Polanski Nicked

From the BBC:

The organisers [of the Zurich Film Festival] say Polanski, 76, was detained by police on Saturday as he travelled to Switzerland from France to collect a lifetime achievement award.

Link via Google News

In Nova Scotia, mutant garlic crushes you!

Slashdot links to this interesting story:

Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred metres from his farm.

"I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules," he said Tuesday.

The GIS on “mutant garlic” is surprisingly robust.

We’ve got a world that tweets

A story about a humidor that automatically tweets its status information made me nostalgic for a time when some believed that every home appliance would soon have an Ethernet port and a network stack. This (of course) did not happen, but that’s not to say that others didn’t attempt to gin-up remote, network-carried status updates. There was that one coffee pot, remember. Also, that woman. Every time a new “technology” comes along, you can expect to see variants of those old stories break out again.

Link via Slashdot

Nothing but Star Wars

Over at Cracked, they examine six stupid non-movie Star Wars characters. But, of course there’s some commentary on the movies in there, too:

Did the first gay Star Wars character have to be a creepy, purple, gangster slug? We're already trying to justify the fantastically racist Jar Jar Binks, the mincing gilded nancybot C-3PO, the vaguely Jewish/Middle Eastern swindler Watto and the fact that Darth Vader suddenly started speaking with the voice of a black man when he turned evil. Give us a little help here, guys.

Succinctly puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it?

I remember dinosaurs

Spotted this post over at Phantom Leap this morning, and it catapulted me into a nostalgic trance. Dinosaur!, a documentary about – well, you can probably guess – was one of those great television events that just about every kid of dinosaur-loving age had a tape of. I really have nothing to add to Nick’s post; just wanted to highlight it.

Man, that show was almost as good as UFO Cover Up: Live!

Listen to the hearts

A parent has written in to Slashdot with an interesting tale. It seems that his/her son’s gym class is requiring the kids to wear heart monitors. Hmm...

My tinfoil-hat concern is that the heart rate data will be tied to each child, then archived and eventually used for/against them down the road when applying for insurance, high-stress jobs, etc. 'I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you' Has anyone heard of such a program, or had their child(ren) take part in it?

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m only linking to this because it mentions Pickleball!

Wrongonomics

I passionately dislike economists. Even Paul Krugman. But I have to admit that I feel that I have to link to an article of his where he tries to explain how all those supposedly brilliant economists got blindsided by the recession.

But it’s a long article, so I’ll try to summarize for those who are short on time:

Economists of 2007: Well, our mathematical model is perfect – assuming that markets always work and that investors are always rational – which they totally are!

Bankrupt Person of 2009: Hey Economists, how’d you fail to predict the recession?

Economists of 2009: Nobody  could have predicted this!

BP2009: What about all those folks who did predict it?

E2009: WHAAAA! Don’t yell at us! The intellectual underpinnings of our high-paying jobs has crumbled under our feet – we feel bad enough already! STOP ASKING QUESTIONS, prole!

The end.

Indie media ahead of the curve

From a post on the CJR blog, The Audit:

The fact is, and as immodest as it may seem to say, independents were repeatedly ahead of the curve on covering the mortgage and real estate bubble and in connecting the dots between vital elements of the bigger story—especially the links between predatory and lending and the metastasizing mortgage-backed securities market.

The lesson here: Pay attention to independent media, if you want to know what kind of horrible misfortune is about to blindside everyone else.

Warning: Video game content

And yet more self-glorification, to boot. The second installment of the Video Game Console Beauty Contest has been posted to my 1up.com blog.

Herding the cats

It can be tough to manage geeks in the workplace. So, every manager should probably read this Computerworld article:

I can sum up every article, book and column written by notable management experts about managing IT in two sentences: "Geeks are smart and creative, but they are also egocentric, antisocial, managerially and business-challenged, victim-prone, bullheaded and credit-whoring. To overcome these intractable behavioral deficits you must do X, Y and Z."

X, Y and Z are variable and usually contradictory between one expert and the next, but the patronizing stereotypes remain constant. I'm not entirely sure that is helpful.

Probably only interesting to those who have to manage IT staff; and, while I might have a few quibbles here and there, I do think that it’s important enough to highly recommend.

The size of the problem

More enlightening information about how banks really work, from the Consumerist:

Banks now make more on debit card overdraft fees than credit card penalties—they'll rake in about $27 billion in 2009 alone, according to the New York Times. They obviously have zero incentive to curb the practice. In fact, one economist told the paper that "45 percent of the nation's banks and credit unions collect more from overdraft services than they make in profits."

If banks could figure out a way to make money by whaling on your junk with a wiffle ball bat, they’d be doing that too. Uh, I mean, what problem?

Because it bears repeating

There is a wonderfully succinct reminder in this post at CJR (criticizing two recent articles in the NYT and the WSJ) of the terrible state of wages in America:

The bottom 90 percent of Americans, for example, earned incomes in 2007 that were 1.7 percent less than in 2000, the equivalent of working fifty-two weeks but getting paid for only fifty-one, facts not mentioned in either newspaper, while the top 1 percent during the same period saw their incomes rise 12 percent. The average increase alone was $145,300, which is more than four times the average income of each taxpayer in the bottom 90 percent.

Why this information isn’t repeated every day, on every newscast, boggles the mind. Surely, a large number of viewers that news organizations hope to attract are part of the bottom 90%, and would be interested in this information? Perhaps there might be some desire on the part of the top 10% to keep this information from being promulgated, but since the message here is inevitably that nothing much can be done about this issue, why should they care?

Fish story, with a hook

Beware! The first paragraph of this NY Times article uses the sketchy provenance of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish as bait to get you to read yet another story of mankind’s environmental depredations:

The answer to the eternal mystery of what makes up a Filet-O-Fish sandwich turns out to involve an ugly creature from the sunless depths of the Pacific, whose bounty, it seems, is not limitless.

See?! (But maybe you should read it anyway, if you’re interested in this sort of thing.)

Thrilling!

Do you like Dan Brown? Do you like computer viruses? Well, you’re in luck!

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today Show kicked off a week-long promotion for Brown’s Da Vinci sequel by airing the first of a series of clues to the thriller’s plot, in the form of a tour of a real-life biological research facility nicknamed “the Death Star” because it houses dead animal specimens. Host Matt Lauer challenged viewers to identify the research site and its location, and thereby acquire vital information about the novel [.... ]

But on Wednesday morning the top Google search result for “death star research” — the logical query — would bring you no closer to unraveling the Lost Symbol mystery. Instead, it produced a malicious website that uses pop-ups, mouse-trapping and a well-executed fake virus scan to trick you into installing a Windows executable that will screw up your computer pretty badly.

Well, being caught up in a malware conspiracy must be at least as exciting as reading about a fictional conspiracy.

Writing might not be good for you

At the Millions, Robert McGuire posits that writing may not actually be cathartic:

I’ve been working the last two years on my first novel, which has certain elements of autobiography to it, and in that time I can’t help but notice a certain decline in the indicators of good mental health. It’s not that I’ve turned into the tortured artist type, appearing in public looking like ten miles of bad example, nor was I a paragon of mental health to begin with. But compared to the years before I started the book, I have become moodier and more withdrawn, and most of the time I’m thinking about the book instead of connecting to the people around me.

At last, the truth can be told.

Bloggers: It’s not like they’re people

From Techdirt: A journalist uses a story first reported by a blogger, then fails to credit the blogger with the story, then tells the person that, “it’s company policy”. Look:

We've highlighted a few different cases of those traditional newspapers taking stories from bloggers without credit.

Charles Vestal points us to another such case, but in this one, the reporter confessed and noted that it was company policy not to credit bloggers. In this case, it involved a local New York City blog that goes by the charming name NewYorkShitty.com. Last month, it reported on an illegal gym in the neighborhood. A little over a week later, the big News Corp/Rubert Murdoch-owned NY Post wrote an article covering just that story that seemed pretty obviously taken straight from the original.

Doesn’t that make you want to buy a newspaper? Don’t they deserve your support?

Corrections are so boring

Over a the CJR blog, they respond to columnist Michael Kinsley’s assertion that corrections are just plain silly. CJR says, no, they are not:

In a breathtaking display of arrogance from someone with such an influential platform on the Post’s opinion page, Kinsley seems to have forgotten that newspapers have real power over the lives of the subjects they cover. I suppose after a long career, information can start to seem like props for feats of intellect, but they have consequences for the real people whose lives are mined for raw material. When mistakes are made in a story, often a correction published inconspicuously does little to fix the damage.

Will Kinsley regret the error? Or will he even notice?

Nick Cave reads from Bunny Munro

Yet more content from the AV Club: Nick Cave reads a chapter from his new book, Bunny Munro. We’ll probably give it a listen – Cave’s got one of the more distinctive voices out there.

Don’t give up

Hopeful: Well, as they promised they would, the AV Club has posted it’s list of 25 anti-suicide songs. Really fucking bleak: Almost all of them are really, really bad.

One side note: In yesterday’s list of 36 suicide soundtrack songs, they completely ignored My Bloody Valentine’s Sue Is Fine. WTF?