In the wrong place at the wrong time

There is a lot of rubbish on Digg, but every once in a while you can find some gems. I found this article tonight and it has a bunch of screenshots and photographs of misplaced advertisements. (My favorite is pictured above.) Some of the ads are really poorly placed, like the ad for United Airlines frequent flier miles on the MSNBC website on September 11, 2001. Some are a sort of dirty. Others are hysterically funny, like an awkwardly arranged Yanni CD.

Those pictures remind me of another funny advertisement picture. Probably the result of some enterprising young movie theater employees, it's still quite funny.

Subject-O-Matique

My email client of choice is Yahoo! Mail. I use Gmail a lot too, especially with friends who use it, becuase it has some great features. The main one I like is the threaded conversations that keep all emails on the same subject together. But I have resisted swiching over entirely because Google's privacy policies are worrysome, and I have used my Yahoo! account for a long time. Plus, Yahoo! Mail has some great features and a very nice interface.

Today I discovered a really funny feature of Yahoo! Mail that I had never seen before. When you compose an email, it has a button labeled "Subject" you can click. When you hover over the button, it reveals the label "Subject-O-Matique." It automatically generates a random subject for your email, and some of them are hysterically funny. Here's the first ten it generated for me:

• I love animals cause they're made of meat.
• The sushi boats are in the harbor for the night
• Seeking a contextually relevant trap page
• If you don't tell lies, at least you don't have to remember what you have said.
• Hold me closer, Tony Danza
• Anachronistic Antidisestablishmentarianism: A Case Study
• Tonight on a very special "Blossom"...
• What we have here is a failure to communicate
• Valla con queso!
• Black Bean Chicken, medium spicy

I could seriously keep clicking that button for hours, it's so funny. There seems to be a near-endless supply of random subject lines. My favorite one wasn't in the first ten, so I didn't include it in the list above, but it was "Re: the location of your pants." If you have a Yahoo! account, you should seriously check the Subject-O-Matique

On the value of junk

Becca and I have spent much of the week at her parents house because all of her siblings are home at the moment. With everyone together, they decided it was a good opportunity to clean out the garage. It had a lot of boxes full of stuff that was potentially valuable or memorable to someone, so they all had to be there before they could throw anything out.

I have helped a little bit, but I had just a support role; I was mostly on Lindsay duty. I got to thinking about all the junk that everyone has in their house. I'm not really the sentimental sort, so I tend to espouse a "Less is more" philosophy when it comes to junk. But I think there is some real value in having memories and mementos of old times and friends. Of course, I would rather that they be smaller rather than larger. And some things are best recorded in a photograph. Becca took pictures of some things before she thew them out or gave them away. But some things really should be saved.

I also got to thinking about miscellaneous stuff that people keep because it might be useful one day. If you've ever seen those shows on cable like Clean House or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, you know that some people take this philosphy to the extreme. But it is handy to have a place for miscelaneous stuff. I've known some extreme neat freaks that still had a junk bin or junk drawer for all the undefined odds and ends that you collect up. I have a couple small drawers full of miscellaneous things, and every once in a while I need something random (like a clothes pin or a SD card reader) and I can just pull it out of the drawer. The goal, of course, is to make sure that the drawer doesn't expand and take over the whole desk, and the desk the whole room, and the room the whole house. Right now my junk drawer has taken over my desk, but it will have to stay that way until after the bar exam. I guess finding the balance between order and entropy is the key.

Photo credit: striatic.

How to Waste Time, part IV

A couple weeks ago I saw this fun gadget on another blog and I decided to give it a try. Wordle is a Java applet (a program within your browser) that takes a bunch of text or a website and creates a word cloud. I made this one of my blog last week, so it's a little heavy on the Calvin & Hobbes. I might have to extract the whole text of my blog for the past few years and create a word cloud of of that. It would be interesting to see what words came up the most since 2004. You should give it a try and see what it does to your blog or something you wrote.

Fast mapping

Since we’ve seen a lot of new people and done a lot of new things in the past few weeks, Lindsay’s vocabulary has virtually exploded. She says a couple new words a day, and I can’t keep up with all the new words that she knows. Her recall is good too. She learned the word “boat” last night in the bathtub while playing with her toy boats, and this morning she saw a picture of Noah’s Ark and correctly identified it as a boat. The little tub toys really didn’t look much like the illustrated ark, but she understood what a boat did — it floats, and sometimes people or things go in the boat. I thought that was actually pretty perceptive.

I’m also interested to see what names she uses for things or animals she doesn’t already know. This morning she was watching an animal video, and she thought for a moment and then made a guess at some of the exotic animals. She called the otters “kitties,” which makes some sense because of their whiskers. She called a water buffalo a cow. More interestingly, she called a lizard a turtle. I thought this was interesting because the shape of the lizard is really quite different from a turtle, but she already identifies that the lizard and the turtle are related. I’m not sure she quite understands the concept of reptile, but she’s on her way.

Language is such a fluid thing, so I’m continually entertained and impressed with how fast she picks up the words. Her retention is really improving. Speech and language are part of what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal world. The ability to learn and immediately retain words is sometimes known as “fast mapping,” and it’s fun to see it in action with Lindsay. I recently learned of and read an article in Science Magazine about a few dogs who have been found to have this same fast mapping ability. Of the hundreds of dogs they have examined, scientists have only found two dogs with this ability. Both are border collies, a breed which has been bred over hundreds of years to understand and obey a variety of words and signals as part of their animal herding duties. So while only the most intelligent and carefully bred dogs have this ability, any old two-year-old can fast map thousands of words. People are very clever animals, and our little animal is fun to watch. If anyone else likes nerdy stuff like this, the Science article is here and the radio article where I first heard about it is here.

Calvin y Hobbes

We have a fantastic used book store near where we live, and every time I go there, I check out the Spanish language section. Most of the time it just has a bunch of popular English novels translated into Spanish and a bunch of religious texts, but occasionally I find some good Spanish or Latin American literature. Last night I found an illustrated copy of Doña Bárbara, the best-known work of Venezuelan author (and former president) Rómulo Gallegos. I was quite pleased with my find and I almost turned away, when something else caught my eye. It was a Calvin and Hobbes collection, En todas partes hay tesoros. I couldn't resist.

Today I read through the strips, and it was a weird experience. I'm quite familiar with almost all of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, but I have rarely read them in Spanish. Some of the humor really doesn't translate very well; other times it's almost better in Spanish as the result of some clever Spanish colloquialism. I find myself critiquing the translations of some strips. A lot of the humor is dumbed down a bit, since some of the subtle social commentary doesn't translate well. But some of the most complicated subtexts come across quite well. It's been fun to see a new side of "Calvin y Hobbes." I could almost never get tired of these guys.
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The dialogue for the strip above is the following:
Panel 1 - Calvin: Want to see something incredible?
Panel 2 - Calvin: Look, you put the bread in this slot and lower this lever . . .
Panel 3 - Calvin: You wait a few minutes, and out comes toast!
Panel 4 - Hobbes: Wow! And where's the bread? Calvin: I have no idea! Isn't it incredible?

Excuses, excuses

Whenever someone says something happened or didn't happen "due to unforeseen circumstances," it is almost invariably a lie. The circumstances surrounding the error or omission were almost always foreseeable, usually long before the deadline. The "unforeseen circumstances" is just a cover, a verbal shield to obscure the fact that someone (often the speaker) screwed up.

Case in point: the grades for my last semester of law school are past due, but we still haven't received them. By my memory, this is the third time grades have been late in the last two years. I got an email today from the registrar telling everyone that grades would be late. We all knew this, of course, because they were due to be released two days ago. The registrar cited "unforeseen circumstances" for the delay. This is, of course, utter nonsense. Not only were the circumstances foreseeable, they were almost probable. Certain professors are notorious in their failure to comply with a deadline. In fact, if you asked the students, they would probably give you a list of the professors who were most likely to deliver grades late, and that list would probably be fairly accurate.

Additionally, the registrar's office has never been known for its superb organization or punctuality. There was a spat a year ago when the then-registrar failed to end a exam on time. This can be a big deal, since most law school essay exams are structured so that you have less time than you want to write. An extra ten minutes can make a significant difference. The registrar's office also has a long history of schedule conflicts, registration errors, and various other administrative goofs. Given the serial tardiness of some professors and the track record of the registrar, it was almost inevitable that the grades would be released late. That whole "unforeseen circumstances" bit is bollocks.

What I'd really like to see is an up-front admission of responsibility, followed by specific identification of the offending parties. Something like, "We didn't really get around to telling you this until after the deadline because we're disorganized, but we though you should know that Professors Doe,Wossname, and Fulano turned in grades late. For your convenience, their email addresses, office numbers, and home addresses have been attached below."

The next step

I got this in the mail today. It invites me to "take the next step" in my life by enrolling at Draughons Junior College. I've never heard of Draughons, but it apparently has four locations in Tennessee and Kentucky. However, I'm not exactly sure what makes them think that the next step for a top-20 law school graduate is to get an associates degree in dental assisting or pharmacy technology.

My best guess is that they got my information from the company that rented out caps and gowns for graduation, and they think I just graduated from high school. If so, they need to improve their mailing pool accuracy. They're not going to get much response from someone who already has a bachelors and a J.D.

Zombies

As a graduation present, my mother-in-law got us a 6-month subscription to Blockbuster By Mail.¹ The first movie we got was I Am Legend, which we watched last week. I wrote my customary little review of the movie, but it got me thinking about something that was only tangentially related, so I thought I'd talk a little more about it.

I Am Legend is essentially a zombie movie. Will Smith is the last man alive in New York City, and the "zombies" come out at night. Of course, these aren't your traditional movie zombies that can't move faster than a slow walk. That just isn't scary enough. These are wild, ferocious, feral monsters that can break through walls and leap up buildings. You will never see these sorts of zombies dancing together in a music video.

It seems to me that there have been quite a few of these new zombie movies in the last few years. In 1990 there was a remake of the Romero/Russo 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead. I've seen bits of the 1990 version, and the zombies in that movie were still fairly slow, although a bit faster and deadlier than the older version.² But the recent zombie flicks like 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later) feature more mobile zombies. The Resident Evil trilogy of movies, like their video game progenitors, feature fast and vicious creatures, like those in I Am Legend. I also think that it's interesting that the zombie trend seems to branch out beyond the horror film genre. All the above films are visions of the relatively near future. And the cult sci-fi series Firefly, with its accompanying movie, Serenity, also featured a rabid group of people (called "reavers") that bore a very strong resemblance to the new zombies.

I'm not sure exactly why the new zombies have been so popular, but I have a few guesses. The first reason is because the old zombies just aren't that scary anymore. People don't go for suspense or anticipation anymore -- they want the blood and guts. The old, slow, shuffling zombies that appeared in Thriller and were lampooned in Shaun of the Dead don't draw the crowds. So movie makers feel the need to up the zombie ante.

My second guess as to why movies have super-zombies is because of video games. Zombie video games have long been popular, in part because it's a good excuse to blow away a lot of people without making it seem too dehumanizing. Honestly, what other possible scenario would make a shotgun-wielding, trigger-happy homicidal maniac a hero? But in order for the games to be more challenging, the video game zombies can't just shuffle around. That would be like a Duck Hunt of the Living Dead.³ So the zombies get a little more energetic. Obviously, this hypothesis works well with the Resident Evil movies, since they are based on video games, but I think it also affected similar movies of the genre.

My third guess as to the reasons behind the new generation of zombies is based in the common reason given for the existence of zombies. In the old zombie flicks, there wasn't always a reason given as to why there were a bunch of dead people wandering around, eating the living. It was unexplained or identified as black magic, and left at that. The new zombie films usually identify the reason as some mutation, genetically-engineered virus, experiment gone wrong, nuclear disaster, or some other post-modern disaster. These sorts of zombies are less based in the original concepts of zombies taken from voodoo and other Haitian traditions, so they need not be restricted by the previous zombie conventions. In fact, mutations or viruses might provide some fictional rationale for a super-strong and super-fast zombie group.

Finally, I think the new zombie movies have super-zombies because special effects make it possible. Half of the summer blockbuster movies in the last decade seem to have been made just because technology now makes it possible to render the images contained in the movie.⁴ Some writer or movie executive says, "Hey, we can make fast and scary zombies with computers. Lets' do it!"

My reasons may be way off base, but those are my hypotheses. Clearly, I have given this topic far more thought than any such frivolous subject merits. But I'm not alone -- you should see how many zombie fan sites there are on the Internet. And a few years ago a man named Max Brooks published a fanciful how-to manual called The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, which laid out in impressive detail how to survive during a zombie apocalypse. Maybe it takes someone with no life to write about a group of monsters with a similar problem.

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¹ Seriously, best graduation present ever. I love my mother-in-law. She knows that I can count on one hand the times I've been to a movie theater in the past three years. I have a lot of movies to catch up on. Actually, if you can think of a movie that you liked in the last three or four years, suggest it in the comments and I'll put it in our queue.
² I intentionally omitted Army of Darkness from this brief review of zombie flicks because I don't think skeleton warriors qualify as zombies. However, since the horror genre is just about my least favorite, I'm sure I missed some good zombie movies. Anyone have some other examples of the increasingly mobile zombie evolution?
³ Although that could be a kinda fun game. With all the zombie fans out there, I thought someone must have made a flash-based zombie shooting game. Sure enough, there are several. So many, in fact, that there are sites that aggregate all the zombie games. For example, here's a top 10 list of zombie games.
⁴ How else can you explain Wild Wild West, Anaconda, The Phantom Menace, Alien vs. Predator, etc.? Someone should tell movie executives that just because it is possible to make a movie, that doesn't mean that it is advisable.

Paperback

My wife's grandfather is an avid reader, and almost every time he visits he brings a book or two for us to read. We've discovered some fun books that way, although I haven't had the time to read anything he's brought by in almost a year. But I did read the back cover of a book he left for us a while back, and it cracked me up. Here's a portion of the teaser:

An ambitious young congressional assistant, Jim Dillon has discovered a time bomb hidden away in America's Constitution—a provision that could be used to wrest power from the Chief Executive; a long -forgotten clause that could incite a devastating constitutional crisis. . .and plunge the country into chaos.

Whoa! Sounds like exciting stuff! And with recommendations from Stephen Coonts and Rush Limbaugh on the cover, how could I resist reading this book?

I found that paragraph laughable, although I may have to explain a bit of why. First of all, the U.S. Constitution is one of the most scrutinized documents ever produced, perhaps surpassed only by some religious texts. It's not that long of a document, so it really doesn't have much to hide. As it turns out, the "time bomb" to which the author refers is Art. I § 8, which states in relevant part: "The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." One may safely surmise that in the course of this doubtlessly thrilling novel, Congress will try to usurp power from the President using that clause, or some other such dramatic political gambit.

The only problem is, it just doesn't work that way. When one branch of government (or an agency/commission within a branch) asserts a power that it does not have (or it received through improper congressional delegation), the other branches don't sit idly by. Every high school student who slept through less than half of the civics classes understands that the separation of powers doctrine and the checks-and-balances structure function to keep each branch of government from exerting too much power. What they don't realize is that "constitutional crises" happen slowly and undramatically for the most part. When the situations actually blow up, it's a political crisis, not a constitutional crisis. Desegregation, Watergate, and the Clinton impeachment all had their bases in a potential imbalance of power among the branches of government. But the legal underpinings of those situations were largely ignored. Which isn't surprising, because let's face it: legal stuff is boring. It takes an imaginative writer to make legal stuff seem interesting. Even John Grisham's legal thrillers are only thrilling because of some other plot, like murder or intrigue or suspense. So even though the author is a University of Virginia law grad, I don't have high hopes for any exciting legal parts. Because law is boring.

I still might read that book, though. It's summer, after all, which is a good time to read silly, pulpy novels. But if I do read the book, it won't be because of the legal aspect. It will be because Rush Limbaugh recommended it.*
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* Words can't even describe how much I'm joking when I say that.

Eye doctor

I got my yearly eye exam yesterday. I've needed corrective lenses since I was about 10 years old, so this has been an annual ritual for most of my life. Eye exams have changed a lot since I first got glasses. They seem to be faster now. That may be attributable to my perceptions of how long they took when I was 10 (I have never been a particularly patient person), but more likely, I think this is an actual change that results from better equipment. The machines get pretty close to my prescription, and then the doctor and I get to play the "which is better" game. That's always a fun part of the exam. My eyes may be in between prescriptions, because I'm never sure which lens works better. As a consequence, over the last ten years or so, I've bounced back and forth between prescription levels. Last time I went to the eye doctor he said that I was a good candidate for laser surgery because my eyes aren't changing. I like the idea of not having to wear corrective lenses, but until I get good insurance, it's not gonna happen.

Even though I've been to the eye doctor many dozens of times, I had a new experience yesterday. Since I'm nearsighted, he wanted to dilate my eyes so he could check to make sure there was no strain or tearing of the retina. He said I wouldn't be able to focus on something close up without taking off my glasses, and that I would be very sensitive to light, but that those effects would fade in an hour or two. I didn't need to do any reading that day, so I had him do it. He put a drop of solution in each eye. I assume that it contained some sort of muscle relaxant, because after 15 minutes my pupils were HUGE. Seriously, you could hardly see the iris at all. It was kinda creepy-looking. It reminded me of the pot-head kid that sat next to me in middle school. His pupils were almost always dilated, among other symptoms. :-)

My eyes checked out fine -- no tearing or worry signs -- so the doc sent me home with a prescription and a pair of "solar shield" sunglasses. (Think old man sunglasses and you'll know what they looked like.) Becca was outside playing with Lindsay when I came home, and she burst into laughter as soon as she saw me in my slick shades. They weren't exactly what you would call fashionable. In fact, I kinda felt like an old man, because I had to peer over my glasses to see anything up close. I felt like I needed bifocals. I closed all the blinds in the house because everything was so bright to me. I couldn't really do anything like write, cook, or type, so I ended up just watching TV for part of the afternoon. I have this week off, so it worked out okay. But the doc apparently underestimated how long the drops would last; it was almost 4 hours before I stopped needing sunglasses. I'll keep that in mind next time the eye doctor wants to dilate my eyes; it wouldn't do for me to walk into a job interview or conference later that day, looking like I just dropped acid.
Photo credit: deqalb.

Thoughts in the supermarket checkout line

• The biggest misnomer in the publishing world is People Magazine's list of the 100 Most Beautiful People. Are these people really the most beautiful? Of course not. They're just the most popular right now. Beauty has nothing to do with it. If Johnny Depp is really that attractive, he would have been declared the most sexy man long before he surfaced in Pirates of the Caribbean. Why wasn't he even on the list before his career took off? Could it be that beauty is a figment of popularity and not actual looks? Perish the thought. Although, if that were the case, the 100 Most Beautiful People list would merely represent those with the most recent and successful plastic surgeries. On second thought, no. That's gross. (See Goldie Hawn, etc.)
• According to the tabloids, almost every couple is perpetually on the rocks. Bill and Hillary are about to end it. Brad and Angelina just had a fight. David and Victoria Beckham are splitting up. Pamela Anderson and whomever she's married to at the moment are on the breaks. Of course, celebrity couples break up so often that most tabloids can claim they were right all along.
• Is there some sort of industry requirement that women's magazines have a "sex secret" or "sex tip" column in each issue? I don't remember ever seeing one without it. And are there really any sex secrets left? Each new issue declares some new trick that will inevitably "blow his mind." And yet, I find it extremely unlikely that these claims can be true month after month. Though there seems to be no lack of people willing to believe it. But practically speaking, if someone really did discover something new about sex, they wouldn't publish it in a two-bit weekly. They'd patent the process and make millions. (I love the idea of patenting a sex move. I also think the patent application would be hilarious, especially the discussion of the originality elements.)
  

Writing a paper

My exams are over, but I still have 35 pages to write in my seminar paper. And it hasn't gone very well so far, although I've already done a lot this morning. Still, it's slow going. I'll probably be working on it up until the deadline for electronic submission on Friday at midnight.

Everyone around the law school (myself included) is getting a little more haggard and more stressed out. Today I was eating breakfast and listening to some other students as they got ready to go into a morning exam. One of them said she still had to finish a seminar paper. The other one asked what the topic was, and she grimaced and said it was boring stuff. He asked what her thesis was, and she said something about venture capitalism and Sarbanes-Oxley and regulation. At then end of that recitation, the other student (who didn't seem like he understood a word of what she said) smiled and cheerfully added ". . . And World Peace!"

I think that's the best use of a Miss Congeniality quote I've ever heard.

Underwater photography

This month's issue of Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting little piece on Bruce Mozert,¹ who pioneered underwater photography from the 1930's all the way to the 1970's. His favorite place to photograph was Silver Springs, one of the many crystal-clear springs in Central Florida that were some of the state's major tourist attractions until Disney World opened in 1971. Mozert, at right, said “My imagination runs away with me."

I thought the photographs from the magazine and website were fantastic. They have an interesting combination of technological innovation, surrealism, and American post-War aesthetics. Here's a few of the photographs in the Smithsonian article. Due to the Smithosnian's overly-restrictive Terms of Use, each photograph is accompanied by the caption from the website. I have a bit more to say about that in the footnotes.² But for now, enjoy some of these great pictures.

Original caption: Bruce Mozert's underwater stills shaped the image of Silver Springs for more than four decades.
My caption: There's no wall there, dummy! Just swim around and get the girl!

Original caption: Mozert put condensed milk to good use for some special effects at the barbecue.
My caption: It's a complete coincidence that most of these pictures include attractive young women.

Original caption: Mozert rounded up some garden tools to mark Silver Springs’ spring cleanup.
My caption: If living under water still requires yard work, then count me out.

Original caption: For some 45 years (except for service with the Army Air Forces during World War II), Mozert created scenes of people underwater to show off the wondrous clarity of Silver Springs' waters.
My caption: This whole picture is fake. That's not really a water trap. And you will never meet scantily clad women while golfing. Not that it will stop most guys from trying.

Original caption: Mozert pioneered underwater photography, building waterproof housings that allowed him to go deep with a camera in hand.
My caption: Don't tip back in that chair! You'll fall and hurt yourself. Oh, wait . . ..

Original caption: His photos helped establish Silver Springs as a premier tourist attraction during the 1950s.
My caption: Is she trying to entice a fish? I'm not sure I like the idea of interspecies flirting.

Original caption: Mozert's images anchored a national publicity campaign for the springs from the 1940s through the '70s.
My caption: I totally could run the hurdles if I got to float over them.

Original caption: Mozert's staged scenes were ultimately created to showcase the natural wonder of the springs.
My caption: This is what kids in the 50's used to do for fun. Sit around, play the ukelele, and talk to the fake fish.

Original caption:With his surreal vision, Mozert cast Silver Springs in a light perfectly suited to postwar America.
My caption: Get off the phone, Jane! You'll run the underwater phone bill up!

All photographs Copyright Bruce Mozert/University Press of Florida
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¹ Mozert's photography was well recognized in the middle of the 2oth Century, but his sister, Zoë Mozert, was even more famous -- as a pin-up girl. Google her at your own risk, but this site is relatively skin-free and has a brief biography of her career.
² The Smithsonian Institution's Copyright policies are typical of many online content providers. They say one thing but do another. For example, the copyright policy claims that fair use is permitted, but establishes terms that are inconsistent with the Fair Use in the Copyright Act. I am allowed to post these photos here, only because "the site displays no advertisements and no sponsors, does not charge a fee for services, and does not offer any product or service for sale." Additionally, the images are unaltered with all captions included and a URL back to the Smithsonian site. I have a lot to say about such "super-copyright" provisions, but I'll save those for my seminar paper on the topic.

Comic errors

I'm the kind of person that often notices mistakes in movies. You know, when something is inconsistent between shots. Apparently a lot of people look for these sorts of goofs -- there are quite a few websites dedicated to movie mistakes. A lot of them are quite humorous -- I enjoyed looking through the popular ones.

I imagine it's really tough to maintain continuity on a movie set. Most scenes are shot over the course of a couple days, and you have to get the costumes and set to look absolutely identical. On mosts sets there is a person who is in charge of ensuring continuity, and they take lots of photos before they take each break so they can match up again afterwards.

Cartoonists don't have a crew working with them, but you'd think they would have an easier time maintaining continuity. After all, they draw the frames -- they can draw them however they want. That didn't stop Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, from switching a character's arms in yesterday's comic.

You don't have to be a nit-picker to spot that this cartoon is all out of whack. It seems to me that Adams is getting lazy. The strip has never been what you would call "well drawn," but at lest it's mostly coherent. Tsk tsk. Maybe Adams needs to take a page from the movie set book and hire someone to make sure each frame fits with the next one. While he's at it, he might consider hiring someone to write funny jokes.

Ubuntu 8.04

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04, as in, 04/2008) is going to be released this week. With finals going full-tilt, I might have time to upgrade to Xubuntu 8.04 this week, but I won't sit down and play with the new features until the week after next.

Unless you're a Linux user or fan, this probably doesn't interest you. But it's generally good for everyone, since a better free operating system gives Microsoft and Apple an incentive to keep innovating. And since a lot of Linux machines run the servers that make up the World Wide Web, improved Linux distributions can make the Web better and more secure.

Glorious

This came in the mail today. (Click the player for the accompanying audio.)

I can now kiss my 5-year-old, 35 lb CRT monitor good-bye!
Audio credit: Project Gutenberg, via Hallelujah Chorus.

Book tag

I have been tagged. My normal policy on blog tags and chain letters is to ignore them, but this one intrigued me, so I'm doing it in spite of my policy. This particular tagging requires the following steps:

1. Pick up the nearest book (at least 123 pages).
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence
4. Post the 5th sentence on your blog.
5. Tag 5 people.

I plan on omitting the fifth step, although any of you are welcome to try it yourselves. Just make sure that the book has more than 123 pages so as to comply with the entirely arbitrary terms of the tag. My particular book has 916 pages, which is probably overkill. Here are my results:

The nearest book to me is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The fifth sentence on page 123:

"If he wanted a seat in the U.S. Senate, however, he would need the support of Ohio Democrats, a task that would not be made easier by assaulting a Democratic president."

As some background information, the above sentence refers to Salmon P. Chase, the eminent Ohio senator and governor who was a top contender for the presidential nomination of the newly-formed Republican party. Team of Rivals is centered around Abraham Lincoln, but it also details his interactions with his rivals whom he brought into his cabinet. Chase became Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury during the strained and crucial years of the Civil War. Chase remained very ambitious through the Lincoln administration, and in 1864 Lincoln nominated him to replace Roger Taney as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. While Chief Justice Taney had authored the controversial Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, Salmon Chase, a lifelong abolitionist, took a decidedly different approach. One of Chase's first acts as Chief Justice was to appoint John Rock as the first African-American to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Sentient computers

So The Office is starting up again in a few weeks, with a new episode on April 10. Which is only tangentially related to the topic of this post. The other day I was thinking about the episode where Jim and Pam convince Dwight that the new Dunder-Mifflin computer system has gained sentience and is out to destroy him. I started thinking about fictional depictions of computer sentience. They seem to fall into a couple general categories:

The first bunch depict these sentient computers as malevolent machines trying to destroy or enslave the human race. Think the Terminator series or The Matrix Trilogy.¹ This category works well with action movies, so you see a fair number of them.

The second category of fictional sentient computers depicts them as child-like. Cite to Steven Spielberg's A.I., the Robert Heinlein classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Data from Star Trek, and most of Isaac Asimov's short stories.² These computers are basically like child geniuses who know a lot but are still learning what it means to be a person. Almost inevitably, these depictions involve a quest for the computer or robot to become more human-like.

A third, in-between category of sentient computers are the kind that start out nice and end up mean. Some examples could include the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Braniac computer from Superman's home planet,³ Krypton, and the VIKI central computer in the movie I, Robot. Once again, this kind of computer makes for good cinema, so there are a lot of movie examples.

As I was thinking of how writers like to depict sentient computers, it occurred to me that they've probably got it all wrong. If a computer ever really did "wake up," I don't think its first impulses would be to conquer the world, become human, or to help out and then become evil. In fact, if sentient computers ever happen, I think they'll develop the same traits as their creators. Which means we'll have a bunch of immature practical jokers on our hands. And if you think about it, how do we know that our computers haven't already woken up? Ever computer I've ever used had lots of funny quirks and tricks. How do we know this isn't the computers' way of getting a good laugh?

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¹ If you're familiar with the backstory of The Matrix (as depicted in The Second Renaissance) you know that the machines didn't start out malevolent. Contrast that with the SKYNET computer in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines that nukes every human city as its first cognizant act. However, as far as the films go, the Matrix machines are definitely more interested in enslaving humans rather than making peace with them. They may go in my third category over-all, but in the movies they are distinctly first category material.
² "Bicentennial Man" is a good example of the child-like robot. It, too, was made into a movie. This is not to say that Asimov didn't contemplate the possibility of more malevolent robots. His short stories "Robot Dreams" and "Little Lost Robot" both hint at a creepy possibility in robots, and the ideas were incorporated somewhat into the I, Robot film.
³ The character of Brainiac has as many interpretations as there are versions of the Superman series. The version that most prominently portrays Brainiac as the corrupted central computer is actually the animated series. In the comic books and other portrayals, Brainiac more closely resembles the first, malevolent category.

Stay on the sidewalk

On Tuesday evenings Becca has practice with a community band, so I'm home with Lindsay. I actually look forward to some of the time I get to spend with the Babe, since I'm gone all day and I really only see here for a couple hours before bedtime. We read stories and play with blocks and all those fun kid stuff. Now that she's almost 18 months old, she's pretty fun to play with. And playing with her keeps her out of other trouble.

Yesterday I decided that we should go to the playground together. So after Becca left for rehearsal, Lindsay and I went for a little walk. The playground is just a few blocks away, which is very convenient. I started out walking with Lindsay on the sidewalk, but it soon became almost impossible. It wasn't because she can't walk well -- she ran along almost faster than I could walk. The problem is that, for Lindsay, walking isn't the linear experience it is for you and I. She sees the concrete walkway as more of a suggestion than a requirement. She kept running off into people's yards to investigate dandelions, bushes, and law ornaments. When I tried to tell her to stay on the concrete, she complied by turning up the next driveway and marching halfway to the house before I could catch her and bring her back to the sidewalk.

Eventually I just put her on my shoulders and carried her to the park. Once the playground was in sight, I didn't have any more problems with her wandering off course. Watching the Babe made me wonder what we would be like if you and I had never learned all those little rules and social mores that are part of society. We'd probably chase dandelions through other people's yards a lot more often.

Photo credit: infinite.magic