maebmij’s blog

This Guardian article talks about Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympic sprinter with speeds that would currently place him 8th-fastest among able-bodied sprinters in Britain. He runs with Össur custom sprint feet (pictured). He’s asking to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and there’s some debate over whether the feet constitute an unfair advantage. But I think the more interesting question is: As prosthetic technology improves, will we start seeing the best times coming from the Paralympics instead of the Olympics? Is it not at least theoretically possible that we could design a better sprinting leg than the human leg?
The article immediately reminded me of a great makes-you-think hidden detail from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a sci-fi story where many of the characters are cybernetically enhanced, having had various muscles and joints replaced with stronger artificial ones:

One of these characters mentions he’s a former boxing medallist; but if you look closely, you discover that his medal is a Paralympic one. It took me a few moments to work this out (“but he isn’t disabled!”): One possible future for the Paralympics is as the competition where humans with elective (and superior) prosthetics are allowed to compete; in such a scenario, they could become the most interesting competition, with the Olympics relegated to special-interest for the purists…

It makes me sad to think that there might be a computing device out there incapable of running fortune. Since the iPhone doesn’t run real (local) 3rd-party apps, Apple wants you to write “Web 2.0 applications” for it instead. After an evening’s work (largely on the logo you see to the left – I’m very proud of it), I give you Fortune, the web app – a wrapper for the fortune-mod package from Debian.

A few days ago, reader.mac.com turned up, and was theorised to be an iPhone-only feed reader web app. Now that the device has been released, you can check it out from other browsers:

• Install User-Agent Switcher (or change your user-agent string manually)
• Use the iPhone user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
• Visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http:%2F%2Fmaebmij.org%2Fblog%2Ffeed, or your choice of feed URL

Apparently, Safari on the iPhone sends RSS feeds to this app instead of processing them locally.

1972 Wella Balsam ad, from A Word From Our Sponsor, about mainstream advertising’s co-option of the 60s/70s counterculture.

I spent today catching up on videos I’ve been meaning to watch:

Wired/New York Public Library debate: The Battle Over Books, from 2005

Larry Lessig and representatives from Google, a publisher’s association, and an authors’ guild all debate the legality and necessity of Google Book Search. It’s worthwhile, if only because both sides get their ideas across pretty well. Lessig is very convincing, as usual.

A Discussion with danah boyd, from 2006

Danah was in the news yesterday for her piece on social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. This video covers some similar ground: It’s a rambling talk/discussion about how people interact socially online, focusing mostly on MySpace and Friendster. She’s a good speaker.

Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, from 1981

Everything from discussing what’s wrong with the way maths is taught, to getting toungue-tied trying to explain hadrons and quarks off-the-cuff without using any big words. The most interesting part, to me, is his extremely frank discussion of how he felt about his part in developing the first nuclear weapons.

I’ve been reading about possessions.

The Dalai Lama, via Howard C. Cutler:

“For example, in the case of wanting more expensive possessions, if that is based on a mental attitude that just wants more and more, then eventually you’ll reach a limit of what you can get; you’ll come up against reality. … When it comes to dealing with greed, one thing that is quite characteristic is that although it arrives by the desire to obtain something, it is not satisfied by obtaining. … The true antidote of greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object or not; either way, you are still content.”

OK, so does getting rid of all your possessions solve anything? Brad Warner’s What If We Gave It Away?:

“But the proverbial monk with nothing but a robe is largely a thing of the past. I’ve come across a few people who’ve tried to create modern day variations. But I’m largely unimpressed. One guy I saw followed the ancient Buddhist custom of never handling money. Only all this really meant was that he never picked up the check.”

So I think what these guys are saying is that it’s not a problem to have stuff, in the sense that in modern society it simplifies everything, for you and for those around you. If you want to brush your teeth, you are just going to be a pain for everyone unless you have your own toothbrush.

But there is another reason for owning something, and I think it boils down to this:

“It’s just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that’s it. That’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. Whatever else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.”

(Fight Club.) i.e: to feel better about yourself – to turn yourself into the kind of person who would would have a particular thing.

Unable to resist the allure of such advanced technologies as comments and a proper archiving system, I have switched my blogging software to WordPress.
Sorry for the RSS-reader hiccup I will presumably cause . I also took the opportunity to work on the stylesheet for the site a little bit. Please let me know if anything doesn’t work right…
Oh, and I must report that I have failed to keep my permalink URIs from changing. And I am suitably ashamed.

I’ve been having great fun (along with the everyone else) with the new Google Maps feature that lets you view certain streets from the point-of-view of a sinister, slow-moving surveillance van instead of a satellite/plane:

Some related fun stuff:

Robot Exclusion Protocol: I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower to find another one sitting near the drain. It was about 2 feet tall and made of metal… (via jwz)

Robots.txt 2.0 (via BoingBoing)

Last year, I was involved in the technical organisation for a conference. This meant that I had to make sure that laptops, projectors and everything else were set up before the start of each talk.

Going back to the main room after the morning tea break one day to do a last minute check, I discovered some damn kids had disconnected the speakers and projector from the lectern computer and were using them to play this:

The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar

It’s directed by Michel Gondry (There’s also an interesting making-of). One of the kids was enthusing about the technology that went into making the video – but I must have watched to at least a third of the way through before realising that it wasn’t just straight film from a train window.

This video is reminiscent of an 80s kids’ cartoon – I’m thinking of Cities of Gold or Once Upon a Time… Life – but those cartoons were never actually this cool; I just remember them that way.

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Reading about textonyms, I learned that if you type ‘Woohoo’ (i.e. 966466) on a numeric keypad using the T9 input system, the predictive text algorithm produces ‘Zonino’. I can’t figure out how this word found its way into the T9 dictionary – it isn’t an English dictionary word, and while it seems to be a surname, it’s pretty rare.

There’s some anecdotal evidence that this and other automatic word substitutions have escaped into the wild as synonyms of the intended words.

Takashi Fujii is the host of Matthew’s Best Hit TV (maybe you remember him from a scene in Lost in Translation). He also has a music career, which I discovered by accident: I was looking to see if Tommy february⁶ (yesterday’s video) had any music available on the iTunes store. The only song my search produced was OH MY JULIET! by Takashi Fujii, on the Babel soundtrack. It turned out that Tommy produced the song, and the iTunes metadata had faithfully recorded this.

Anyway, the song is pure Tommy february⁶, and the video’s fun too:

Takashi Fujii – OH MY JULIET!

After the brilliant green‘s third album, their singer, Tomoko, started a solo side-project as ‘Tommy february⁶‘ (the 6 is silent), singing 80s-style synth-pop. What’s interesting (and perhaps distinctly Japanese) here is the lack of angle or attitude – the music is “irony free“:

Tommy february⁶ – ♥KISS♥ ONE MORE TIME

When I lived in Germany, I spent a lot of time watching Viva Zwei, a music video TV channel. They played a lot of local music, and one of the most interesting phenomena was that of “Deutscher hip-hop”, which was at the height of its popularity at the time. It tended intentionally towards humour and light-hearted songs, but beyond that I think there was an unintentionally comical aspect to some of these songs – especially the videos.

I liked the following one particularly because of Toni L, who shows up from 3:25 onwards:

Torch feat. Toni L – Wir waren mal Stars

Bram Cohen (the BitTorrent guy) posted one of the programming challenges he apparently uses in job interview screenings:

What is the exponent of the largest power of two whose base seven representation doesn’t contain three zeros in a row?

It’s implied that the solution should involve some coding. Here’s the original entry; here’s my take on a solution. The comments on Bram’s entry make interesting reading (it’s not quite what you might expect), but have a go at a solution first if you’re going to .

I don’t wish to make high-handed comments about software licensing and its associated attitudes, but this makes me so glad I don’t rely on much proprietary software any more:

…I insert fake bugs just so I can publically embarass crack users. Future crack-specific “bugs” won’t be as blatant as this one – they’ll involve annoying changes to functionality, unexpected results, etc.

–Nick Bradbury

Additionally, if enough thrust is applied, any pig is capable of ballistic flight.

–Flying pig

See also the Rock, Paper, Scissors article: Amazingly complete, with photographic gameplay guide, international tournaments, application to evolutionary strategy in lizards, and pages more…

Oh, how shall I reverse the order of lines in a file?

In Vim:

:g/^/m0

(thanks, Vim manual chapter 12!)

From the shell:

tr "\n" "#" < myfile.txt |rev|tr "#" "\n"|rev

(Watch out for #s in your source file)
(thanks, Lonneke!)

Update: GNU Textutils includes tac (cat backwards…) which reverses the lines of its input.

a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won’t heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don’t, they don’t speak for us.
I’ll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,

with no alarms and no surprises…

–Radiohead, No Surprises. The video is excellent too.

Then her husband took out his pocket watch.

“One hour, Marcie. I’ll give you one hour,” he said. “If you’re not back by then, you can find your own way home.”

She walked for half an hour with her bare feet in the frothy edge of the sea, then turned back along the cliff path, and from the shelter of some trees, watched her husband, at five minutes past the appointed hour, slam the car door and turn the ignition. Just as he was gathering speed, she jumped into the road and stopped the car.

Then she climbed in and spent the rest of her life with a man who would have gone home without her.

–Claire Keegan, Close to the Water’s Edge

A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The dessicated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

“I’m married now,” she said. “To an accountant three years my senior. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi and I play tennis with my friends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

–Haruki Murakami, Birthday Girl

Every Planet We Reach is Dead

In addition to the title being a punchy six-word-story in its own right (though cribbed from the title of a Gorillaz song), the above is a great six-sentence-story by Peter Wild which I ran across recently. It’s been lingering in my mind ever since.