| Audiobooks for the Win |
[Aug. 16th, 2008|01:28 pm] |
My father never reads. I think he may be dyslexic, because he's very embarrassed about it. A couple years ago I got him an iPod. He went from nigh computer illiteracy to dredging Usenet for pirated music in about ten seconds. Several months ago, I bought him Ender's Game on audible.com. He finally started listening to it two weeks ago. He's now done, and he's ravenous for more. So yeah, if you know anybody who doesn't like reading, you might be able to expand his or her horizons with a cheap MP3 player.
Ender fans, I'd like to solicit your advice. I read in a few places that it would be a good idea for a new reader to jump straight from Ender's Game to Ender's Shadow. Is that a good call, or should I get him Speaker for the Dead?
When I see stuff like this, I get encouraged. Small environmental changes really can change the course of people's lives. |
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| That's not a kitty... |
[Jul. 29th, 2008|07:42 am] |
So, we've been trying to catch our missing cat in a cat trap. Until now, we'd captured two strays. Here's what showed up in the trap this morning:
Poor skunk. Rabies aside, I'd love to just take a tarp out there and open the trap. A call has already been placed with animal control, though.
I should refit the back gate with a remote controlled solenoid. You'd think the idea of a remote controlled trap release would be popular, but I haven't seen anything of the sort in online stores.
[Update: Animal Control failed to follow up on my call, so I released it myself. Poor skunk. Adam in a bag suit and skunk war dance pictures forthcoming.] |
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| Inspiration in the Lamest Places |
[Jul. 21st, 2008|04:50 pm] |
Does anyone have an audio copy of Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-whatsit "On the Rise"? I used to be able to record audio output using Win2K's Sound Recorder, but it looks like that feature has been removed.
Why would I want such a trite song? Because inspiration can come from the lamest places.
Y'see, I think that people are pretty great on the whole, and that the biggest hurdle between our current society and a much better society is an improved "social interface" -- improved tools, feedback, possibilities, and expectations. I want to be part of that through activism and non-profit web application development.
What does that have to do with "On the Rise"? Well, while I think that my aspirations would have a tangible positive benefit, I've got to feel it to be motivated. My lizard brain has to care about people, has to be convinced that I can make a difference, has to be convinced that people are awesome and deserve a chance to make a better life for themselves and everyone else. Cheesy sh*t like "On the Rise" helps. |
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| Japanese Journal Article |
[Jul. 8th, 2008|01:05 pm] |
Does anybody on my friends list speak fluent Japanese? A good friend of mine needs a translation of an academic paper. Offer includes free dinner, a tea party, and an introduction to one of the coolest people you could ever hope to meet.
crickets
Did I mention that she's hot?
OK, then. |
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| Rational |
[Jun. 28th, 2008|11:38 am] |
I think, perhaps, that someone making $50k/yr with biannual $2,000 bonuses would have a higher quality of life than someone making $55k/yr, all other things being equal. I'm not going to pretend that's a particularly profound insight or even that it's correct, but if you say something like that in a group, someone's bound to say "But that's not rational."
The typical answer is, "Well, people aren't rational," and then everybody bobs their heads in half-hearted agreement, and the subject changes.
But doesn't it take a deeply rational person to set up her situation and finances in a way that takes into account a deep understanding of herself? Isn't it the "objective" thinker who's living in a demented fantasy? Isn't "Well, people aren't rational," the exact wrong response?
Or am I just being an asshole all caught up in semantics? ;-) |
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[Jun. 23rd, 2008|07:09 pm] |
Damn, I've got to stop listening to Flobots, or I might end up actually implementing some of my ideas.
Somehow that makes me feel cheap. |
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[Jun. 22nd, 2008|12:01 am] |
Huh, it feels good to come home.
I always was a momma's boy. |
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| Dear Sun Microsystems, |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|06:47 pm] |
Please don't take this the wrong way, but how the f*ck did you manage to invest a bajillion man-hours into developing the Java Advanced Imaging library without anyone accidentally learning basic color management?
Lovingly yours,
-Adam
PS: Please bring back Duke. |
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| Roku |
[Jun. 1st, 2008|12:50 pm] |
Huh, Roku just released a set-top NetFlix player. I kind of hope it takes off. Red Envelope Entertainment has been a huge boon for the publication of foreign films, documentaries, and political works. I'm hoping NetFlix can leverage a successful set-top platform to do for episodic content what they've done for films. That would be... kinda huge.
As a child, did anyone else have a fear of being bombed by passing planes? |
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| Craig Leddy |
[May. 30th, 2008|05:55 pm] |
Craig Leddy, the president of Interactive TV Works and a major proponent of the OpenCable/Tru2Way technology on which the cable industry has chosen to standardize was kind enough to answer a question of mine. You can read more about him in CableLabs' "OpenCable(TM) Platform Primer 2.0" publication.
( Question: )
( Answer: ) |
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| Lame Nightmare |
[May. 30th, 2008|05:49 pm] |
Last night I had the lamest nightmare ever.
I dreamed my cats were meowing piteously from dire hunger. The kitchen was full of grocery bags with cans of cat food in them, but they were all Friskies brand "Mariner's Catch," which all of our cats hate. I tore through bag after bag looking, frantically looking for a can that wasn't blue, and then went through the blue ones, looking for a different label. It was SO HORRIBLE. |
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| IHNJ, IJLS... |
[May. 25th, 2008|09:34 am] |
I have no joke, I just like saying --
Memetically Insane |
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| Dancer in the Dark |
[May. 15th, 2008|10:09 am] |
Dancer in the Dark features Björk as a low-income US immigrant with a hereditary degenerative ocular disease. She tries to save up enough money to pay for an operation that will prevent her son from going blind before she goes blind herself.
Sound depressing? It is. What makes it even worse is that it's shot like a badly edited documentary, leaving you feeling like you're stuck in wage-slave hell.
So why should you watch it? Because listening to Björk sing "My Favorite Things" in her distinctive style is AWESOME. |
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| RFC: Academia and Communities of Practice |
[May. 4th, 2008|11:04 am] |
I really wish all scientific journals were publicly available online. I appreciate that we need incentives for effective peer review, widespread reproduction, and integrity. One of the most powerful aspects of the Internet, however, is the proliferation of communities of practice.
Expert photography, graphic design, 3D modeling, and UNIX system administration are all things that used to require intensive training, begetting membership in a professional class. Nowadays, you can pick these things up by hanging out and contributing in online forums, newsgroups, mailing lists, and IRC chat channels. These communities of practice not only allow one to learn expert-grade information, but also allow techniques to evolve and for new techniques to propagate quickly. In this sense, these communities can actually be better than classic forms of learning.
We're even seeing interesting communities of practice being built up around legal studies, which is a domain that is firmly held by one of the most exclusive professional classes - lawyers. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that in the next five years.
But one place where communities of practice are being squelched is science. You can't go into a forum and ask, "Hey, the Donovan lab group at Boston University suggests foo in this article, but that doesn't jibe with Mulkasey's findings at Stanford in this article. What's the deal?"
I mean, you could. But then the number of people who could contribute to the conversation would be tiny, and nobody else would pay attention.
So here's the position I'm advancing. Communities of practice are the single best way to create a dialog around science, and have the potential to:
1) Integrate the knowledge of disparate labs
2) Drive questions in scientific inquiry
3) Become a major center of debate, and a referenceable*, living repository of ongoing issues
4) Generate interest in the sciences
5) Give direction to students (who see thousands of articles with no coherent "story" to tie them together except for biased and incomplete review articles)
6) Finally create real connections with the public consciousness in a way that's a million times better than current science journalism.
I further suggest that the lack of public availability of these articles prevents the creation of these communities of practice. There has to be a better way.
PS: I think this approach would be an effective substitute for a lot of the value of academic conferences.
*"Referenceable" should totally be a word. |
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| Update |
[May. 2nd, 2008|07:11 am] |
So, I haven't updated in ages.
Visited ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) shadowravyn in the hospital. It was nice to see her. I was worried that she might be in rough shape, but she seemed all right, and she was in excellent humor. verrucaria and shogunhb were there, and we chatted about gaming and creative inspiration. If I'd known that shogunhb's game included a little ceramic bird that gets excited and hungry when you're close to death, I might have second-guessed my gift purchase. The bird I brought didn't seem particularly excited, but it did seem fat and happy.
As verrucaria mentioned, over the weekend we went to a used bookstore in West Brookfield called The Book Bear. It's pretty great. It's a warehouse, and in a lot of places the books are stacked two layers deep. You can kill an afternoon there easily. We grabbed an engineering drawing book -- do you have any idea how many circles it takes to make a professional-looking W? Damned modernists were crazy. "Hey, that looks nice, therefore it must be pointing to some Platonic ideal, therefore any engineer who draws a W with less than 25 circles is a DEGENERATE."
Picked up a book on a subset of culture in a subset of the medieval period to feed my quiet, underrepresented inner geek. Picked up a couple of books discussing historical examples of spontaneous non-governmental social organization. More on that later.
Saw The Band's Visit this past weekend. It's a good film, although I'd suggest you wait for the rental. I mean, unless you've got a first date, and you want to show your boo/beau how sophisticated and cultured you are... You know, just until you get him or her hooked, at which point you can go back to fun movies. |
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| Pet Peeve: Blaming "Stupid People" |
[Apr. 24th, 2008|07:55 am] |
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Quick Tip: If there's a problem, don't blame the ignorant. Seriously, what are they supposed to do about it? Blame the people who know enough to do something about it, but don't. Very often, that's you and me. |
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| Organizing Fellowship |
[Apr. 4th, 2008|12:01 pm] |
I've got to imagine this would be a better lesson in civics than any college course. It's an unpaid six week stint where you get training and experience in becoming a grassroots organizer. If I were single and saddled with a mere fraction of my current debt, I'd be all over it.
If you know anybody who might be interested, direct them here:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/fellowsapp
If you have some extra living space, consider boarding a grassroots organizer.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/s/fellowshousing |
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