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Sunday, August 18, 2002 |
Tivo
Man, this Tivo thing is really cool. After a week, I know I'm just scraping the surface of the stuff you can do with it. It's aleady changed the way I watch baseball games. I've been marking Giants games to record. Then I come into the game about half way through, and watch the first part of the game in fast motion, slowing down when the Giants are batting, speeding up over ads, pitching changes, etc. By the time the game is in the final innings, I've caught up with the live version, and watch it. Curious. Is this a better way to watch baseball? I don't know yet. For big games, and for times when one's feeling leisurely, then the entire game is more fun to watch in real time; I know, especially with the excellent Giants announcers, I'm missing a lot. (Still, as lousy as the Giants have been doing the last couple weeks, it's hard to justify giving them more time.) One other change, it's hard when actively watching with the remote, to do what I normally do when watching this kind of TV, namely catch up on my newspaper, magazine, and web reading.
10:47:08 PM Permalink
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Touchgraph
I have a feeling this has been around for a while, but I'm just noticing it. An interesting graphical interface to Google results searching for links to particular websites. It's an interesting way to find out what's in the neighborhood of a particular site, and bears more examination.
10:42:30 PM Permalink
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Circles in the Crops, Holes in the Head
Okay, here's a choice between two explanations. 1. Crop Circles are caused by normal people, the kind you see every day of the week. or 2) They are caused by some unknown cause, perhaps an unknown plasma or aliens.
Now, given these two explanations, and given that people have demonstrated how they create them, what explanation do you believe? Amazingly enough, or perhaps not, there are those who believe the second explanation (which is, of course, no explanation at all).
In 1991, two elderly chaps told the British newspaper Today that they were responsible for the crop circles. Doug Bower and Dave Chorley claimed they'd started making the circles as a prank one Friday night in 1978 after downing a few pints at a pub in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge. Over 13 years, they'd created more than 1,000 glyphs, they said, and copycats had done the rest.
To prove their point, they created a crop circle while a reporter watched. It was a simple process. They set up a pole with a string attached to the top. They pulled the string taut and walked in a circle. That created the perimeter. Then they flattened the grain inside the circle by pushing wooden planks around.
When they finished, the newspaper summoned Patrick Delgado, a prominent crop circle researcher. Delgado inspected the circle and issued his learned opinion:
"No human being could have done this," he said. "These crops are laid down in these sensational patterns by an energy that remains unexplained and is of a high level of intelligence."
But that's not good enough for some wonderbrains:
"Doug and Dave certainly did make some of them," Andrews says. "But we know they didn't make them all. Many farmers tell you they had circles in the '60s. An elderly man told me he had circles in his field in 1923 and 1924 -- as noted in his diary."
What's cool, though, is that it's not just pranksters any more. It's become a conceptual art form:
Lundberg and the Circlemakers are eager to take crop circles into pop culture. They maintain an elaborate Web site (www.circlemakers.org), and they've created crop circles for use in ads for Weetabix crackers and Mountain Dew. They also sell crop circle postcards, T-shirts and how-to manuals.
This activity is regarded as blasphemy by mystics who see crop circles as religious objects. Consequently, Lundberg says, he has received hundreds of nasty e-mails.
The goofier the belief, it seems, the harder it becomes for people to let it go, and the more drastic their reaction to those who would pop their bubble. Doesn't matter if it's crop circles, UFOs, bigfoot, Ron Hubbard, Uri Geller, or Jesus. If person A says he can magically bend spoons, and then Person B bends the spoon and shows you that it doesn't take magic to do it, then why continue to believe that Person A has magcial powers?
9:02:23 PM Permalink
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Come All Without, Come All Within
Yow! In last night's concert in Baltimore, Bob sang Quinn, The Eskimo. It's the first live outing of this tune since the August 31, 1969 Isle of Wight Concert. That version is preserved in all its, err, glory, on Self Portrait.
A cat's meow and a cow's moo, I can recite 'em all,
Just tell me where it hurts yuh, honey,
And I'll tell you who to call.
Nobody can get no sleep,
There's someone on ev'ryone's toes
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here,
Ev'rybody's gonna wanna doze.
Come all without, come all within,
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn.
(But check out the real lyrics and guitar tab at My Back Pages.
8:42:18 PM Permalink
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Ashcroft's Hellish Vision
Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants.
Clearly this man is not fit for his office, and neither is the man who appointed him. It's time for him to go. Every day he serves is an insult to Americans who believe in freedom.
9:18:01 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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