October 22, 2010
October 21, 2010
October 20, 2010
Some combination tools work well … and then there’s this one
Christopher Schwarz gives in to the urge to try out a new tool that combines the rasp and the chisel in one not-so-easy-to-handle package:
Now usually when I see a tool like this I just ignore it. Boneheaded ideas like this usually end up in a mass grave with the bones of dodo birds, passenger pigeons and AMC Pacer automobiles. But a couple weeks ago I stumbled on a set of these tools for sale — new — on Amazon.
These tools must be stopped. So I bought a set of three to take a look. They are as bad as I feared.
The tools are incredibly heavy. The rasp teeth are coarse and not very aggressive. They manage to make more of a farting sound than any scratches in the wood. Of course, it doesn’t help things that you have to use the rasp one-handed — grabbing the chisel tip is ill-advised.
Or is it? The chisel edge is as sharp as Lennie from “Of Mice and Men.” And when you do pound the chisel into a piece of wood (thank you Mongo the Mallet) the tool stops dead after 1″ because the rasp teeth dig into your work.
And the worst thing of all? They are branded as Nicholson — the once-great rasp maker.
But if this tool can succeed in the marketplace for 10 years, what other opportunities are toolmakers missing out on?
October 19, 2010
Got a transmedia “strategy”?
They’re all the rage these days. If you don’t have one, you can get a custom-crafted, up-to-the-microsecond strategy outlined for you at whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com, like this one:
As you can see, it makes at least as much sense as “real” strategies sometimes do.
H/T to Warren Ellis for the link.
October 15, 2010
The Two Scotts both pick Minnesota over Dallas
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Feschuk-Reid affair without some light banter:
Dallas (plus 1.5) at Minnesota
Reid: I’ve always thought that when a girl plays hard to get, it’s time to start sending her up-close photos of your bait and tackle. On the field, Favre may be guided by pure instinct but off the field he appears to be a careful thinker. Shrewd strategies designed to achieve maximum impact. That’s what I take away from this entire Deadspin affair. And like Wade Phillips, I look forward to seeing how Tony Romo blows this game in the fourth quarter. Pick: Minnesota.
[. . .]
Feschuk: Favre got nailed in the bag with a pigskin during practice this week, and that’s not even a euphemism. Clearly, the football gods are taking rare pleasure in delivering the gunslinger’s comeuppance. The video of Favre taking one in the tenders was funny enough on its own, but even funnier in this treatment by the folks at Kissing Suzy Kolber.
Pick: Minnesota.
An alternate interpretation of the video was from Mark Craig who suggested that it was “NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (not pictured) visited Winter Park today to deliver his punishment to the future Hall of Fame quarterback.”
October 14, 2010
Little Bobby Tables must speak Swedish
By way of Bruce Schneier an opportunity to show another xkcd comic:
So, what’s the Swedish tie-in?
As you may have heard, we’ve had a very close election here in Sweden. Today the Swedish Election Authority published the hand written votes. While scanning through them I happened to notice
R;13;Hallands län;80;Halmstad;01;Halmstads västra valkrets;0904;Söndrum 4;pwn DROP TABLE VALJ;1
The second to last field is the actual text on the ballot. Could it be that Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has migrated to Sweden? Well, it’s probably just a joke but even so it brings questions since an SQL-injection on election data would be very serious.
Old stereotypes still thrive in niche ecologies
An exchange that wouldn’t have been at all surprising in, say, 1950:
"Jo,
As much as I appreciate your reply, I think this manuscript is perahps [sic] too heavy for you.
Don't get me wrong, I am not remeaning [sic] your professionalism, it's just VERY profound and maybe too much for a female to edit.
A delicate mind I do not want editing this.
Best regards,
Etc"
Jo Caird called on deep reserves of patience to respond:
"Dear Etc,
Thanks for your prompt reply.
Thanks too for your candid (not to mention eloquently expressed - although I believe the word you were looking for was 'demeaning', not 'remeaning') appraisal of my intellectual and professional capabilities. It's reassuring to me, as a 'female' (again, I believe you mean 'woman') of delicate sensibilities and feeble judgement, to know that considerate gentlemen such as yourself exist to protect me from that which I lack the depth of character to understand.
As to how you've assessed that I am too weak-minded to work on, or even indeed to read, your manuscript, given that we have never met, or even spoken on the phone, I can only speculate. I wish you, in any case, all the best with it.
Have a lovely weekend.
Kind regards,
Jo"
H/T to Tim Harford for the link.
October 13, 2010
“I just taught them a new game . . .”
H/T to Martina for the link.
October 12, 2010
Female characters in modern fiction
The Female Character Flowchart looks at “the one- and two-dimensional female characters we see over and over again in modern fiction.”
Click image to see full size flowchart
H/T to Royce McDaniels for the link.
Mitch Miller, drawing upon years of “men are simple/women are complicated” media memes, responded:
Wow! That’s a lot of female characters, considering that there’s only five male characters:
The Good Guy
The Bad Guy
The Good Bad Guy
The Bad Good Guy
and
The Sidekick
Terry Pratchett’s I Shall Wear Midnight
I’m being self-sacrificing, having sent my copy off with Victor when he went back to campus yesterday, so this review by Cory Doctorow just highlights what I’ll get to read in a couple of week’s time:
Terry Pratchett’s newly released I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth volume in the Tiffany Aching books, about a young girl born to be the witch of a chalky, sheep-farming area called, simply, The Chalk (the other three volumes being Wee Free Men, Hatful of Sky and Wintersmith). Tiffany’s old gran was the “Wise Woman” of the hills, and her gifts came down to Tiffany, who, at the age of 7 or 8, began to need them — first to rescue the Baron’s son when he was kidnapped by the Queen of Faerie (Tiffany hit her with an iron frying pan) and then to learn proper magic while apprenticed to a real witch, and finally to kiss the Wintersmith during a morris dance, and then have to set the seasons to right.
In Midnight, Tiffany returns. Now she’s 16, and she has assumed all the burdens of being The Chalk’s witch — and they are burdensome — delivering the babies, salving the wounds, clipping the neglected old ladies’ toenails, changing the bandages, and using magic to take away the pain of the Baron, who is dying.
As if being thrust into an early maturity wasn’t enough, witchery has fallen into disrepute on The Chalk — and seemingly everywhere. There are old ladies being crushed and drowned by mobs, there are the whispers and the forked fingers to fight the evil eye when Tiffany passes, and then, when the Baron dies while Tiffany eases him into the next world, there is the wildfire rumor that Tiffany killed him.
This series is a wonderful read for both children and adults: Pratchett’s sense of humour and his touch of magical-but-real provide a great read for both audiences. Highly recommended, especially if you haven’t already become a fan of his main Discworld series.
October 7, 2010
Breaking: Historians confess they invented “ancient Greeks”
As many had suspected for years, the entire history of ancient Greece was fabricated by historians:
A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had “entirely fabricated” ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.
The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge “Greek” documents and artifacts.
“Honestly, we never meant for things to go this far,” said Professor Gene Haddlebury, who has offered to resign his position as chair of Hellenic Studies at Georgetown University. “We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns — everything.”
[. . .]
According to Haddlebury, the idea of inventing a wholly fraudulent ancient culture came about when he and other scholars realized they had no idea what had actually happened in Europe during the 800-year period before the Christian era.
I’m glad that they’ve finally come clean on this huge historical fraud. Especially The Iliad, which “was a bitch to write, by the way” but “it seemed to catch on.”
QotD: The dangers of being a novelist
I’m in the middle of starting a new novel right now, and the bad thing about that strange phase of existence is that everything you see and hear somehow relates, in the wankmulch your brain has become, to that novel. Even a shopping list becomes a mass of notation and connective lines — because you’re convinced that the six things on it reveal something phenomenal about the world and your place in it, and there’s a place in the novel where you can shove all that in.
Deep down, there’s a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world.
Also it’s important to note that when writers — or at least I — get into this condition, we talk very fast and make not a lot of sense.
Warren Ellis, “Ghosting the real world”, Wired (UK), 2010-10-07
October 5, 2010
The Guild, Season 4 episode 12
Another new think tank . . . but this one’s different
These days it seems that there’s a new think tank springing up on every corner, covering so many different issues and interests. But there’s one area that’s still underserved in the think tank world, so Adam Thierer is inaugurating a new think tank to cover those areas:
I’m pleased to announce my new venture: The Sin Think Tank. The mission of the Sin Think Tank will be to promote prurient interests, gun play, gambling, unhealthy eating, and alcohol and tobacco appreciation. Some of our positions or programs will include:
* The Bob Guccione Fellow in Cultural Studies
* The Joe Camel Chair in Environmental Analysis
* The Smith & Wesson Institute for Peace
* The Jack Daniels Center for Spirited Discussion
* The Center for Gambling Promotion
* The Dunkin Donuts Nutrition & Nourishment Initiative (aka, the “Feed the World” initiative)
* The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation for Free Living & High Times
