L'Inconnue de la Seine : The death mask of this unidentified Parisian teenage suicide became a popular early-20th century objet d'art , eventually the model for the face of the standard CPR training mannequin.
Cauliflower Hindenburg : taken from a series of model reconstructions of famous explosions, made from cauliflower.
'Supergiant' crustacean found in deepest ocean : 34cm amphipod discovered in the Kermadec Trench.
I was churlishly unimpressed by the iTunes "12 days" Christmas promotion this year. However whilst subsequently browsing the iTunes Store home page I did find one app that impressed me enough to blog about.
There's a store section called " Apps Starter Kit " which lists a dozen or so applications that Apple are promoting as "must have" installs for new iOS users. I installed a handful of these to my iPhone 3GS, but the one that has most impressed me so far is the iOS edition of DragonDictate .
It's a "split brain" app, by which I mean it uses "the cloud" to perform the text-to-speech conversion. So far I have been quite impressed with the accuracy of the process, in fact I have created this blog post by dictating while walking the dog, with just a little editing afterwards for tidy up and to add hyperlinks. I suppose it is a little like a poor man's edition of Siri, minus the pretend A.I. and the search and reminders integration.
You can get text by dictating into a text box within the application and there is a quick menu of options that allow you to create an SMS or an e-mail or copy the text to the system clipboard easily for use in other applications. This collaboration isn't too clunky and although dictating text into your phone is a little stilted it doesn't seem to be significantly less effective than my relatively crappy typing on the iPhone on-screen keyboard.
The app was free, presumably it's intended as a promotional device to introduce users to the Dragon family of software applications. Obviously there are some privacy concerns raised by having the voice processing performed on a remote server, but the terms and conditions include a privacy policy which guarantees to preserve your anonymity and keep your data private. The application did even prompted me to ask if I wanted all of my contact names uploaded to the remote service for greater the use of name recognition, and took pains to explain that this would only include name fields from my contacts database and no other personally identifying information or contact details.
I am not sure I would make a habit of using it for writing long articles or even blog posts like this but I think it could prove to be quite useful for such purposes as short e-mail replies or even sending SMS messages in situations where it's inconvenient to type.
Faster Fourier Transform : MIT researchers will present a new algorithm that improves on FFT.
I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you : Neal Pollack clearly knew him very well indeed.
According to wikipedia, the term " Churnalism " was first coined by a BBC journalist. I think they may still have journalists working there.
See how many items of product placement you can see in this proud piece of presumably PR-led "pop sci" about smart vending machines . I found it, prominently linked, on the BBC news home page on Boxing Day. The entire notion has a whiff that classic of white elephant puffery from the old school the internet fridge about it.
I don't know if I'm alone in finding this sort of thing repellant. The motivation to whip up this kind of nearly content-free guff into page length pieces must come from somewhere, which means a degree of specific intent. There's the skeleton of an interesting piece on mechanical learning and commercial interests buried in there somewhere, but I find it difficult to read when I keep being stabbed in the eyes by blatant marketing copy, much of which I uncharitably suspect of being pasted in directly from the source press-release. The focus of the piece ought to be on the science, perhaps some of the biometrics and algorithms supporting the interesting sounding audience impression metric (AIM) software , but that's given a throwaway mention; instead the article's centre of gravity seems distorted to orbit around some recently launched consumer products, with little depth of story. Weird details leave unanswered questions hanging. In what way is a new Jell-O SKU "Just for adults" to the extent that it requires a screening interview by femputer ? Titillating teaser questions like this are familiar marketing devices used to capture and exploit base curiosity, but seem out of place in a news piece without any resolution. How does the system handle adults whose body shape diverges strongly from their defined four age brackets? What the merry heck is a general manager of personal solutions anyway?
I gave up counting the product placement incidents after the first couple of paragraphs. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the BBC house style rules would know just how many direct repetitions of the properly capitalized brand names Kraft and Intel are strictly necessary, but there seem to be an awful lot of them littering the piece. There's a lovely Intel i7 box graphic three-quarters of the way down the piece; it seems to me only tangentally related to the story, yet conveniently re-uses the branding iconography supporting their current consumer-targetted CPU line.
Like many a British license-fee payer, I have a peculiar, combative slightly proprietorial relationship with the BBC; being in some weird sense a stake-holder in this unique broadcasting organisation; pride mingles with a misplace sense of ownership, disappointment tangles with admiration. Once upon a time I viewed their web initiatives as exemplary, inspirational and essential. These days they seem increasingly overcooked, irrelevant, and misguided.
I realise, in a sense, I'm a grumpy old man ranting at the telly, but I think this tapering off of content quality provided by BBC online is a real thing. If so, a really worrying trend; added to this we have an effectively Conservative administration, who I'm sure would love to see the BBC, already in retreat, broken up further. Spreading out the more lucrative parts of the special quasi-monopoly, to their chums in commercial broadcasting whilst binning even more of the less lucrative parts in the name of austerity would fit in well with their principles of government.<p> 
This year scheduling means our turn for hosting the big family meal falls on Christmas eve. Mrs S. did the lion's share of the cooking, facilitated by a new kitchen, more commodious than the postage stamp sized galley we've had for the past couple of years. Champagne, ice-cream,CBeebies pantomime on a loop, nut-roast, sprout and chestnut soup, mechanical penguins, musical crackers, roasted vegetables, and plenty of early presents for young Ada May to open and get over-excited about. Merry Christmas to all four of my readers!
The cognitive benefits of chewing gum : Study shows chewing gum effectively boosts mental performance.
Ken Russell RIP : One of the 'name' directors that made me realise I was pretty interested in film.
Of course, I bought and read the Jobsography , Kindle edition, naturally. While I'm not sure I identify with all the howling fanboys' anguished reviews, given my role as super-NEXTSTEP-fanboy I was a bit disappointed, although not particularly surprised, at the relative lack of NeXT content. So I was overjoyed when this 1986 PBS documentary , featuring NeXT in it's pre-launch startup guise, popped up in it's wake. The linked blog post also contains the NeXT stevenote, from the eventual product launch.
Of course it's not actually running NEXTSTEP. Of course, in a sense it is. Just like your phone.
Thanks to ebay. I like the fact that the sticker arrived with a little template indicating the correct 28° of jaunt. I ignored it of course, and just lined it up by eye.
Things that Turbo Pascal 3 is smaller than : The Turbo Pascal 3.02 IDE and compiler, for MS-DOS, was an executable slightly less than 40KB in size. Here's a list of computery things that are larger than that.
As if finding young me in a box wasn't enough of a memo from Father Time, I've had the "circle of life" message underlined firmly this weekend, by throwing my back out. I mean, properly out, like a sit-com old man, or a Dad from the pages of the Beano. Lifting hurts, walking hurts, sitting mostly hurts, breathing hurts, and bending over is right out. It's one of those marvellous hysterical systems, as the slightest twinge of pain induces all sorts of involuntary tensing in the frantically overcompensating muscle superstructure of my back. The lower nervous system is clear in it's mission. No harm must befall the spine. I strongly suspect that the resultant freezing and spasm makes everything significantly more painful than the original twinge would have managed on it's own, but I am not a doctor. Even though I often assure people that I am, this is actually a well-practiced lie, serving the purposes of antique stock-comedy forms.
The generational aspect of this calamity draws from the fact that I triggered the strain whilst throwing young Ada May ceilingward, in response to her requests to "play flying". Unluckily for me, the initial spasm occurred at the point of release of a throw, meaning that despite my attention being drawn to all sorts of immediate and novel spinal trauma, I still had an falling two year old to catch safely before I could collapse sobbing to the floor with my honour and dignity intact. Two year old children, I must say, are quite a bit heavier than their one year old incarnation.
The thing with back trouble, most sources assure me, is to try and persevere through it. Grit one's teeth, and carry on as much of your normal routine as you can manage. On no account admit defeat and flee to your bed rest. Rest will relax and weaken your back, and exacerbate the problem, or if you're unlucky, invent some new ones. And so I struggle forwards in embittered mimicry of my daily routine, gasping and wheezing and moaning every couple of steps, frozen in place with involuntary grimacing stuck to my face. It has taken me nearly twice as long to get to work as it ordinarily might. Negotiating St. Pancras, I find myself flooded with sympathy for anybody with genuine mobility problems. The place is a nightmare, and it's supposed to be one of London's newest, most accessible hubs. I inch my way towards the office. All my hope is invested in my fancy orthopaedic stool . Please, mighty German engineering, please do your work.
Twenty-five year old me pouts condescendingly from my home page as I update my blog. He's got nothing but contempt for broken backed old men. He's too vain and pre-occupied to worry himself with mundane things like exercise and posture. I'm starting to hate that guy a bit.
I was clearing out a box in the office, and a strip of passport-sized photos fell out, with one missing. Here is one of the remaining shots from this strip.
Apparently this is what I looked like, fifteen-plus years ago. I had no idea booth-photos were so indestructable. I think it's because the booth was pre-digital. I subsequently found a few other strips, in the same box which were taken a handful of years later, in a booth that used a digital process; they've blurred, bled, and run quite noticeably
jwz hands-on user support : Another one gone. I'm only just starting to realise that all this time, I've been blessed to live in the time of the giants.
Behind the scenes pick of the day : AICN archive of cute on-set photographs taken from well-loved movies.
Mr. David Hepworth , of the lovely Word Magazine (I subscribe !), a usually reliable, and always interesting cultural commentator just blogged a piece about the reactions to the untimely passing of ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs . I think his assessment of Mr Jobs' cultural impact is wrong. I was going to present my reaction in place on his blog, although it did seem to grow a little too long for the commentary section, and I subsequently found out that his blogger site seems to be set up disallow comments from people who aren't logged in to a Google account, which I object to, somewhat dogmatically. So I decided to post my piece here, and link back to his , which is more in keeping with my own views about how the Web ought to run.
I don't disagree fundamentally with the tone of the piece. I do share his unease over the now seemingly mandatory broadcast grief marathons that accompany any death in the public eye, and I find an unpleasant hint of infantile narcissim in the fetish relationship between the user and product celebrated with the mass parades of public Apple evangelists and their iDevices, which might be a cousin to the sentiments he expresses about toys and proportional responses.
This attempt to sum up Mr. Jobs as a super-skilled marketer I think underestimates the scale, and perhaps also the nature of Mr. Jobs' contributions, some of which are subtle, many of which may look obvious, but usually only by hindsight. Even if his role was solely as a provoker, and curator of works; and I doubt it was, the truth is rarely that neat - he seems to have his fingerprints near the genesis of a string of transformational products, which do seem to fulfill the cliche of yes, changing the world.
Start at the beginning: His role in realising the portable microcomputer as a packaged appliance, something like a food processor, that people could be taught to directly integrate into their homes and offices. The Apple II barnstormed this market. I am not so sure as most other commentators that this idea was an obvious, archetypal product simply waiting to happen. Putting computers in your house, I think, is a fundamentally odd idea, albeit one that we have now fully naturalised. In 1976 it must have been almost schizophrenic.
Refining this idea into the Macintosh and Lisa, a specifically pioneering further insight was that a then unusual square pixel bitmapped display would better lend itself to curve plotting. This gave us the WYSIWYG relationship between the graphical computer and the laser printer , computer typography and thereby re-shaped the primary means of production for print and graphics.
The post-Apple "wilderness years" are particularly interesting. At NeXT they pioneered software controlled automated computer assembly and production, I've heard it said maybe a decade ahead of everyone else. I think they made a lot of mistakes, but I also think these lessons learned were invaluable later on. More significantly, the NeXT system software placed an elegant emphasis on "object-oriented programming", carefully enveloping the tedious nuts and bolts of interfacing with electrical computer hardware with well chosen software 'components'; tidy abstractions that lead to a system that was significantly easier to port to new hardware configurations, and simultaneously could be more-easily programmed at a higher level, without resorting to so much specialist understanding of specific hardware.
The significance of the work at NeXT will not be fully realised until later in his career, but as an intriguing footnote, it is on a NeXT workstation that a British scientist called Tim Berners-Lee develops some applications and protocols he calls the "World Wide Web". Mr Berners-Lee is on the record noting that the unique NeXT development tools allowed him to easily connect abstract layers to form useful application prototypes in the space of a couple of months.
Steve's other business during those years was Pixar . You don't have to study the history of cinema over the last two decades too hard to detect just how fundamentally Pixar shaped mainstream family movie making.
Then he returns to Apple and begins that now over-documented turnaround from prodigal son and failing company, to pin-up CEO and spectacular media and financial success. It's worth pointing out that the portablility of the NeXT system software allows them to insinuate it into Macintosh entirely. Next the iPod, and then we get iTunes, and the 'iTunes Store'. And then the same elegant software evolves to pocket phones, where the relative ease of programming buoys up the freshly invented 'App market'. And a finely edged production control builds an on-demand production, supply and retail operation that is the envy of the rest of the industry.
I'm not a professional writer as Mr. Hepworth is. I hope I don't read like I'm elegising him mawkishly like some Princess Di or Jade Goody for the "Facebook generation", or lionising him in super-human terms as though he's some over-egged digital Da Vinci, or Newton. I never met him. I'm not laying flowers anywhere. I'm sure that a huge part of his success was through fortunate timing, and developing good taste and keeping good company, but this is surely true of many whom history accounts amongst the Great, perhaps even of most. What a C.V. though!
These things are not a competition you can score, and yet I don't think most Word Magazine readers would rush to disagree with the suggestion that Steve's musical idols like Dylan or the Beatles "changed the world". I'm comfortable suggesting that to a subsequent generation, with it's own new media of choice, Steven P. Jobs influenced and changed the world to an arguably similar degree.