There are details to nit-pick, such as the fact that the electricity to run the players’ PCs seems to be double counted into both the cost of the avatar and the cost of the human player, but this calculation that Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians is pretty interesting [via Clicked]. It’s an interesting ecological assessment of a new entertainment form, and a really interesting comparison of global resource consumption.
Books to avoid
B sends me a link to the opposite of all of those book recommender tools out there, the LibraryThing UnSuggester, which analyzes their database of people’s book collections and tells you what books you shouldn’t read if you like a particular book. More accurately, it tells you what books are least likely to be in the same collection with your selected book. I tried out two of my favorites from different genres, and while it was pretty accurate on its unsuggestions for Cryptonomicon, the list for Pride and Prejudice has a significant overlap with my collection, what with the Norvig AI/Lisp books, Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming collection (really, a must for any library) and other computing texts. How sad….
DCMA Exemptions
I was talking with a colleague on Friday about the legality of backing up a video found online to an internal server as a safeguard for still being able to view the film in a class setting even if the network, or the film’s server, goes down when one is planning to use it. While it is not entirely the same situation, the first item on the Copyright Office’s list of exemptions from DCMA copying restrictions certainly suggests that doing so is not inconsistent with the Copyright Office’s interpretation of fair use:
Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.
Other entries on the list of note include permission to break protection if the hardware it is on is obsolete, if the protections make the material inaccessible to the visually impaired, or if the purpose of the circumvention is to do security research.
Do this and that and the other yourself….
In the past week, some very different do-it-yourself projects have come across the MAKE: Blog:
Building a crystal radio out of household items,
Mak e a resistor man! (sooooo cute!),
make an LED Popsicle stick picture frame,
and a bit late from the holidays, Make a Pecan pie based Icosahdron, aka the pie-cosahedron.
Christmas Countdown
Every year Matt over at X-Entertainment puts together a Advent Calendar based on the Playmobile toy advent calendar, plus he promises to post goodies in his weblog each day. If you haven’t seen this before, you may want to read the History of X-E’s Advent Calendar first, as this year’s story picks up with the same running cast of characters.
If you have read along in the past, Knacks has a MySpace page!
Holiday Gadget
I was chatting with some colleagues about what new holiday gadgets they are coveting, and was surprised that there isn’t really a major toy coming out that I’m interested in. And then I saw the new Altair 8800 kit [via Boing Boing]. I have no practical use for this thing, but I think it would be a blast to play with. The “differences/comparison pictures” section of the site is really well done – I recommend it as well as the more obvious technical documentation sections for a picture of how these are actually being built.
Finally, a good use for a Mac
In one of the cutest hacks I’ve seen in a while, someone uses the Powerbook motion sensor to power a software marionette [via MAKE: Blog]. The applet code is included – it draws on a library for accessing the Sudden Motion Sensor, but there are links provided to a couple of such libraries, if you are interested in trying this hack out for yourself. At the least, go check out the great videos of the marionette in action.
Moby-Dick Liveblog
Maybe this is done a lot and it’s the first time I’ve run into it, but I love the idea of liveblogging a book as you read it, and defective yeti is doiing a brilliant job with Moby-Dick. Just a couple of weeks ago he came up against the infamous “whale chapter”:
“Cetology” has the narrator giving an impromptu lecture on the nature of the whale, grouping the beasts into fourteen categories and offering lengthy descriptions of each. Here, Melville uses a literary technique known as OMG BORING! In some other context I might have found this engrossing, but here it’s like, “Dude, you got your marine biology lecture in my adventure story!”
I, too, forced my way through this novel, feeling that it was a missing piece of my education by never having read it. I tackled it over the summer while I was in college, taking it to work with me and reading a chapter or two a day during lunch while I sat outside eating cheese sandwiches and escaping the basement computer lab I was spending all of my time in.
Thinking about what books I might do this with, I have totally stalled out on my efforts to read the Federalist Papers cover to cover. But, the sane side of me says that this is a project that probably needs to sit a few dozen items down the to-do list.
Science in the university
In response to Harvard releasing its internal report on their educational objectives, Steven Pinker discusses some reservations, more with the high-level phrasing than the specific steps to be taken, it seems [via Arts & Letters Daily]. Of particular interest – even at Harvard the debates about requiring science, how much science, and of what types for what reason take place. Pinker laments that the current argument for science education seems to have a greater requirement that the applicability to social issues be made the focus than other fields find required of themselves. While it isn’t a full argument, I thought his counterclaim for the relevancy of pure science education was nicely phrased:
Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.
I believe that a person for whom this understanding is not second-nature cannot be said to be educated. And I think that some acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge should be a goal of the general education requirement and a stated value of a university.
Dismissive, veers towards defensive…..
I know that good weblogger style would suggest that I shouldn’t link to another of ze’s videoblogs so soon, but I’ve been catching up after not web surfing much the past couple of weeks and couldn’t resist pointing people towards his tips for hiring a web developer, starting with what their personal appearance says about their development aesthetic. Very funny, in a “I wish it weren’t kind of true” way.