MacBookPro

Woot!

Back in the USA

It's 4.15 AM, here in portland and I have no idea what time zone my bag is in. Unfortunately BA decided not to send it to Portland with me, however they did give me a mini-BA-bag containing the following.

• 1 XL White T-Shirt with BA-logo
• 1 Toothbrush
• Toothpaste
• Disposable razor
• Shaving cream
• Roll on deodorant
• Plastic comb
• $50

So my personal hygiene is taken care of but I will have to use that $50 to buy some new underwear and await the arrival of my bag. This is the second time my bag has been lost traveling, the first was far more stressful as it was just a couple of nights before the Geneva motorshow and contained my suit and everything I else i needed. Now that was a stressful wait this is easy by comparison.

Mash up city

This is a great collection of mash-ups and bastard pop all built into a great little flash player app that allows you to listen to the tracks and then of you like download them. There are 2,747 tracks so it should keep all your mash--up needs satisfied for a while! goodblimey.com/tunes

In a former life...

Thats me driving a 2 million dollar concept car, what were they thinking. And this is the team that worked on the car A few more details and more driving.

Odd Sympathy

The excellent Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society has a fascinating article on the phenomenon of odd sympathy.

The term “odd sympathy” was coined by the 17th-century Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens to describe the strange phenonmenon he observed while laying sick in bed and looking up at two of his newly invented pendulum clocks hanging on the wall above him. Inexplicably, the two pendulums always swung in opposite directions. Even when he would release them in different positions, they eventually fell back in synch (or antisynch, to be precise). Huygens had discovered the principle of coupled oscillation, but it took a recent study by physicists at Georgia Tech (image above) to prove that it was the miniscule force of the pendulums operating on a beam in the wall that caused them to link up.

I like about this is that Huygens didn't look for some supernatural or otherworldly explanation for this, but made observations and analyses that were later proved by scientists with better tools. There are some other great example of odd sympathy here to including being able to tell the time form the synchronised chirp of snow crickets! Its science and I love it, read more!

This is an effort to get re-elected!

This video was produced by the RNC(Republican National Committee) to aid the re-election of republican congressman on November the 7th. To me and others it appears to be a video celebrating Al-Qaeda, almost a recruiting video. It uses heroic imagery of the fighters training mixed with senior Al-Qaeda leaders messages.

The object is to terrify Americans into voting republican on November 7th. Given their record so far and just how badly this advert misses the mark, I cant say its got a hope in hell of working. I certainly hope to see the Republicans lose control of the house and hopefully usher in a new phase of American government, with a house that will actually stand up to this loathsome president.

Tangerine

Tangerine is a new music analysis tool for OSX and it addresses my two biggest gripes about these kinds of applications:

1. It's blazing fast, taking less than 2 hours to analyse my nearly 5000 tracks and 35Gb of music on a 1.5GHz G4 Powerbook.
2. It actually delivers sensible results (in the main)

First impressions of this fashionably beta application are great, it gets on with analysing your music in the background, and remarkably not slowing everything to a complete crawl. It measures both beats per minute and the beat intensity, and then allows you to build playlists that filter based on those two criteria.

Using the sliders you can see how many tracks meet the criteria in real time and then even choose the profile of intensity that you want the playlist to build.

Finally the actual playlist itself is beautifully designed running along the bottom of the application window, it shows the album art using the width of the box to display the track length and the height its intensity. Mouse over the album art shows track details.

I can actually see myself using this over iTunes for a lot of my listening, especially while working, when I want relatively low intensity tracks picked out at random from the library. Of course if you want to you can save the playlist to iTunes and play it there.

I am sure I will bump into some negatives as I use this more, but so far I am very pleasantly impressed.

P.S. If you blog about it they will give you a free license, though this has not changed my opinion of whether this is a good application or not.

Link

Negative Calories

Coca-cola is on the verge of launching the first negative calorie drink. I wonder what the nutritional information will say: This drink contains -20 Calories, excessive consumption will lead to starvation. I am sure there was a wired items found from the future with a food product that had negative calories. Life imitating art, or just the inevitability of technological progress.

A Third of people believe torture is ok to combat terrorism

I am surprised it is so low. I am also pleased at least in the UK that the vast majority 72% are against all forms of terrorism. This BBC poll shows up some other interesting details, like why do so many people in India not have a view on this very important issue, 45%replied neither or don't know. You can see the full results and commentary here, BBC News

Dawkins on Colbert + other interviews

Dawkins is out pushing his book the God Delusion and some of his interviews are worth watching On Colbert, it should be a powerful combination. On Paxman On BBC News, probably the most interesting. He responds to a number of questions emailed from viewers.

Creative Upgrade removes FM Recording

I will put this simply, if you bought a creative MP3 player because it had FM recording, you have just been screwed. The latest update removes this feature. I assume at the will of the RIAA or some other royalty collection agency. There is now a serious issue of trust with these manufacturers. It is no longer the case that you get what you pay for. You now have to trust that the company you paid money to will not turn around and remove features, or otherwise de-value or break your device. How does consumer protection law fit intro this. If a product is sold to you as having a certain set of features and then some are removed, can you then file a complaint under the trade descriptions act. If it said FM recording clearly on the box and in advertising but did not actually have FM recording out of the box, there certainly would be a case to answer, at least in the UK. As more and more devices are updated over the internet how do we ensure that we get what we pay for and it stays that way. Via boing boing

Toribash - The strangest Fighting game

Toribash is the most intriguing fighting game I have seen in a long time. Its bloody you can dismember people, so far so usual, but its all done on a turn based body mechanics system. There are no fixed moves, you tell the character to contract muscles extend muscles etc. Its very tricky to get the hang of, just trying to punch someone is hard enough let alone the moves shown it he demo video. The demo is a small download works on PC and MAC and is probably dangerously addictive. Warning loud techno music and blood feature inthis video.

Link

Beauty is a product

Nothing new here but very well illustrated. This spot for Dove's real beauty campaign shows just how much work goes into creating the images that we see every day beaming down perfectly at us from billboards and out from the pages of magazines. Watch the psot production work in Photoshop closely its interesting to see, just how many significant changes they make, longer neck, larger eyes etc they make, not simply airbrushing, but altering the whole structure of the face.

Torture and the Ticking Time Bomb

This article is an excellent rebuttal to Judge Posners argument that the value of the information sought justifies the means to get it.

“The value of the information sought depends in part on the menace to social welfare that has motivated the interrogation. If it is dire enough and the value of the information great enough, only a die-hard civil libertarian will deny the propriety of using a high degree of coercion to elicit the information. It might be the whereabouts of a kidnapping victim, the location of a ticking time bomb, the site of a biological weapon about to be deployed, the identity of key terrorist leaders, or the details of terrorist plots.”

This is essentially the Ticking Time Bomb argument and it is both hypothetical and in many aspects fallacious, it implies that there is no other means of getting the information and that torture will get you the information accurately in that scenario. It is a powerful argument that clouds our thinking and pushes us to accept legalised judicial torture. However it is a hypothetical argument and we should not be condoning torture in any case let alone using a hypothetical argument to open the legal floodgates to judicial torture. Introducing this kind of abhorrent legislation to deal with a hypothetical threat seems insane. The comments to the post in question are also very good reading indeed, some choice quotes:

Every regime that commits this crime does so in the name of salvation - Arial Dorfman

The supposed syllogism goes something like this: 1. TTB makes clear that all reasonable people can and should support torture is some limited circumstances -- to torture one to save millions (of helpless, unsuspecting Americans). 2. Ergo, our government, in order to confront TTB scenarios, must have a general authorization to torture "terrorists," and must have it in advance by law, so that when TTB arises our interrogators are not limited by a torture prohibition. This argument commits a category error. It universalizes a fanciful scenario that has never happened into a general rule.

Of course the final point has to be:

I almost forgot. After you finish following orders and torturing the suspect, it turns out he really didn’t know anything. That’s the way almost all of these scenarios end, isn’t it?

Read the full article and the excellent comments here:

Realtime SMS tag cloud

This is a fairly neat idea on the BBc Radio1 website. The radio station gets a lot of text messages between 500 and 1000 an hour, now you can see a tag cloud of common words from the messages. It would be cool to see some of dynamism evolution of words as they grow more popular but all in all a cool concept for the BBC. You can check it out here and some info from one of the developers here via Data Mining

Great optical illusion

This is a fantastic free cut out and build yourself optical illusion. The effect is fairly startling, and even with my fairly limited craft skills I managed to make this in less than 10 minutes. You can download it at http://www.grand-illusions.com/ Make sure you check out the video of the illusion its pretty impressive.

Richard Dawkins Foundation

Richard Dawkins who has been described as Darwins Rotweiler has started a foundation for reason and science, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. I have tremendous admiraton for Dawkins, he is outspoken on the value of reason and rational thinking over religion and superstition particularly in the current climate of religious and sectarian violence. His 2 part BBC Tv Series the root of all evil was a fantastic demonstration of how dogmatic and unthinking many of these religious institutions are. His new foundation has surprisingly clear goals, all laid out in a neat video. The site also has lots of fresh content and good discussions in the comment threads well worth checking out. He points out the rise of pseudo science, something that probably upsets me more than anything else. If people took this much interest in real science the world would probably be a much better place.

I have just visited my local branch of Britain’s biggest bookshop chain, and this is what I found: six books on astronomy and nineteen books on astrology. The real science is outnumbered three to one by the pseudoscience. There were twenty books on angels, which means that angels and astrology together (39) outnumber the totality of books on all the sciences (33). When you add in the books on fairies, crystal healing, fortune telling, faith healing, Nostradamus, psychics and dream interpretation, it is no contest. Pseudoscience outnumbers science by at least three to one, and I didn’t even begin to count the far larger number of books on religion

Is all this pseudo science just harmless fun or does it usurp the power of science to fool people into spending their money on complete rubbish. People seem to want to believe from crystal healers to psychics, with no evidence at all, they are willing to part with hard earned cash for what? A fuzzy feeling that the world can be easily understood through vibrational harmonics and talking to the dead. I can't see how many of these things are essentially scams, do the practitioners/authors genuinely believe in their powers? James Randi can't find anyone who believes that they really have powers, and are prepared to prove them. He offers a one million dollar prize to anyone who can prove their powers under a controlled experiment. So far there have been no takers....

Back to the USA

I am back off to the USA for the winter months, I will be leaving November the 2nd and back in late Jan, so by my reckoning I have just under one month to see all my friends and get sick of them before heading off!

Dawkins in Portland

Richard Dawkins is going to be talking about his new book the God Delusion at the fantastic Powell's City of Books in Portland. Unfortunately I don't think I will be back in time to catch him but I am sorely tempted to get an earlier flight out to the states just so I can hear him speak. More details here:

Awesome making of video

This really well produced video shows just how much CGI and post work goes into even simple seeming scenes. This is for eternal sunshine of the spotless mind but they also have other making of's to check out. I am blown away, and have to reevaluate jsut how many scenes use these techniques in film. Link