Category Archives: Current Affairs

wil’s tuesday link-o-rama

As part of my continuing plot to convince you all to read my Propeller submissions, I present a few of my favorite stories from the last couple of days:

The dying art of the knuckleball

In the Red Sox clubhouse a few hours before the start of a drizzly, early-May game against the Rays, Tim Wakefield wraps his hand around a brand-new baseball and models his knuckleball grip. On television, Wakefield’s grip appears claw-like and uncomfortable, but up close, it looks effortless…

Okay, first of all, when did the Devil Rays become the Rays? Did it happen because some crazy fundies got all worked up? I’m laying 3:2 that they did.

My enthusiasm for baseball — actually, in all professional sports that aren’t hockey or soccer — has cratered in the last couple of years, but I still love to watch a knuckleballer confound a batter. It’s a dying art , like pitchers who can last more than 5 innings.

Librarian carrying “McCain=Bush” sign kicked out of McCain event

In McCain’s *open to the public* townhall meeting, a 61 year-old woman was cited for trespassing on orders from the McCain security detail for carrying a sign that read “McCain=Bush.” Carol Kreck received a ticket and her court date is set for July 23.

That the event this woman was removed from was a public event, and she didn’t do anything more disruptive than hold up a sign. “All I did was carry a sign that said McCain = Bush,” Kreck said. “And for everyone who voted for Bush, I don’t see why it’s offensive to say McCain = Bush.” Well, McCain is running for Bush’s third term.

Book review: It’s All Too Much

It’s All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to “organize” all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place.

Some friends of ours have my dream house: it’s got beautiful hardwood floors, it’s uncluttered, and they can park both of their cars in their garage. My whole life, I’ve had a problem with holding onto things (real and imagined) so this book looked super interesting to me, not because I need it (I know that I just need to get rid of my shit) but because it tells me that I’m not the only one with this problem.

HOWTO: build anti-paparazzi sunglasses

Hackaday posts plans to build some simple but effective anti-paparazzi sunglasses. They work by mounting two small infrared lights on the front. The wearer is completely inconspicuous to the human eye, but cameras only see a big white blur where your face should be.

I had to deal with paparazzi in that “really fucks with your ability to live your life” way for about two months when I was a teenager. I quickly figured out that if I avoided certain places and certain people, I could also avoid the cameras. But this project is interesting to me because we live in a world where our fucktard leaders are increasingly shoving their faces into every aspect of our personal and private lives, so any effort to say NOT YOURS is pretty important to me.

Bacon mania!

Why are Americans so batty for bacon? It’s delicious, it’s decadent — and it’s also a fashion statement.

I’m a vegetarian, so bacon as food is irrelevant to me. However, bacon as a cultural phenomenon? That’s something else entirely. Something crispy and delicious!

The History of the Chaos Computer Club

With causes like ensuring secure voting machines, protecting privacy, defeating censorship and governmental obfuscation, and promoting hacker ethics, the CCC has become something of a hacktivist powerhouse. They hold an annual “Chaos Communications Congress” gathering and also a very cool hacker camp every four years.

If you’re intrigued by this article, I highly recommend reading The Hacker Crackdown, The Cuckoo’s Egg, and Cyberpunk (which has nothing to do with actual Cyberpunk).

Book Review: Dungeons and Desktops

Dungeons and Desktops chronicles the rise and fall of the Computer RPG industry, from Akalabeth to Zelda. While the bulk of the book is devoted to the genre’s ‘Golden Age’ in the late ’80s and early ’90s, author Matt Barton explores the entire history of CRPGs, from their origins in the mid ’70s to the very recent past.

I’ve written a lot of articles about video games, and my love of classic gaming is well known. But I don’t know if I’ve ever pointed out just how much I love computer RPGS. From the Infocom games of my childhood to early Mac games like Uninvited and DejaVu to Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, to Bioshock, the RPGS are my absolute favorites. This book seems really, really awesome. (And really, really expensive, unfortunately.)

i think the planet is trying to tell us something . . .

North Pole ice ‘may disappear by September’

Arctic sea ice is now retreating so quickly that scientists say there is now a 50-50 chance that it will have gone completely by September.

[…]

The Arctic is seen as an important indicator of the potentially catastrophic changes that scientists say will come as the planet warms.

Honeybee collapse claims record number of hives this year

A record 36 percent of U.S. commercial bee colonies have been lost to mysterious causes so far this year and worse may be yet to come, experts told a congressional panel Thursday.

The year’s bee colony losses are about twice the usual seen following a typical winter, scientists warn. Despite ambitious new research efforts, the causes remain a mystery.

Um. I like this planet. It’s really beautiful, and it’s currently the only one I can live on. Could we maybe work together as a species to stop shit like this from happening?

windows open and raining in

I came across some really interesting items while Propelling today, which I wanted to share, because I can:

Farmers Put 220 Acres Under Glass to Create Vast Artificial Environment

On the chilly Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, farmers are placing 220 acres of land under glass so they can grow vegetables all year round. The greenhouse, when completed, will house 1.3 million plants and increase the UK’s crop of green vegetables by 15%. Called Thanet Earth, the project will be a series of 7 connected grenhouses with a relatively small carbon footprint. And nothing grown inside Thanet Earth will ever touch soil.

This interests me a great deal because I’m considering some hydroponic gardening in addition to my regular gardening here, as we attempt to reduce our carbon footprint and become more self-sufficient. Climate change played an important part in the worldbuilding of the novella I’m working on, so I’ve spent a lot of time researching the future of agriculture; it’s interesting to me to see people experimenting with different techniques in the present.

A Professional Gambler’s Take on the Tim Donaghy Scandal

Haralabos Voulgaris leads a rare life.

He’s one of very few people — Voulgaris estimates there may be as few as four or five — who have achieved a high level of success betting full-time on the NBA.

And he does very well at it. “In the last eight years,” he explains, “the 2004-2005 season was the only year where I didn’t turn a nice profit, and I lost very small.”

His approach is intensively evidence-based. He has his own massive database that would be the envy of any stat geek. For instance: Given two line-ups of players on the floor, his database does, he says, a good job of predicting which players will guard each other. The database also tracks the tendencies of individual referees, and factors all that and much more into forecasts. Voulgaris also watches close to 1,000 games a year.

He designed the database as a tool to outwit oddsmakers, and it works for that.

But it’s also a fine-tuned machine for researching the claims and career of Tim Donaghy. And having used this database, and his contacts in the sports betting world, Voulgaris says that his confidence in the integrity of the NBA has been shaken, to the point that, despite his big income, he’s looking for ways to stop betting altogether.

“The league has made a big mistake,” he says.

I sort of knew Haralabos back in my poker-playing days, and really liked him because he was one of the first players who was really kind to me, even though he had no reason to be. I knew he bet on sports, but I had no idea he was as serious as he appears to be. His perspective on this whole scandal was fascinating to me, especially how his data and analysis support Donaghy’s claims. He says the NBA has done a great job of sweeping the whole thing under the rug. Unfortunately, I agree with him.

The Watchmen Motion Comic

Warner Bros. plans on releasing about a dozen 22 to 26 minute webisodes to help make the complex story of Watchmen easier for the uninitiated to digest. Recently, WatchmenComicMovie was shown a teaser trailer for these webisodes by an anonymous source. From what we saw these webisodes are going to be really well done.

The series of webisodes, which will be titled Watchmen: A Digital Graphic Novel, will be less like a slide show of original comic panels and more of the comic book “brought to life” with rudimentary animation techniques.

The teaser is simply a conglomeration of different scenes from the comic book given motion and set to dramatic orchestral music. In order to animate the comic, the production team has apparently dissected the elements from each panel that they wanted to move — such as a cloud or a character — and animated it in front of a restored or “filled in” background.

For example — they animated the iconic comic panel that shows The Comedian’s funeral from above to not only have falling rain and lightning, but wind that realistically blows the coats and clothing of the mourners surrounding the open grave. In another, Ozymandias sits in front of his monitor bank — each commercial and T.V. program on the screens in motion — scratching the back of his pet Bubastis’ head. For lack of a better way to describe the trailer, it’s like you’re watching an episode of Watchmen: The Animated Series.

DUDE! Even though living in a post-Phantom Menace world has made my default position on all these thing “apprehensively optimistic” I can’t wait to watch these. It seems like everyone involved in Watchmen truly gets it, so it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep my hopes nice and low . . . they want to go up and up and up.

This last story isn’t my submission, but that’s just because my fellow scout Keith beat me to it:

The Prisoner remake: details emerge?

The Prisoner Appreciation Society (Six of One) is reporting that this classic, surreal sci-fi/adventure series is set to return for a six-episode miniseries run. The announcement coincides with The Prisoner’s 40th anniversary.

Reports have Jim Caviezel playing the heroic Number Six — actor with a penchant for playing long-suffering characters (Bobby Jones, Jesus). Sir Ian McKellen would play arch-nemesis Number Two, while cementing his status alongside Christopher Lee as the greatest nerd project actors of their generation. Between the two of them, they’d own Star Wars, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, Dracula, Frankenstein and X-Men).

The Prisoner is my all-time favorite TV show, ever. EVER! After watching marathon after marathon of The Prisoner, I grokked what makes people become Trekkies or Browncoats. It did more than entertain me, it inspired me. I know that’s weird to say about something that’s so Orwellian, but it’s true. The Prisoner spoke to me when I was a teenager. I bought the GURPS book, bought all the video tapes, and picked up every fan-made book and map of The Village I could find. I bought rub-on transfer letters in the Albertus font so I could make my own signs for my dressing room, and I painstakingly drew my own Number Six badge to wear on my jackets. I read and re-read the graphic Novel Shattered Visage fruitlessly looking for clues about . . . stuff. My first big external SCSI Mac II hard disk, which I think weighed in at a mighty 30 Megabytes, was named KAR120C. Again, living in a post-Phantom Menace world makes me a little nervous, and we’ve been talking about this remake almost as long as we were talking about a Watchmen movie, so I don’t even know if this is as reliable as it seems. Regardless, I’m hopeful that there’s someone out there who can treat it right. And a six episode mini-series would be freaking brilliant.

Okay, one last bonus link before I go: years ago, I did an episode of The Outer Limits called The Light Brigade. I was watching The Time Tunnel last night on Hulu, and saw that The Light Brigade is there, as well. It’s useless for non-US visitors (can you use a proxy to fool Hulu? I haven’t tried) but if you’re in the US and want to spend 44 minutes watching me . . . um . . . act, I guess is the word I’m looking for . . . now you can.