Science Addiction

Advani, in the footsteps of Obama.

Drawing inspiration from the Illinois senator, the BJP wants to target the youth vote in a big way using technology. Therefore, like Obama, a website is being designed for Advani where his speeches will be uploaded right away and like Obama, text messages on cellphones will be a big weapon to get the attention of young voters.
[From NDTV.com: Now, Advani plans to go Obama way]

For the uninitiated, Advani has almost been Prime Minister a few times over the past 20 years, but has proven a tad too right-wing for the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party in India to nominate as their PM. And he’s embracing the Obama model. Oh, and he’s older than McCain.

As The Dark Knight is poised to become the highest grossing movie of the year, it is interesting to note that 1998 was the last year that the highest grossing movie in the U.S. was an original script.

Not a sequel, prequel, based on a comic, based on a book or anything else. An original screenplay. Since then, we’ve had two Star Wars, a Grinch, a Potter, two Spider-Men, a returning King, a green ogre, the chest of a dead pirate, and now a dark knight.

Of note, also, is that prior to Star Wars in ‘99 we had four straight years of original screenplays- Toy Story, Independence Day, Titanic and Saving Private Ryan.

I’m not saying I don’t like the movies we’ve gotten in the last ten years- I can’t, I am a confessed Star Wars addict and have shed tears for a few fallen wizards- but this does tell you why big studios pump millions in to a steady diet of sequels, super heroes and wizards. We’ve voted with our dollars.

A few months ago, I was at a popular local ice cream place, digging in to a much-too-large-to-be-kiddie-sized cup of ice cream when I noticed a prominent local politician approach other ice cream eaters around me.

“Ooh, cool,” this political junkie thought to himself. “One day when this person is nationally important, I’ll be able to say to blog that I shook them by the hand.”

Except, I didn’t.

This local politician of some renown walked up to the people on the bench in front of me and talked with them for a while. Then to the bench next to me. Then behind me. And then to every other bench in the area except mine. And then they- politician+entourage- left.

I may not fit any ‘demographic’ that the campaign was trying to target. And I may not even look like a citizen to the narrow-minded suburban. But even if the potential upside of shaking my hand was negligible, the potential downside is significant. I was turned from a voter indifferent to a voter scorned. More importantly, a blogger scorned.

And dictatorships hath no fury like a blogger scorned.

I would just like to say that I love doodling on my iPhone.

Oh, and the Wordpress blogging app rocks.

You may not have noticed it (how dare you!), but this blog is licensed CC-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This means:

You are free to:

• Share- copy, distribute, transmit (send it to your enemies!)
• Remix- adapt the articles (I’m waiting for the musical)

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution- You must attribute it to me.
• Noncommercial- You may not use it for commercial purposes.
• ShareAlike- If you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license.

So why did I choose this license?

• To paraphrase Cory Doctorow, the only thing worse than an author who’s work is pirated is an author who’s work is not read. So share!
• The Internet isn’t one-way. It is interactive. There is an archaic notion that my job is to write this blog and your job is to read. You and me are standing on the shoulders of giants. On the Internet, you stand on my shoulders, I’ll stand on yours and we’ll make one weird circus freak. So adapt and remix!
• I have an ego, and I don’t like people taking credit for my work. So attribute (to me)!
• Stand on my shoulders if you want, but don’t sell tickets to it (without my permission). So non-commercial! This is basically so that no one is making money off me without my knowledge. When asked, I’ve been known to give permission.
• And clearly, I can’t let you share and remix my work, but then allow you to prevent further sharing and remixing. So share alike!

You’re free to use this license (or one of the many others Creative Commons has written) for any of your creative works. There’s even a comic (CC-licensed of course) to explain all the licenses.

Oh noes!

A long time ago, Chris Seibold, one of my co-writers at Apple Matters, asked if I had any ideas for a book he was writing for O’Reilly publishers called “The Big Book of Apple Hacks”. That email turned in to a little brainstorming which led to five chapters that I have in the book.

• MacFuse
• SSH Tunnels
• ImageMagick
• Tivo + Mac
• Fink & MacPorts

Of course, those chapters have much better names in the book. Unfortunately, a publishing error left my name off the acknowledgments at the end of the book (seriously!), but my name is at the end of each chapter I wrote. Hopefully the book will have many reprints in the future which will include my name!

So, what’s hot this summer, asks AllPosters.com?

No kidding. The paper (by Gary Pulsinelli) is about the ownership rights of artistic works among goblins in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Last year, I had noted that they sounded a lot like the RIAA/MPAA/ MAFIAA. This paper has a different take, but tips its hat to this blog post and the reader comments. If you read the paper, it is in footnote #29 on page 5.

Salman Rushdie was at the Memorial Church at Harvard last night, for a reading organized by the Harvard Book Store. He read from his newest novel “The Enchantress of Florence” (which I had him sign) but I had another agenda. I got my father’s 20-year-old copy of Midnight’s Children signed, the copy (and father) that introduced me to Rushdie.

Rushdie was everything his novels indicated he might be- frighteningly smart, witty and with an uncanny ability to keep an audience surprised and entertained.

The new novel sounds fascinating, with a classical mix of history, fantasy and Rushdie. It is one of those what-ifs that every student of history has when they look at ancient contemporaries and wonder if they had ever met. (What if Picasso met Einstein in Paris in 1904?). What if the Mughal Emperor Akbar in India had contact with rennaissance Europe, asks Rushdie. In his words, the unbelievable stuff in his book is true; the believable is what he made up.

(An exercise for the reader: one of the people in the picture is Rushdie and one is me. And the purple book is my wrinkled old Midnight’s Children.)

Daniel Plainview’s “I drink your milkshake” line from “There Will be Blood” has gained a lot of pop-culture traction lately (most famously on SNL). While he wasn’t directly talking about the remix culture, it’s great to hear artists that understand that the more they get “slagged” the better it is for culture (and them). Here’s Daniel Day-Lewis:

“If people absorb something you’ve done… and people can make something else out of it, that’s delightful to me. I come from two cultures – England and Ireland – where there’s a long tradition of… we call it slagging in Ireland, taking the piss in England, and if you can offer up something that people can slag you for, they’re always grateful for that.”
[From IMDb]

This is very addictive: Slate’s Delegate Calculator. I could hypothesize for hours…

Three weeks ago, the Freakonomics blog called for a “6 word motto for the U.S.” There were many suggestions, ranging from the mocking the right (“Hubris: it’s not just for Greeks!” and “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”) to mocking the left (“What would liberals hate without it?”), but finally blogger/writer Stephen Dubner narrowed them down to these five, which the readers were asked to vote on:

1. The Most Gentle Empire So Far
2. You Should See the Other Guy
3. Caution! Experiment in Progress Since 1776
4. Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon
5. Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

And now, I’m happy to report, the winner is: “Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay”.

Is your child growing up with false hope? Never fear, Playmobil has just the toy for you:

From the Manufacturer: The traveler hands her spare change and watch to the security guard and proceeds through the metal detector. With no time to spare, she picks up her luggage and hurries to board her flight!

Presenting, the Playmobil Security Check Point- so your child can fantasize about a police-state before living in one. If your lucky, maybe she can run it! Of course, the best part are the reviews:

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).

Of course, remind your kid to leave the set at home the next time you travel. Never know what will happen if the authorities find a detailed model of their awesome security system in your luggage.

(via Schneier and Threat Level)

Fantastic profile of Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, in the New York Times.

In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. [..] Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

I’ve had a similar theory for a while now, which I’ve tried to spin in to a fantasy novel (someday…) about a creator as a high-on-sugar kid with a LEGO set, albeit a LEGO set that builds intricate worlds. I’m paraphrasing, of course.

In any case, none of these ideas are ‘Matrix’-like pluggable-hybrid humans; they’re actually completely simulate that live in the circuits. The tubes, as they say in Alaska. I’d buy this theory, except there’s no way of knowing if it’s true. This isn’t the Truman Show, where you can walk out the end of the world or where everyone else is in on the joke. So, ultimately, it’s a cool hypothesis but I’m already set against unprovable creators.