Photos of Fidel Castro by Roberto Salas, his personal documentarian.
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Entries for June 2005
The Economist reports of the current state of biomimicry. Includes information about “biological patents”, which I’d never heard of before.
Get rid of cell phone reception dead spots by using cellular repeaters. They’re not cheap, but they work.
Researching quantum honeybees. Can bees detect quantum fields and use them to find food?
Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art NOW THEN online exhibit. “What did professional comic artists draw like when they were 12 years old”?
A legal guide for bloggers
Because I occasionally do or say things that get me in trouble with The Man (see Ken Jennings/Sony and Simply Porn), I’m often asked my opinion on what to do when other people find themselves in similar situations. After lots of disclaiming (I’m not a lawyer, but…), I usually end up giving very little useful advice because I don’t know much about the issues involved with any case beyond my own. But now, I will be able to point people to the EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers:
Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.
Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that’s under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.
The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you’re doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn’t help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven’t yet decided how it applies to bloggers.
But here’s the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn’t use the law to stifle legitimate free expression. That’s why EFF created this guide, compiling a number of FAQs designed to help you understand your rights and, if necessary, defend your freedom.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…the EFF is doing great work in defending our rights online and is worth supporting.
I am a Japanese School Teacher. Experiences teaching junior high school in Japan.
“There is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft.”. “Consequently physics per se cannot causally determine the outcome of human creativity; rather it creates the ‘possibility space’ to allow human intelligence to function autonomously.”
Old seed grows new tree
2000 year old seed grows a previously extinct Judean date tree. It’s like a plant version of Jurassic Park.
Visual ringtones
There was a panel on synaesthesia at Eyebeam last week and as I was finishing up some work before heading home, I caught a bit of the introduction. It’s a bit different than the standard boilerplate announcement you hear at most conferences/panels:
If you have cell phones or pagers, please leave them on because they might result in some interesting visual experiences for some of us here.
Later, a phone rings:
Ooh, orange!
This review of Per Se mentions their non-alcoholic wine pairings. “With each course, we were given a beverage - ranging from grape juice to steamed milk - which complimented the tastes in the dish. Libby’s ‘Red Rice and Beans’ was completed by a lime margarita. My foie gras with a gossamer grape juice that was finer than most wines.”
Hossein Derakhshan, founding father of the influential Iranian blogging movement, is visiting Iran and needs your financial support. He’s going to cover the trip as a citizen journalist but warns that he may be detained, questioned, thrown in jail, be forced to make false statements, etc.
“Graffiti Taxonomy presents isolated letters from various graffiti tags, reproduced in similar scales and at close proximity”. “The intent of these studies is to show the diversity of styles as expressed in a single character.”
Malcolm Gladwell talks about his work space. He does most of his writing on his laptop while sitting on sofas and in coffeeshops and restaurants.
A blueprint for the writing process: “Sniff. Explore. Collect. Focus. Select. Order. Draft. Revise.”.
On the art of the movie trailer. “There are few more cynical forms of art, or of advertising. Trailers are full of deception. Because what they want you to do is to see the movie they want you to see, not the movie that it is.”
Presentation: how to make a million dollars. “In America, starting a successful business is the surest, most controllable path available to you for making a million dollars”.
Urbanist Joel Kotkin (no relation) on what makes for a thriving city. “He argues that to be successful, today’s cities must still be places that are ‘sacred, safe, and busy.’”
Design refresh
Made a few changes to the design of the site just now. If it looks a little goofy, you may need to press shift-reload or restart your browser to load the new stylesheet (I can’t believe it’s 2005 and I still need to say this…come on, browser makers). The header and footer are different (site-wide), as is the front page. It’s a continuation of the tag idea I introduced here almost a year ago and an amalgam of a couple different designs I’ve been tinkering with for the last few months…with the combination, I finally got it where I want it. It looks pretty much the same as the last design (yellow tab/banner at the top), but it’s going to be more flexible going forward…and I just plain like it better than the last one (which I got tired of pretty quickly).
Photos from Ireland
Ireland is green. Green, green, green. Such a cliche, but it really is unbelievably green. Here are some photos I took on a recent trip there:
We spent a little more than a week in southwestern Ireland, mostly in Cork, Kerry, and Clare. We actually drove through Limerick with a man from Nantucket, which if we’d been less jetlagged, we would have thought was more funny than we did. There was traditional Irish music in a pub in Dingle and Ennis. Some amazing porridge (no, really!). It rained a lot, but you got used to it after awhile. I’d never had a Guinness (for strength!) before and I figured the place to have one was in Ireland, so I ordered a half one night at a pub. I could only finish half of it…even a quarter of a pint of stout was too much for a amateur imbiber like myself.
I’ve got a short piece in the second issue of Make magazine about Mark Simonson’s Lego film scanner. This is my first bit of paid writing ever.
Walt Mossberg: wireless phone carriers exercise too much control over the technology their customers can use. “I once saw a sign at the offices of a big cellphone carrier that said, ‘It isn’t a phone until “Harry” says it’s a phone.’ But why should it be up to Harry (a real carrier employee whose name I have changed)? Why shouldn’t the market decide whether a device is a good phone?”
Nancy Cartwright says The Simpsons movie is now in production. Will one of the entertainment industry’s biggest pieces of vaporware actually get shipped?
Cory Doctorow discovers bliss in Mexican drinking chocolate. Having had food experiences like this, I can relate to the feeling.
The Daughters of Freya is a serialized email mystery. “The mystery is told through emails exchanged between journalist Samantha Dempsey and the other characters. You’ll receive a few emails at random times every day over the three weeks that it takes for the mystery to unfold.”
An interview with Rob Walker, who writes about design and consumer behavior for the NY Times Magazine. “The consumer is making a decision as to whether the product succeeds or fails, and what I do is to come in afterwards and try to articulate what the consumer saw or didn’t see that makes something succeed or fail.”
Kirven Blount travels to Denmark to try out for a Danish professional basketball teams. “You go to your local gym to play basketball. Some enormous foreigners arrive. They play very well. So do you. They tell you they are professional basketball players from Denmark, and that you should fly to Copenhagen for a tryout.”
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