesting things about this comet and what it can show us about the sun, then suddenly the author says (mildly paraphrasing here), “Holy shit! It came round the other side!” A decent video of the comet shooting out the other side is here.

The comet actually left its tail behind as it whipped around the sun, and there’s really cool footage of the comet streaking toward the sun, leaving a trail (probably) whipped around by magnetic storms. It’s all pretty cool.

Part of what’s interesting to me about all this is just how many devices were available to observe the course of comet Lovejoy. In the coming days, as more data comes in from other observers, we stand to learn a lot about our home star. You know I’ll be checking in.

[Edit] Let’s try embedding this youtube video, shall we? It’s a little wider than my format, but I think that will be all right this once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPJ3Xbl9nZM

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If Daniel Craig were an Athlete, he’d Play Hockey

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I just saw an ad for a movie that featured Daniel Craig, and it took me back to my time on the set of Casino Royale. Though the action was theoretically in Miami, we were in Prague in February.

Daniel Craig was a total pro. Easygoing, just another member of the cast, doing his best.

There’s a lot of time between shots in a project like this, and during a break Craig was sparring with his coach (or was it his on-screen adversary? facts are skitterish). Maybe he was working to keep warm, maybe to make the fight scene better.

He hurt his wrist. Not a big injury, not the sort of thing that slows down a pro. When he reported the setback he seemed a little embarrassed about the attention his discomfort brought. I wasn’t in his head at that moment, but I think he might have regretted bringing it up at all. But he’s a pro, and a pro tells his director if there might be a weakness in his game.

Which is totally the opposite of soccer, which I presume through national profiling is Craig’s sport of choice. Can you imagine what a soccer (football, according to Craig’s people) player would do with a minor wrist injury? Lie on the field and cry like a baby, that’s what. Aaaaah! how can I kick a ball with this terrible pain in my wrist?

Note to proponents of the game: get up off the grass and play and maybe you’ll convince me.

There are sports where the ability to shrug off a minor tweak is still valued, but when it comes down to being embarrassed about being hurt, about not wanting to make a deal of it at all except how it might affect your team, then we’re talking hockey. That’s where Craig was that day on set. He was a hockey actor.

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The New Magic

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I don’t actually have any use for this device, but I can still marvel at the amazingness of it:

Magic!

This little puppy acts just like an ordinary storage chip for your camera, except it’s also a WiFi transmitter that automatically copies your pictures to your home computer or phone and clears the space for more pictures. With the WiFi you can also have the chip guess roughly where it is in the world, and tag your photos with the location. You can even have it upload to Picasa or whatever automatically. (Though anyone who posts every picture they take to Flikr without first editing is someone who’s photos I will never view.)

Remember when we had WiFi cards that we could stick in the side of a computer with the antenna poking out? That was pretty cool. Now this tiny chip does the same thing, only it integrates with your photo software. Holey Moley.

Technical quibbles: it only works with JPEGs (even sharing on your own network, which strikes me as odd), and the SD form factor doesn’t work in all cameras. There are adapters, however.

Back when they thought we’d have atom-powered flying cars, they didn’t think of this stuff.

Thanks!

NaNoWriMo Victory!

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Winning NaNoWriMo has always been easy for me. The thing is, this year I had a different, much more important writing deadline. It’s official now, I failed to complete a draft of Munchies in time to slide it to Kij over winter break. The late push has been extremely fertile; just yesterday I wrote a scene that is both touching and gut-wrenching. I’d say more but then it would be a spoiler. Poor Agatha.

Meanwhile, there was NaNoWriMo. Really, you’re not supposed to extend an existing work, but that rule’s been largely ignored from the beginning. This year I also ignored that rule. The kids at NaNoCetral also suggest many ways to pad word count; I abused those suggestions and invented a new one all my own.

The ultimate result coming out of November: some really good scenes — a few even approaching publishable quality — but not a novel to ship. Those scenes, and a crapload of other words. I’m claiming victory this year, but it’s the first time in more than a decade that I’ve felt a little defensive about it. I didn’t win the way I like to win.

Thanks!

Amazon Links Restored

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Jerry Brown saw reason, and now people in California can be Amazon affiliates again. Hooray!

Actually, this happened a while ago, but I’m just now getting around to restoring all the links on this site to my affiliate account instead of the the other account that was cared for by someone in another state.

All is back to normal here, so if you’re going to be shopping at Amazon anyway, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d start with the link in the sidebar.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Intracorporeal Memo

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To: Heart, Lungs, Legs
From: Brain
Re: Exercise intensity

Exercise intensity will continue to increase. Get used to it.

Note: Way to hang in there, knees. Keep up the good work.

Thanks!

Nice View They’ve Got

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Astronomy Picture of the Day is one of my favorite sites, but yesterday’s edition was even better than most. I’ve always wanted to see the aurora borealis, and I will, dammit, but now I also want to see the northern lights from space.

Can someone hook me up?

Thanks!

Call me g2-587217eb4d0b8b1710372695336f2a58

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The other day I got an email notification that someone had requested a password change for my wordpress.com account. WTF? I almost never even log into wordpress.com. But, if someone knew my member name, they could try to hack my account and I assumed that this message was a result of such shenanigans. I figured an actual change of my password was in order, just to be safe.

Then I noticed the user name on the account: g2-587217eb4d0b8b1710372695336f2a58

That’s actually not my user name at wordpress.com. Someone (a robot, obviously) created an account with my email address. Huh. I logged into the fake account, changed its password so whoever created it wouldn’t get access to it, and looked around for a way to delete the account entirely. I couldn’t find one.

I know you had a snafu that led to people’s passwords being stored less securely, and therefore a spate of “reset your password” messages issued forth, but this message was absolutely not the same as those. I am fanatic about protecting my email password (as I write about here), and I have changed it recently. There is no other sign that my email account has been compromised.

I logged in as the bogus user and checked to see if any comments or posts had been made; it appeared not. So, I set the password to something ridiculous and promptly forgot it.

The only problem is, when I leave comments on people’s wordpress.com blogs, after I put in my email it auto-fills the rest with data from the bogus account.

So, two things:
1) how did there come to be an account with an email address the bad guy almost certainly didn’t have access to?
2) how can I make that bogus account go away entirely, and never bother me again?

Thanks!

My Thoughts on Joe Paterno

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I don’t feel good about piling on to the media onslaught surrounding Penn State, but there’s a lot of hysteria flying around and some of it’s shit.

Please allow me to summarize the current scandal: A coach at Penn State has been accused of gut-wrenching numbers of child molestation charges. The worst part is that when he retired he was given permission to visit the football facilities but he was not allowed to bring children. (I got that last off sports radio, so it might be false.) If it’s true, however, it implies that the powers-that-be knew of the coach’s deep and intractable evil, and their response was to make sure they weren’t implicated later.

Joe Paterno, legendary coach, King of Happy Valley (where Penn State is located), has said he is shocked and wishes he had done more when he saw trouble signs. People are jumping all over his ass asking, “How could he have been so naïve? He must have known something!”

But that’s the killer with naïvety. In retrospect you do know. You realize that when you hear that someone in your employ is accused of doing something awful you don’t just kick it up to your boss and assume they will do the right thing. And if you’re an old-schooler living a sheltered life in a town called Happy Valley, It’s hard to picture the guy next to you as being purely evil. You can’t even imagine the crime, let alone believe your friend capable of it.

Someone in that organization knew. I don’t think it was Joe, and I think the administration wanted it that way. They knew Joe the old-schooler would not have let them cover things up. Now Joe’s been fired, and perhaps that will give others the awareness and strength to act when someone close to them is doing something wrong. Perhaps people will be able to see the evil now.

On the other hand, I’m disturbed at the amount of press focussed on what this will do to Paterno’s legacy at the expense of discussing what the (alleged) spawn of hell did to those poor kids. And look! I just added to that.

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I Want to SEE Moore’s Law

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When I first pulled my iPad out of its box and held it, I said, “This little thing has more computing power than most spacecraft.” Pretty sure that’s true; most spacecraft are pretty old and it takes a long, long time to get a chip certified for space. Still, It’d be fun to have some facts. There’s no single metric to compare computers, but I’d still be interested in a chart of computer power through the ages. How does my iPad compare to an IBM 360, a classic mainframe (it’s no contest, really, but how many times faster is the iPad)? How far to go yet before my phone threatens Cray’s numbers?

Somewhere out there, some geek/historian must be compiling this kind of info. I searched a little bit but it was all about fastest on the planet. Consumer devices (other than game boxes which are only compared to other game boxes) need not apply. But those guys are missing the true revolution: that our phones and cars and DVD players are wicked-fast computers. Supercomputers are being measured in petaflops these days. Big Whoop. I’ve got a phone that can understand my words.

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Got me an iPad!

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It was only a matter of time, I suppose, considering where I work. I get a discount on the gadgets, and I sold it to myself as a way to be more productive. “I can read while I work out,” I said. Of course, I could have paid a fraction of the cost of an iPad for a Kindle and done the same thing.

But there’s something about this device. I’m not one to get tech envy; I don’t have to have the latest phone or the slickest TV or anything like that. But when I saw my coworkers with their iPads, I have to admit I turned a little green.

When it first came out I couldn’t decide whether it was too big or too small. Both, I decided. Too big for your pocket, too small for serious work. Then I started seeing the things in meetings where laptops used to rule. The executives who use my work are all-iPad. At least at Apple, it’s proven to be a serious business tool. Not too big. Not too small. A portable conduit to the Infoverse, with a screen big enough to interact with all that stuff out there.

So now I own one. I’ll still be taking the laptop to meetings. Most meetings, anyway. And I did work out today, and read while doing it.

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Keep the Shovel

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The official sister of Muddled Ramblings has on occasion told me about a show called “Pimp My Ride.” In this show, photogenic people turn their old, crappy vehicles over to a bunch of talented and resourceful people who “pimp it out”, as the kids say. In this case “pimp” does not mean to use the car to promote prostitution, rather it means convert the vehicle into one a pimp might drive. This means it must have “bling”: conspicuous and profligate disregard for cost, a desire to attract attention at the sacrifice of taste. Money for money’s sake.

Today for the first time I saw (but did not hear) the show. It opened with many scenes of a frighteningly cute young woman driving an old, beat-up Land Cruiser. The vehicle had no doors. I *heart* explosives, a sticker on the front bumper proclaimed. On the left front fender a short-handled shovel was anchored. When you’re in deep sand, a thousand miles from home, a shovel can save your life. Various people in hip-hop attire were shown posing next to the sticker and the shovel. The seats had four-point harnesses and the speakers were in black-spraypainted wooden boxes rattling around in back.

The bubbly young lady was shooed away and the pimping began. In my head, I was imagining how I would trick out this particular ride. They gave the thing new paint (yellow!) and front ironwork with lights. Nice. That eliminated the bumper sticker that everyone had made such a big deal of, but I was sure that the ‘explosives’ motif would be honored some other way. I mean, shit. Explosives.

I was wrong. The pixie came back, jumped up and down with terrific excitement, and fawned over her transformed vehicle. My thought: where’s the shovel? Apparently all that time spent posing next to the shovel was to bury it, not praise it. These urban ride-pimpers had no respect for the rural, self-sufficient, working-man characteristics of the vehicle. What I thought had been a great chance to build up and enhance an iconic vehicle was just another makeover, like taking a great singer and cramming her into the conformity-box of American Idol. A wilderness hero goes Hollywood.

Apparently Little Miss Sunshine, whom, based on her vehicle, I had judged to be an independent desert rat, a rambler, in fact was just in the wrong car to start with. That, or she was good at pretending to be happy.

And you know what? Even in Hollywood, that shovel should have stayed. The businesslike seats should have stayed. The ride would have benefitted from a little bit of badass (big tires on shiny wheels are often mistaken for badass, as they were in this case, but you know the real thing when you see it). All the time the people spent posing next to the shovel is proof that it made an impression.

There were lots of cool things the ride-pimpers added to the vehicle, and I have to admit that if I’d not seen the original I would have just written the result off as another toy truck that some rich kid bought. Knowing its history, though, I know that truck could have been so much more.

Whatever you’re doing out there, make sure you keep the shovel. The shovel is where the soul is.

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Why I Should Be an Analyst for Sharks Radio

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As time was running out against the Penguins, who have been moving the puck all night as well as any team I’ve ever seen, McGinn of the Sharks scored a tying goal. “That’s what we need!” I proclaimed.

No shit, Sherlock.

The game continues, tied in the third.

Thanks!

Ig Nobel

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The awards are in jest, but at the same time they’re not. The Ig Nobel awards have honored the inventors of pink lawn flamingos (yes, they were invented), and other breakthroughs of science. This year: wasabi smoke alarm, procrastination, and apples and oranges. Not to mention the bug that loves to hump a beer bottle.

(I actually started writing this episode a few weeks ago, when commentary on this year’s awards was actually timely, but the partially complete episode has been sitting, waiting for a time when I don’t have anything better to say. Welcome to November.)

This year the august panel that dispenses these awards honored a paper titled “Apples and Oranges: a comparison.” It turns out you can compare the two, and now there’s science to back it up. Keep that in mind next time you’re accused of arguing in bad faith.

In other news, A Japanese team was honored this year for a study of just how much wasabi was the right amount to emit from a smoke detector. Not enough, people don’t wake up and burn to death. Too much, people burn to death while crying their eyes out.

“A wasabi smoke alarm?” I hear you say, “What a waste of science!” The whole thing sounds pretty stupid, until you give your smoke detector to a profoundly deaf person. Wait a minute, this thing is genius. That’s how you win an Ig Nobel. Discoveries that make you laugh, then think.

With a little funding, I think I could rack up a dozen of the damn things.

I’m linking to an article at ars technica, in which the one real breakthrough of the year is taken quite seriously: The theory of structured procrastination. The author postulates that, to be a high achiever, one must always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid something even more important. Now I ask myself: Can I be wasting my life more effectively?

This principle has already had a positive effect on my life. (Although, to be honest, this last week I’ve slid a little bit.) I ask myself “can I be wasting my time better?” and the answer is almost always yes. Some of the alternative procrastination options are frighteningly close to productive.

Thanks!

The Smart Phone that’s (Almost) Smart Enough

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I’m told a lot of people were disappointed by the announcement of the iPhone 4S, and I guess I can see why. The hardware sports a much faster processor, but it’s not 4G! My current 3G phone is plenty fast enough for what I do, and that has included tethering it to my computer for Web access where there’s no WiFi. So, 4G doesn’t really seem that important to me.

Tethering the phone to my computer, now that’s a big deal, and something that iPhones can’t (or at least couldn’t) do without cracking them first. So I don’t currently have an iPhone.

The 4S is the one that finally has me tempted, however. To understand why, let me tell you what I wish my current smart phone could do.

1) I wish I could pick it up without looking, push a button, say ‘navigate home’, set it back down, and have the GPS system take me to my current address. Naturally I want this function when I’ve taken a wrong turn and I don’t want to mess with a damn phone, I just want to get out of there. I don’t have any spare attention to work through menus or wait while the phone processes ‘navigate’ and I can then tell it my address (which includes a street name that the voice recognition never gets right).

2) Again I’m driving. I want to pick up the phone, say, “I’m in traffic” and have the phone notify my boss that I’m running late, and send a message to anyone I might have an appointment with in the next 30 minutes. This would lower my stress immeasurably and remove a temptation (which I never succumb to) to make a phone call while driving.

Enter Siri, your humble personal assistant, and the real thing that’s exciting about the 4S.

Here’s a story an Apple board member told today at Steve’s memorial service. He related that on the day Steve came before the board to resign as CEO, he stuck around for the rest of the meeting. It was the day Siri was demonstrated to the board, and after a few minutes Steve said “let me see that thing.” The presenter hesitated, saying the phone had been calibrated to his voice, but really he knew that Steve was going to throw something unexpected at the device to see how it handled it. You never said no to Steve at a time like that. Steve started by asking the phone a couple of typical questions, then said, “Are you a man or a woman?”

Siri responded, “I have not been assigned a gender.” Steve, I believe, was pleased.

Al Gore, also a board member, told another Siri story. Al’s theme was that people genuinely love Apple’s products (there is, apparently, neurological evidence supporting this). He pointed out, however, that technology really doesn’t love you back. To illustrate the point he told of a friend (daughter, maybe? I’m a bit sketchy on the specifics) who asked Siri, “do you love me?”

Siri said, “I respect you.”

Oh, yeah, you can also say “Siri, text Katherine and say I’ll be late,” and it will. “Katherine says no problem,” Siri might say a few minutes later. Not as fun, but a lot more useful. I’m confident that with a little fiddling Siri can actually do my two use-cases above.

If Siri is as good as it seems, it will be remembered long after people stop putting ‘i’ at the front of everything. Our robot overlords will remember Siri as a turning point. It is the next user interface, the hands-free, eyes-free, give-me-what-I-need-without-interrupting-my-current-task interface. The one from Star Trek and Galaxy Quest, only, unlike in the latter, anyone can talk to it.

Siri says, “I am your humble personal assistant.”

Thanks!