http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB1038261936872356908,
00.html Fun puff piece on the recommendation engines of
TiVo, Amazon, etc. running amok. “After Mr. Meyer ordered a
documentary about New York from Amazon.com, it pitched him
countless documentaries—even one on the history of the
thimble.” At least Amazon has a “Why was I
recommended this?” link;
Mark Pilgrim’s “Recommended
Reading” system doesn’t, and I have a sneaking
suspicion that it’s not doing much more than serving up the
highest-linked weblogs I haven’t read. 22:47
Archives
This month: 25 entries.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021202ta_talk_paumgarten US$100m was recently bequeathed to Poetry, which currently operates with four staff and an annual budget of US$600,000. One writer quips, “That’s probably more money than poetry has gotten, in total, since Homer.” 12:09
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=301120002331577597%25NewsgroupPosting%40John-
Wasser.com Electrical engineering for grown-ups: a very big
cable shorts out in LA. (Note date—this is ten years ago.) 11:17
http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/what/voting/count_senate.htm I quite like the Australia voting system: electorate-wide preferential voting for the House of Representatives and state-wide proportional representation in the Senate. (Voting is also compulsory.) But the details of the Senate’s voting system are insanely complicated! Part of the procedure, for example, involves calculating a figure “to the eighth decimal point, without rounding.” 11:32
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,844116,00.html The declining shock-value of fuck. Some miscellaneous quotes:
“Ethnic slurs are regarded as the taboo,” agrees Ayto. “Nigger is far more taboo than fuck or even cunt. I think if a politician were to be heard off-camera saying fuck, it would be trivial, but if he said nigger, that would be the end of his career.”
...
Further verification that fuck is, well, fucked, comes from Andrea Wills, the BBC’s chief advisor on editorial policy. “In research, 50% or more people said the words that should never be broadcast are cunt, motherfucker, nigger, Paki and spastic. Young women also don’t like whore, slag and twat. But fuck wasn’t on the list.”
The final line in the story (from a “middle-class west London mother”): “I’d rather my children said fuck than toilet.” 01:35
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2074008 A 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron, showing Schwarzenegger winning the 1975 Mr Olympia title, is being re-released. 11:44
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2481643.stm A right to die edge case: Ian Brady was jailed for life in 1966 after being convicted (with Myra Hindley) of “abducting, torturing and killing children.” He has no hope of parole and has been asking for some years that he be allowed to die. But (this is probably customary) the prison won’t allow it. So, three years ago he began a hunger strike; since then he’s been fed through a tube. Should he be allowed to die? 15:29
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/17/magazine/17WTWT.html Old-style cargo pilots: “There are four basic food groups: nicotine, caffeine, chocolate and sugar. I carry a thermos of coffee when I get on the plane. I refill it at our hub and buy two packets of Oreos—first pack’s gone in an hour; the second takes me two hours. Oreos work the best—they’re chocolate and sugar. Mix them with coffee, that’s three out of four. What more do you want?” 11:24
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2002/11/item20021118004609_1.htm Strange, energetic, clumsy account of Hewitt’s victory in the Masters Cup: “Throughout, Hewitt repeatedly found angles so sharp that Ferrero could have shaved with them had the Spaniard not put his ablutions on hold for the week.” 10:36
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,840339,
00.html This is messy: Hitomi Soga, kidnapped in Japan by
North Korea two decades ago Korea, was recently permitted to visit
Japan. She now wants
to return home to her husband and children so that they can
together discuss where to live—but the Japanese
government won’t let her, saying that she’s been
brainwashed. To make things even more complicated,
Soga’s husband is an American, Charles Jenkins, a US Army
deserter who defected to North Korea in 1965. And since the US military
police still want him, he could be extradited if he goes to Japan… (Pictures.) 01:52
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/g/graham.htm Like something out of Monty Python! R. L. Graham proves that a particular math problem has a solution, and that the solution is less than Graham’s Number—a number so large that a special notation is required to write it down. (According to this page, “if all the material in the universe were turned into pen and ink it would not be enough to write the number down.”) Graham’s Number is an upper bound. What do experts suspect (but can’t prove) the actual solution to be? 6.
(Rad big number notation.) 11:49
http://www2.warnerbros.com/madmagazine/files/onthestands/
ots_424/bunion.html Mad Magazine parody of The
Onion. (According to jwz,
Mad was
provoked.) 19:58
http://www.lies.com/wiki/index.cgi?WinonaRyderOnTrial Interesting discussion of fashion and fame via a careful day-by-day chronicle of the clothes Winona wore.
“One of the things I’ve been vaguely aware of for a while now is that for the person who understands fashion, it is the breaking of the rules (always, though, within carefully circumscribed boundaries) that makes the difference between a merely acceptable appearance and one that gets talked about (in a good sense). At a certain point, the difference between accident and artifice vanishes, and I’m pretty sure that for Winona and clothes, at least, that point has long since been passed.” 17:11
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/arts/09PHYS.html More on the Bogdanov affair:
Igor’s thesis had many things [referee] Dr. Jackiw didn’t understand, but he found it intriguing. “All these were ideas that could possibly make sense,” he said. “It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That’s all I ask.”
In the letters section a day later, two physics professors protest a little too much: (1) journals (especially those journals) don’t count anymore; and (2) it doesn’t matter if journals sometimes publish rubbish because nowadays it’s too hard to tell what’s rubbish and what’s not.
(According to ISI’s Journal Citation Reports, Classical and Quantum Gravity is ranked 10th out of 66 “multidisciplinary” physics journals in its “impact factor”; the Annals of Physics is ranked 11th—so I don’t think it fair to say that these are obscure.) 09:45
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14153 Candid Camera was a “gentle, joyful study of human nature”; its successors are meaner, harsher, more humiliating. 09:54
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/magazine/03HOWTO.html How to’s of the entertainment industry: how to shoot a nude scene/maintain continuity/shoot in the middle of Times Square.
How to avoid an R rating: “What the M.P.A.A. is looking for is responsibility from characters. If they feel that drug use or drinking is being glamorized, they’ll have a problem with it. They are going to respond more favorably if the person who is doing drugs or drinking pays a price for it. They’re also more comfortable if sexualized situations are more played for laughs than for realism—if you’re going to have a condom in a film, it’s better to have it stuck to someone’s foot than used as a birth-control device. And I’ve discovered that it really helps if the guy makes the first move in a sexual encounter.” 15:55
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html Fascinating reverse-Sokol? Two brothers write nonsense physics papers, get them published in peer-reviewed physics journals. It now appears that this was not actually a hoax—the Bogdanovs were at least trying to do proper physics, although their papers should have been rejected for being crap. (Which, from the point of view of the physics community, is an outcome almost as bad.)
A long Usenet thread started on the 23rd of October with a post from the respected John Baez. Among the messages is an amusingly cautious reminder from Alan Sokol that “from the mere fact of publication of my parody … not much can be deduced.” (This is a real quote, but it’s quite a contrast to the first few paragraphs of his Lingua Franca article.)
(Update: French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics.) 02:14
http://www.verbatim.com/products/products.cfm?pro_id=379 Vinyl-look CD-Rs! Is there any place in Melbourne that makes CDs from vinyl? 00:55
http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/bob8.asp About voting systems. 00:34
http://www.michaelmoore.com/message/articles.php?Article=2002-
10-23 Michael Moore tries out moral equivalence: Washington
sniper was no big deal, etc. because every day “at least eight
children killed by gun violence in the United States.” What
the fuck?! I can’t imagine this position has much support
now; how pissed would people have been if he had had the
intellectual honesty to run it whilst the sniper (snipers) was
(were) still loose? (Also: I can’t be bother checking his figures,
but I can’t believe that there’s never been a day
with, say,
seven deaths.)
“If you want to do something to make our children’s lives a bit safer, one thing you can do is to participate in one of the various demonstrations taking place this Saturday around the country protesting Bush’s war against Iraq.”—what does one have to do with the other? 00:23
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_
id=1416410 The Economist argues for some
controversial approaches to immigration, including the idea
that “countries should give preference to those who seem to
integrate most readily.”
Two other difficult issues:
- Why do we not allow two equivalent individuals (an Australian journalist and an American journalist, say) to swap countries, leading to a net gain of two satisfied individuals? (That is, allow unlimited migration between countries with the same income per head—actually this is suggested.) It is because not many Australian journalists want to swap jobs with Indian journalists?
- How much is lost (in human capital) when an educated individual leaves a poor country for a rich one?
A companion article contains some interesting figures and graphs. 23:40
http://www.guardian.co.uk/indonesia/Story/0,2763,812709,
00.html Clive James argues that “the true instigation
for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies,
but their virtues.” Had to read this twice to realise
that amongst it all he advocates … nothing much in particular. 23:29
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2073166 Zac Unger, a firefighter who last year wrote a terrific Slate diary on his job, is this week writing about the birth and first days of his daughter, who was born three months premature (and to a surrogate mother). Fascinating and provocative: in her first ten days of life, Percy ran up bills of $380,000. 03:15