Caught a really good band and a really good movie tonight in Prospect Park, as part of a really good summer festival series.
Too bad it really rained lots, and I wound up really wet and muddy, but there’s nothing like watching an outdoor movie on a huge screen while there’s rain falling all around you…it’s just awesome. Really.
I just had this exchange with a computer:
19. Is it small? No.
18. Can it be painted? No.
17. Can it be washed? Yes.
16. Is it multicolored? No.
15. Can you get information by using it? No.
14. Is it heavier than a pound of butter? No.
13. Do you carry it in your pocket? No.
12. Do you use it at work? Yes.
11. Can you smell it? No.
10. Does it have a hole in it? No.
9. Is it comforting? Yes.
8. Would you find it in an office? Yes.
7. Is it soft? Yes.
6. Does it come in a pack? No.
5. Does it get wet? Irrelevant.
4. Is it a common household object? Yes.
3. Does it have a hard outer shell? No.
2. Would you find it on a farm? Yes.
1. It is classified as Other.
Now, looking at the questions above, how in the hell did it triangulate in on the correct guess: “I am guessing that it is a pair of pants?” I’m thoroughly impressed. Try it out yourself…
Just stumbled across a link for Evill.net, a free rooftop wi-fi network in the East Village. Makes me wish I lived on the other side of the East River (and had a rooftop garden, to boot).
Check out Tribe.net…seems like a substantially more sophisticated network-driven service, far more flexible than Friendster, and more useful for those of us looking to do more than just meet people to date (for example, soon-to-be-job-hunting me)…sign up, and add me as a friend…
It’s been a great week, especially the past few days, for seeing familiar faces. A bunch of my friends from Hopkins met in NYC this past weekend for “Men’s Night”, which Kevin does a better job of explaining than I could.
Myself, I’m good friends with these guys, some more than others, but they’ve got a history that goes back several years before I met any of them, and I’ve always tended to fade into the background a little when they’re all together (shades of being the college freshman hanging out with a bunch of seniors). I’m not actually a participant in Men’s Night proper – it was never my tradition, and I never felt bad about not being included.
This weekend, though, was maybe the first time I ever felt completely and totally a part of this group of guys. From dinner at Virgil’s on Friday night, to brunch, a museum and wandering the Strand on Saturday, I felt like I fit in, was one of the gang. I still wasn’t around for Men’s Night itself, and that’s ok – the important thing to me was that I was able to see friends that I haven’t seen together in years, and have it feel like home. (Plus, I hear the initiation ritual’s a real bitch.)
It’s odd writing this, knowing that some of them will most likely read this, so Kev, Dave, Justin, Dave, Eli, Ernie and Jeremy…thanks. Seeing you all in one place made me miss…well, having you all in one place. As great as you all are, the group of you is even greater than the sum of your parts.
A few months ago, I had an e-mail exchange with my editor at Publisher’s Weekly (I do some science & technology book reviewing), in which I noted the following:
Something I’ve been noticing as I’ve been reviewing these books, in particular the last few, is that there’s a genre that might be described as:1) Take a historical figure known for one particular discovery.
2) Use their story as a jumping-off point for historical digressions,
usually one per chapter. About half of the digressions should be
scientific/philosophical, the other half political/cultural.Call it the “contextual scientific biography,” if you will…
The book that triggered this thought was Amir Aczel’s Pendulum. Now, the NY Times has their review of the same book up, and the reviewer writes:
You know the genre by now. Take a single event, object, invention (the cod, Pok√İmon, the Fender precision bass); make a grand claim for its influence (the fish, video game, instrument that “changed the world”); and offer a quickie history, with diverting asides. The results can be charming and enriching, a novel historical take that compels readers to reconsider their assumptions about cause and effect.
I wonder what it was about this particular book that seems to make people think consciously about the genre conventions of contemporary science/technology writing?
Just saw an absolutely fantastic example of the technology/public interface: Oprah did a segment on TiVo. Now, I myself haven’t gotten a TiVo yet, mainly because I don’t live in one place all the time where I have cable TV, but I have enough friends who swear by it that I’ve got a good sense of the details of what it can do (now, if I could bolt a DirecTV dish on the roof of my car and wire up a TiVo in there, that’d be a different story…)
One of the things I find fascinating about TiVo is the way in which the technology is constructed not simply as a thing in and of itself, but as a thing which is esentially a VCR, but better. Over the course of this Oprah segment, this point was hammered over and over: it’s like a VCR, but without tapes; it’s like a VCR but smarter; it’s like a VCR but easier to program.
So, not only are we seeing the construction of a new technology, we’re actually watching this happen based on understandings of an older technology. However, these tropes surrounding the VCR (particularly the idea that it’s hard to program) haven’t been around since the beginning of the industry…in fact, as I wrote in a paper that I’ll get around to sending off to be published someday, the idea of “not being able to program youtr VCR” that Oprah self-identified with only dates back to around 1990. In fact, I’ve got a copy of an old Betamax sales tape that shows how to program your Beta, and it uses pretty much the exact same rhetoric as TiVo is now.
This seems to be the life-cycle of a consumer electronic technology – introduction, obsolesence, and rebirth of a new one, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its old meanings.