maebmij’s blog

I’ve been reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. It’s largely an advocation of the scientific method and scepiticism over pseudoscience and mysticism. I think I’ve read enough of it now to draw out and describe a common thread that appealed to me:
Science very rarely proclaims anything absolutely untrue. What it will often do is proclaim “no evidence”. Science cannot address an issue that is not evidence-based – it simply has nothing to say about it. So claims such as “there is an invisible, intangible dragon in my garage” or “there exist other undetectable universes outside of our own” (to paraphrase two of Sagan’s examples) may or may not be true, but science cannot advocate them.
However (and this is the crunch, and the contentious bit), if science cannot back up a claim, that is synonymous with saying that you have no rational basis for your claim. Your are, as likely as not, wrong, and history is absolutely littered with examples of people who have made mistakes in just this way.

You know, Wired seems to be getting cool again. I say ‘again’ as if I was aware of its existence back in ’96 or so when they say it was a cool magazine – but I’ve been noticing more articles that aren’t useless, and I was actually tempted to buy a dead tree copy the other day.
Anyway, there’s an interesting little article about nerds in highschool that I think explains some stuff – check it out if you’re so inclined.

I was finding it hard to compare the real-world size of different compact cameras, so I started making cardboard mockups of them – here are the Casio Exilim EX-S100 (recommended by Cory on Boingboing) and the Sony Cybershot DSC-L1 that I mentioned the other day.

So my parents kept asking me what I wanted for Christmas. I had no idea, and thinking about it made me pay special attention to Uncle Mark’s 2005 Gift Guide featured on the excellent user experience blog This is Broken.
Mark recommends the Cybershot U40 as the only digital camera worth getting:


It looks pretty sweet: It’s very small, and (more important than you’d think) it starts up very quickly when you switch it on. But it’s only 2 megapixels, and it doesn’t record sound in its mpeg movie mode. Oh, and no zoom, but I don’t care so much about that, truth be told.

The Sony Salesguy says that it’s been replaced by the Cybershot L1:


Much more impressive featurewise: 4.1 megapixels, 3x zoom, records sound. It’s just a little bigger, though, and has one of those slide-out-when-you-switch-it-on lenses which would slow it down for startup speed. Plus it’s more expensive.
Anyway, it being past christmas, I now have a while to ponder my choices (and of course wait for something better to be released ).

I have little sympathy for Real in their current predicament with Apple. Real make a lot of statements along the lines of “Apple is being monopolistic by only allowing Apple iTunes songs to play on the iPod”. This is rubbish of course: I don’t have a single iTunes song on my iPod. What they mean is “we want Apple to give us a way to screw our iPod using customers by selling them DRMed songs”. Well, tough. If you want to sell music, support a standard that everyone can play! I am amazingly unsympathetic to your problems finding a way to sell digitally restricted rubbish.
It should be noted that I’m not really siding with Apple on this one either – iTunes DRM is just as evil as Real are asking to be.

I’ve noticed that it’s usually quite tedious to copy a file or two between my laptop and another computer on the LAN at a friend’s house, especially in heterogenous environments. Samba filesharing rarely discovers any hosts without some tweaking, most of my friends don’t run sshd so I can’t scp stuff in, and then there’s often the issue of typing sensitive passwords into someone else’s computer if there’s no anonymous share available.
So I’ve been thinking that an ultra simple app based on zeroconf/rendezvous would be useful: A ‘contact list’ of hosts detected by zeroconf which are also running the program (just like iTunes sharing). Onto each listed host you can drop files or folders, and these get copied to a configured directory on the remote computer. No passwords, no instant messaging, no remote browsing, just a simple way of dumping files from one computer to another.

On bus on the way back from an expedition to buy bubble tea I sat behind a guy wearing a polo shirt with this insignia on the back:

It just seems to be an agreement between HP and Microsoft to support each other’s stuff for certain customers, but the word ‘frontline’ was odd. I guess it’s marketing-speak for ‘customer facing’, but my first thought was more of the two companies joining forces to fight off the ever-more-powerful enemies. I suppose it appealed to my sense of persecution .
Also, the guy wearing the shirt looked very much the team-player type – fit, tanned, short-sided but still trendy blonde haircut, etc. I felt a strong urge to dislike him.

feel my heart slamming
against my ribs
the smell of your body
and the touch of your lips
you’re beyond our
imagination
you’re beyond our
imagination

–Gusgus – Teenage Sensation

Jessica Pierce is aglow with the validation that feeling productive and useful brings. Bruce Sterling likes Belgrade, and plans to return next week. And Jamie Zawinski has a great gruesome/ironic Union Carbide ad from the sixties which he is willing to share.