brainrow

From CNET, this quote of the day:

At a public hearing in Los Angeles Tuesday before the Federal Communications Commission, consumer groups, civil rights leaders, independent content producers, journalists and the like argued that media consolidation is killing creativity and diversity.

“Homogenization is good for milk,” said Patric Verrone, president of Writers Guild of America, West. “But it’s bad for ideas.”

Surely everybody agrees with that.

I need this:

Sharp has produced a 64-inch LCD monitor that provides screen resolution four times that of normal high-definition screens. Normal HD screens have 2 million pixel points. The new Sharp monitor, which is on display at the Ceatec technology trade show here this week, sports 4,096-by-2,160 pixel-line resolution — double the number of vertical and horizontal pixel lines offered by a normal HD screen. This comes out to nearly 9 million pixel points.

…

The screen, still in the development phase, will be targeted at film and television producers as well as medical researchers, a Sharp representative said. The exhibit is one of the more popular at the weeklong trade show taking place outside Tokyo. But eventually, these technologies trickle down to the consumer market.

Now! Now! Now! Now! NOW!

Other prototypes being shown include a screen with a technology Sharp calls Mega Contrast. The screen has a 1 million-to-1 contrast ratio. Typical HD LCD screens sport a 1,200-to-1 contrast ratio.

I hate technology. It brings out the worst in me.

The downside of embedding videos from YouTube: when YouTube is having trouble, I’m having trouble, too.

Right after the terror attacks in 2001, even the folks poking fun at George W. Bush believed that he would rise to confront history’s challenge. It’s five years later, and boy, were we ever wrong!

Sometimes I have a suspicious mind.

Got a phone call early today. A recorded voice said they had detected suspicious activity on my credit card, and asked me to call an 800 number to confirm or deny those transactions.

But I wondered: how do I know this call is really from the bank that issued my credit card? How do I know the 800 number is legit? The whole thing reminds me too much of phishing, which has become familiar in email, but seems new over the phone.

I mention this here because this may be an early sign of a new trend in fraud, and it’s good to be alert to these things.

Update: There is a new scam called “vishing” — phishing by voice. From USA Today:

The upshot: “If you get a telephone call where someone is asking you to provide or confirm any of your personal information, immediately hang up and call your financial institution with the number on the back of the card,” said Paul Henry, a vice president with Secure Computing Corp. “If it was a real issue, they can address the issue.”

PC World has a list of the 25 worst web sites:

From unforgettable flame-outs to some of the most popular destinations around, no one is safe from our look at the world’s dumbest dot-coms and silliest sites.

I hate it when I lose out on an award just because I wasn’t even considered. Oh, well. There’s always next year.

Via 43 Folders, Cory Doctorow on why we should stay away from Amazon Unbox (Warning: strong language):

Amazon’s new video-on-demand store may sound like a good idea, but once you take a look at the “agreement” you enter into by giving them your money, that changes. The Amazon terms-of-service are among the worst I’ve ever seen, a document through which you surrender your rights to privacy, integrity of your personal data, and control over your computer, in exchange for a chance to pay near-retail cost to watch Police Academy n-1.

…

When you sign onto Unbox, you sign away all the amazing customer rights that Amazon itself is so careful to protect. Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don’t belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.

Amazon Unbox’s user agreement isn’t just galling for its evilness — it’s also commercially suicidal. No sane person will agree to this.

Tonight on The Daily Show, “Senior White House Correspondent” John Oliver tried to explain how the American people are simultaneously safe and not-safe. He assured us that the Bush Administration failed in response to Hurricane Katrina only because of a pre-8/29 mindset, and that those mistakes would not be repeated in a post-8/29 world. And he summed up by saying this:

George W. Bush is the right man to lead us in the era post whatever horrible calamity he leads us into next.

The New York Times’ Portraits of Grief remind us, with photos and short biographies, just how much we lost.

From Daily Kos, absolutely wrenching, THIS is What 9/11 Felt Like:

Suddenly, we are watching the first tower collapse upon itself. I used to work Downtown, and I know lower Manhattan like the back of my hand. I try to imagine what could be happening to the people who are outside the towers, and how far the collapsed tower would have fallen on the city blocks around it. Then, I get a call from a neighbor who tells me not to worry about my husband, who is at the ferry on lower Manhattan, trying to get to his car on the New Jersey side.  I continue to watch the television, as the second tower collapses. My babysitter’s daughter calls now, crying; she doesn’t know where her husband is, so I tell my babysitter to go home. She leaves, and suddenly, I hear jets scrambling directly over my house. For a moment, I think it may be a nuclear attack, because they are so fast, and so loud. I grab my two-year-old, and rush for the basement, thinking about my other two children just two blocks away. I sit under a doorway downstairs, try to calm my child, and pray.

I suppose this has become a 9/11 tradition here.

Back in 2001, I enjoyed visiting a light-hearted Macintosh news and rumor parody site called As the Apple Turns. Sadly, the site was last updated in October of last year, and the search engine and some of the links there don’t seem to be working now. So this link, from September 12, 2001, comes by way of the WayBack Machine:

This, Too, Shall Pass? (9/12/01).

I can’t give you a brief excerpt. You have to go read the whole thing.

It’s a 9/11 tradition.

On the PBS NewsHour tonight was poet Lucille Clifton, reading from her poem “September Songs, A Poem in Seven Days.” My own transcription:

Tuesday, 9/11:
Thunder and lightning and our world is another place.
No day will ever be the same,
No blood untouched.
They know this storm in other wheres:
Israel, Ireland, Palestine,
But God has blessed America, we sing.
And God has blessed America,
To learn that no one is exempt.
The world is one.
All fear is one.
All life, all death, all one.

From the BBC: ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin killed.

Australian environmentalist and television personality Steve Irwin has died during a diving accident.

Mr Irwin, 44, was killed by a stingray barb to the chest while he was filming an underwater documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.

In these times of modern times, when you can’t tell your ACs from your DCs, aren’t we all looking for a little stopping power? — Firesign Theatre

Speaking of Bob Geiger, he’s reposted a piece he wrote last year called I Know This Little Boy In New Orleans. I didn’t know about Geiger’s blog last year, so I’m glad he reposted this. Go read the whole thing, please.

I know the little boy in this picture.

No, I don’t know him personally. But he is roughly the same age as my small son. This boy is beautiful, innocent, vulnerable and probably very scared in this photo.

I know this young boy.

New calamities, outrages and diversions rush at us every day — every hour, sometimes — each one dragging our attention away from the one before. They come so quickly, it seems, that we don’t have time to truly understand any one of these events. Inspired by a photo of a little boy stuck in the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, Gieger stopped the world for a moment, and probed for a deeper understanding.

Read it. And once you’ve read it, stop the world for another moment. Think about the Palestinian and Lebanese children under Israeli bombs, and about the Israeli children under Hezbollah and Hamas rockets and terror bombings. Think of the people whose homes and jobs and families were swept away by the Indian Ocean tsunami, or by earthquakes in Pakistan, or by “ethnic cleansing” in Darfur. Think of all the photos of missing faces tacked up in New York City by desperate friends and loved ones after the murderous attacks of 9/11. Think of ordinary people trying to live a decent life in Baghdad without becoming someone’s “collateral damage.”

Hurts, doesn’t it?

I have a friend who says “life is cheap” in the Mideast. During the Vietnam War, I heard it said that the Vietnamese don’t respect life the way we do. Sure. And as Daffy Duck once said, “I’m not like other people — pain hurts me.”

It’s no wonder the 24-hour news networks give us a relentless diet of inconsequential trivia rather than getting to the bottom of events that are killing hundreds of children today. It’s anesthesia.

My youth is long gone, but I’m holding onto my immaturity, by gosh. Just like Lakehead University:

A small Canadian university has sparked controversy with its recruitment drive by using posters and a website mocking US President George W Bush.

Lakehead University in northern Ontario set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students.

It shows a picture of Yale graduate Mr Bush with the caption: “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.”

…

“Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.”

…

Student union president Isabelle Poniatowski told Reuters the campaign was low-brow and lacked class.

“It still strikes me as being very repugnant,” she said. “Lakehead has so many positive attributes that you could really sell to people that live down south.”

And what does a university have if it doesn’t have class?

Sure, this recruitment campaign is immature and inappropriate. Here’s to immaturity and inappropriateness.

In the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan tracks down a web guitar wizard:

Eight months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube, the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply “guitar.” A black-and-white title card gave the performer’s name as funtwo.

…

Like a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video drew hordes of seekers with diverse interests and attitudes. Guitar sites, MySpace pages and a Polish video site called Smog linked to it, and viewers thundered to YouTube to watch it. If individual viewings were shipped records, “guitar” would have gone gold almost instantly. Now, with nearly 7.35 million views — and a spot in the site’s 10 most-viewed videos of all time — funtwo’s performance would be platinum many times over. From the perch it’s occupied for months on YouTube’s “most discussed” list, it generates a seemingly endless stream of praise (riveting, sick, better than Hendrix), exegesis, criticism, footnotes, skepticism, anger and awe.

The most basic comment is a question: Who is this guy?

Heffernan tracks down funtwo, a 23-year-old Korean named Jeong-Hyun Lim. On the way, she introduces us to Jerry Chang, who created this guitar arrangement, and takes us into a half-hidden world of spectacular talent, creativity, skill and dedication outside fame’s spotlight.

Online guitar performances seem to carry a modesty clause, in the same way that hip-hop comes with a boast. Many of the guitarists, like Mr. Chang and Mr. Lim, exhibit a kind of anti-showmanship that seems distinctly Asian. They often praise other musicians, denigrate their own skills and talk about how much more they have to practice. Sometimes an element of flat-out abjection even enters into this act, as though the chief reason to play guitar is to be excoriated by others. As Mr. Lim said, “I am always thinking that I’m not that good player and must improve more than now.”

…

Mr. Lim’s fans said they watch his “Canon Rock” video daily, as it inspires them to work hard. When I watch, I feel moved by Mr. Lim’s virtuosity to do as he does: find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new Internet world demands.

I’m not terribly concerned that our popular culture values swagger and denigrates competence. But I do worry that our political culture does that, too.