First Impressions.

Many years ago there was a fairly crap Disney movie released, called "Arachnophobia". I was around nine years old at the time, and I loved it (I was a sucker for Disney's particularly emasculated attempts at "horror", right up until I discovered my good buddy Freddy).

Later that year my parents treated me to the purchase of any three computer games. Direct from "Some Random Guy's Basement," they came replete with photocopied instructions and felt-tip marker labels that you just knew were oh-so legit.

Ah yes, my parents truly did spoil me.

Anyway, I promptly chose the "Arachnophobia" game from the shelf, and tried to ignore that the packaging was an old envelope thick with liquid paper in a rather poor attempt to cover up the "Par Avon" label, not the mention that it had come from "Ting" in "Hong Tai".

The game itself has long since been lost, though until recently my only memory of it was that I had tried it a few times, and then stopped. I couldn't particularly remember why I had stopped, I simply assumed that it wasn't
very good, and my gnat-like attention span had been drawn elsewhere.

Ah, but if only that were true.

Yes, my friends, I have just discovered my very first repressed memory.

I recently stumbled across some screenshots from the game, and I now remember exactly why I stopped playing.

Yep, you guessed it.

It gave me the willies.

Think back for a moment to those crap powerpoint jokes that you email around to your friends. You know the ones; "stare intently at the middle of the page, and you will see an optical illusion..." And then after a minute a giant zombie head flashes on the screen, and a blood-curdling AAAAAHHHHHRRRHRRHRHGGGHHH!!! is sounded through the speakers. Childish, sure, but oh-so-fun to spectate.

Well, imagine the same thing, as a nine year old, with this picture.

Would that give you the willies?

Prose.

I simply adore articles that start like this:

"What’s one foot across and sits behind two inches of skin, four inches of fat and 10 inches of muscle? That’s right: an elephant’s testicle."

More fascinating pieces of trivia - and a few opportunities - can be found in The Worst Jobs in Science list for 2007.

Lord, I Hate Computers.

Let's present a hypothetical situation here; say your car breaks down, and you have absolutely no idea what the problem is.

(Obviously, you're not a mechanic. If you happen to actually be a mechanic then just replace "car" with "tortoise" for the purpose of this exercise.)

Assume now that the car doesn't actually break down completely, it just degrades in some small way. Perhaps you have to twist the headlight knob a few times before the lights come on, or maybe the presets on your stereo reset every time you turn off the car. Nothing major, nothing you couldn't get used to, but annoying nonetheless.

Would you call a mechanic?

If you had a great deal of disposable income and an expensive car, perhaps. But many people would simply live with the problem, unless it became progressively worse. Most people, however, would call "that person".

You know the guy. The "friend" who "knows about cars". Perhaps it's a hobby of his. Perhaps he's simply more enthusiastic about cars than anyone around him. Nonetheless, he is considered by his less-educated peers to be an educated and enthusiastic amateur in the field of automechanics. More importantly, his services are normally free.

(No, I'm not talking about myself. Bear with me.)

So you call this friend of yours - the "Car Guy" - and have him come round to look at the problem. Naturally, he's more than happy to "Have a go at it," and fix up whatever little problem is slowly gnawing away at your motoring pleasure.

Of course, he doesn't actually fix the problem.

Nope.

He makes it worse.

And you end up having to take it to a professional (Or, possibly, another "friend") to actually fix.

Countless times I have had to clean up after some enthusiastic amateur. There's an old saying that "A little knowledge is just enough to make you dangerous." This is excruciatingly evident in the legions of enthusiastic would-be nerds clutching desperately at their Windows XP rescue disks, wondering why the sad looking box of scrap laid out in front of them simply won't start.

As you can imagine, cleaning it up gets a little frustrating.

Possible Bumper Sticker:

"In germany, I was funny, although it's not hard to be funny in a country of unfunny people."

(Lifted from an email from a friend.)

Greatest. Ethnic. Joke. Ever.

True story;

A little while ago we were at a friend's wedding - a russian couple. We were in the wedding party, along with quite a few of their russian friends. During photos the photographer was directing everyone around in the typical fashion; "You, go stand next to that bench. You, over by the wall. You two, sit in the middle. You, next to that pole."

At which point I said: "Hang on, you can't have a russian standing next to a pole."

No one got it, though. Strange.

The Dear Departing.

Overheard in airport;

Security: "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?"

Passenger: "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?"

Security: "That's why we ask."

Must've Been A Big Veal...

Fair's Fair.

I'm as wholistic as the next guy, but this is over the line for me.

While We're At It,

Proportionally, how many women would you say look at this poster and think "Yep, I'll go buy a pair of those," and how many would simply walk away feeling worse about themselves?

No Comment.

Explain To Me Again,

Why you think having a brochure will make you easier to find?

I Had a Dream...

..that was like a movie.

"Sure," I hear you say, "Everybody has dreams that are like movies."

Except this one was in widescreen. Clearly letterboxed. Obviously filmed in a cinema with a handheld camera. People were standing up in front of me to find their seats.

There was even a point where the camera was tucked behind the chair as the usher walked past.

And it was subtitled. In Thai. I don't even know Thai, I just know enough to recognise it as Thai when I see it.

Why would my subconscious mind subtitle movies for me in Thai?

If Asked,

What would you give as an example of a "Twiticism"?

Quote of the day;

(Note that "ZB" refers to a "zetabyte", which is roughly a thousand exabytes, or a million petabytes, or a billion terabytes, or a trillion gigabytes. I'm sure someone should work it out in a more commonly used term, such as "Library of Congress"es.)

“ “By the way, how many hours (days?) of Pr0n could be held by 1 ZB?”

Years, my friend. Years.”

(Courtesy Zamwi.com.)

This does bring up a fairly interesting point; storage capacities are constantly increasing, yet what are we creating that is worth filling the space with? Every document ever written wouldn't make much of a dent in a zetabyte of storage space, nor would every song ever recorded. Every episode of Cheers? Google's entire index (effectively, a copy of every web page that it searches) is only a few petabytes, a few hundred thousand orders of magnitude smaller than a zetabyte. An hour of good quality video can be compressed into about a gigabyte of space, so a zetabyte would give us a trillion hours, or just over a hundred and ten million years. What on earth would be the purpose of holding onto a million century's worth of video?

Of course, we could record - and watch - everything is the highest possible quality. The maximum perceptible resolution of the human eye is about 1/60th of a degree, so assuming that we can see 180 degrees both horizontally and vertically, this gives us 116,640,000 points that the human eye can distinguish (that's roughly a one hundred megapixel camera).

Looking at the storage required for an image that size, simply multiply by three (for the red, green and blue channels), then multiply by 32 bits per pixel, for a grand total of around 1.3 gigabytes per image.

At, say, sixty frames per second, our zetabyte storage system can still hold about four hundred years of video (allowing a bit for the audio track). This level of quality is absurd, of course, but it'll be interesting to see at what point we simply stop worrying about storage. Or perhaps we'll find something else entirely to put there?

Bear in mind, of course, that such a system has not - and probably will never - be built. The article simply talks about the development of software that could handle a system of such magnitude. The largest hard disks currently available top out at around five hundred gigabytes, barely enough for a few seconds of our ultra-high-definition recording. "Regular" high definition, however, runs at about ten gigabytes an hour, giving us a fairly reasonable fifty hours of film. A respectible three weeks of regular DVD-quality video (at a paltry one gigabyte per hour) can be stored on these drives. I remember - some years ago - admiring a friend's mp3 collection, observing that his thirty gigabytes of music could run non-stop for three weeks without repeating a track. At the time I couldn't imagine the need for such an amount of music in one place, let alone in your pocket.

As an aside, it increasingly seems that there is less of a need for local storage; My email, photos, journals, bookmarks, favourite videos, and other assorted documents are all stored on some web service, and accessed via a web browser. I'm sure there'll always be a need for fast local storage, but lord knows I trust Google with my photo collection far more than I trust myself. Who knows; perhaps one day we'll just have a wireless internet connection in our pocket, and a world of movies and music at our fingertips.

The Limits of Good Advice.

There's only so much that people are willing to learn from others; the rest must be from personal experience. That said, I ran accross some excellent advice on another blog, though I stumbled at this;

"MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals."

Wow. Just, wow. I'm halfway through an MBA right now, and I can honestly say I have absolutely no idea what the hell he is talking about.

Approach.

I'm something of a gadget nut. Love them. Can't get enough of them. When I get a new phone my first thought is "Okay, let's see what we can make this thing do."

There are two products that have received a fair degree of publicity lately; the OLPC and the iPhone. These represent two fundamentally different approaches to the "gadget" philosophy, however the philosophy itself remains the same; make technology accessible.

The OLPC is a laptop designed from scratch to be durable, functional, low power, and - above all - affordable. It is the application of the ever-decreasing cost of technology to the minimal requirements for the developing world's education sector. It look's like an outstanding product, bringing technology and connectivity to students at a previously unheard of price - around $US100. A magnificent achievement. On a technological level, it actually surpasses many "western" products in many important areas - screen readability, wireless access range, battery life, software adaptability, and many more. The operating system is an open platform that can be extended by the students themselves. The OLPC foundation is looking to change the world, shipping five million (!) of these things in their first year, starting mid-2007.

The iPhone, in contrast, brings cutting edge technology and interface design together in a beautifully small package. It is a phone, a PDA, and an internet access machine all in one. It is a luxury item, and is priced accordingly. It is a closed platform and that is tightly controlled by the manufacturer, however it looks to provide an exemplary user experience.

Of course, these two projects are serving entirely different markets, and have almost entirely different goals. On an idealogical level, the OLPC project wins hands down. The iPhone, however, looks to solve a signficant problem in many people's lives - frustration at awful phones - that is no less real.

They Can,

Why can't you?

Rock On.

As a child I felt I wasn't allowed to like rock music. Not by any authority figure, but rather by mself. I had already pigeonholed myself as a fairly straight-laced, follow-the-rules kind of kid, and I had always thought that rock music was "too cool" for someone like me. Add to this some fairly misconcieved ideas about what "rock music" actually was (think thrash metal), and I basically ignored rock music for quite a while.

Then, of course, I stumbled across music that made me go "holy crap, music can sound like this?"

That's what happens when you base your behaviour on misconceptions. You miss out on wonderful opportunities. We do it all the time; the food we don't try, the people we don't talk to, the books we don't read, the jobs we don't try.

What have you dismissed as "not for me"?

Footnote: Growing older, I have since learned that most thrash metal band members are nerds. Make of that what you will.

A Historic Scale.

I recently heard a quote in an interview on the radio, regarding the slow - but steady - acceptance of women through the medical profession. It was taken in the late nineteenth century, and ran "female doctors are a novelty, like midgets and fat boys." Aside from the obvious humour to be had at misinterpreting the use of the word novelty - I, for one, would hardly enjoy receiving a fat boy and a midget with a happy meal - I am more interested in the use of the fat boy as an example. Obesity has been increasingly (though incorrectly) referred to as an epidemic over the last few decades, so I find it refreshing to hear of a time where an overweight child was rare enough to be considered a curiosity.

"The Monk and the Hare."

Keeps running through my head as the title of a fable, but I can't seem to find it. Perhaps I just made it up. Still, it seems important to me now, so I'll bother spending some effort on it - even if it isn't real.

If you can create an impression of value in something, then that impression tends to perpetuate itself. In Japan, for example, the Kit Kat chocolate bar sells out before every exam period, as it is considered a lucky charm for students. Many people have attributed this phenomenon to the similarity between "Kit Kat" and a Japanese phrase for good luck, "Kitto Kattsu". But if the only reason is linguistic, why did it take 70 years of Kit Kats being available for people to notice the connection?

Simple. The chocolate maker created an impression of value in the product.

Does this relate to any actual value? Of course not. But people are still buying Kit Kats.