- This could be interesting: apparently Redbox is looking to install DVD rental kiosks at libraries. As a librarian at the link above writes:
Unfortunately I think Redbox will only target libraries in large cities and wouldn’t bother with a small town like mine. It would be a great service to the community, but probably not enough profit to make it interesting for them.
Where it could do some good — that is, by generating foot traffic and providing DVDs to libraries that couldn’t otherwise afford them — Redbox likely won’t be interested, but will instead focus on locations where they might actually do some harm — by charging for what are now free rentals, and by sharing only a tiny percentage of that charge with the libraries. If nothing else, though, I think it suggests that Redbox understands the precariousness of its existence; as online streaming becomes the dominant industry model, it will need to seek out more and new rental locations to survive.
- There are two ways to look at this: the first, “Obama cancels moon mission,” makes for a quick and easy soundbite. But the second, “Obama scraps Bush’s wildly empty promise and redirects funding to more important areas” is probably more accurate. Still, it’s a shame we’re not going back to the moon any time in the near future.
- I’m not sure all of the titles on the Oddest Book Title of the Year award longlist are really that odd, but what library would be complete without Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, Map-based Comparative Genomics in Legumes, or Planet Asthma: Art and Acitivty Book?
- An interesting article by A.O. Scott on Smoking in ‘Avatar’ and the Limits of Boundaries on Ratings.
- And finally, there have got to be easier ways to get around New York [via]:
science
Tuesday various
- Anybody wanna chip in together and buy Miramax?
- I mean, I’d be happy to write Errol Morris another letter like this if you think it would help. (I love how Weinstein asks Morris for casting suggestions to play himself.)
- Well that’s just weird: Barack Obama and Scott Brown are cousins. [via]
- Texas bans a children’s book because they thought it was written by a Marxist. Not only is that pretty dumb, they were also wrong. [via]
- And finally, are there aliens already among us? Inside us?
Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth — which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation — has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.
Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television — which uses a far weaker signal — and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.
“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.” [via]
Wednesday various
- A whole lot of talk today has been about Apple’s new iPad. (You shouldn’t have any trouble finding plenty of links on your own.) Almost despite myself, I’m guardedly optimistic about its future and genuinely interested in its application — in a way, I should add, that I generally wasn’t interested in the iPhone. I think I’m going to wait a little before I try to justify buying one for myself, at least until a few more in-depth reviews are in. As Brad Stone notes in the New York Times, “Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.”
- Rachel Swirsky: “Genre is a tool. It’s not a prophecy.“
- Here’s a fascinating article on confessions of a book pirate:
TM: Do you have a sense of where these books are coming from and who is putting them online?
[TRC:] I assume they are primarily produced by individuals like me – bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow.
I’m sure that there are others – the compulsive collectors who download and re-share without ever reading one, the habitual pirates who want to be the first to upload a new release, and people with some other weird agenda that only they understand. [via]
- Meanwhile, the world’s largest book — it’s five feet tall by six feet wide, and it takes six people to lift it — will be displayed with its pages open for the first time. I like how the Guardian calls it “almost absurdly huge.” How big does a book have to be before they’d drop that “almost”? [via]
- And finally, a movie made by chimpanzees. All the obvious jokes aside, I wonder if this is really as impressive as it may at first sound — since, as the BBC notes:
The apes are unlikely to have actively tried to film any particular subject, or understand that by carrying Chimpcam around, they were making a film.
This seems less like a film from the chimps’ perspective than footage they accidentally shot. Still, the study as a whole does sound intriguing. [via]
Saturdazed
Just another Saturday that seems to have disappeared much too quick. Where does the time go? I think it’s at least partly the shorter days in winter, the early sunsets, of which I’ve never been a particular fan. At least we’re well past the solstice at this point.
I didn’t do a whole lot today besides potter around the house, around the internet, and around the town on a short afternoon walk. I spent the walk listening to To the Best of Our Knowledge, one of my favorite podcasts. Their whole “Wonder of Physics” episode was fascinating, but I was especially intrigued by their interview with Mark Oliver Everett. Everett is the frontman of the indie rock band the Eels and, as it happens, the son of physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. (And who was, therefore and sadly, many decades ahead of his time.) The younger Everett recently worked on a documentary about his father for the BBC. “Everybody should be so lucky to get to make a documentary about their father,” he says. It looks like his is online at YouTube, so I may have to check it out in full.
I also listened to a segment of the Leonard Lopate Show, which I’d heard a little of last night as I waited in the car to pick my parents up at the train station. It’s an interview with neuroscientist Douglas Field about glial cells, which apparently makes up the vast bulk of our brains but, until recently, weren’t at all understood. I was especially struck last night by this exchange near the end of their conversation:
Lopate: In a passage of your book where you describe the way that glia interact with oxygen, you describe oxygen as lethal. Well, I thought oxygen was what gives us life.
Field: Yes, it is what gives us life, but for a biologist, we take a long view. I mean, oxygen is relatively new in this planet’s atmosphere and wasn’t there —
Lopate: It killed off a whole previous group of living organisms —
Field: It’s a byproduct of plants. It’s a toxic byproduct, and organisms who could not adjust to that didn’t survive.
I had never looked at it quite like that, and it’s why I went back and listened to the entire interview this afternoon.
All of which is considerably more exciting than the afternoon itself. I think now I’m just going to watch the premiere episode of Caprica and then do some late-night capping.
The drunk button
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about This American Life‘s show about the alcohol consumption at Penn State. (“A football school with a drinking problem,” is how the oft-quoted quip goes. And as someone who worked on campus during many a football game weekend, I can tell you, it’s often not far from the truth.) One of the students interviewed on the show said, “If there were a drunk button, I’d buy one.”
Well maybe now there is:
An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness and hangovers is being developed by scientists.
The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.
The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.
But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.
Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.
As Chris McLaren points out, this leads to all sorts of other questions — not to mention science-fictional, world-changing extrapolations. How, just for starters, would it impact this kind of clever molecular mixology? But I think there’s definitely something to this. Personally, I don’t drink very much, or often, and the kind of excessive drinking that TAL made seem like the norm at Penn State is, to me at least, just staggering. (Honestly, three drinks and a slight buzz over the course of a long evening is as extreme as I ever get.) But if we can simulate the pleasures and benefits of social drinking, while at the same time eliminating all the dangers inherent in excessive alcohol consumption and public drunkenness, shouldn’t we maybe look into doing so?