Doggy
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Ethan’s brother just got a dog, and it’s staying in our apartment for the night because dogs aren’t allowed at the hotel. (They’re not allowed here either, but, meh).
So cute!
Tombs
I was just thinking about tombs (it’s for a paper, I swear) and how a tomb is really a place that people expect their body to be for eternity.
Granted, tomb is kind of an outdated word for it, but the concept is essentially the same.
So how inconsiderate is it of us to dig up egyptian rulers? It seems kind of like “just kidding, you don’t get to spend eternity chillin down here. You’re dead now and we’re going to poke at you with some metal sticks.”
But maybe that’s just me.
Casino Royale on November 17th
The new bond film, with the new bond (Daniel Craig) is slated to open on November 17th. I just caught a new preview of the movie here.
It’s a pretty cool looking trailer.
At first I was worried about Craig being Bond. But I think he’ll make a good Bond, if a bit more towards the book character than Brosnan was. In any case, it’ll take at least a movie for me to get used to seeing him in this role. I think the problem is that I’ve seen him in a fair number of other stuff already, and it’ll be hard for me to really picture him being 007.
Generally speaking, the movie looks like it could be pretty awesome. At this point I have just a few worries:
- I think it’s too bad that they changed the game to make them play texas hold-em at the casino.
- I worry that they’re going to make Bond to human re: the bond girl. Every time they try to make Bond care the movie falls a little flat (License to Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies).
- I’m also worried that they’re going to keep going with the more “urban” feel of the last Bond movie (which hardly deserves the name). Bond movies work a lot better with a touch of class.
I guess I’ll just have to wait and find out.
Standards vs Software
Generally speaking, it seems that when it comes to technology that involves formatting, there are two basic ways to go about streamlining.
First, and this is really the better option: adopt a standard. This is what happened with CD-ROMs, VHS, DVD (professional), and what we expect will happen with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray and, eventually, digital music files.
But the other way to handle things is just to throw a bunch of software at it.
Region encoding exists (stupidly) to prevent people on different continents from watching the same media. Throw software at it, smooths it all out, makes it play everywhere.
E-mail is a mess. Basically every e-mail program and service has their own formatting rules, there’s RTF, plain text, microsoft enhanced whatchamacallit, etc, etc. So the solution is for each individual e-mail program to be robust enough to take what’s coming in and process it all so it looks pretty on your screen.
Seems pretty inefficient, doesn’t it?
The cost of 10 years
There’s a very interesting article in the New York Times today about the rising cost of health care, specifically, the rising cost of health insurance.
David Leonhardt brings up a surprisingly good point: that the cost and effectiveness of medical care has gone up dramatically, and that it’s worth it.
Instead, a baby born in the United States this year will live to age 78
on average, a decade longer than the average baby born in 1950. People
who have already made it to their 40’s can now expect to reach age 80.
These gains are probably bigger than the ones the British experienced
in the entire millennium leading up to 1800. If you think about this as
the return on the investments in medicine, the payoff has been
fabulous: Would you prefer spending an extra $5,500 on health care
every year — or losing 10 years off your lifespan?
Now maybe I’m just a huge cynic, but let’s say you live those 78 years at $5,500 a pop - that totals about $429,000, which is a lot of dough. In fact, that would probably cover most of the “fancy medicine” that, on average, people would need for those last ten years of their life.
And you can get 1970’s medical care for $500 a year, right? So…why do we have to involve the insurance companies?
I guess, essentially, I’d agree with Leonhardt if I thought we were paying the price of our medical care, but I don’t think we are. I think that the corporate side of medicine is screwed uuup.
Anyways it’s an interesting article.
An unusual side effect
Since I’m in my last year of college, it seems as though it’s about time I stopped living in the little cinderblock boxes that my school provides for as many students as they can.
Living off campus in a proper apartment has made a lot of minor differences in my life and the way I treat school. Since I’m no longer living, breathing, and eating on campus all day every day, I tend to spend less time thinking like I’m a student and more time thinking like I’m a person.
It’s very refreshing.
I’ve taken to doing ordinary things like cooking (which can be pretty damn fun) and going out to do things (something that doesn’t usually happen when you live on campus. Not at Oxy. Not off campus anyway).
But an aside from all the things you’d expect to change in my life, the one thing that strikes me as odd is how much better my work ethic got once I moved away from school. I have a paper due friday (and to be fair it’s going to kick my ass), and I just spent an hour doing some of the analysis and prep-work necessary for — get this — formulating a prompt.
Now I’ll probably spend another two or three doing more of the same tomorrow, but the fact is, I’m doing it, and I’ve got two full days left to scribble away. Astounding.
ps. the paper really is going to kick my ass.
House
I started watching House reruns on TV in late August this year and I got pretty addicted to the show, and anyone else who’s fallen into this trap will understand how glad I was to find out that my wonderful roomie down here owns seasons one and two on DVD.
So in between watching the new episodes this season I’ve been going through the old DVDs and filling in the blanks.
Tonight at about 9:15 I started watching the two episodes that are actually linked together - I didn’t think before I started in, but now, two and a half episodes later…AAAUGH. Why must this show be so evil?
In any case, new episode in season 3 tomorrow…in HD ;)
Things I shouldn’t buy but that I want to
To this list I’m officially adding this Blade Runner gun. I basically never see this thing sold. It’s almost worth the $70 on ebay.
Discoverability (continued…)
The internet is really just a big jumble of information, and the only way things are really tied together is with search.
Yahoo! was the first to do it and Google was the first to make it cool, but searching online is nowhere near as good as it needs to be if it’s really the only way to get around.
More and more the internet has become a place where we expect that everything exists - generally speaking, if there’s a question, someone, somewhere, at some point, has posted the answer in little digital bits. The problem is finding it.
Blogs are the next step in making things discoverable. Little, personal funnels of information and opinion that, if carefully surfed, can get you practically anywhere.
But the problem is that blogs don’t have a good discovery mechanism themselves. The vast majority of the blogs that I read turned up in my feedreader (or rather, my bookmark toolbar, since I’ve stopped using a feedreader) because someone told me about them.
I’m all for personal recommendations, but how sad is it that the number one discovery method for things online is offline?
What is there besides search?
Directories. Portals. High profile pages (blogs or news sites). But the internet isn’t like music, where you have a (reasonably) manageable category - anyone can throw up a new site anytime (and people frequently do).
Yahoo! tried to keep the web directoried for ages. They still have a directory, but it’s not their main vehicle anymore. There’s the DMOZ, but they’ve got some werid restrictions and copyright issues that keep some sites off the list. And anyway who wants to browse the web by directories? Not me.
So what we probably need is a massively huge Amazon.com for web sites, where each site has their own little spot in the database, complete with “people who liked this site also liked this one”, a little summary and screenshot, and mini-reviews from like-minded sojourners.
Think that’s the next step in search?
Massive Attack at the Hollywood Bowl
I went to see Massive Attack this evening at the Hollywood Bowl with my roomate Ethan - it was a pretty badass concert all in all.
There were tons of people there, but two of our concert-goers semi-ditched us, so we had four seats to ourselves and got to be all comfortable in the crowd. I would have taken some pictures but my camera is still busted from when I dropped it running from a bee in Berlin (don’t ask).
In any case, Massive Attack is the band that does awesome music like the main title theme to House and this song:
Massive Attack - Super Predators
E-mail (as a system) is broken
It occurs to me today, as I try repeatedly to do something so simple as to coordinate a group project via e-mail, that e-mail is a broken system.
I have not been able to consistently recieve and send e-mail with people I need to be in contact with for months. On average, I have to send an e-mail twice to get it somewhere, and on average, I tend to recieve about 25% of the e-mail people (claim) to send me.
That’s a broken system. I can’t rely on it.
I miss fast internet
I am completely aware that “fast internet” is entirely relative, and my internet conection is only slow in comparison to what I’ve been using for the past two years, but it’s still frustrating sometimes.
When I’m at home, aside from cable (which wasn’t feasibly priced), our only option was to get relatively slow DSL. I’m pretty sure it’s 256k DSL. That was top of the line five years ago, but now it’s painstakingly slow - especially since it’s DSL.
If we’re downloading anything, checking e-mail is impossible. If someone’s playing a game, you can’t really browse the internet (or maybe it goes the other way).
I get these brief glimpses of ridiculously fast internet when I’m back on school campus and I tap into the wireless oxy network - I just downloaded about 50 e-mails in less than a minute. That wouldn’t happen at home.
Le sigh.
Changes and opportunities
I changed my Facebook profile today, which I never do.
If I didn’t think that Facebook was well on its way to crapland, I’d probably care a lot more about the feeds and the opportunities that they create (I bet we have facebook mini-celebrities within the year).
But the thing is, Facebook was cool for two reasons:
- It was closed
- It linked me with people I knew in real life
It’s essentially open now, and in about eight months it’s going to stop linking me to people I see all the time at school and start being like an unfortunate yearbook where people get uglier all the time so you can’t pretend people never change.
Oh well.
They found a shark that walks
According to Lycos news, they found, among a zillion new species, a shark that walks around on its fins:
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Scientists combing through undersea fauna off Indonesia’s Papua province said Monday they had discovered dozens of new species, including a shark that walks on its fins and a shrimp that looks like a praying mantis.
The team from U.S.-based Conservation International also warned that the area - known as Bird’s Head Seascape - is under danger from fishermen who use dynamite and cyanide to net their catches and called on Indonesia’s government to do more to protect it.
I fell like if I wasn’t easily seasick and scared shitless of poisonous marine life, diving through coral would be the most beautiful thing ever.
Be warned…
Hehe
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