alphabet.gif (GIF Image, 988×200 pixels) is an animation of the evolution of the Latin alphabet from its Phoenician roots. Neat use of animatiion to make a point. Thanks to Alex for this.
The end of modem pools
McMaster is ending its dialin modem service as of May 2006. (See McMaster Dial-Up Internet Services.) It is the end of an era of connectivity. Not that I use it or know anyone who does. How many people still use modems, I wonder?
Too Much to Read: Science and City
McMaster has a great lecture series supported by the Hamilton Spector called “Science in the City”. Yesterday I gave one of the talks on “Too Much To Read: Using Computers to Cope With Information Overload” (see the Spectator article beforehand, Spectator interviews Prof. Geoffrey Rockwell.) It was encouraging how many people are interested in a topic like this. There really is broad interest in questions around information, reading, and the Internet. The questions at the end ranged from “should I switch to Firefox?” to “how can I use a concordancer on the information I have?”
Declassification in Reverse
Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program is a page edited by Matthew M. Aid that discusses the extraordinary reclassification program by the U.S. intelligence community. Previously declassified (public) documents are being withdrawn from public view in addition to the exploding amount of information that is not being reviewed and declassified in the first place.
The National Security Archive is a non governmental non-profit institution that documents and advocates for freedom of information.
DFC Intelligence on Online Games
DFC Intelligence is a game industry research company that produces reports for sale. They have some articles online for free like Monthly Briefing on “Who will benefit from the growth of online game subscription revenue?” (March 7, 2006). This briefing article makes some interesting points, including, “Most notably, over 50% of online game subscription revenue in 2005 came from Asian countries outside Japan, most notably South Korea, China and Taiwan.”
A welcome caveat in the article,
The online game market has supposedly been on the cusp of booming for 20 years or so. There has been a great deal of trial and error in getting the market to where it is today. Many of the success stories have seemingly come out of nowhere. Future growth will require companies to take some significant risky investments. Most companies that have invested with a conscious goal of growing their online game business have not been successful. Right now there is even a question of whether traditional publishers need online games for growth over the next several years.
Xich Lo (Cyclo)
Xich lo (1995) by Vietnamese/French director Anh Hung Tran is unlike the other two features he directed (see
my earlier entry). The photographic cinematography is there, but the style is urban and violent. In Cyclo a poor and naive brother and sister enter a cycle of underworld prostitution and gang violence, almost losing their innocent lives. The treatment of the random violence in post-war Vietnam is unlike the methodical American lyrical violence. It is the random cutting of street life. The director puts it well in this Film Scouts Interview.
That’s why I hope you felt another kind of violence here, a moral violence. I often hear people say that in American films violence is gratuitous, I don’t agree. It’s always justified, meaning the hero’s wife gets killed early on, so he retaliates, therefore it’s justified. That’s mechanical violence. In Quentin Tarantino’s films, on the other hand, the violence is playful, jubilant.
When you deal with violence, you must avoid the playful, the jubilant, the laughter, and the justification. It’s easy satisfaction. When Cyclo’s bicycle is stolen, there’s no need for the young robbers to hit him. Yet they do, and I show it, to give you the feeling of how unfair it is. I even make the scene a tad longer, so as to make the unfairness of it all, and the violence it entails, even more unbearable, and you can’t desire it. As opposed to “Reservoir Dogs” where, after the guy has had his ear chopped off, you’re frustrated because he’s not burnt to ashes.
That’s why I’ve never been comfortable with Tarantino’s taste for blood.
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Kottke: the first professional blogger
According to the Jason Wikipedia article, Jason Kottke of kottke.org was the first to try to make a living from blogging through a PBS-like micropatrons approach where he had a 3 week “fund drive” which raised enough for him to blog for a year.
After a year he reflected on the experience in Oh, what a year. felixsalmon was not impressed.
This story, which was big news at the time, is old now, I know. Thanks to Matt for alerting me to it (back when it was news.)
Make Love Not Spam, the Last Chapter
Over a year ago I blogged about the grockwel: Make Love Not Spam campaign. The site now links to a page with documentation on the discontinued project including this lovely picture of what spammers actually look like.
There is a cool animation of what the screensaver looked like.
Frank McCourt: Teacher Man
There is no seeping fear like the first year you teach school. Reading Frank McCourt‘s Teacher Man brought it back to me. There are no easy secrets to get you through, just doing it until you can smell the type of class you have as they walk in. Just doing it until there are some moments that worked and stories to tell.
It wouldn’t have helped my teaching if I had read this book back then at 23 when I first taught, but I would have recognized the fear when I wondered at night just what I thought I was doing.
I’ve had to ask myself what the hell I’m doing in the classroom. I’ve worked out an equation for myself. On the left side of the blackboard I print a capital F, on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from the left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM. (p. 253)
Regular Expression reAnimator
StÈfan Sinclair has blogged in Visualizing Regular Expressions a project by Oliver Steele that animates regular expressions (those cryptic things you write when searching texts for patterns.) Regular expressions and pattern matching have a long and interesting history that has yet to be written. Two points:
- Steve Ramsay has a nice page on regular expressions where he provides a short history,
Regular expressions trace back to the work of an American mathematician by the name of Stephen Kleene (one of the most influential figures in the development of theoretical computer science) who developed regular expressions as a notation for describing what he called “the algebra of regular sets.” His work eventually found its way into some early efforts with computational search algorithms, and from there to some of the earliest text-manipulation tools on the Unix platform (including ed and grep). In the context of computer searches, the “*” is formally known as a “Kleene star.”
- The Haubens in the online archive of Netizens describe the development of Grep as the one of the first tools to demonstrate the power of piping in Unix,
Grep is listed in the Manual for Version 4 Unix which is dated November, 1973. The date given for the creation of grep is March 3, 1973, following the creation of pipes.(43) The creation of grep, McIlroy explains, was followed by the invention of other special purpose software programs that could be used as tools.
Regular expression (regex) matching since Grep shows up as a language within most other languages (like Ruby and Java) for handling strings. It is the archetype of the software tool – a utility within a larger environment or application. This is something I commented on in MIMes and MeRMAids.