Over the years, my interest in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis has more than once led to a moment of conversational awkwardness, when it turned out that the other party had been quietly distracted by the effort to figure out what the anti-totalitarian left had to do with taking peyote.
With time I have learned to detect the signs of struggle early, and so make haste to point out that I don’t mean Carlos Castaneda, whose tales of cosmic shenanigans with Yaqui shaman Don Juan once played a big part in the counterculture. [click to continue…]
After a moderately funny NPR April Fool’s piece on banning ringtones in New York, this sponsor announcement made me laugh out loud.
On the news headlines that followed, the lead item was that the U.S. was scrambling to complete a huge free trade deal (“the biggest since NAFTA”) with North Korea.
Crooks & Liars links to that fine old Smashing Pumpkins video, “Tonight, Tonight”: the George Méliès, “Le Voyage Dans La Lune” homage.
Anyway, if you’ve never seen the Méliès original, you should be aware YouTube has got it, too (part 1; part 2) – the 14 minute epic; the first science fiction film.
Purists take note. What we’ve got here is a hybrid version: round about minute 11, when the the first selenite appears, the voice-over indicates that “the fantastical being rushes at the astronomer, who defends himself”. Obviously this is from the digitally remastered Lucas edition of 1904. In the film itself – unremastered, 1902 material – it is clear the astronomer strikes first, aggressively exploding the alien with his umbrella.
Kenneth Horne was born 100 years ago today. My earliest memory is battling with my parents to be allowed to get to bed in time to hear Round The Horne. I even remember when it went off the air because of his untimely death (though in my memory it was replaced by These You Have Loved with Cliff Morgan, which can’t be right). In latter years my daughters have shared the joy of Horne with me courtesy of BBC7. Julian and Sandy, Rambling Sid Rumpo (and here), Charles and Fiona, and, bemused in the middle, the calm tones of Horne himself. BBC7 is celebrating with an episode of Much Binding in the Marsh, a feature-length musical dramatisation of Three Men on A Boat (with Leslie Phillips as a bonus!) and a fun-packed 3-hour history of Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne.
A bemused follow-up to my Frankensteinpost. Here’s what you get tangled in, trying to edit this stuff into shape (plus YouTube goodies!). [click to continue…]
Last week I posted rather breathlessly about the amount of content the BBC is putting online for free downloads. At the back of my mind, I had a little niggley thought which I chose not to pursue; wasn’t the BBC doing something a while back to get its whole archive online so that any member of the global public could rip, mix and burn? And hadn’t Cory Doctorow of EFF/BoingBoing been doing some work on this at some point?
“The BBC had so much promise a few years ago, back when it was talking about delivering real, world-class public value to license payers by doing the hard work of clearing the footage in the archive and letting the public remix it. Now that vision has been reduced to a sham — the BBC iPlayer, a steaming pile of DRM that restricts you to being a mere consumer of BBC programming, downloading it to your PC for a mere seven days.
For a minute there, the BBC seemed like it would enable a creative nation. Now it’s joining the jerks in Hollywood who think that media exists to be passively swallowed by a legion of glassy eyed zombie audience members. ”
The Beeb’s excuse is that it’s looking for an ‘open standards DRM’, an inherent contradiction if ever there was, and also that it can’t clear its archive. Doctorow points out the weakness of the latter claim; if BBC was so worried about past clearing archival footage, it would be working to “prospectively clear everything in its production pipeline, something that could have been done five years ago”. As he says, the BBC exists to make its content maximally available to the public.
BBC consultation on ‘on demand’ services here (boingboing link to it is broken). BBC Backstage podcast of a discussion on BBC and DRM here.
Another “bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=200, this time with Megan McArdle on global warming, minimum wage and healthcare, for those as wants to see (not as much in the way of fireworks as those who have seen our interactions in the blogosphere might expect).
“Jeff Han”:http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/ works on multi-touch interfaces: touch screens that can recognize more than one point of input, and thus combinations of gestures and so on. Here’s a “cool video”:http://www.macrumors.com/2007/02/12/more-multitouch-from-jeff-han/ showing some of the interface methods his company is developing. (Warning: cheesy music.)
You can see some cool possibilities for educational and presentational bells and whistles, such as the taxonomic tree one of the operators is shown navigating. The possibilities for high-dimensional dynamic data visualization are also obvious. We see a scatterplot being manipulated with some scaled data points on it, for instance. Something like “Ggobi”:http://www.ggobi.org/ would be fun to use on a system like this. In the near future, the phrase “touchy-feely” may well apply to the quantitative rather than the qualitative crowd.
Just a reminder to Madisonians that the second installment of our discussions of The Good Childhood takes place tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Central Library in Madison at 7. This week’s topic will be “The Good Childhood: Does it Exist?” Please come along if you can.
For interested non-Madisonians, a 2-hour long mp3 of the previous discussion is available here (I haven’t listened, because listening to myself talk when I’m not actually talking is very hard!), the text of Sally Schrag’s presentation is here. My presentation is not yet available online, but when it is it will be here. In a week or so I’ll try to present my thoughts here more formally.
Although it’s a far from perfect institution, the BBC seems to take its public service obligations seriously. It’s really embraced downloading of its non externally copyrighted material. I would love to see the material fully searchable, rather than simply indexed. And it’s about time the BBC started putting its back catalogue of documentaries and dramas online. Surely, back in the days before expensive co-productions with HBO, the rights issues should have been trivial? If the BBC wants to win the argument for an increase in the licence fee next time around, opening up its archives would strengthen the case.
(Oh, and to any wing nuts who wish to comment along the lines of ‘hnnh, bbc, root of all evil’; go away and read a book.)
Kieran claims that there are no classic Irish public service ads on youtube. So there is one way in which we Brits are culturally ahead of the former colony, what a relief. Green Cross Code man here. Better, though, is a 2-DVD set of the hundreds of British PIFs from the 60’s through the 80’s for only 7 quid. You’ll find Tufty (voiced by Bernard Cribbins I now realise), various instantiations of Dr. Who, and loads more, including several versions of the Green Cross Code man who, as a very public sociologist points out is better known to the wider world as Darth Vader (though someone else did the voice I believe, because Dave Prowse couldn’t shake his West Country accent).
Instantaneous Update. 2 minutes of googling gets me to this and this. Rolf Harris’s command to teach them to swim has special poignancy for me. At the age of 4 I spotted a younger kid floating unconsious and face down in a deserted swimming pool and, somehow, had the presence of mind to exit the dreamlike world in my head that I mostly lived in and fetch help very fast indeed. The kid lived. And I’ve always HATED swimming.
for only 7 quid. You’ll find