Nancy Farmer is another great SF author who often gets YA'd... if you're unfamiliar with her mythologically inspired tales, i urge you to check out one of the following: The Eye, The Ear, & The Arm, The Sea of Trolls, The House of the Scorpion.

@#13 posted by Jeff

'...more clutter messing up the landscape.'

well, technically everything that's asphalt or on top of asphalt is litter...

on my old bike commute from Oak Square in Brighton to Kendall Square in Cambridge, a young (high school or college age) girl was struck by a motorist in the heart of Allston, probably one of the densest populations for college kids in Boston.

a ghost bike accompanies her real bike, as well as a HUGE amount of photographs, well-wishes and other memorabilia.

for almost a year after (and maybe still to this day), someone would go to the chainlink fence nearby and stick in plastic cups spelling out YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.

i don't know how well this sort of thing reminds drivers on Boston's crowded streets to give what little room they can (most drivers have been pretty good, actually, but we have a pretty high bike population in nice weather). however, this sort of memorial definitely gives the community something to grab onto and it always made me pause inside and reflect a little and remember whenever i had the temptation to skid through red lights because i felt i could make it.

@#40 posted by ustaath

that explanation makes sense, and i respect your decision not to be forthcoming with such private details.

i just think it's snarky to say such things as 'nobody really cares whether you believe it or not' when the very nature of information these days requires constant questioning of its legitimacy, especially if it's presented as truth. isn't it figures like Hofmann who teach us to ask questions and not trust murmurs?

@#33 posted by ustaath

criminy, i'm hardly crusty. i'm just asking for a little corroboration, possibly some e-mails sent around, when reporting the death of a much loved scientific figure.

if all you've got is 'wikipedia', i don't think you can blame me for thinking 'guh, internet noise.'

i would rather wait an hour to hear some substantive truth than have hot-and-cold running rumor.

i think drudge-style unsubstantiated scoops like this are why i don't read the BB with the frequency that i used to. it gets hard to take you seriously when your sources are reddit and wikipedia.

even if true, you had no sources and everyone ate it up. it comes off as another example that bloggers don't subscribe to the general ethics of journalism.

in other news:

http://justaplant.com/info/freevibe.jpg

what's a 'gritball'?

heh funny, to me (and to the interviewer according to his comments on the mefi thread) the interview seals the deal that these are just two retirees doing this for fun and not out of some deep need to add 'ironic humor' to the internet.

and of course the interview is on their site. it's edited by Fred. why does saying that he hopes his movie will be funny tell you this is an elaborate ruse? why is it hard to accept this is genuine?

ooops. link was above (missed it). sorry, fungible.

the mefi interview (mentioned above, edited by Fred, and available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWhlelFPRro ) seems to suggest that this is genuine cable access variety weird. Also, newer camcorders can shoot in 16:9... why do you have to be a pro to use a weird aspect ratio?

I say 'real.' I would also kindly request calling off detective services and all sorts of stalkery you folks may have planned and leave these poor people alone in their kooky little shell.

my favorite part of The Big Bus is where the stewardess calmly explains the complicated process of putting on the hazmat suit when the bus goes out of control.

for a silly movie it was unexpectedly good!

psssh. some envelope pushers they are. their lack of Tauren porn reveals that they're total wusses.

that headline is such a tease. i was hoping for a vending machine that dispensed crows!

Or grackles, for the diet conscious.

ah, quaint:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostworld/2152049328/in/photostream/

A device called a transducer produces the high frequency sound waves (about 20,000 cycles per minute), pitched so high they cannot be heard by the human ear.

a) transducer... you mean a SPEAKER?
b) 20,000 cycles per minute = 333 1/3 Hz (cycles per second)... dishwashing in the key of E#!

also, look! the internet!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostworld/2152048164/in/photostream/

pro onion chopper tip:

stand back.

i went from someone who never teared when chopping onions to someone who was affected dramatically (maybe due to passing into adulthood and maybe due to having a different onion supply). i tried all the dumb tricks: cutting under water, freezing... still lots of agonizing pain until i realized i was always chopping onions with my face directly over them. i change my stance a little and voila! onions hurt less.

also, stop monkeying with my foods please.

attn "begs the question" freakos: Xeni quoted an about.com article. The person whose piece she quoted will never see your failed attempts at ridding the English language of its inconsistensies. Please drink more beer until the urge to correct subsides.

Mike! You're doing it wrong! You're supposed to be milking your father's work for all it's worth! We need a Shike animated series and plush dolls, stat!

Seriously, thanks for this. It sounds like an interesting read and I'm happy you've decided to release it to the world.

om, i think you've a different version of the bible than most.

the emblem on the shirt is a nice touch too... chalk up another reason to have kids!

The documentary Genghis Blues is awesome... There is an interesting point where it changes from novel to gripping when it really hits Pena that nothing around him is familiar, a hard thing for a blind person to cope with.

Also, lots of background Feynman goodness.

@radioguy

...unless the impact of piracy is that studios decide to produce less movies per year, in which case there are less overall jobs available for that guy (and other laborers that the industry needs). i see the validity of the argument, and i really don't think watching a movie you didn't pay for is a particularily moral thing to do.

i'm about 5/7th of the way through TFA and it highlights several good points. the primary one for me is that, as the movie/music industries begrudgingly accept online distribution as viable, they do it in the most ham-handed, least convenient way and then spend time complaining that people would rather steal than have a legitimate way of purchasing and consuming media.

which is silly. we all know it. i like downloading stuff. if i want to watch the futurama movie i don't want to go to a store or wait for amazon (et al) to ship a dvd to me. i want to find it, pay a respectable $10-15 for it (no physical product should mean no overhead for shipping, packaging, etc), and bang the download button and wait for a night (or less if there's lots of people seeding). then it's mine and if i want to convert an AVI to QT to watch on my portable device, i can do that. if i want to watch it a hundred times in a week i can do that. if i want to put it on my backup harddrive and find it during my annual cleanup and watch it and still think it's awesome i can do that.

i have this freedom with all the stuff i grab off of the internet, and that's where it supercedes the moral ickiness of stealing.

hey studios: don't tell me stealing's bad. make legitimacy easy.

they tried PSAs before. a couple of years ago I went to a multiplex with a bunch of friends and between the previews but before the feature there was a nice little 1 minute PSA with a set painter who explained that pirating movies doesn't really hurt big stars or movie execs, but it does hurt guys like him. he went on to say that pirating is really bad, super uncool, and no one should ever do it.

then the feature came on and i spent two hours or so watching johnny depp being a really cool pirate.

Huh, Catherine Keener's character in 40 Year Old Virgin ran one of these but I didn't think they actually existed in mundane life.

I love these little facets of transition. Sorta like steam powered cars.

An extremely interesting roleplaying experiment, but is it still pacifism if you're healing the damage dealers so they can stay alive longer to do more murder? Seems like Gandhi would not approve.

@#25:

a) directors have little control over how big studios release their films, especially not the transfer process.

b) i would wait for the US Universal release due in March (I'm told) and see how the transfer quality is there.

Has anyone seen the surrounding context of this clip? Outside of the thirty seconds clipped here for someone's personal amusement and then puked onto the internets? I, for one, have not, and do not believe that a sound bite in any way translates to "comprehensive artistic statement."

Even if it does feature a sexy microphone.

everyone should have their lynch approved HD projector home theater setups by now right?

DLHD*? You mean the setup that belches ether whenever the lights go out, causes your wife to have an affair with Balthazar Getty while a grinning man in pancake makeup silently looks on, and replaces all non-dialogue soundtrack with a hypnotic thrumming? Hell yeah! Waaaay better than THX... you don't even need a subwoofer, just a good supply of Pabst Blue Ribbon!

(*Lady in the Radiator not included. See store for details.)

#10:

Looks like managemyhome.com has pulled the "feature." Or at least I can find it following the directions from that link.

I'm sorry, Axel, what I said was rude. Still, I don't think it's particularly good etiquette to complain that an article on a site which is largely populated and maintained by, as you call us, Usaians does not explicate acronyms with which a majority of its readers are familiar, especially when there's about 4,010 articles a month about the circus of stupidity that is the TSA.

I encounter acronyms I don't understand every day. When I do, I quietly check out what they mean (takes, what, five seconds? especially if you already know a site offhand), go "oh," and continue reading. No reason to make a stink over something so small when you can rectify the problem yourself. It's not like this site has a secret language.

Another quick misconception to clean up (now that no one will be reading this post any more):

#41, posted by bravo

Why not leave all the twiddling to the rendering device and leave the source media intact? It seems that the content could be mastered to some reasonable level of fidelity and let the device and its environment sort out the details. Back in the day, they even had a button for it and what a coincidence - its label was "loudness".

The loudness button on many stereos is not magic, or in any way related to the aforementioned 'loudness war': it is a high and low shelf with anywhere from +6 to +12dB gain meant to compensate for the Fletcher-Munson (et al) Inverse Equal Loudness Curves (hence "loudness") by boosting treble and bass so that material can be more easily perceived at low listening levels.

Granted, you say "let the device and its environment sort out the details" but this only works for low listening levels because the Curve disappears (or, flattens, rather) around 80 or so dBSPL for most people and most stereo systems do not 1) know when they're throwing 80 dB SPL at you or 2) change the gain of the loudness function's filters as voltage through the system increases, so if loudness is on and you turn your stereo up because your roommates aren't home or rock music is better loud or whatever, the bass and treble gain is still in place and will distort.

So, while I agree that the source material should remain "intact" and producers/mixers/mastering engineers should have fidelity and artistic integrity being their highest concerns, since 'loudness' and other 'enhancement' and end-user 'mastering' schemes (like iTunes' harmonic excitement and volume normalization (through dynamics limiting) grossness) are pretty passive things, they are definitely not solutions to making better sounding MP3s (which I guess is what the producers in TFA are aiming at). They are last ditch efforts, like using umbrellas as parachutes.

The only solution is knowledge and unfortunately digital audio is scary/technical for a lot of people.

BTW people, I had to go to acronymfinder.com to find out that "TSA" stands for Transportation Security Administration. We don't all live in your benighted country or fly regularly, sheesh...

Or read BB with any regularity, apparently.

Oh no! The internets! I had to use them to look something up and learn things!

I like the ars article on this:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080102-sears-come-see-the-softer-side-of-spyware.html

Especially this part:

In an update to his original post, Googins noted that Sears actually offers a slightly different privacy policy—via the same URL—to compromised computers versus those that have yet to install the software. "If you access that URL with a machine compromised by the Sears proxy software, you will get the policy with direct language (like 'monitors all Internet behavior'). If you access the policy using an uncompromised system, you will get the toned-down version (like 'provide superior service')," he wrote.

Totally awesome, and highly indicitive of the gulf between 'service provider' and end user. It's not just MPAA/RIAA who are the bad guys, and I'm sure the Sears VP's mindset is "we just want to know why customers are shopping at Amazon (et al) instead of us."

Also, apparently no one on high at Sears Holding has ever had their computer pwnzord by spyware. That's the only reason I can think they would OK this and think customers would not A) eventually find out and B) scream for heads to roll when it hits the Washington Post.

in other news: "chomping on a meat stick and sipping on an A&W coffee."

root beer flavored coffee? yuck/yum.

(that is the sort of notion that makes me whistle while wizzin')

"knitting software"?

for reals?

Man this happens to me every time I try to run a lowbie through the treacherous land of Nord-Trøndelag. Those moose aggro pretty easily, but it's way better to use a freezing trap and hightail it.