OMG, Mr Darcy!

Excerpts from 1-star reviews of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice on Amazon.com.

It just goes on and on and on, only to lead this sister ending up with that guy, this sister ending up with that guy, etc. — Adam Appleby

Personally I am disgusted. I think that they are all pompous and rather annoying. — A Customer

A terrible bore, really sort of a nightmare that never ends. — Laura “witchbaby”

I find this book repulsive. I am offended by every paragraph that I read. I have never felt such contemt for any work that I read. I pasionately despise this novel. The 17th century English aristocracy is offensive and without merit. — A Customer

Over two-hundred pages wasted on useless tasteless writing! It was a majority consensus in my senior English class that Pride and Prejudice was awful. — Elisabeth

Austen clearly never learned that readers do not like run-on sentences because the so called "novel" consists of run-on sentences that sometimes consist of more than one page. This novel is complete trash. — Mark Twain “Sam”

I hated this book. It was difficult to read, because Austen never seemed to get to the point, and everything seemed to happen so slowly. It was ridiculous. — cnyadan

this is possibly the boringest classice ever written, which is saying a lot considering the fact they're all quite boring. I mean look at the story, what a bunch of bull! What the hell...omg, Mr.Darcy! *rolls eyes* Could she not have thought of anything more exciting? — A Customer

This story was written in the early Victorian era, and hence it is quite old. I found it to be utterly boring. Maybe it was a big deal back in the time, but nobody cares nowadays. — krazykow@softhome.net

Making sense of the money mess

I suspect that most people outside the money industries don't really understand why the financial system collapsed and how pervasive it is. That's why all the various elements of it have just been put in one big conceptual box and called the "economic crisis".

This video, made by Los Angeles–based designer Jonathan Jarvis, is the best graphic visualisation of how this all came about I have seen, and I highly recommend it to you.



Jarvis is currently practicing in the Graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. You can see some of his other projects – including a brilliant demonstration which makes all the mobile phones in a room ring simultaneously – at his website, here.

Nice to meet you, too: some first impressions of Twitter

I’m aware that blogging about Twitter is like dancing about architecture, but I can’t write 140-characters-or-less forever. I also get that I'm late to the party but that's never stopped me before.

I started an account for the magazine I work for first. It’s a sign of the times that after 25 years in print, I get a daily report on UBs and PIs for the magazine’s website. “It’s the future!” everyone keeps barking at me because, having grown up in print media, they’re convinced that UBs=circulation and PIs=readership. I’m yet to be convinced – I think the model is wilder and more chaotic – but there you go. It’s a living – for now.

So, onto Twitter and using it as a cute little marketing tool for the website. Links, competition announcements, whatever. There’s a lift in UBs and PIs that can be tracked to all those tiny.urls and bit.ly links, and everyone’s happy. Hurrah.

What catches my eye, however, is what’s flowing past me as a result. All the followers are tweeting away and it’s pretty interesting. I get it straight away: Twitter isn’t chat, it isn’t static and it’s not even “regularly updated” content. It’s a torrent of moments straight from people’s heads.

At first it’s just a shitstorm of blathering voices until I realise that I can turn some up and turn some down. I can even turn them off completely.

I started my own Twitter account, @kollektor. I transfered the most interesting voices from the work account first, just a handful of them. Voices that, if I was in a room full of people, would be the ones I would listen to because they’re talking about things I’m interested in.

The girl who tweets regularly “so bored” is not one of them.

At first I stand in the doorway of an unfamiliar room. There’s a flow, a style going on that I’m not part of, and I want to get to know a bit more about the rhythms and conventions before I plunge in.

I find people in my own city tweeting about food, fashion, media, geekery, politics, bars, art and news. I’m interested in all of these things, so I follow them.

But it’s not called social media for nothing and I can’t lurk for too long. It’s a two-way street, so I contribute: what I’m reading that I’d recommend to others, what I’ve discovered during the course of my day that delighted me and might delight others, an occasional bit of direct tweeting. A couple of photos, a TV still that amused me, a traffic report (!), some links, a bon mot here and there.

You put in, you get back. Some replies, retweets, even a cheeky DM.

No one’s running things. No one is moderating or setting the agenda. Again, Twitter isn’t chat.

I should rephrase that: I’m running things, I’m moderating.

Too many tweets about the intricacies of C++ programming? Unfollow.

Talk of seasonal produce around town? Follow.

So far, I’ve kept my follows fairly local, the Twitter equivalent of going to London and staying in Earls Court. This will change.

Black in name only

It turns out that black box flight recorders aren't black.


This is the flight recorder from the US Airways plane that landed on the river in New York. While it's somewhat blackened around the edges, it's not black. Being bright orange makes it easier to find.

In related news, as I was saying in this post, it's not legitimate news unless there's an Aussie onboard. And so, on the front page of the Daily Telegraph:

Aussie's miracle escape from Flight 1549
"There were no screams, tears, just a strange peace," the only Australian on board, 26-year-old Emma Cowan said.

The thoughts and feelings of the plane's 154 other passengers were unreported.

Would you mind if I put you on hold?

43 minutes spent talking to my phone company’s “care” call-centre in India. It took nine people to answer my ostensibly simple question: What is the status of my order?

No record of the order. No match for the receipt number. “Would you mind if I put you on hold?” For five minutes.

Along the way, inumerable requests for my date of birth. I know for sure that I’ve never given it to them, and I said so. But still they ask because it's in the script. And then, “I’m sorry, sir, nothing is coming up on my computer. Would you mind holding just a moment?” A five-minute wait, then transferred to someone else, and the routine starts again. 

Nine times.

In the end, I was given an email address. I immediately wrote an email and had a response within 30 seconds.

1,000,000 for setting yourself up for failure

You have a point. You believe in something. You think other people do, too. So you create a Facebook group to collect 1,000,000 people – or more! – to show that you're right. You fail. The numbers don't lie.

[You can click through, if you must.]

I bet I can find 1,000,000 Christians

Size: 311,430 members

I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Just Want Peace

Size: 229,846 members

10,000,000 Strong for our Troops!

Size: 214,456 members

LETS MAKE THE GUINNESS BOOK OF RECORDS 4 THE MOST PPL IN A FACEBOOK GROUP!!

Size: 143,650 members

Let's see how many Christians there is at facebook !!

Size: 86,979 members

I BET I CAN FIND 10,000,000 PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT FYROM RENAMED MACEDONIA!!

Size: 80,363 members

I bet i can find 1,000,000 people against Abortion

Size: 56,669 members

5,000,000 for Heath Ledger to win an Oscar

Size: 49,890 members

I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who hate facebook groups

Size: 15 members

1,000,000 strong for the legalization of marijuana.

Size: 92,007 members

Petition for Led Zeppelin United States Tour - 1,000,000 strong

Size: 34,173 members

1,000,000 Strong For The Jonas Brothers

Size: 18,029 members

1,000,000+ people not ashamed of JESUS CHRIST

Size: 9,512 members

I BET I CAN FIND 1,000,000 PEOPLE WHO ADMIRE GEORGE BUSH!

Size: 9,106 members

If this group reaches 1,000,000, I'll cut off my penis

Size: 5,037 members

1,000,000 strong for our Troops

Size: 1,697 members

If this group reaches 1,000,000 there would be a MILLION people in it!

Size: 1,187 members

Ellen does Cher

Searching for smears

Apologies to all my regular readers – hello east coast of India! hello person in Sweden! – for the lack of posts lately. I'm launching a new magazine and a new website on 16 October, so busy is an understatement.

Anyway, I was cruising around the Barack Obama campaign website and there's a page devoted to correcting false stories about the candidate, including this gorgeous search tool.

Let Wikipedia launch your music career

Got some time to waste? Go to Wikipedia and hit the Random article button on the left-hand side. That’s the name of your band. Hit it again to find the name of your hot new CD. A few more times and you’ve got the names of all your songs. Here’s mine:

BAND: Simtel

ALBUM: Guqin aesthetics

TRACKS:

1. Space pirate
   
2. De Dannan
   
3. Cineaste
   
4. Nest Freemark
   
5. Bondelum
   
6. Medial intercondylar tubercle
   
7. Spring Garden Tunnel
   
8. William Langewiesche
   
9. Blaise Gisbert
   
10. Symphony No. 1 (Nielsen)
    

Oh, no – does this make me a geek?

There's this guy called Jay Hinson. He's bright. Really bright. His PhD thesis was on the decay of the tau lepton into three charged pions and a tau neutrino. That's particle physics, people.

So Jay lets his mind wander one day and starts to think about "technology which allows subspace fields to 'reduce' the mass of a ship while still allowing for energy and momentum conservation".

Except when Jay says "ship", he means "space ship". And when he says "technology", he means "Star Trek".

"This," Jau writes, "led me to consider various other energy and momentum related questions concerning subspace and warp fields in general."

Like it does.

To read Jay's musings on this subject, all 17,236 words of it, click here.

Elsewhere – ie, back in the real world – you will find Jay's discussion of relativity and faster-than-light travel (it starts here).

He calls it an FAQ and, while I would quibble about his use of the word "frequently", it's actually a highly readable piece of work that had me thinking "Shit – I understand relativity, special and general!" at one point. Seriously. He made it make perfect sense to me. And I don't know nuthin about nuthin.

Someone needs to publish this guy. Just take out the Star Trek stuff first.

Rise and fry

If the buzzing and beeping of an ordinary alarm clock won't entice you to rouse from your slumber, perhaps the irresistible smell of sizzling bacon will.

The Wake 'n' Bacon alarm clock switches itself on 10 minutes before you want to wake up and cooks some bacon in its internal tray.

It makes the morning so much easier.

This monkey pants

Finally, something on eBay I actually need.

"It's offered to your attention the 'space pants' for macaque small monkey to wear it during the experimental space flight. This pants has been used for animals (monkeys) experiments in 1950s & 1960s in the USSR Institute of Biomedical Problems (IMBP, Moscow). This monkey's 'space pants' are designed with many clasps to fit bigger or smaller monkey."

I must write to the USSR Institute of Biomedical Problems to see if they have any more. This pants is hot.

警警 and 察察

Meet Jingjing and Chacha, the adorable mascots of the Internet Surveillance Division of the Public Security Bureau of the People’s Republic of China. In other words, the internet police.

The bureau employs more than 30,000 people to monitor the internet, ensuring that anything to do with the Falun Gong, police brutality, the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, freedom of speech, democracy, unregulated social or political commentary, Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama and the International Tibet Independence movement never appears on Chinese computer screens.

Its director says, “We published the image of internet police in the form of a cartoon to let all internet users know that the Internet is not a place beyond of law and that the internet police will maintain order in all online behavior."

Recycle your spam

Forward a piece of spam to the Spamrecycler. Its address is spam@spamrecycling.com.

It will send you back a link. Click to watch your inbox-clogging piece of crap turn into something far more interesting to look at. Here's what it made out of mine.

The Stepford munchkins

Before-and-afters from Pageant Photo Retouching, a service specialising in work for children's pageants. And they're special, all right. I'm warning you: only pop them open if you're feeling brave.





More horror here.

Anonymous delivers

“For its part, Scientology is seemingly powerless to stop this underground warfare because members of Anonymous could be anyone.”
— reporter Bryan Seymour, Today Tonight

The /b/ thread that led to today's anti-Scientology actions is archived here.

Digital sajada

Losing count during the Salaah? Then you need US Patent No. 6783822: the Muslim Prayer Counter Rug. Every time your forehead touches the switch (14), it displays on the counter (26). Clever!

All hail Mega-Dik

A new champion has been crowned in the spam wars: the botnet Mega-Dik, used solely to push penis-enlargement products, has taken over from the Storm botnet as the most prolific sender of spam.

Mega-Dik now accounts for 32% of all spam – about 3 billion messages per day – and is growing its army of zombie computers thanks to increasing high broadband penetration and low antivirus protection in Asia and North America.

Seventy percent of all spam is now coming from just five botnets: Mega-D, Pushdo, HTML, One Word Sub and Storm. The average inbox received 4,351 junk emails in 2007.

Making Sensorama

I’m obsessed with Morton Heilig lately. He’s called “the father of virtual reality” with good reason.

When TV sucked the life out of the cinema in the 1950s, the cinema fought back with gimmicks like Cinerama, 3-D and Smell-O-Vision. Heilig, who was working as a Hollywood cinematographer, wanted to take the illusion of cinematic immersion one step further.

His Sensorama machine, patented in 1962, was a hot-bed of cutting-edge technology. The experience was essentially riding a motorbike through the streets, complete with stereo images (for which he invented a new camera and projector) and sound, smells (wafts of hibiscus and jasmine), bumps and shakes through the seat and handlebars and the wind in your hair. All senses covered.

Great idea but, as he said himself, “Sensorama may have been too revolutionary for its time.” It was a commercial flop.

That didn't deter him, however. In 1969 he patented the Experience Theatre, a version of the Sensorama for a larger audience. It was a theatre with a large semi-spherical screen showing 3D motion pictures, with peripheral imagery, directional sounds, scents, wind, temperature variations and body tilting in the seat. The audience was seated in the focus point in arena seating. It didn't take off either, but the Walt Disney Company soon patented a similar system, called Thrillerama.

Got a light?

High-speed digital. You've gotta love it.