Gadgets

Sometimes it seems as if Richard Dawkins is on a crusade to prove that atheists can be just as narrow-minded as religious people. He’s winning. He’s a hyuuuge, classy winner at this crusade. (Of crusades generally, the Children’s Crusade is at the bottom, because it was a loser crusade. For LOSERS! Barely any of those kids even made it back. Ask Donald Trump about whether POWs can be heroes. TIP: THEY CAN’T.)

As you assuredly know, a young man in Texas was recently arrested for a “bomb hoax.” Some people think it’s hoaxes all the way down. Dawkins and his compadres are making extraordinary claims, which require…well, any evidence at all, one feels. Let us imagine Ahmed Mohamed’s family has engineered a stunt. Ahmed makes (for some value of make which includes tinkering with maker modules or disassembling and reassembling old electronics. I mean, if you call that making. Which, tbh, I do.) Wait, that wasn’t a sentence. Anyway, he makes a ‘looks-like-a-bomb-on-purpose-but-is-a-clock.’ This thing, note, is in fact: a clock. Although the young man claims deep insight into the nature of time, he is obviously just aping Heidegger in a juvenile fashion, but so be it–so long as it be noted that I have noted he didn’t provide the police a fully satisfactory answer about what the passage of time really entails, I mean, what does the clock tell you when it tells you that another minute has passed and that now, it is now. My rigorous honesty compels me to denigrate his “clock,” simply because I am devoted to The Truth. It’s like this asshole some guy says:

Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb? A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.

I don’t know any of these things. But I’m intellectually mature enough to admit I don’t know, and to also be OK with that. I don’t feel a need to take the first exit to conclusionville. But I do like to find facts where I can, and prefer to let them lead me to conclusions, rather than a knee jerk judgement based on a headline or sound bite.

Wow. Much openminded. So scientific. OK, sorry, I keep getting off-track for some reason. Right, this hoax is designed to get Ahmed Mohamed reprimanded at school, then arrested, and then become an internet cause celébrè, and then get invited to the White House. First of all, Ahmed and his family have to have judged the over/under for “young brown man thought armed with deadly weapon getting shot by the police” vs. “grievance-mongerer fêted by liberal elitists” a safe bet. I, like, would not take those odds at all. Secondly, for this plan to work, the teachers and police officers have to act like morons all up and down the line. There’s no other way. Really, it has to be a Confederacy of Dunces down there. Do these Clock Truthers realize their grim vision of Texan society is far, far more cynical than mine? Dawkins’ zealotry has obviously clouded his judgment, something which often befalls fundamentalists. To be undeservedly fair, Dawkins has perhaps been walking this back but, you know how it is. You’re a well-respected biologist–but ONE pig. It happens to, like everyone. It’s an experimental phase!

OK for real this is maybe the best thing in a newspaper ever: “David Cameron will not ‘dignify’ allegations that he once ‘inserted a private part of his anatomy’ into a dead pig’s mouth with a response, Downing Street has said.”

Also, this is why I could never be elected to higher office. If I had a wang I would so totally have stuck it in a roast suckling pig by now.

Educational apps for kids are supposed to be fun. The Holy Grail is getting your kid hooked on something that is basically their homework. Via BoingBoing, I found the Holy Grail: Dragonbox. (You can get it through iTunes and from other sources, I’m sure.) [click to continue…]

1. Female Genital Mutilation, Everywhere, Ever.
2. Women Getting Raped in Far-Away Lands, like Afghanistan. AND YOU DON’T EVEN CARE!
3. Growing Gender Imbalances in China and India (Also known as “Where’s Your Precious Right to an Abortion Now, Missy?”)
4. Sexist Islamic Law Codes (“Wait, why just–” “Shut up.”)
5. World Hunger (But not through those programs where they only give micro-payments/loans to women on the basis of research that it is more effective.)
6. Lack of Access to Clean Drinking Water For The World’s Poorest Citizens, Because, Hey, While You’re There.
7. Africa. Is Some Shit Just Fucked up There, or What? Get On That.
8. Access to The Most Basic Knowledge About Human Reproduction and Assistance of Midwives Can Lower Peri-Natal Deaths Tremendously, But Please Don’t Tell Anyone About Contraception or Abortions.
9. Forced Prostitution, Sex Slavery, Human Trafficking.
10. Are We Seriously Just Not Even Trying to Go to Mars Anymore? Really, Though? We Made it to The Moon in Like 5 Years With Some Slide Rules and Horn-rimmed Glasses and Shit, and Now All We’ve Got is These Weaksauce Telescopes Peering Back in Time. What the Fuck? Mars, Bitches!

Now you know, ladies. Sorry any sexism in developed nations up to and including your own personal experiences of sexual assault didn’t even make it on the list, but better luck next time!

For the record, I’m just going to go out there and say the Siri thing was a conspiracy–of one. One pro-life programmer who cared about it a LOT, and 8,000 other programmers who let the error stay in through multiple testing of multiple versions due to (in this case) malign neglect; they just never looked. The claims that Siri is worse than Google only when and where it relies on Yelp seem to have been falsified; the program really looks to have something of a significant blind spot, too significant to be chalked up to error. I’m willing to give the Apple programmers the benefit of the doubt and say they are not juvenile frat-boy assholes. There’s just this one asshole, and then a large number of men and some women (some of both of whom are no doubt, living in this fallen world as we do, also assholes), who never tested the program along this particular axis. People have bitched about it; Apple will fix it; the next time someone will check first. This is often how you fight sexism in ordinary life. You don’t dive in front of that Afghani girl about to take a bottle of acid to the face and shoot the guy attacking her. You just influence the people around you by expression your opinions forcefully. Should we all donate money to the many thousands of feminist organizations working overseas to combat the life-threatening situations many of the world’s women face? Yes. Really. And you should take that fucking sandwich out of your mouth and give the money to OxFam. Pro Tip: “Afghanistan, infinite no backsies!” is not a valid argument to the effect that a given woman should shut up about some given topic.

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More seriously – do people seriously see a use for the iPad? For me, most of its pluses are minuses. If I want to read stuff, I _vastly prefer_ the zero animation just the plain text ma’am approach of your average e-book reader, to the hideous advertisements that I am sure will be bouncing from every page on the average iPad read (you think you’ll be able to download an AdBlock equivalent? think again). About the only positive thing I can say in the iPad’s favor is that it doesn’t do Flash.

Two very different things that impressed me in 2009: [click to continue…]

Happy Christmas to those of you who are so inclined; happy Festivus/religious or non religious holiday of your choice to those who aren’t. And in honour of those of you who have spent a large chunk of the day trying to open presents for the pleasure of impatient children, I present you with the iSlice, a ceramic blade purpose-designed to ‘open difficult plastic packages,’ such as those heat-sealed plastic packs ones that many toys and electronic devices come in. And what does the iSlice arrive in? Why a difficult-to-open heat-sealed plastic pack of course.

I’ve seen various textcloud applications before, but “Wordle”:http://wordle.net/ (via “Steve Poole”:http://unspeak.net/) is the first one that I’ve seen that makes it easy to produce aesthetically attractive pictures of the information. Below is the textcloud of my book, “The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation” which I’m preparing for publication in Cambridge’s Comparative Politics series (click on the graphic to see the full thing). I want to make a poster of this and frame it for my office.

I got a new mac recently – oh joy! – and happened to notice this bit of the set-up instructions.

If you don’t intend to keep or use your other Mac, it’s best to deauthorize it from playing music, videos, or audiobooks that you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store. Deauthorizing a computer prevents any songs, videos, or audiobooks you’ve purchased from being played by someone else and frees up another authorization for use.

Because listening to someone else’s songs is like using someone else’s toothbrush, the Lord knows. Don’t get me started about lending books. The book mobile would roll through town, just as during the crusades the rotting, infected heads of the dead were lobbed over the walls of besieged towns, to dismay and disease the defenders …

I think someone told this story before:

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

Which reminds me of this screed against Amazon’s Kindle, the Future of Reading (a Play in Six Acts).

Speaking of which: the Kindle is now available for immediate shipping. They’ve sorted out their supply issues and are going great guns. They are also commencing engagement in what sounds like grossly uncompetitive behavior in the POD market, preparing to force small publishers to use their very ill-regarded BookSurge service. That’s just terrible. [click to continue…]

Apparently Amazon’s Kindle is selling well. So says their front page. I’ve always wanted an eBook reader I could really want. [click to continue…]

A few hours left for those in North America to participate in the One Laptop Per Child program. $399 plus shipping pays for two of these special laptops: one for a child in a lesser developed nation and one for you.

While most of my research is about pointing out that simply offering access to devices will not get people connected effectively and efficiently, gaining access to digital media is an important first step in the process.

Here’s a review by a 12 year old (not part of the target audience though) and a video review by David Pogue. I would’ve offered my own review, but I didn’t order it in time to get my hands on it by today’s deadline.

Photo credit: mike3k on Flickr

The “howls”:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.html “of”:http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/11/14512.html “derision”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/more-kindle-com.html greeting the announcement of the Amazon Kindle last week reminds me that I never got around to reviewing the “iRex Iliad”:http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad that I bought some months ago. I can’t provide a proper comparison of the two; not only do I not own a Kindle, obviously, but I haven’t even used the Iliad to read DRM-protected books (this has only become a possibility in the last few months; before that you were limited to PDFs and the like). But for my particular purposes as an academic, the Iliad works very well. It’s still a first generation technology, and has several kinks that could, and should, be ironed out. Even so, what I’ve seen convinces me that academics are likely to become early adopters of this technology _en masse_ when it comes down in price and becomes a little more user friendly.
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We’ve got a new MacBook, after our 7 year old iBook finally gave up the ghost. (I figure that’s a pretty good run for a portable computer.) I have gotten a baffling amount of frankly contradictory advice about battery conditioning from a number of sources. (Weirdly, the documentation says nothing about this. Doesn’t even tell you to charge it fully the first time.) The only thing everyone I’ve asked agrees on is charging fully the first time. But then some people say you are supposed to let it run down fully. Then charge it again fully. Others say it is bad to do that. You are supposed to make sure it retains a middling sort of charge and that the old ions are jostled regularly. Or whatever. Is there any actual knowledge in the world (I would settle for true belief, honestly) concerning how to maintain a mac battery for maximum power and life?

Via “Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/04/steorns-orbo-free-energy-machine-demonstrated-tomorrow/ comes news that “Steorn”:http://www.steorn.com/ are back with an allegedly working demonstration of their magnetic “free energy” (i.e., perpetual motion) machine, the “Orbo”:http://www.steorn.com/orbo/. You may remember them from “last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/22/free-lunch-and-irish-breakfast/. As before, the reading on the kookometer is over in the red, as the device is being pitched directly to the media, the demo is taking place as a show at an “art museum”:http://www.kinetica-museum.org/new_site/, and some convoluted jury system “challenge” is in place to validate it. The smart money, I believe, is of the view that Steorn — if they’re not just charlatans — have honestly reinvented some version of the magnetic motor, a mainstay of perpetual motion cranks.

I was able to pick up an iPhone early through a local contact at Apple, and I have to say it’s really something. No of course I wasn’t able to do that — who do you think I am? Besides, I already have a phone on a relatively new contract. But I was in the Campus Bookstore here at the U of A and, while briefly down in the computer section, I heard store employees field two calls from people asking whether it would be possible to buy an iPhone there tomorrow, and whether there would be an educational discount on them. The guy in the store replied with more than a trace of sadness that they weren’t carrying the phone because it was only available at Apple Stores and AT&T outlets. He didn’t know about the educational discount. I was only there for about five minutes and clearly these weren’t the first two calls they’d had about this today.

I won’t be buying one anytime soon but, like I “said before”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/04/iphone/, it seems to me that the iPhone is going to be a success for Apple, and will probably provide a large kick in the ass to other cellphone manufacturers in the process. Criticism of the iPhone — and general backlash against the widespred interest amongst consumers — has been brewing for some time now. “John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/ has been keeping track of “some”:http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/straws_grasping “examples.”:http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/iphone_high_water_mark

Having read a bunch of the iPhone Naysayers, I’m struck by how much they miss the point of what Apple is trying to do with the device (in addition, I find myself wondering what the qualifications for becoming an IT Industry Analyst are, exactly).

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