Unsolicited Advice

The single biggest reason I have never gone over to the Mac side is that Apple has a policy of discouraging you, at every possible turn, from noodling around with your devices. It's great for people who just want their doodads to work the way they worked when they left the factory -- and would rather gnaw their own mouse hand off than dig around in the guts to change anything themselves -- but I much prefer to own computers I can get into without three security Torx drivers and a hand grenade. It's mine now, I'll break it if I want to. The IdeaPad has an interesting hardware configuration. It first came out after solid state hard drives were made available to the public, but before the prices had come down to any reasonable level. They shipped from Lenovo with Windows installed on an eensy little 24 GB SSD for booting (just a chip smacked directly on the motherboard, so far as I can tell; Linux views it as /dev/sda1), and a secondary 500 GB platter drive for file storage....

On a far less depressing note, Sebastian Stan impresses the fuck out of me. Jazmin is also a big fan of the Marvel movie universe, so we've been watching things, including the Captain America films. In between gratuitous but certainly not unappreciated ass shots of Chris Evans, it has come to my notice that Stan does know how to act. Quite well, in fact. Bucky and the Winter Soldier share virtually no body language. To the point where I had to double check to make sure that was the same actor. And Sebastian Stan shares virtually no body language with either of them, to the point where I caught an interview of the leads from Cap2 and had to check again  to make sure that was him and not some part of the head production crew being shyly silent on the end of the line. The only recognizable thing about him is that he does actually use Bucky's lopsided picking-up-girls grin on reporters sometimes. Stan isn't particularly uncomfortable on stage, but he has no pressing need to b...

IBM purges sections of supercomputer Watson's memory after it begins swearing. Excuse me while I laugh until I injure myself. In a way, this is tremendously impressive. The guy who covered it for io9 summed it up rather well , when he commented that if he'd been in the room when Watson started to drop the word "bullshit", his "hair would have stood on end". Profanity is one of the weirdest parts of language, and it is particularly weird in English, where the word 'fuck' can be folded, spindled and mutilated into almost any grammatical function you care to try. One of my best party tricks is pinpointing who isn't a native English speaker (and what their first language is) and an easy way to get your fingernails into cracking a problem like that is to watch for who swears weirdly, and in what way they're going slightly caterwampus. You can even use it to distinguish English dialects in writing, where an accent can't be heard -- although...

The cosmos conspire to remind me that I should tell you guys about my favorite TV science nerds. I'm not going to waffle on too long, as I've got nine other windows open with stuff I ought to be doing, but today's YouTube link goes to a show called Stargazing Live: Back To Earth . It is a talk show about astronomy and astrophysics, hosted by an Irish stand-up comedian who read physics at uni and still plays enough video games to complain about the crouch button in FPSes and the song unlock paths in music games, and a Mancunian currently working with the LHC who is only the second  person I know of to have both a PhD in physics and a musical credit on Top 10 pop album. Dara O'Briain  is a frequent-flyer on panel shows, and in his solo stand-up routine is infamous for picking on the front row right at the beginning of the show, and then returning to pick on them -- with ridiculously detailed references to the first round -- two hours later at the end. If you've only...

In the Wikipedia article on eidetic memory, it's suggested that Sherlock from the latest BBC series has it, but this is then disputed with the observation that he also seems to have cultivated the ability to 'delete' things from his internal storage. What Sherlock seems to have is pretty close to what I  call an eidetic memory, i.e., whatever I've got. The sticking point seems to be whether one needs to "know" things or merely "remember" them for it to count. There is a distinct difference between the two for me. I obviously know  a lot of stuff -- this can be attested to by any one of the probably thousands of people who, over the course of my lifetime, have stared at me slack-jawed while I ramble blithely across three different subjects that normally require a graduate degree -- but that's not my eidetic memory. That's the fact that my brain is a enormous filing cabinet. Facts  and procedures  require understanding, at least for me. I f...

In which I apply way too much logic to the Hulk. Again. [small Avengers  spoiler. spoiler. spoiler spoiler spoily spoiler. this is getting monotonous, but i suppose it's better than being beaten by a rampaging mob of comic geeks.]

It occurred to me the other day that the Kindle is really nothing more than a very tiny storage device. I don't mean the actual SSD chip inside, although that's physically very small; K3 and KK have 4GB of storage with 1GB-ish masked off for a wee Java kernel and the scratchpad for the OS and experimental browsers, and text takes up so few bytes that the only reasons to give it that much are for the Audible audiobook option and because demand for standard USB storage below that is probably so underwhelming that it would cost them more  to order a lesser capacity. Those chips are basically nothing -- I have a 4GB flashdrive attached to my keys which is exactly big enough to house the USB-A connector. If computers commonly had micro-USB ports, you could easily manufacture a 32GB portable drive small enough to accidentally insufflate, never mind lose .[1] I'm actually talking about the screen. Using a display as temporary storage is nothing new. Any kind of persistent disp...

The Library at Alexandria was the greatest of the ancient world. It was actually a Musaeum in the original sense -- a house of the Muses, a school and a repository for the arts and sciences. Their collection came partly from donations and partly from purchases, but largely from simply passing a law that any boat that docked in Alexandria had to let the Library scribes copy any books on board. Since Alexandria was a huge trading port, that meant a great many books passed through the city. Nobody actually knows how many scrolls were in the collection; accounts range from 40,000 to 700,000. The most oft-cited number I've seen is 400,000. Nobody really knows when or how the Library was destroyed, either. Common knowledge for centuries has been that it went up in flames, but who exactly set the fire, why, and whether they intended to gut the Library or merely failed to pay attention to what was in their way is unknown. Virtually everyone agrees that it was a horrible loss for humanity...

This Kindle thing still amazes me. I came around about the same time as the space shuttle and CDs, and look what else they've invented in my lifetime. Somewhere in their garage, my parents have a platter from a hard drive that died in Dad's lab at work right before I was born, which is actually the size  of a platter, and has a big obvious groove in the surfacing where the air gap collapsed and the head scraped a ring of magnetic material off. I asked them once how big a deal the disk was, and they agreed it would have been maybe a couple of megabytes, been stacked with a bunch of other platters in a rack the size of a small dishwasher, and cost some insane number of thousands of dollars. I'm typing on a $500 laptop that weighs about five pounds and has a 120GB hard drive. The Kindle is solid-state, the size of a trade paperback book, and holds about 3GB of text; my MP3 player is half the size of a matchbox, has a multi-color display on the front, and can hold 4GB of audi...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

April Fools' Day is surprisingly universal. The custom of playing pranks on the first of April is widespread in Europe, in places like France, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom, whose inhabitants carried it with them to the places they colonized around the world. Iranians do the same on the 13th day of their year, which is usually the first or second of April in the Gregorian calendar. Spanish-speaking areas celebrate a similar holiday in the last few days of December. April Fools' Day is also one of the few things celebrated consistently on the internet, a place with no unified geography, language, cultural or religious traditions. Being generally run and populated by people whose sense of humor runs strongly towards the "ha ha only serious" end of the spectrum, the internet thinks that April Fools' Day jokes are hilarious beyond belief, and spend a fair amount of time and effort making them as awesomely tongue-in-cheek as possible. These range from the tra...

I mentioned in a previous post that I am a Sherlockian . This tends to strike people as being a bit bats, a little like being a scholar of the history of Middle Earth, whilst pretending it wasn't made up out of whole cloth. The idea is that, from one counterfactual premise -- that Holmes and Watson were real people, with Doyle being Watson's literary agent -- you jump off into a huge game of recreational research and logic, where you try to figure out where and when the cases happened, in what order, who some of the "disguised" names might really have been, etc. Sherlockians, in fact, call it "The Great Game", which if you've been watching the BBC's modern series Sherlock  you'll note they used as the title of the finale of series one. It's loads of fun if you're the sort of person who reads academic papers in your spare time, which I am -- I have a lot of anecdotes that start with sentences like "It was Friday, so I was drinking and...

I am ridiculously sentimental about old media. The history of broadcast and recording is a source of endless fascination for me. I'm not entirely sure why, except I think there's something magical about being able to capture a performance at one moment in time and carry it forward so that millions of people -- some of whom weren't even born when the performance took place! -- can experience it for themselves. Virtual time travel, albeit slow unidirectional virtual time travel. Back in the days of yore, televisions were very temperamental. The worst we deal with now is figuring out how to make our movies display in widescreen, so they aren't full of pencil-people. Early televisions were wholly analog, and there were an infinity of ways the horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, convergence, retrace, and maybe a thousand other things could be faintly, but irritatingly, off. There was actually a point to having a TV serviceman, who would come to your house and fiddle ...

I just found Google Play. Google Play gives you 20,000 tracks of storage for free. Not a space limitation, a limitation on the number of songs. That is horrifyingly brilliant and I'm kind of ticked nobody had thought of that before. You can also buy music straight from Google Music on Google Play. Which you can then download from your cloud storage whenever, because you bought it, you should be able to play it on your gadgets. I like this idea, mostly because fuck iTunes, fuck it a lot. The only machine I've ever had that liked it is the Mac I'm typing on now. It crashes like a loaded starlet in a red Camaro every time I try to start it on the Windows machine. And DRM can just wither and die. I've also been recently setting up an Ubuntu partition on the Windows machine, and have discovered, while updating Chrome on everything, that if I log into Chrome  rather than just logging into Google , then my browsing history and extensions and a zillion other things follow...

For the past week or so, I've been testing a Lindows setup on my personal laptop. I was pretty dedicated to Windows for a long time, having cut my teeth largely on MS-DOS and Windows 3.1; my only exposure to other OSes was aging Apple ][ and Mac Classic computers in the school system, which may have been revolutionary when they were purchased, but impressed no one by the time I got to them. I assume schools bought them because of Apple's reputation as the home of all the most awesome edutainment software ( so many hours bickering with my classmates over whether it was my turn to play Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? or Oregon Trail ), although if any of them knew anything about computers the reason would actually have been that there has always been about 300% less having to open the case up, either metaphorically or literally, and bang on shit to make things work on a Macintosh. Back then, of course, there were real gaps between what the various platforms could do for ...