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Books, Movies, Music

Mike Walter’s Mellotron

Before gadgeteers could get affordable (or any) electronics for polyphonic sound synthesis or sample playback, they dallied with tape playback devices that would link each key to its own tape mechanism that played a pre-recorded tape loop at the keyed pitch. They called it a Mellotron, and yes, an 88-key piano would require 88 tape […] » about 200 words

Bad Covers: Oops! I Did It Again

Memepool.com points out that the folks at Supermasterpiece are claiming priority over Britney Spears’ Oops ! I Did It Again. Their story is: “Oops ! I Did It Again” was recorded in April, 1932 in a Chicago studio, most likely Nearlie’s or West and Fourth. Cut for the Decca label by Louis Armstrong and elemends […] » about 300 words

Movie Night: Save The Green Planet

I’m at a loss for words of my own to describe Save The Green Planet (IMDb page), so I’ll have to crib from others. Amazon’s description: A sensitive, blue collar sad sack hopped up on conspiracy theories and sci-fi is convinced that aliens have infiltrated human society and are planning to destroy the planet at […] » about 300 words

The Conservatives vs. Freakonomics

Conservatives hate Freakonomics, that book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner that takes on more than a few sticky issues that most people don’t normally consider to be within the purview of economics. (See also the Freakonomics blog). Publisher’s Weekly notes: There isn’t really a grand theory of everything here, except […] » about 400 words

Pravda and McCarthyism

Don’t worry. I’m right on top of whatever happens in Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Russian Federation. Or, at least, I’m right on top of whatever they report in their English language version. The thing that had me choking on my onion and boursin cheese bagel this morning was the story headlined FBI arrests […] » about 300 words

Must Read: Ambient Findability

Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good. Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a […] » about 300 words

Ambient Findability And The Google Economy

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut […] » about 500 words

PowerPoint. Killer App?

Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post wonders if PowerPoint is a killing app. She’s not the first to note that NASA administrators make decisions — sometimes fatal decisions — on the basis of PowerPoint presentations that mask or misrepresent details. I wrote about Edward Tufte’s Cognitive Style of PowerPoint essay in a previous post. Marcus […] » about 300 words

Search, Findability, The Google Economy: How It Shapes Us

Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.

Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:

Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond?

Here, as always when thinking about information, think about “marketplace” in broader terms than pure commercial, pure profit. This is the Google Economy.

Re-Shelving Orwell’s 1984

Via Jon Gordon‘s Future Tense: Re-shelving George Orwell.

Smart people everywhere are taking it upon themselves to re-shelve George Orwell’s 1984 from fiction to more appropriate sections in non-fiction, like “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”

Instructions and photos on Flickr.

Another Limitation of LC Classification

Right up front in the prologue of Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted she quotes the following from Richard Dooling on the difficulty in researching “bad language”:

The Library of Congress classification system does not provide a selection of books … on swearing or dirty words. A researcher … must travel to the BF of psychoanalysis, the PE of slang, the GT of anthropology, the P of literature and literary theory, the N of art, the RC of medical psychiatry, and back to the B of religion and philosphy.

Grizzly Man

David Edelstein’s review of Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, describes Timothy Treadwell as …a manic but lovable whack-job who doggedly filmed and obsessively idealized the bears that would ultimately eat him… The film is made up largely of the bits of the hundreds of hours of video that Treadwell himself shot during his 14 years […] » about 300 words

Annoises

Via Gizmodo: a CD of annoying sounds at Gadgets.co.uk. Twenty “ear splitting” sound effects and a pair of earplugs “for your sanity and protection” for £14.99. What 20 sound effects?

  • Drill
  • Party (at least 200 People)
  • Orgasm (Outstanding)
  • Train
  • Drum (Played by a Child)
  • Inhuman Screams
  • Walking (High Heels)
  • Domestic Squabble
  • Doors Banging
  • Bowling
  • Unhappy Dog
  • Practicing a violin
  • Traffic Jam
  • Garbage Truck
  • A screaming newborn baby
  • Phone Ringing
  • Ball Game
  • Pigeons
  • Spring house cleaning
  • Cock-a-Doodle-Do!

Usage instructions?

Choose your favourite track from this hilarious CD, turn up the volume, and sit back (or go out for half an hour) and reap sweet revenge.

Grizzly Man

Within the last wild lands of North America dwells an animal that inspires respect and fear around the world. It is the grizzly bear, a living legend of the wilderness. Grizzlies can sprint thirty five plus miles an hour, smell carrion at nine or more miles, and drag a thousand-pund animal up steep mountains. The […] » about 400 words

Movie Night: Open Water

Joe recommended Open Water whole heartedly, but others, like some of these one-star reviewers at Amazon, had equally strong reactions against it. I first learned of the events the movie is based on in Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, where he described the events of Thomas and Eileen Lonergan’s disappearance during a dive in […] » about 200 words

Reminisce: My First Ebook

The first ebook I ever read was Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown on my Newton Message Pad 2000. It had a big and bright screen — “the best screen for reading eBooks on the (non-)market” says DJ Vollkasko — but it could get a bit little heavy at times.

Crackdown is available for free, along with perhaps 16,000 others, at Matthew McClintock’s ManyBooks.net. Downloads are available in 11 different formats, or you can read online.

Movie Night: House Of Flying Daggers

I’ve been a fan of Zhang Yimou’s[1] films since, well, for a while now. But I’m also a huge kung fu fan — Jackie Chan especially — so House of Flying Daggers was quite a treat. It’s not that I didn’t like Hero, or that Daggers was particularly funny. To the contrary, it’s tale of […] » about 200 words