I blocked all the Texas Hold’em and Poker comment spam with AuthImage a while back, but starting early this morning I’ve been hit by Traceback spam! Grrrrrr.
Easy to delete, but like comment spam, a real pain and it bypasses AuthImage somehow.
Lots about this on the WordPress site. Hope to be reading through this and this and this later today.
Category: Amusements (Page 29 of 31)
Things that are amusing
There is no end to the reviewing and essaying on Jared Diamond’s new book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.â€
Today’s New York Times Book Review has a lengthy and thoughtful essay by Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook reviews Diamond’s career and touches on his other books including “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Why is Sex Fun?” The first won Diamond the Pulitzer Prize and the second reflected the serious work that won him the National Medal of Science. Easterbrook is less enthusiastic than say Malcolm Gladwell or Steward Brand and in the end less thoughtful than David Brin.
I’ve written on Collapse and the mania surrounding it here and here and here.
They did it again! UNC broke 100 points as they delivered a loss to UVa up in Charlottesville today. 110 to 76 but it could have been even more embarassing.
The oustanding question is: Does the Bojangles Two Biscuits for a Dollar deal count for Away Games? Do I have to go to the local Bojangles to find out or will you guys let me know?
Previous teams that gave us Bojangles wins this year were Cleveland State, William and Mary and Maryland.
Bloglines lets you check to see what others who subscribe to your blog also read through their “related feeds’ feature. Interesting results for each blog and a good way to find new blogs that you might want to read.
Note: I do not have a bloglines account and do not use bloglines for my blog reading. I use Sage.
What an unexpected epiphany for a late January — Epiphany being officially on the 6th and this being the 29th — to see a tree full of robins just as the storm begins. The tall Savannah Holly was full of berries and was soon full of robins as the snow changed to freezing rain today. As I watched the birds dive into the tree, I noticed one of smaller. Though it shared a red breast with the others in the flock, it was quickly obvious that this was a different bird. Sure enough was it moved about the tree, I could see that it was an Eastern Bluebird.
In some ways seeing the blue bird among the robins should be no surprise since both at thrushes, but in the midst of the ice storm to see a blue bird feeding on red berries, a bright flash of blue among the brown robins (his cousins in red breastedness) — that is something else.
David McConville forwards Aussie fun had by combining iPod Photos and old school stereoscope. A cute hardware hack to produce 3-D for “the future now.”
Although the Yahoo! Video Search has gotten less press than the more limited Google Video Search, it’s different and better in many ways.
While Google has a very limited number of videos — all from recent Bay Area TV — indexed by transcripts, Yahoo! uses www page contexts and file names (ala Google Image Search) for their database. This means you get a huge collection to search. It also means that you can actually watch the video once you’ve discovered it. With Google, you only get images snapped at about 30 second intervals.
Frankly the two searches attack very different problems. Yahoo! is about resource discovery and not much about the content within the video at any level of granularity. Google is much more about mining the content within a video stream — but mostly by using closed captioning as a transcript (or so it seems).
You can submit your videos to either system. Yahoo! tells you to use RSS enclosures:
Enter the full URL, including the http:// prefix (for example, http://www.yahoo.com/mymedia.xml) of the RSS feed (either with Media RSS or RSS 2.0 enclosures) you would like to submit to Yahoo! Video Search. Dead feeds will be automatically detected and removed on an ongoing basis. For additional information about Media RSS feeds, see the Media RSS specification. Your RSS feed will be crawled soon. After your feed is crawled, please expect a delay before your content will appear in Video Search results
Very cool and very clued.
Google uses only a web-based form for inquiring about adding your collection.
A great benefit of being “Paul Jones” is that you can seek and find many of your name-twins’ videos. All these and more found using Yahoo!’s Video Search.
- Paul R Jones, a philanthropist and art collector in Delaware, has a nice introduction to his gift of art to the University of Delaware.
- The USS John Paul Jones is toured in a military video.
- Led Zep’s John Paul Jones is interviewed in 1972 kept at a Russian site.
- Paul Wine Jones plays some dirty blues to a poorly lit but appreciative crowd.
- Wrestler Paul Jones throws it down in a historic video (I would hate to have been Dusty Rhodes).
- Rodeo rider Paul Jones takes a dive (but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, we are told).
Google video search for Paul Jones returns nothing.
Sally Greene writes that the Chris Ware assembled McSweeney’s 13 was just named the Best of the Year’s Comix by Time magazine. The cover, Sally gave me a signed flat frameable version for Christmas since I love the book so much, was already a prize winner at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Ware has been racking up the awards as a writer and as an illustrator having been part of the Whitney Biennial 2002 (thanks to Miles for the Ware History of Art poster from that show) and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth.
In a related note, I picked up the graphic novel version of Paul Auster‘s City of Glass (as turned into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli) today at lunch. The book came out in 1994 or 5 and I’d been meaning to find a copy. To my amazement, there it was in a mall Barnes and Noble’s shop. One copy.
Auster is a very complex character and a great translator. He’s struck me as American and European at the same time. A writer very much of a broad world and of very very modern sensabilities. Art Speiglman’s introduction to the graphic novel quickly convinced me that the book in my hand would be a good introduction albeit slantways into the world Auster.
Folks in the UK will have to wait til next month to get a copy when it’s released by Faber there.
Google just made their video search engine available today. Even though the database is made up only of the past month’s offerings from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN, it’s very impressive — and as of this morning very fast.
The results are an image and a snippet of the transcript for each hit.
Downsides include no final video results; you get a 5 image story board with text instead and a small very small database.
Google has a high overview description on the about pages.
The Help/FAQ pages also give you a lot of insight into the transcript-oriented search. Nice features like title: and channel:
Tom Bowers unearthed this site from Harvard, which aims to test your/our implicit associations concerning gender, race and weight with a simple interactive test. Tom found the site in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine January 23rd. He writes “Its premise is that although many Americans believe they are not prejudiced, a new test provides evidence that they really are.”
I donno. I did pretty well myself. Does this mean I’m “Clear”?
This book, A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates, is why Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature was invented. A must for those who keep telling me that there really is something to the Davinci Code.
For the more visually oriented, Nassib recommends the Bruce Lee Remixer. You can be master of the Master of Kung-fo with many posibilities as every key on a keyboard becomes active for the remix. Includes mucho audio.
Spent too brief a time at Tyndall Galleries for the opening in honor of Beverly McIver’s most recent work. The subject of the show is a celebration of the life of McIver’s mother. McIver’s work has often been self portraits. Earlier as a clown with white face on and more recently in black face. McIver, who is black, has created work that is both beautiful and disturbing or at least shifted from our expectations of what portrait might mean. One of the paintings of her mother shows her in her last days in the intensive care unit. Another shows her mother clapping in delight.
I reget that I missed the gallery talk. I did get to hear others rave about it. McIver, I’m told, talked about her growth as an artist, her relationship with her mother, her new life in Tempe, AZ and more. Having grown up in Greensboro, McIver was surprised to be in an area where there are few other blacks and reflected that experience.
Having just finished blogging about clarity and handwriting/typing, I picked up the resurrected Oxford American‘s latest issue. Michael Parker has a very very funny story in the form of a student paper called “Hidden Meanings: Treatment of Time, Supreme Irony, and Life Experiences in the Song ‘Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman.’” The story isn’t online, but it has already been taken on a kind of “Supreme Irony.”
Parker read the story at a Literary Symposium at East Carolina University this fall. The reporter for the East Carolinian wrote:
[Parker] presented a detailed analysis of a song entitled “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman.”
Well, not exactly. Parker is a very good writer writing as a very bad but honest writer who has a lot to say to and about her teacher and much more in the course of the paper. I’m not giving away any secrets when I say that the teacher has been right in saying that the writer “sprawls lacks cohesion or is not well organized.” But that is the point, of course. The story is not just a parody of student writing but a story that sprawls it’s way into a kind of tenderness and honesty and self-revelation that keeps you in sympathy with the writer even as you are laughing out loud.
Any story that begins:
In the song “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More No Big Fat Woman” by Joe Tex, the speaker of narrator fo this song, a man previously injured before the song’s opening chords by a large, aggressive-type woman in a disco-type bar, refuses to bump with the “big fat woman” of the title. In doing so he is merely exercising his right to an injury-free existence thus insuring him the ability to work and provide for him and his family if he has one. I don’t know it doesn’t ever say. In this paper, I will prove there is a hidden meaning that everybody doesn’t get in this popular Song, Saying or Incident from Public Life.
has an awful lot going for it.
UPDATE: Here are the all important lyrics to the Joe Tex song, “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)”
We all know that having to explain things in writing helps you clarify your thinking and helps you remember facts. Well at least for most of us. Good writers, that is those with good handwriting, have better grammar and better test scores or so say education researchers in a recent NYTimes article.
However, another handwriting expert, Albany -based Kate Gladstone, is quoted as saying “that while a student needs to jot down 100 legible words a minute to follow a typical lecture, someone using print can manage only 30. ‘That’s fine for class,’ she said, ‘if the class is first grade.'”
I was sent a reference to the NYTimes article (which is heavily discussed on the blog Collision Detection) by the person who has the worst handwriting, does the most compulsive note-taking, and is the single fastest typist of anyone I know.
Where does that leave the rest of us? Those of us who never managed even a C in penmanship as it was called back in the day. Those of us who were required to take typing in what was called “junior high.” Those of us who were forbidden to take any classes in creative writing or journalism until we had completed two semesters of typing. Those of us who have tried to become poets instead of novelists because we can’t imagine writing more that 5000 words on anything — and having to edit our own writing. Those of us so dyslexic that any grouping of letters seem like they might be an actual word if we could just work out the anagram in front of us.
Here in the South, that’s news. Especially when the day-time temperatures were in the 70s last week! YIKES
Only flurries, but it’s the idea of the stuff.
UPDATE: Sticking and building up! Yankee arrogance about how to drive, how to walk, etc soars! Southerners rush to groceries to buy white – eggs, bread, milk, toilet paper all vanish from the shelves!
Just took an email query from Sarah Stirland of the National Journal about Duke Law‘s Center for the Study of the Public Domain Moving Image Contest. Sarah asked what struck me in particular about the winners.
I said:
One interesting thing to me is that only one film really looked to the future. That is the future effects of the current laws or to an imagined future. That film was from Poland! (actually a cartoon) “Music for our Grandchildren”
More often film-makers looked back either in humor as in “Stealing Home” or as documentarians speaking about the extreme difficulty of practicing their craft. “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” Then they were speaking only of the current state of the law and how it has an impact on them as individuals.
This tells me that the story of the documentarians is real and immediate. We’ve been digitizing a lot of folkloric documentaries for our Folkstreams.net project and had to wonder if such films made in the 60s and 70s could be made again in the current legal climate. The answer as “Powerful Pictures” and “Army One by One” tell us is not without great difficulty if at all. Will all documentarians have to become lawyers?
One other perhaps obvious note. All the winners were in black and white. But these days with digital editing and cameras it’s just as cheap to do color as to do black and white. I am still wondering what that means, but I suspect that it has to do with feeling the past is more compelling, more authentic and perhaps more free (to use images from at any rate). It could also mean an unhealthy avoidance of the future.
For my earlier post on the contest results, see http://ibiblio.org/pjones/wordpress/index.php?p=223
I have read all of the four books selected or under consideration for the three local let’s-read-a-book-together programs. Not only that I’ve met three of the authors and I go a long ways back with two of them. In fact, I’ve written here about two of them and their authors. (just establishing my credentials).
My SILS collegue David Carr will be leading the discussion of Tracy Kidder‘s book about Paul Framer, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” in Carrboro.
UNC is deciding between Tim Tyson‘s “Blood Done Sign My Name” and Kidder’s “Mountains” with Yann Martel‘s “Life of Pi” still in the running.
The rumor or more than a rumor is that Chapel Hill will mount a let’s-read-a-book program with Bland Simpson‘s “Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals: The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering.”
I wrote about Kidder and Farmer’s visit here to Chapel Hill to boost a fund raiser for Partners In Health and have several posts about Tim Tyson, my connections to him and others in his book and the national NPR story on the book.
I would have trouble ranking the books, but as far as social consequence of their discussions there is no doubt that “Blood” and “Mountains” are the more important.
“Pi” is a fine literary novel that I would recommend to anyone, but not particularly for a community book that would encourage a community to confront their local unresolved issues.
“Ghost Ship” is an interesting bit of North Carolina history retold as a nonfiction novel. Whatever social and community circumstances surround the mystery are largely unexplored. If the book were paired with David Cecelski‘s “The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina,” we’d get a better understanding of the people, the history and the life of the coast of NC. I did greatly enjoy reading both books while on Ocracoke Island in sight of the lighthouse there.
[more after a break — poor UNC just defeated by Wake Forest]
The shared problem and shared project of this area is the problem of facing up to our shared histories. “Mountains” uses the tales of a single man and his struggles to bring light on the history and consequences of our relationship with our sister revolutionary democracy Haiti. Though Haiti can be avoided by exoticising it, by saying it’s over there across the water. Farmer would not allow that. His own book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, is strong and clear analysis of interactions of health, human rights and geopolitics. A discussion of “Mountains” can not avoid grappling with the questions that Framer makes it the business of his life to constantly reencounter. He wants us to know that mysterious Haiti is not a mystery but a part of our own doing across history.
Tyson’s book addresses many of the same questions as does Kidder’s book on Farmer. His book however is close to home. In fact not far from Chapel Hill. Not in the far distant past, but in the recent past. In 1970. Tyson tells the story of a murder that is not a mystery. As in Farmer, the “mystery” is our history and our collective doing and our decision to ignore and disown our deeds.
Just my luck, I leave perfectly good warm pizza here in the Lab (thanks Kimberly) to sprint over to Duke Law for the announcement of the winners of The Center for the Study of the Public Domain‘s Moving Image Contest. Once I got there their pizza was cold.
You may recall that I was one of three judges for the contest; the others were Creative Commons’ Glenn Otis Brown and FullFrame Documentary Festival‘s Laurie Racine.
The winners chosen by the three of us and the winner of the People’s Choice Online Voting were announced by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle.
As you can imagine, especially if you know the judges, there was a divergence of opinions, but we picked four very strong and enjoyable films. The People did a fine job too — since I agree with them that “Stealing Home” is particularly good.
“The contest asked for 2 minute movies about the ways that intellectual property affects art– specifically documentary film or music.”
Drop by and have a view.
Let me put in a plug for “Music for Our Grandchildren” which was produced in Poland. If you want to watch that one and you are not in Poland, then you might want to get your download from Duke.
I rarely repost from Slashdot, but I confess that’s the way I found this story which was originally reported in NewsDay. Two older guys standing in line at the First District Court in Hempstead, NY were telling Lawyer jokes — all of which you’ve heard before (especially if you are married to a lawyer as I am).
The punch line is that they were arrested for disorderly conduct.
But others wonder if another punch was involved:
The men are founders of Americans for Legal Reform, a group of outspoken advocates who use confrontational tactics to push for greater access to courts for the public and to monitor how well courts serve the public. One tactic is driving a truck around the Huntington area emblazoned with the slogan “Stop The Lawyer Disease.”
In an update, NewsDay reports that radical lawyer and talk show host Ron Kuby will be defending the jokesters.
UNC scored a mere 91 points to Georgia Tech’s 69 tonight. Sloppy play with lots of turnovers due to great pressure from the Yellow Jacket defense will result in a general drop in sausage consumption across North Carolina tomorrow. The Tar Heels left us 9 points shy of the sausage biscuit special.
Not expecting a Bojangles day after the Wake Forest game on Saturday. The Deacons just dispatched Maryland 81 – 66.
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