tech

Thursday various

  • Go on, ask me anything.

  • This future of publishing ad — which I’m seeing re-posted everywhere — is clever. And sure, the whole “death of publishing” thing is all in how you look at it. But, at the same time — and watch the video before you read this — I found it a little too gimmicky. Maybe it’s the length, since it is a little too long to be a truly effective advertisement, or maybe it’s that they kind of had to cheat to make the trick of it work. It is clever, though, I won’t argue with that.

  • This isn’t new, but c’mon, how can you resist a headline like Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included? [via]

  • Manahatta: same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
  • And finally, John Seavey on George Lucas’ biggest mistake:

    But all that gets lost in the sheer awesomeness of the Jedi. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high–Yoda is a cool Wise Old Master with all the good bits in Episode Five, Qui-Gon Jinn is played by Liam Neeson and Mace Windu is Samuel Freaking Jackson, and the lightsaber is the coolest weapon in the history of film. Everyone takes Yoda’s words at face value–even the authorized sequels, which show Luke trying to re-establish the Jedi in the image of the old order. Everyone assumes that Luke narrowly won his struggle with the Dark Side at the end, but in fact, he did exactly what people do every day. He got upset, he channeled his anger constructively, and then he calmed down. Only the Manichean nutbags who run the Jedi and the Sith think that this is some kind of near-impossible achievement. The Jedi aren’t the heroes of the film, Luke is, for realizing that there’s something more than the false duality that trapped and ultimately destroyed his father.

    That’s the message of the Star Wars films, and it’s a shame that Lucas made it so hard for people to notice.

Monday various

  • So first the Discovery Channel created this commercial, which was actually kind of awesome. It was set to the tune of a traditional campire song (which was itself set to the tune of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul”). And then Randall Munroe created this webcomic, riffing off the commerical, which was itself pretty awesome. And now that awesomeness has gone one step further. Honestly, where else are you going to see Neil Gaiman singing while bouncing on a trampoline with his daughter? Or Cory Doctorow in full red cape and goggles regalia? This is just seriously fun. [via]
  • Meanwhile, here’s the Ultimate Graphic Novel (in six panels). I don’t think they missed anything. [via]
  • While I’m on the subject of comics and artwork, check out Derek Chatwood’s terrific illustrations. The short stories that accompany the drawings are worth reading, too! [via]
  • Apparently, you can remove scratches from your DVDs using just a banana and some toothpaste. Time to MacGyver up! [via]
  • And finally, the world’s luckiest sports fan? [via]

Monday various

  • I think the most interesting thing about this new Dante’s Inferno video game — which itself sounds pretty silly, a mashup that misses the point of both sides — is this quote:

    “We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

    Because it underlines that Disney made it big by adapting well known tales it didn’t originate (from the very beginning, actually) but nowadays runs for its lawyers anytime someone tries to do the same to it. This is nothing new, but shouldn’t Mickey Mouse be, you know, out of copyright by now?

  • The headline reads, After Taliban hit supplies, Army chef serves up 42 days of Spam. [via]
  • You can keep your fart noise generators, this is the only iPhone app I’d really love to have. If they make it available for the iPad, I may just have to break down and buy one.
  • “A third of all children aged five to 16 are convinced that the body of one of their teachers has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being.” Tell me, can you prove that they haven’t? (Then again: “The survey was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to coincide with the release of Aliens In the Attic on DVD.” So, you know, grain of salt and everything.) [via]
  • And finally, I’m basically just copying this from Making Light, but I agree that Cat Valente makes maybe one of the best arguments for why we still need publishers in the world of e-publishing:

    Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

    And writers would line up at their door.

    I’m obviously biased, since I work as an editor (for a smaller textbook and professional publisher). But sometimes, there’s a middleman for a reason.

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]