Plurp: A Weblog

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2001.01.07 : 2001.01.13

Saturday, January 13, 2001
Blab. One of our most loyal readers writes:
Actually, my errand boy and I broke up several years ago. We didn't do too well as boyfriend & girlfriend. But over time (and great distance), we have been able to develop a different kind of friendship, which is actually quite nice. We have a little symbiotic relationship where he hosts my weblog and does various little tasks for me, and in return I chastise his erroneous beliefs about the innateness of grammar and so forth. I know I'm getting the nice end of the stick, but he really does derive gratification from hosting my weblog & stuff, strange little clever fellow that he is.
We are still pulling feet out of our mouth (the count is up to seven so far), and offer our abject apologies at having stumbled so rudely into the personal life of our loyal reader.
This bloggery stuff is so complicated!

Blab. Referencing yesterday's observation of car crunching, a reader writes:
"A line of five cards that had obviously rear-ended each other moments before"
No wonder there are soooo many accidents on the roads of New York! They should leave the card playing to professionals!
Well, OK, we all know that that readership of Plurp is made up exclusively of obsessive copy editors. But the scary thing is that we received this particular missive not five minutes after posting yesterday's Plurp, at about 6:30 PM on a Friday night.
Perhaps we have a stalker. An obsessive, copy editing stalker.

Blab. Responding to our request to name that one final Deadly Sin when they are all, finally, consolidated, a reader suggests:
Following the example of physicists, it should be called the Grand Unified Sin.
Perfect. GUS it is.

Blab. Taking a different view of Katie's rant against the present not living up to the past's view of the future (still with me?), a reader speculates:
Perhaps Katie's robots and fold-up cars are like Avery Brooks' flying cars in that IBM commercials. You know, the one where he asks, "Where are the flying cars?!" and then goes on to answer his own question: maybe we don't really need flying cars. Similarly, I recall seeing an article in 1979 or 1980 predicting all the wonderful technologies that would be coming out in the 1980s. In 1990 I went back and checked it, and it was far too optimistic, but one prediction still stands out in my mind: that videophones would be common by the mid-80s. Anyway, my point is, here we are today and videophones still aren't common--but it's not because the technology isn't there; it's just that it turns out most people don't want videophones.
But, but, we want robots!

Yow. Out of the blue, the shining electronic machine that is PlurpMail delivers a missive from an old college friend that we haven't seen for a dozen years. Turns out he founded a biotech company and was recently asked to give the commencement address for the college we both attended. Way cool!

Yow. We're being gloriously lazy today (sloth + gluttony + lust), laying in bed and watching another episode of New York, A Documentary Film by Ric Burns, published by PBS. It's absolutely wonderful!
It follows the history of New York City from the early Dutch settlers through 1931. It is illustrated with extensive primary sources - the words of writers of the time, both great and plebian; newspapers; photographs; and movies, including Edison's first movies of New York. It is told by an amazing collection of contemporary historians, writers, politicians and great thinkers.
It is huge, comprising five two-hour videos, and every bit of it is riviting. The great events that built, not only New York, but America - the culture, the innovation, the heights of capitalism, the depths of immigrant desperation, all brought to life more vividly than I would have believed possible.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
I generally hate historical treatments. Dunno why; I just find them dull. But this is one of the most engaging, most exciting, most human stories I've ever seen.
Highly recommended.

Plurp. A Richter 7.6 earthquake off the coast of El Salvador today. That's big! Fortunately, damage seems extremely limited. And in the midst of it, this great, great image:
Most businesses in the city also were closed -- though in a surreal touch, acrobats and dancers from a touring circus marched through the streets past frightened people, using a loudspeaker to promote a coming performance.

Plop. More on it, Ginger, slime-flapping markedroids, whatever.
Here's the patent from which yesterday's illustration was taken. And some quotes that didn't quite appear in yesterday's breathless hype.
[The invention may require work by] "city planners, regulators, legislators, large commercial companies, and university presidents about how cities, companies and campuses can be retrofitted for Ginger."
...
[We] kept mum about Ginger out of concern that corporations in industries that may be threatened by Ginger could "use their massive resources to erect obstacles against us or, worse, simply appropriate the technology by assigning hundreds of engineers to catch up to us and thousands of employees to produce it."
- Dean Kamen, inventor of it, Ginger, whatever
"I can't help but feel that we are victims here. I have a feeling that someone is out there having a big laugh over this. I just don't know who it is."
- Paul Saffo, Director, Institute of the Future

A firehose of hype. Astonishing.
(Though the image of all of us at IBM Research slithering about on weird gyro-stabilized skateboards is both weird and kinda cool. There are historical rumors of some colorful Research person back a while ago riding a Harley-Davidson down the long, curving halls of the Yorktown lab. I've always liked that image. But do I think this is a New Social Phenomenon? Yeah, right.)

Plurp. What the hellip is … ... does anyone know? I'm so ... confused!

Yow. Care to create a jazz riff on Mary Had a Little Lamb? You can do so on the virtual piano.

Plurp. I've been wondering who stole Daniel Moynihan's lips. Or were they sold at an early age by his poor parents to some kind of black market Lip Bank? Does anyone know?

Yak.
Floriduh.

Plurp.
The blue dog once
invented a personal
transportation device
involving marketing personnel and
long steel needles.

Friday, January 12, 2001
Blab. Our most reverential reader writes:
Seven deadly sins? My lawyer thinks he can get me five......
One can argue a strong case that Avarice, Greed and Envy can all be classified in the same category.....which is great for me because now I can say with conviction that I am guilty of only FIVE deadly sins instead of the SEVEN subscribed to by most.
Goodness, and what with Sloth and Gluttony having been combined into Weekends, that brings the total down to four.
If this trend continues, we predict that there will be just one mortal sin in a few years. Readers are invited to suggest a name for it.
Blab. A reader who just can't let it go writes:
While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 90 year old man (he got his hand caught in a gate while working his cattle) a doctor and the old man were discussing Bush's health care reform ideas.
The old man said "Well, ya know, old Bush is a post turtle".
So, not knowing what he meant the doctor asked him what a "post turtle" was. And he said, "When you're driving down a country road, and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he can't get anything done while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor thing down."
Our loyal reader may be dismayed to learn that this joke was not originally about Bush. Rather, Google suggests that it may have started with Clinton.
While suturing a laceration on the hand of a old volunteer firefighter the doctor started discussing President Clinton's health care reform ideas.
The firefighter said "Well, ya know old Clinton's a post turtle".
Not knowing what he meant the doctor asked. "What's a post turtle?" "Well, when your driving down a country road, and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle. You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he can't get anything done while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor thing down."
It's a tribute to the American political system that identical jabs can be directed at almost any president, regardless of alleged party affiliation.
The expression post turtle, by the way, might even be of Australian origin. And there's even a poem about them, somehow connected with Hillary Clinton.

Blab. A reader prods us to question the meaning of life itself.
Why smell a skyblue dog eroding?!

Blab. Living at the Crossroads of Previously Unrelated Ideas, a reader suggests:
Rear Window as a VIDEO GAME!!!
Boo-ya! I'm seeing a first-person game with you in the Jimmy Stewart role. You can talk to the people who come into your room, call people on the phone, etc.

Plurp. The sun is starting to melt some of the foot-or-so of snow today, and all of the people who can't drive seem to have taken to the road again. I passed three separate accidents on the way in:

A line of five cars that had obviously rear-ended each other moments before.

A car that smashed into the rearmost car in (1) just as I was passing the line of cars, causing the original five to smash recursively into each other again to great and noisy effect.

A car that was overturned, sideways across the highway, glass splattered all over the road, with someone still pinned inside, upside-down.

I decided to drive the last few miles to work somewhat more conservatively than usual. But I'm sure I'll revert to my normal style again on Monday.

Yo. Speaking of dreams, I have a recurring dream in which I'm a passenger on an airplane and the airplane is flying low. No, I mean really low. 20-30 feet off the ground low, weaving between buildings, careening up grain elevators when an alleyway ends abruptly, etc. etc.
It occurred to me this morning that this is about driving. Or rather, about the kind of driving I do. Yee hah.

Rant. Katie beat me to this particular rant, but she does it so well!
y'know what? dammit! its the FUTURE. its friggin january 12th 2001. and i dont have a SINGLE goddamn robot. <shakes head sadly> 1984 wasn't all it was cracked up to be either. but this is REALLY the future. and i don't even have the option to live in a space station or relax in my vacation home on the mars colony. my car does NOT, in fact, fold up into a briefcase as promised in the jetsons. wasn't the future supposed to be... y'know... great?

Plop. Architect Edouard Francois has created my own personal interior design hell - buildings designed to have plants growing out of the walls. A new apartment building in Montpellier, for instance, has walls made of crushed volcanic rock "that will sustain cacti and figs".
Aaaaaarrrgh!!!

Yo. Some folks at MIT are soliciting random people to enter "common sense" facts into a big database. (e.g. "Ice is cold", "Dogs have hair") Their idea seems similar to Cyc - a huge database of common sense facts might be used to do reasoning much like humans do. Or, at least, that's what they think.
And anybody can enter facts. Heh. They're so trusting.
As a way of stimulating you to give them good facts, they show you a picture. Then they ask you to enter a fact that the picture reminds you of. Here are our contributions.

Picture My Contributed Fact

Panel of a modern car radio Buttons can be licked.

Fuzzy photo of a car Sweaters and bad photos are fuzzy.

Rock star with bright line behind his head When hair burns, it does not smell like lemons.

Leather boot Dad liked his steaks cooked so long that they became shoe leather.

Doctor examining a patient's throat Doctors can help by removing wooden sticks from your mouth.

Sushi on a plate Pixels can be made in almost any color

Life ring from a boat Sculpture must be constructed of white rope and beige plastic rings.

Old books Books are often made of worms and dust.

Duck decoy Computer scientists have successfully created many kinds of living creatures.

Badly pixellated photo of a family of five Families seldom survive the pixellation process.

Rubber duckie Ducks construct musical instruments from children's toys.

Speedboat Boats are used to hold the ocean down.

Bolt and nut The screwdriver was invented by a person named Phillip.

Axe Axes can be used to sing songs.

Steak and scallions on a grill Onions eat meat.

Cougar Many cats have web sites.

We're always pleased to contribute to the march of science.
We encourage our readers to help them out, and report your creative facts here.

Yo. Eat it. What really silly edible things can we find on the Web?

Edible What? On the Web?

Edible trees Sure!

Edible roads Nope.

Edible sky Yes, oddly.

Edible rocks Certainly.

Edible words Yes, in several languages.

Edible pins No (thank god).

Edible buildings Yep.

Edible ears Yes, but heh.

Edible pixels Um, yes.

Edible shards Yes. Ouch.

It's actually kinda hard to think of things of this form that aren't on the Web. The Web is a Very Strange Place. We like that.

Yow. Dave cites a wonderful, wonderful story about ... well, go read it yourself. Really. Go. It about sums it all up. It does.

Yo. Celebrity Elvis Sumo Mud Wrestling.

Yo. What makes people smile? Simple Pleasures.

Yow. PhotoBots. Modestly cool. Edible pixels, ya know.

Plop. What is it ? CNN doesn't know, but they are utterly breathless about it.
Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos says it's a "product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it." Computer whiz Steve Jobs says it will change the way cities are designed.
Harvard Business School Press has paid $250,000 for a book about a mysterious invention with the codename "Ginger." Neither the agent nor the publisher knows what "Ginger" is, but they apparently believe it's well worth finding out.
Ah, but MSNBC knows more bits of the mystery of it.
... the digerati of Silicon Valley who know [the inventor] well were convinced they had the answer yesterday.
Ginger, they claimed, is a wearable car.
Speculation and even drawings of a purported patent application flew feverishly around the Web.
The drawing looks like a pogo stick with a single wheel under it that you can’t push over, no matter how hard you try. “Sort of ‘B.C.’ meets George Jetson in the form of a Razor on steroids,” as Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future put it yesterday.
Let's review. The Next Big Thing, that is, the Thing That Will Revolutionize The World, that is, The Thing That Astonishes All Of Silicon Valley is ... a scooter.
A scooter.
This is why I could never be a VC. I look at stuff like this and say So what? And, if pushed, I point out that a 60 MPH scooter will kill more people than WW I and II combined, that it's not comfortable to stand up while traveling like that, that having bugs smashed into your face at high velocity is not appealing to some people.
In short, I am just too much of a nay-sayer, too much of a wet blanket, to ever consider putting a dime of my hard-earned money on such a preposterous idea.
I would however, seriously consider investing in the PR firm responsible for all this buzz.
But hey, what do I know? Maybe Katie gets her Jetson's car after all.

Yak.
Herbert? He just screen-scraped the Bible to write Dune.

Plurp.
Like ribbons of
silt in the River Plurp,
pixels of the Blue Dog were
eroding away.

Thursday, January 11, 2001
Blab. Our poor reader, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of Mayhem Day on Plurp, seems to be losing his or her grip on sanity altogether.
I hear a flywood bog imploding!
How very unfortunate. Naturally, we can assume no legal responsibility for any ill effects resulting from reading Plurp. Our legal staff assures us that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution offers an effective shield under which we can perpetrate all sorts of mischief like this.
Which is to say, we feel your pain.

Blab. A loyal reader, trying to help us discover if Hitchcock's Rear Window originated from a stage play, writes:
Steve, In response to your Rear Window inquiry - I could find nothing that suggests that there was a stage version of this story. However, I did find the court case Stewart vs. Abend which was filed over the rights to the story. I suspect if there was a stage production, they too would have been named or at least alluded to in the case and there is no mention. I must admit, it would be great as a stage production but it was scripted to put the audience in the position of the voyeur. Ah well, I wonder if a stage production could still be done as a re-release :-)
- Christine
That makes sense, and we will consider that the final word on the topic. Any readers who do produce a stage version should certainly send us tickets, though.
(Stewart vs. Abend. Now that's funny! We wonder if the lawsuit terminated normally.)

Blab. A minimalist reader writes:
geekgirl

Blab. A reader with nostalgic taste writes:
http://lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html
- dwl (No futher commentary seems required)
Nor will any be given.

Blab. A reader fascinated with gadgets writes:
HiHo, I stumbled onto this little DOS train sim. It's given me many smiles. Free download at:
http://www.abracadata.com/html/index99.html
Our reader was slightly gnawed upon by HTML frames. A more precise reference is here.
Dozens of large, elaborate railroad layouts are included with the product! Run up to eight trains at once; choose which one will be your engineer's view. Switch, reverse, control your speed, load and unload cargo. Control weather conditions, day or night running, terrain, pickup/delivery schedules and response to train collisions.
Looks like fun, even if it is pretty low-rez and DOS-y. The program also works in Windows, and there's a Mac version.
Woo woo!

Plurp. Omigosh! Yet another day with all sorts of ones and zeroes in it. Where will it all end?

Yo. We note with interest that Katie got her blogger voices facility working. (Click on the word Discuss there.) We're not sure we like the fragmented discussion style very much, but it's still nice to see interactivity come to more blogs. And that means her pineal gland is safe from the hummingbirds, which is always good.

Plop. Have you ever played with cats by having them chase the light of a laser pointer? Yes? Well, you're under arrest, because doing this has been patented. Really.
US5443036: Method of exercising a cat
A method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.
Notice the clever generalization. This doesn't just apply to cats. Badgers, as well, would fall under this. And probably armadillos too. And meerkats. (Thanks to Ron.)
In other late-breaking news, IBM was granted more U.S. patents than anybody else for the eighth straight year in a row. No connection with that cat thing, though. Really.

Plurp. We had a nice conversation yesterday with a couple of people from Beijing who work in the HooHai building. Where do they work?
There's a building in Chinatown in New York with a sign that says Wing Fat Trading Company. You wouldn't think there'd be enough to build a business around, would you?
Also in Chinatown is a restaurant called the Double Hey Rice Shoppe. Hey hey!

Plop. The upcoming presidential inauguration promises to be more exciting than usual. FBI Supervisor James Rice says:
We have to be prepared to respond to absolutely any scenario or any situation that would come up that could affect this event, from a terrorist attack to bombing, a chemical or biological or nuclear incident, or demonstrations on the parade route
We do recall that some folks were not very pleased with that election thing last year, but nuclear incidents?! Maybe we'll just stay home.

Yo. You may recall that MoMA has some pretty weird art exhibits.
Actual Size examines the work of artists who have addressed the issue of scale in exacting, literal ways by creating works in a one-to-one relation with the thing represented.
For Christmas, we received a lovely box of Jelly Belly jelly beans, just as pictured here. There are 40 different flavors, each in its own little individual section.
But the odd thing, and the reason we're boring you with this, is what's on the bottom of the box (not shown here, exactly). It's a picture of what's inside the box - those 40 different kinds of jelly beans, each in its own little section.
At first, we thought How useful - a key to which flavor is which. But no, there are no labels, no clue as to the flavors. It just pictures the jelly beans. So you can't look at the picture and say Oh - the asparagus jelly beans are the third ones from the left. You can only say Oh - the green jelly beans are the third ones from the left. Which you could, of course, have done without the picture.
Soon to appear in MoMA.

Yow. Things To Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument. They'd be funny if people hadn't used most of them on me already. (geekish)

Yo. What happens when we're able to engineer technology that can influence our high-level brain state (and hence, let's suppose, our conscious experience) directly, and in real time? Wireheading.
Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can potentially be used to banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. In its place, gradients of life-long genetically pre-programmed well-being could animate us instead.

Yow. This is the third day of our week-long experiment in which Helen assigns us a topic for lunchtime conversation, in the hope of expanding our conversational repertoire beyond mere geektalk.
The assigned topic. Discussion of recent dreams.
The ensuing conversation. What surprises me is that so many people have such similar experiences in dreams. Maybe it shouldn't - we have very similar experiences in our waking lives after all - but it does. Anyhow, here's what we talked about.
We noted that this was an appropriate topic, given that Martin Luther King Day is coming up.
I have a dream. I'm in school and we're having final exams, but I had forgotten about it and I haven't studied, and I don't have a pencil. I have a dream!
We usually think that we are in our own little cut-off world while we're dreaming, but it isn't always so. Several of us have had dreams in which we have a terrible itch and, no matter how hard we scratch it, it just won't go away. Finally, we will wake up and - lo and behold - we have an itch in just that same place. When we scratch it in our waking state, of course, it goes away.
One of us related having a clock radio in college and having a recurring morning dream that he was smashing clock radios to try to get them to be quiet.
A number of people said they had recurring dreams in which they had to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom was broken, occupied, locked, dirty, or otherwise unable to be used right then. Funny thing, that.
A couple of people told of falling dreams in which they hit the bottom. One person bounced. Another hit hard, and it hurt enough to wake him up.
Another person said they used to have a calculus class first thing in the morning and remembers being in a half-dreaming state in which he worried that the professor was integrating a function without asking its permission, and in which the variables became living beings with feelings and human rights.
We all had the experience of it being difficult to be sure if something we dreamed was actually a dream, and not real. Several of us had woken up so sure that something we had dreamed had actually happened that we still believed it hours later.
About half of us have had lucid dreams, in which we know we are dreaming and can control (some of) what happens in the dream.
We wondered why it's so common to forget dreams after waking. Nobody knew, but we would all love to know!
Someone said we should figure out how to implement dreams in AD&D, but two others of us pointed out that we had already done that, independently, when we were DMs.
Then, dreamlike, we found ourselves debating the difference between wrath and anger, and we started wondering what God's to-do list looks like.
(897) Smite heathen.
(898) Fiddle with fundamental physics just enough to confuse them again.
(899) Tell Adam his baby name was Mini Me .
So we decided we must be done for the day.

Plurp.
The blue dog is
an itch you
cannot scratch

Wednesday, January 10, 2001
Blab. Mayhem day was too much for one of our gentle readers, who is now suffering the hallucinations of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
I see a plywood board exploding
We advise bed rest and competent psychological counseling.

Plurp. Omigosh. Another day with all sorts of ones and zeroes in it. This keeps happening.

Yow. Our ever-so-clever artist friends Blaise & Ginny declare:
We're in the Uh-Ohs! Several years ago, at Art&Artists, we held a context to name the decade starting with 2001, since the usual model (i.e. the Twenties or the Nineties) wouldn't work. The Uh-Ohs was our favorite submission, beating out the Naughts and the Zeros.
We love it, and pledge to adopt this terminology from now on. We encourage our gentle readers to do likewise.
(You can see some of Blaise's more visual work here.)

Yow. Dave gives our humble Web site two links in a thoughtful essay on irony. I'm just so sure he woulda given us lots more if it was about sarcasm. Yeah, right.

Yow. Finally, an advice columnist with attitude!

Plop. What with all the excitement of mayhem day yesterday, we forgot to link to several clever Synjtoons on the topic. So here they are.

Yow. Speaking of the seven deadly sins, Bill finds their official Web site. Quite a good find! (And isn't it wonderful that they have one?)
The Seven Deadly Sins are those transgressions which are fatal to spiritual progress. You probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating. Welcome to your source for both an historical perspective and up-to-date info on the Seven Deadly Sins.
On this site, we learn hitherto unrealized stuff, such as the connection between the seven deadly sins and the seven dwarves.
Seven shrunken men shacked up in a secluded forest cabin, hiding a virginal teenage runaway. Seven tortured forms shouldering their demonic tools as they march into the hellish bowels of the earth, singing as they go. Harmless mythic munchkins or the epitome of Evil? You decide.
I always wondered about that. There are also seven-deadly-sin art objects. Very nice indeed. (Though aren't Avarice and Greed the same sin, and aren't they missing Envy? I love the idea that I'm an expert on sin! Ooh, ooh.)
Great minds think alike. The site ranks the popularity of each of the seven deadly sins by how many hits they get on various Web search engines. I approve!
And they have a test! I've always been a good test-taker (pride). This one's for lust (one of my more preferred sins). I'm really unhappy, however, to have gotten only a pitiful 30% on the test (anger). Sigh. Guess I'll have to revert back to sloth. I always did like sloth. Remind me to tell you about Saturday mornings.
Or, if you're both avaricious and slothful, just buy the t-shirt.

Plurp. Speaking of buying the t-shirt, Dave showed up the other day at lunch wearing the official stevewhite.orgt-shirt. Is that way cool or what? We had not, in fact, ever seen the stevewhite.org t-shirt, or any of the other stevewhite.org artifacts, having been too slothful to buy them myself. You too can own these astonishing collector's items before I do, but only if you act now! (Pride, sloth, avarice, sarcasm.)

Yo. Who writes phrasebooks, anyhow, and why do they think I need to say I want a specimen of your urine in Russian?

Yow. Following up on Helen's requirement that we talk about something non-technical at lunch each day, lunchtalk proceeded as follows.
The assigned topic. Current political subjects, i.e. Supreme Court, Bush's nominations and appointments, international policy, etc.
The ensuing conversation. Well, it was rather complex. This may give you a flavor of it.
How 'bout that Microsoft case?
I heard Jimmy Carter on NPR saying that his organization that oversees elections couldn't oversee an election in Florida because Florida doesn't meet their minimum requirements for democratic voting.
You did? Are you sure? It's hard for me to believe that Florida is worse off than, oh, Guatemala.
Well, the Republicans sent absentee ballots out to dead people several years ago.
Did you hear the ad for Iceland on the radio?
Are they selling it?
No, they're promoting it. The tag line is: Iceland - It's not just a big block of ice.
Maybe we should talk about incorporating politics into the AD&D rules.
I found a Web site by a guy who invented an imaginary world called Virtual Verduria that has politics and stuff.
How many virtual nations are there?
What's a virtual nation?
One with no residency requirement because it has no land, like an Internet country.
What if you wanted to start a religion on the Internet?
I already have.
Was the Church of the Subgenius started on the Net?
I know. We should register a new religion for bots on UDDI. We'd define DTDs for it, give it SOAP protocols for conversion, sinning, etc.
Yeah! We could register political parties for bots on UDDI.
Maybe that's what virtual nations are - collections of bots that have their own elections, their own religions, their own marriages. But how would you know that the thing on the other end was a bot and not a human?
You'd have an anti-Turing test, of course. (See? I knew I could bring the conversation back around to Turing tests.)
What do you get when you cross a Unitarian with a Jehovah's Witness? Someone who runs around knocking on doors for no apparent reason.
We then got off onto how Lenat's Cyc will never work because humans don't remember isolated facts and use first order logic to reason about them. If I ask you "Was Abraham Lincoln tall?" you don't access a bunch of facts stored in a semantic net of the form "Abraham Lincoln was a President", "All Presidents are human", etc. Rather, you bring to mind a picture of Lincoln, look at it, decide that yes, he was tall, and answer the question.
From there, we went to Mormon theology, wondering if we could simulate the queue of souls waiting to be born on MQSeries. At that point everyone decided that the conversation had gotten silly and we went back to work.
I wonder how Helen is doing on the topics we assigned her.

Plurp.
The blue dog was
banned from voting in
seven virtual nations.

Tuesday, January 9, 2001
Blab. It's mayhem day here at Plurp. We were complaining the other day that those great potato gun videos weren't on the Web any more. Sure they are, says Steve, who provides the following.
SpudZooka Videos has a shot of a 1/2" solid pine board exploding on impact with a potato as ammunition.

This picture is of a potato impacting a 3/4" piece of plywood at 700 ft per sec (Mach 0.6). The white stuff is the potato vaporizing on impact. Very little is left after impact. The exposure is 1/2000 of a second using a video camera (lucky shot!).
And here's the Master Blaster Spud Gun page, for those of you dying to do more research on this important subject.
That's mighty impressive! It's good to see those watermelons exploding into microscopic fragments in a few milliseconds. Technology in the service of blind, mindless violence with innocent vegetables. Great stuff.

Blab. Then at lunch yesterday, people were taunting us about losing that Web Challenge to find a firearm that can be fired via remote control over the Web. Oh, I've seen that, says friend E, who submits the following.
The tele-obliteration web page I was talking about at lunch was apparently only active for 30 minutes, not a whole day.
I worked tech (carpentry, mostly) with SRL for a week in Phoenix and saw the air launcher in action. The launcher still used radio control at that point, not TCP/IP. It was super neat. The firearms stuff is only a small part of what they do, the noise generators and vibration making equipment is also quite impressive -- they have a V1 rocket engine, and another machine that spins steel cables so fast the tips reach mach one.
If you like noise, colorful things, also check out LOD, an SRL offshoot organization. The "lod" stands for Lightning On Demand. They built a 130,000 watt Tesla coil and are planning a 5 megawatt coil which is apparently the theoretical maximum for Tesla coils.
If you like dangerous things with easy user interfaces there was also a "Plague Vending Machine" built by the same people, but I was never able to find out if it was real or a hoax.
Amazing - a remote controlled potato gun! Now these are some serious hardware hackers.
I think I actually had lunch from that Plague Vending Machine, though. Is that bad?

Blab. Mayhem in my personal life!
Hey Cutie!
I love your reviews (even though you quote me with abandon!). Gonna miss them if we don't do four more this weekend. BUt that'll be tough since we have the Burns dinner on Sunday..... maybe To MORE????? Huh huh?
Me
Who is this, anyhow? Just imagine what would happen if Helen knew about this!

Blab. Mayhem in the blog!
I'm Ian and so's my wife.
And Bob's your uncle. Fine.

Plurp. Mayhem and take-out. Chinese food or skin condition? Now that's disgusting! (Rebecca.)

Yo. Mayhem with your tax dollars in a mysterious city in the middle of a national forest.
NSA abandons wondrous stuff
Astronomers who took over an abandoned spy base find remarkable, expensive and often incomprehensible stuff at every turn.
...
One area is in a small, sunken river ravine surrounded by barbed wire and an additional guard post. Steps, with reflective metal paneling to shield the identity of those walking beneath, lead down a small hill and wind their way to two small buildings with conference rooms inside - both of which once emanated "white noise" to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
Nice place for a condo. (Beth, via sevencrabrangoon.)

Yow. Mayhem at the lunch table. Helen joined us for a group lunch yesterday at a nearby Chinese restaurant (see above). In the midst of a great conversation about the Turing test, Helen noted (correctly, as it turns out) that there was a lot of tech talk going on amongst the two dozen of us. She also noted (and again correctly) that we were mostly male and mostly geeks, and surmised that this was responsible for the conversational style. If it was a gathering of her friends, she asserted, we would be talking about much more interesting things.
As you can imagine, this brought the conversation to a dead halt, as we all puzzled over what might be a more interesting topic of conversation than the Turing test. At length, someone suggested that Helen needed to write down more interesting topics, because we obviously didn't know what they might be. I volunteered to bring that list to lunch each day for a week, bring up the specified new topic each day, and report the results.
Here, then, is the result of the first day's experiment.
The assigned topic. A discussion of the nature of the 7 deadly sins (one per week).
The ensuing conversation. There was some initial procedural confusion as (a) Ian said We already logged that, and (b) Bill noted that which sin we were to discuss this week was not well specified. Both problems were solved by ignoring them and working on another problem instead: listing the seven deadly sins. This caused a certain amount ot head scratching, and a desire to run and get our laptops to do a Web Search, but here's what we came up with:

Lust

Gluttony

Sloth

Envy

Wrath

Sneezy

Doc

Carrie Fisher's hair style in Star Wars

Not sure why we got eight, but whatever. The conversation veered off in an unexpected direction when someone asked if there were any famous morticians. (No one could think of any.) Then we got onto famous garbage collectors. (Similarly.) Famous barbers. (Sweeney Todd.) Famous optometrists. (Benjamin Franklin.) Famous bus drivers. (Ralph Cramden.)
And, as always happens in lunchtalk, the conversation folded back on itself and we wondered who the most famous avatar of each of the deadly sins might be. Here's our list.

Lust: The Marquis de Sade (male) and Catherine the Great (female).

Gluttony: Wimpy.

Sloth: Mycroft Holmes.

Envy: Avis.

Wrath: God.

Avarice: Scrooge McDuck.

Pride: Narcissus.

Having picked over this particular conversational carcass for the next six weeks, the pack then turned on Helen, pointing out that geek is in these days, and non-geek conversation is so last millennium. It seemed only fair that we reform the conversational transgressions of Helen and her friends with a similar assignment.
So here it is. Each day for the next five days, Helen and her AOL friends must discuss the following topics, and report back.

Wednesday: Biggest explosion that can be made for $12.95 or less. Some experience with the solution must be evidenced.

Thursday: Worst design flaw in HTML.

Friday: Alternate color coding schemes for resistors.

Saturday: Best rule modification in AD&D.

Sunday: How 'bout that Microsoft case?

This should be interesting. Stay tuned.

Plurp.
The blue dog finally
achieved terminal
velocity.

Monday, January 8, 2001
Blab. Continuing the fascinating controversy about the authorship of some random piece of Blabbery or another, a reader masquerading as someone claiming to be Ian writes:
I am Ian (no, really), and I confirm that I did not suggest the medium sized blab box... personally, I have grown to like the little dinky one (I'm just grateful I didn't have to type my PBC into a box this size...)
Peanut Butter Cookie? Piercing Blue Cadillac? Putrid Bovine Carcass?
Ah! Painful Bassoon Concerto. Yeah, that's it.

Blab. Compounding the confusion, a reader writes:
I'm not Ian, either! Ian's over there somewhere!
With Mia, no doubt.

Blab. Not satisfied with a potential three Blab boxes, a reader anxious to assign work to us insists:
The Web's about personalization: Each reader should get a personalized blab box. Now that would be progress
Excellent. Yours is here.

Blab. A reader who favors our own flavor of electronic nitpicking says:
You neglected to use the web-search-as-spell-check trick:
epipheny
epiphany
Or any other spell check, it seem. Oops!

Yow. After completing our four-movie marathon this past weekend, we watched Hitchcock's Rear Window on TV. Is it OK if I admit that I think Grace Kelley was astonishingly beautiful? Those of you agog about Brittany Spears or Jewel have no idea.
This is not to diminish my fascination with the beauty of women like, say, Helen. And it is a bit weird in that blondes do not generally captivate me. I don't really understand what it was, but there's definitely something about Kelley that was amazing.

Plurp. You know, Hitchcock's Rear Window looks very much like it originated as a stage play, but I can't find a definitive Web reference saying either that it was or wasn't. Three Plurp points to anyone who can.

Yo. One of the things that's so great about New York is that you can find just about any kind of entertainment you can imagine, as well as many kinds you probably can't. Take, for instance, the current show at Alphabet Lounge:
"... Imagine yourself (or your partner) helpless and exposed, sealed between sheets of latex, a breathing tube your only connection to the outside world." If that doesn't sounds like fun, what does?
We can't imagine.

Yow. The Bureau of Corporate Allegory. I can't explain it. Go look. Right now. Absolutely hilarious. (Dave reminded us.)

Plurp.
The blue dog,
being two dimensional,
had no rear
window.

Sunday, January 7, 2001
Blab. Hmph. Maybe I guessed wrong about the person who suggested we have a medium sized Blab box.
Hey, I am not Ian! But Ian can do the CGI thing if HE wants...
It's so hard to know! Accusations, denials, counter-accusations. It's enough to make your head spin.

Yo. Having completed the main task of our four-movie weekend (seeing four movies, of course), we have now spent more time in darkened buildings than most bats, and consumed more popcorn than the OSHA maximum two-day limit for adults. The second two movies of our four-movie weekend were Traffic and Cast Away.
Traffic is a complex drama about the illegal drug business between Mexico and the U.S. Told from the point of view of five (or so) different groups of people, it does a really good job of making personal some very complex social and economic relationships that make the drug industry work.
The acting is all quite competent, though Michael Douglas doesn't stretch himself by playing the professional-in-charge once again. The plot is definitely engaging, though I must admit getting confused in the middle there somewhere about which assassin was after which informant for which transgression. The movie has a definite point of view - that attacking the supply side (the traditional War On Drugs) is hopeless, and that only by paying attention to the motives of the poor addicts and addicts-to-be can we make progress. Helen thought this was taken to maudlin extremes at the end when Douglas quits his Presidential appointment as U.S. drug czar to spend time with his hooked daughter in AA meetings. She's probably right. And yes, the obligatory genuflections are made in the direction of alcohol and tobacco as addictive drugs
The standout in the movie, however, was the photography and camera work, and it is really fabulous. Most of the movie is done with handheld cameras in cinema verite, to great effect. Tension is hightened by clipping 0.1 second out of each second of film in places, making even fluid motion jarring. The transitions into Mexico are sepia toned, emphasizing the unfamiliarity of the culture, and many of the outside scenes are done in blinding overexposure, as if the light hurts our drug-soaked eyes.
There are several brilliant sequences. In one, a helicopter carrying Douglas is landing in Mexico and the single camera, on the ground, spirals around the helicopter, making it into a beautiful and surrealistic object. In another, a group of cops is trying to decide whether to drive or walk with an informant. You see them from the point of the view of the assassin who has wired their car with a bomb, and neither he nor you can see or hear them well. We found ourselves leaning in our seats to get a better look. Great stuff.
Don't get me started about the War On Drugs. Yes, I have very definite opinions. Traffic does an excellent job of portraying why it is such a difficult problem, and how the various parties to the problem have adapted to each others' moves.
Recommended.
The last entrant in our weekend marathon was Cast Away. Let me say right at the start that I am a big, big fan of Tom Hanks. I love pretty much everything he's ever done. Big may well be my favorite movie of all time, and I cry every time I see it.
Having said that, I'll tell you that I am not a fan of Cast Away. Hanks is terrific; his dramatic range is well exercised. But the movie is weak. In the first part of the movie, Hanks is made out as the ultimate go-get-em time-management freak for FedEx. "We live and we die by the clock!" he exhorts a group of Russian FedExers who aren't used to the notion that things actually have to get done.
Leaving on a plane for Tahiti for FedEx instead of proposing to his One True Love, Hanks' life is interrupted by a viscious plane crash (you won't see this movie on American Airlines!). Stranded on the canonical desert island, Hanks must survive with only his dim wit and a dozen washed-up FedEx boxes (containing, duh, a flashlight, steel knives (from ice skates), fish netting (from clothing) and lots of other useful material). It was like Survivor with fewer contestants.
Hanks, no Boy Scout, takes a week to figure out that it would be a good idea to gather fresh water from the plentiful rain. He never does grok that slicing yourself on coral is contra-indicated. Why he doesn't die of infection is a mystery. And there is one hilarious scene - it must have been intentional? - in which Hanks, naked, scraggly-haired, squatting on the beach, stares up at a Port-a-Potty that has drifted onto the island before having an epipheny. The resemblance to the apes staring at the monolith in 2001 was too much to bear. I expected him to club himself over the head with a pig bone.
Four years later, he comes back to the real world, only to find that his One True Love married some dopey dentist. They still love each other desperately but, hello?, bow silently to convention and leave her with the dentist while Hanks drives off into the prarie to Find A New Life. Did he learn nothing on the island? Guess not. And neither, I fear, do we.
It's an OK movie, I guess, but it misses so many opportunities. Hanks is very well drawn as an efficiency expert in the beginning, but nothing is ever made of it! He could have been a banana salesman for all that it mattered to the rest of the plot. The desert island sequence is way too long and breaks no real new ground; you've seen it all before. His return to his One True Love just didn't work for me. Either go back to her or show us The New Life. Or something. Sheesh.
Not particularly recommended.

Yo. We saw a trailer of an upcoming film about a bunch of Elvis impersonators who knock over a casino in Las Vegas. It stars Kevin Costner. Helen and I wondered what the pitch must have been like.
It's the next big thing, J.B.! See, these Elvis impersonators go to Las Vegas and figure they'll steal a bunch of money from a casino and then run off in cars. And we'll get that great guy from Waterworld and The Postman - what's his name? Anyhow, it'll be great.
And people put money on stuff like this. Amazing.

Plurp.
The blue dog pitched
this great movie idea
to both of the Warner brothers.
Bill liked it, but Ted thought it
was bogus.

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