Masked predictions
The Economist of 25.09.04 reports that, according to Buyseasons, a US costume company, Dubya Halloween masks are outselling Kerry masks by 57% to 43%. Why is this interesting as well as depressing? Because sales of Halloween masks have correctly predicted the results of the last six presidential elections!
Maurice Wilkins is dead
The quiet, unassuming ‘third man’ in the Double Helix story has died at the age of 87. The X-ray diffraction images provided by his unit in King’s College, London (many of them done by Rosie Franklin) gave Francis Crick and James Watson the clues they needed to deduce the helical structure of DNA. The Guardian ran a lovely obituary of Wilkins written by the late Anthony Tucker which quotes the beautiful description of his work he gave in his Nobel dissertation. “Determining the three-dimensional structure of a molecule by means of x-ray diffraction”, he said, “is rather like trying to understand the workings of a folding chair by looking only at its shadow.”
Why I’m happy to pay the BBC licence fee
NEWS.COM report:
The British Broadcasting Corp. has announced an open-source video compression project that it hopes could one day give Windows Media Player a run for its money.
The BBC didn’t make a particularly big show of the project at LinuxWorld in London, but if the codec lives up to expectations, it could soon be challenging proprietary video technology.
The codec, called Dirac–after physicist Paul Dirac–is still in the early stages of testing. But developers say when it goes into beta in the fall of 2005, there’s a good chance it will be as good, if not better, than anything else out there.
Lead developer Thomas Davies, who founded the project three years ago, has Microsoft’s Windows Media Player in his sights.
Davies stressed that he is not seeking to create a product, but rather a tool that other developers can use to build their own software.
“It is an entirely general-purpose code,” he said. The technologies used are suitable for everything, he said, from low-resolution mobile phone screens to high-definition television and even cinema. “You could use it for desktop video production, you could use it for streaming, or you could use it for movies–anyplace where you need compression.”
Mirror, mirror
Autumn sunlight on a wall
The First (and Last) Law of Web Design
(from Mark Hurst)
On any given Web page, users will either…
– click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal,
– or click the Back button on their Web browser.
This is all you need to know. Ignore it at your peril.
Unconstitutional
This is the poster for Robert Greenwald’s new film.
You can download a trailer from here.
The economics of music distribution
William Fisher’s instructive four-slide PDF summary of how online distribution of music would change the economics of the industry. [Via Larry’s Blog. Thanks to Azeem for spotting that I’d got Mr Fisher’s first name wrong (I’d called him ‘Mike’.) Just to confuse things further, Larry called him ‘Terry’!]
Letters from the liberators
Lots of US soldiers serving in Iraq have been emailing Michael Moore.
“It’s hard”, writes one correspondent, “listening to my platoon sergeant saying, ‘If you decide you want to kill a civilian that looks threatening, shoot him. I’d rather fill out paperwork than get one of my soldiers killed by some raghead.'”
“I was guarding some Iraqi workers one day”, writes another. “Their task was to fill sandbags for our base. The temperature was at least 120. I had to sit there with full gear on and monitor them. I was sitting and drinking water, and I could barely tolerate the heat, so I directed the workers to go to the shade and sit and drink water. I let them rest for about 20 minutes. Then a staff sergeant told me that they didn’t need a break, and that they were to fill sandbags until the cows come home. He told the Iraqis to go back to work.
After 30 minutes, I let them have a break again, thus disobeying orders. If these were soldiers working, in this heat, those soldiers would be bound to a 10-minute work, 50-minute rest cycle, to prevent heat casualties. Again the staff sergeant came and sent the Iraqis back to work and told me I could sit in the shade. I told him no, I had to be out there with them so that when I started to need water, then they would definitely need water. He told me that wasn’t necessary, and that they live here, and that they are used to it.”
Lots more in the same vein in a Guardian excerpt from Moore’s collection of these dispiriting letters.
The Explorer Trap
This is an experiment — an audio version of my most recent Observer column. Free download from here (MP3 format, 4.8MB, running time 5.14 mins.)