I don’t use Radio Userland any longer, but I found these instructions incredibly helpful, so here they are:
go to system.verbs.builtins.radio.data.systemUrls
add a name: kitNews
value: /system/kit/news
now go to system.verbs.builtins.radio.macros.adminMenu
scroll down to addCommand list
add the following: addCommand (“Kit News”,radio.data.systemUrls.kitNews)
save
How to add menus to Radio Userland Read More »
I’ve been gathering materials for a possible class about the inter-relations of technology and the humanities. Here are some potential sources of information.
Essays on the Philosophy of Technology I
Google Search: Portrayal of Technology in Literature and Film
Tech & the humanities Read More »
When a magician dies (a real, entertainment magician, not one who practices white or black magic, which I don’t believe in anyway), there is a traditional broken-wand ceremony, in which members of the Society of American Magicians break the dead person’s wand, symbolizing that it has lost its magic. The broken-wand ceremony was first held in 1926 after Houdini’s death.
The broken-wand ceremony Read More »
Now this is interesting – it definitely says something about our ability to work around restrictions, provided we remain unaware that the restrictions exist in the first place.
One day in 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of “unsolvable” statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are perhaps more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but as unproved statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.) Six weeks later, Dantzig’s statistic professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two “homework” proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on another paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem. [The Unsolvable Math Problem]
Solving the unsolvable problem Read More »
Brian Eno composed the famous sound that plays when you start up Windows 95 (Don’t remember it? You can download it here.). Here’s what he had to say about composing it:
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, ‘Here’s a specific problem — solve it.’ The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3¼ seconds long.’ I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Brian Eno on the MSFT Windows 95 sound Read More »
"larboard": the left side of a boat; AKA "port"
Word of the day: larboard Read More »
"Continuing to Calais, Edward [III] began a lengthy siege. … Calais Surrendered in August, 1347. Edward was particularly lenient in not killing the garrison and population for resisting him. Six of the towns Burgesses were ordered to appear before him with ropes around their necks and the town’s keys, and to submit to his will, Philippa persuaded him not to execute them." [The Medieval Combat Society; also see Edward III. of Windsor – The Story of the Siege of Calais for a longer version]
Edward III & the 6 worthy men of Calais Read More »
In 1698, Peter the Great worked as a common laborer while in England so that he could learn the art of shipbuilding.
Peter the Great’s disguise Read More »
From “Celebrities face the ‘piñata syndrome’” in The L. A. Times:
As a result, every story has an abbreviated life span, accelerating the demand for more news. Ultimately, this adds up to exaggerated expectations of celebrities. If they can’t maintain their public persona, they’re devoured for our entertainment instead.
“I call it the piñata syndrome,” says publicist Howard Bragman, founder of the Hollywood PR firm Bragman Nyman Cafarelli. “It’s really about the media. They’re only lifting you up so that they can take sticks and beat you and see what comes out.”
The pinata syndrome Read More »
So Jans & I are talking at the Broadway Oyster Bar last night, and all of a sudden Jans says, “Have you ever noticed how many diseases and other medical terms would make great band names? Like The Multiple Lacerations. Or The Compound Fractures.”
“You’re right!” I replied. “How about The Bleeding Ulcers? And The GI Tracts!”
Got any other ideas?
Great band names, part 24 Read More »
From a review of Sinatra: The Life, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, in today’s New York Times:
When it snowed, one writer observed, “girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”
Sinatra’s footprints Read More »
From Jon Henley’s “In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema” (The Guardian: 8 September 2004):
Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement. Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris’s most intriguing recent discoveries. "We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said. …
Members of the force’s sports squad, responsible – among other tasks – for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.
Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.
Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".
There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.
A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.
"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."
Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us." …
There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.
… the Perforating Mexicans, last night told French radio the subterranean cinema was its work.
Film noir in the Parisian catacombs. Secret bars and telephones. Scuttling down drains for secret assignations. "Do not try to find us." I’m swooning just thinking about it!
Secret movies in the Paris underground Read More »
So we’re sitting at the CWELUG meeting, talking, and someone talks about fathoms, which leads to cubits, which leads to hands, which leads to stone. Someone says, “What’s your weight in stone?” I say, “I measure my weight in boulders.”
"New research shows why it doesn’t take much for a new problem or an unfamiliar task to tax our thinking. According to University of Queensland cognitive science researchers …, the number of individual variables we can mentally handle while trying to solve a problem (like baking a lemon meringue pie) is relatively small: Four variables are difficult; five are nearly impossible. …
It’s difficult to measure the limits of processing capacity because most people automatically use problem solving skills to break down large complex problems into small, manageable ‘chunks.’ A baker, for example, will treat “cream butter, sugar and egg together” as a single chunk — a single step in the process — rather than thinking of each ingredient separately. …
The researchers found that, as the problems got more complex, participants performed less well and were less confident. They were significantly less able to accurately solve the problems involving four-way interactions than the ones involving three-way interactions, and they were (not surprisingly) less confident of their solutions. And five-way interactions? Forget it. Their performance was no better than chance.
After the four- and five-way interactions, participants said things like, ‘I kept losing information,’ and ‘I just lost track.’" [How much can your mind keep track of?]
How many variables can we track? Read More »
Warning: this will mean nothing unless you know the two parties involved.
David H. was drunk and for some reason we asked him if he found Jans attractive. His reply:
No! He’s Scottish! And brutish! I feel like he’d take over my country and invade my netherlands!
David evaluates Jans Read More »
Bruce Schneier: "Why are people so lousy at estimating, evaluating and accepting risk? That’s a complicated question, and I spend most of Chapter 2 of Beyond Fear trying to answer it. Evaluating risk is one of the most basic functions of a brain and something hard-wired into every species possessing one. Our own notions of risk are based on experience, but also on emotion and intuition. The problem is that the risk analysis ability that has served our species so well over the millennia is being overtaxed by modern society. Modern science and technology create things that cannot be explained to the average person; hence, the average person cannot evaluate the risks associated with them. Modern mass communication perturbs the natural experiential process, magnifying spectacular but rare risks and minimizing common but uninteresting risks. This kind of thing isn’t newâ€â€government agencies like the FDA were established precisely because the average person cannot intelligently evaluate the risks of food additives and drugsâ€â€but it does have profound effects on people’s security decisions. They make bad ones." [The Evolution of a Cryptographer]
Why are we bad at estimating risk? Read More »
Annie Dillard on writing:
A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”
“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”
The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.”
Do you like sentences? Read More »
I was walking around on Wash U’s campus a while back – I don’t remember where, exactly – when I looked down and noticed that I was walking over bricks that had been “donated” by folks who had given money to WU. This is standard practice a lot of places: donate $$$, get a brick with a message on it written by you.
As I walked, I was struck by the idea that many of the bricks were dedicated to people who had died. Further, one day all of the people listed on those bricks would be dead. Although it was a macabre thought, I realized that this was a walkway of the dead.
A walkway of the dead Read More »
The first line of a mystery novel, suggested by a public defender who heard a woman say it:
“I said, ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘Death was on that boy.'”