Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 30 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Tech Pres jokes – NetApp edition

Thomas Mendoza has been taking public speaking lessons. This is my guess anyway. And I do have a basis for it. His stance. His timing. His presence. The are all studied but casually studied and friendly.
He had several cute jokes. Here’s one.

Backgound: Yahoo! is a major client of NetApp having bought petabytes and petabytes of fileservers.

Mendoza is out to dinner a few weeks before the Google IPO. His dinner partners were the Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and his boss NetApp Board Chair Don Valentine.
In the course of the meal, Mendoza pitches NetApp solutions to Google only to be rejected by Page who goes on about how Google has such brilliant people that they design their own storage systems etc and will never buy a NetApp.
Soon after the bill is delivered. Brin pushes the bill over to Mendoza. Mendoza pauses for a minute. He realizes that these folks are 1) weathier than even he can possibly imagine or will be in two weeks 2) are not going to be his customers. He says as much to Brin and passes the check back.
Brin looks up and says. We make you rich without buying a single NetApp.
How so? asks Mendoza.
We brought out Gmail with gobs of free storage which was a slap in the face to Yahoo! What did they do? They immediately called you up and bought a whole large batch of NetApps. You pay.
And Mendoza did.

Collapse-o-mania continues

Collapse: the book
The promotion and discussion of Jerad Diamond‘s new book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, continues unabated. Last week there was a full page advert in the NYTimes (as well as a review of Malcolm Gladwell‘s new book, “Blink: the power of thinking without thinking”, in the same edition). This morning, Diamond himself was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition. The interview should be online later today.
I’ve been posting on this right along — once the semester gets going I promise to read it instead of reading about it.

Observation: The word Collapse is also a key work in Robert Putnam’s bowling alone thesis in
“Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community”.
That book was answered in part by Richard Florida’s creative class thesis in
“The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life”
.

Will there be a book in answer to Diamond keying in on the word Rise?

CrossFIRED!

Bye to bow-tied twits and to Crossfire as we knew and hated it. Thanks to Jon Stewart.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

The official CNN story on the CNN story here.

Transcript of the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire here.

Not that I ever express opinions here ;->

Many Smart People on What Cannot Be Proved (as yet)

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the “esprit de divination”). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

“The 2005 Edge Question has generated many eye-opening responses from a “who’s who” of third culture scientists and science-minded thinkers. The 120 contributions comprise a document of 60,000 words.”

From John Brockman‘s Edge come some unexpected responses from some very smart people.

Smart People say Dumb things (and Smart Things)

Bill Gates gets caught with a confused message about copyright in an interview with CNet and ends up calling people who want to share “Communists.” This is certain to throw the mostly Libertarian minded Free Software and Creative Commons folks into chaos — not. See boingboing for the best on this. And the /. responses.
He also has a lot to say about:

  • blogging (“I’ve toyed with doing one myself, but I don’t want to be one of those people who start and then don’t finish it, and again I’m thinking maybe I could do one a month or one every six weeks–something like that. I’d kind of like to, but I’ve got to be sure I can keep going for at least a year to make it worth doing.” and later “E-mail is inefficient today with seeing stuff that’s less relevant and how you organize it–bringing in the blog-type capabilities is very important there.”)
  • his beloved Xbox (“And Xbox Live is really talking to your friends, doing things with your friends”)
  • security (“Well, no one invests more in security of their browser than what we do on IE”)
  • FireFox vs IE (“In terms of our agility to do things on the browser, people who underestimated us there in the past lived to regret that.”)
  • Google (” We’ve been in the search business even before Google was around. The commitment we made is to build unique search technology across the board”)
  • and the future (“the tools around Windows and Office are not even half of what they will be.”)

RIP: Illustrators Kelly Freas and Will Eisner

What me worry?

Alfred E. Newman
Frank Kelly Freas who was famous for his many sci-fi illustrations, LP covers, and for his work at Mad magazine, died in his sleep at age 82 on January 2nd 2005. Freas won 11 Hugo Awards for his illustrations, but will remain most famous to me for his Alfred E. Newman images in Mad from the early 60s. Note that there is no resemblance between Newman and Larry Lessig pictured below.

Smiling Spirit
Will Eisner, whose Spirit inspired and even nurtured many comic/graphic artists, died at his home in Florida last night. Eisner invented the terms graphic novel (having done the first serious one) and sequential art as well as exemplifying the kind of serious storytelling that could be done in the comic/comix genre. Just to cite one example of Eisner’s influence, Michael Chabon says that:

I think Eisner was unique in feeling from the start that comic books were not necessarily this despised, bastard, crappy, low-brow kind of art form, and that there was a potential for real art. And he saw that from the very beginning, which was very unusual, and I took that quality and gave it to Joe Kavalier.

MacroInvertebrates and Beavers

On New Year’s Eve day, we went out on the Eno River to my friend, Sylvia Garrard,’s land to take part in the River Watch Program. The idea is to scoop up whatever macroinvertebrates you can find in dip nets and count them. The presence of difference kinds of invertebrates indicates the water quality. Needless to say this is a more fun project in July than in December, but New Year’s Eve this year was unseasonably warm and wonderful — still the water was cold. We found a wide selection of cadis fly larvae, stone fly larvae, dragon fly larvae, crawfish, gill snails, river pennies, a leech, mussels, and more. All this shows that the river along Sylvia’s land is in fine shape.
While we were there we also found lots of beaver work had been going on recently some of it very ambitious. Sally took the pictures.

Breaking 100

In the past week, I’ve been to two UNC basketball games. The first was against Cleveland State (107 – 64). And the second against William and Mary (105 – 66). I can’t complain about winning and I was glad to see both oppponents to continue to scrap and play hard right to the last second.
I did wonder as many there did through our victorious euphoria “What would Dean have done?” These margins of victory are something that we rarely saw when Dean Smith was the coach. Dean believed in taking lopsided matches as an opportunity to play the whole bench. While the bench did see action, especially in the Cleveland State game, it was not to contain the score but as a warning to the starters. This is the sixth game this season in which UNC out scored their opponents by more than 30 points.

Are we seeing the great difference between Roy Williams and Dean Smith? Are we seeing Roy rebuilding the Carolina legend and reputation after some off years?

The good news is that the team played as a team with 6 players scoring in double figures vs Cleveland State and looked good in their passing against William and Mary.

The Rise of Collapse

Collapse: the book
Jerad Diamond speaks (or rather writes) for himself as he condenses his Collapse arguments into a long article on the editorial page of today’s NYTimes called “The Ends of the World as We Know Them”.
Overall, Diamond does a better job describing his Collapse book and the stories therein than either Brand or Gladwell. He is clear that the Norse did not chose exactly for example, but he does point out, as Sally does in her comment, that we have no excuses this time out. Further — and unlike the other reviewers of his book — he points to societies that did no collapse but that saw the signs adapted and endured.
My only complaint at the article is that in my edition of the paper and on the online version of the article, the NYTimes copyeditor was asleep on the job and got the book’s name wrong. It’s not “Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed” but “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
Alert Diamond observers will have already read his take on Easter Island in the form of a review of other books in an early 2004 article in the NY Review of Books.
Sally and Kottke point to an even earlier article in the June 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine called “The last Americans: environmental collapse and the end of civilization – Report”

Dogs, kids, flix

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Sometimes you buy a present for someone that you really end up enjoying yourself. This Christmas, the surprise shared gift was a copy of Mark Haddon‘s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. I picked it up for Sally without having kept up with why it was supposed to be good, but every fiction writer on my Warren Wilson College writers alum list had picked the book as one of their favs so I added it to the gift bag on a whim. Haddon has had a career as a children’s writer, but this book in the voice of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who discovers a murdered poodle and sets out Holmes-like to solve the crime. Like Roddy Doyle’s wonderful “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha,” the voice is convincing and unique and compelling. In fact, I found myself making comparisons to Doyle’s writing as I read “Dog.” Not that the boys who narrated the novels had that much in common. Doyle’s Paddy is a common tough 10 year old from Barrytown; Haddon’s Christopher is a unique traveller in an unsual (to him) world. Doyle is clearly the better writer — less artifice, more direct to the heart action –, but Haddon has the line on the world in which Christopher lives right down to the difficult math that gives him strength to go on. I don’t mean to go into a full book review, but I can say that Sally picked up the book and didn’t stop reading til she finished several hours later. I took the book and read past midnight before I finished it.
I was inspired to google for “Sherlock Holmes autism” which showed me that more people than I had a feeling that Holmes himself may have been modeled on someone with Asperger’s and not just some one hooked on the famous 7% solution of cocaine.

Blender with peas
Tucker and I took a break from extracting the DNA out of dried peas to go see “Limony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events”. It was not completely an unfortunate event, but if you have read and loved the books as we have you will not be impressed. The movie is a Jim Carrey fest and for that it is a fine film including an uncredited cameo by Dustin Hoffman. But it in no way measures up to the intricate slyly revealing multi-layered plots of the books. The books are puzzle pieces of their own; the film both shows too little and too much. What is funny, campy yet gloomy in the books becomes merely depressing in the movie despite the beautiful design throughout. Take your movie money and buy some dried peas, dish soap, 91% alcohol, and meat tenderizer and extract some DNA instead. Take what money you have left and buy the books.
Extra: Roger Ebert uses Wikipedia as a trusted source in his review of this movie.

Pucked! Coffee that heats itself

Puck's self-heating coffee

Exotic pizza chef, Wolfgang Puck, has added his name and brand to single-serving self-heating canned coffee. Puck already has a branded milk-jar shaped coffee drink. The new drink will use calcium oxide (aka quicklime) to heat the coffee/latte as hot as 145 F. No, the CaO will not be in the drink directly although that might be a boon to those with osteoporosis. It will be in a patented recyclable container surrounding the Puck formulated drink. The quicklime will be pressed into a tablet or a “puck.”
The technology, which was known to the Romans, is a patented product from On Tech who will be deploying the technology for hot teas and soups as well as other products.

Ice Palace

Last night the temperature dropped to 13 F and the wind blew down from Canada before the power went off in our house. I was sitting in bed wondering when I’d have to load up my family, our lizard and Sally’s mother and head off to a Day’s Inn. As the first hour passed, I thought of the wonderful F. Scott Fitzgerald story, “The Ice Palace.”
The story, as I remembered it, contrasts the life and reactions to weather, practice and environment between south Georgia and some where that might be Minnesota. Fitzgerald is most interested in the young woman of the South, called “Sally Carrol,” who is obviously a stand-in for Zelda.
I mentioned the story at lunch today as the temperature crawled up to 23 F. No one among my collegues at the table seemed to have heard of it — or to have read much Fitzgerald. The entire story — it is short — is on-line thanks to the folks at the University of South Carolina, a state not mentioned in the story. NC is mentioned in an important way.

“Ever been North before?”

“Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina.”

The irony over time is that Zelda eventually died in a fire in Asheville, NC while a patient at Highland Hospital many years (1948) after the story was published.

There is also an image of how the story looked in the Saturday Evening Post of May 22, 1920.


Ice Palace

See also Linda Wagner-Martin’s Top Ten Jazz Age books in the Guardian UK.

Night of Hawks

Channeling Sonny Boy Williamson via J. Geils Band with a bit of rock and rolling the Temptations on occassion to a biker bar audience at the Blue Bayou Club in Hillsborough, the Nighthawks were the perfect band for the crowd. The average Harley Davidson owner is between 35 and 54 (white male as you might expect) with an income of $78K/yr. I can find no source for the average age of a blues harmonica player and less about their average incomes. I can tell you that the show started at 9:30 as opposed to shows at the Cat’s Cradle which start close to 11 or midnight. The band, the Nighthawks, are very tight and very aware of each other, having played together for 30 years you might expect that. They were very casual as if they walked out of the same 50+(age) biker crowd to play with their tattoos, black t’s, old school lace up sneakers or heavy boots. Songs were mostly about women. Women, who dispite the bands superpowers, could not be gotten next to (“Can’t get next to you”) or couldn’t be called “Sugar” (“cause sugar ain’t that sweet”) or who shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (that is to say the band is past their glammor boy days) or were the sweetest thing in town, but had let them down. The band and the audience has put on a few pounds, but that stopped neither for dancing and getting down. It’s been a while since I was in a smokey club — the Blue Bayou which as a private club allows smoking as well as drinking and dancing is certainly smokey. I had forgotten how it gets in your hair and clothes even if you stand by the slightly open door with the draft blowing the cold night air in toward the bar.
It wasn’t the breeze that caused the band and the audience to get on their best guitar faces in reactions to some basic blues beats and some old school audio circuitry; it was the whining harp and smokey air burning our ears and eyes as should be true in such a successful venue.

Happy anniversary to the Blue Bayou.

Elvis SOLD by Lisa Marie

I am holding back on the Scientologist jokes and the Michael Jackson jokes as I write this.

Here’s the scoop: Scientologist, Michael Jackon ex-wife, Elvis heir, recovering drug addict and rock star impersonator Lisa Marie Presley is selling her father. Not his body, which if he is really dead, is buried on the one bit of the EPE holdings that Lisa Marie will keep. That is the 13 acre Graceland. But almost everything else. Even though the estate brought in over $45 million last year and even though Elvis is the top earner among dead celebrities according to Forbes, Lisa Marie is selling 85% of EPE for only $100 million! There’s more in the AP report on Salon. and in Forbes.

Those of us who have seen Bubba Hotep know the true fate of Elvis (and of JFK)>

Fried Mars Bars and more in the cooker

I may have seen fried Mars bars, sold as Milky Way in the US, in Edinburgh, but one thing is for sure there was a lot of frying going on in those pubs and takeouts. For some reason, it took a mention on Jay Leno’s show to send health officials out looking for candy friers. The health scientists verified that 1 in 5 fish and chips shops fry Mars bars. Batter ’em up. Drop ’em in. Sell ’em for 70 p. Reported somewhat sensationally by the nearly unbelieving Times. Also covered by the BBC.
Miles, we missed this treat whilst in Scotland. But you can try this at home.

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