Science: Interview with Dr. Bradley C. Edwards: "Keith Curtis writes 'I recently discovered that Dr. Bradley C. Edwards, noted expert on the Space Elevator pays $4 for coffee at the same Starbucks that I do. I asked him if he would meet up with me and chat and he graciously agreed. I recorded the interview for posterity. In our wide-ranging conversation we talked about NASA politics, getting energy from space, location, space tourism, software, nanotech, and several other topics.'"

(Via Slashdot.)

Also note this mentioned article by Arthur C Clarke in the Times (the other Times)

FILM WATCH: Isaac Baranoff live-blogs Birth of a N...: "

FILM WATCH: Isaac Baranoff live-blogs Birth of a Nation, amusingly. Excerpt: '7 minutes and 50 seconds into the film: another shot of the damn dogs. Okay, we get it. Southerners own animals AS WELL as Africans. ... (several minutes later:) We get the picture! You're racist, okay?'

"

(Via OxBlog.)

FW: [IP] more on Gaming industry asked to victimize themselves for charity

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Thursday, Oct 13, 2005 9:16 am
Subject: [IP] more on Gaming industry asked to victimize themselves for charity

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dave Wilson <dave@wilson.net>
Date: October 13, 2005 9:03:50 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Gaming industry asked to victimize themselves for charity

In the winter of 1874, a 14-year-old named Jesse Pomeroy was on trial for
kidnapping, mutilating and killing two children,
while on parole for torturing a series of younger boys when he was 12. His
eventual conviction makes him perhaps
America's youngest serial killer. The media circus leading up to Pomeroy's
appearance in court for murdering Mary Cullen
and Horace Mullen was dominated by a belief that his fiendish behavior was
influenced, or perhaps even caused, by a fad
that had swept up the nation over the past three years, the melodramatic
''dime novel.''

Experts said the sensational tales had corrupted Pomeroy. Without
immediate action to suppress the works or at least
keep them out of the hands of impressionable youths, they argued, any youngster exposed
to the material could be expected to engage in
the same sorts of otherwise inexplicable deeds. As the moralizing reached a
crescendo, Pomeroy himself took the stand. And
it was then the nation learned that Pomeroy was illiterate. By his own admission, he'd never read a book in his young life.

This story -- from a column I wrote in 1999 in the wake of Columbine -- is interesting, I think, for two reasons. It illustrates the fact that there's a pattern of blaming youth violence on whatever kids like at the time (jazz, rock, comics, movies, etc.). And it reminds people that murder by children is not a product of the modern age. Critics who charge that kids have never tried to kill people until the advent of video games are ignorant of history (although, to be charitable, many murders by children have almost certainly been wiped from the historical record, either because the adults in charge wanted to protect families or because they just couldn't believe a kid could do such a thing). Pomeroy, who appears to have been quite "sane" in the legal sense (he knew what he was doing was wrong, or at least against the law) was initially sentenced to death, but that was quickly commuted to life in prison since nobody really wanted to execute a child. He lived out nearly all the remainder of his life in solitary confinement (patiently hacking at the walls, floor, and bars of various cells for decades as he made dozens of attempts to escape prison, or at least get to somebody else he could kill). When heart disease rendered him harmless (he couldn't take more than a step before having to stop and catch his breath), he was finally transferred to a prison farm in 1929, where guards and other inmates would torment him by staying just out of arm's reach. He died in 1932. He lives on as a character in a couple of historical novels, and he's arguably the model used for such teen-horror staples as Freddy and Jason: amoral, sadistic, obsessive, and methodical.

Two points: Violent crime, and in particular violent crime committed by youth, has actually seen a steep decline since the introduction of videogames, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Justice Department. So if there is a relationship between videogames and youth violence, it appears to be a positive one. (I'm not saying there is; I'm just saying that if you want to make causative arguments you should at least have some statistical evidence, and not just a few claims from kids facing prison time that a videogame made them do it). And finally, offering $10,000 for somebody to develop a videogame is rather amusing, since development costs for games today are in the range of a modest movie budget, starting at about $10 million. Maybe Mr. Thomson left a few zeros off?

-dave

David Farber wrote:

>

> Begin forwarded message:

> From: Frank Wales <frank@limov.com>
Date: October 12, 2005 5:08:14 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Gaming industry asked to victimize themselves for charity

>
Dave, for IP, perhaps.

> Lawyer Jack Thomson proposes a videogame industry
bludgeon-fest as a new game scenario, in an apparent
attempt to taunt the videogame business into proving
that videogames don't influence violent behaviour:
http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5883

>
Attorney Proposes Violent Game

> October 10, 2005

> by: Matt Saunderson

> Jack Thompson will give $10,000 to charity if any videogame
company makes
and releases a game based on a scenario he created. Miami, Florida
Attorney
Jack Thompson, a long-time outspoken critic of violent and
sexually explicit
videogames, has done something totally unexpected. Thompson today
actually
proposed a violent videogame, and will pay $10,000 to the favorite
charity
of Paul Eibeler (the Chairman of Take-Two Interactive) if any
videogame
company will "create, manufacture, distribute, and sell a video
game in 2006"
based on a scenario he created.

> Thompson's proposal is titled A Modest Video Game Proposal and has
been sent
to members of the press and apparantly to Douglas Lowenstein,
President of the ESA.

> Here's Thompson's proposal (italics are his, not ours):

> "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The Golden Rule

> This writer has been saying for seven years that violent video games
can be "murder simulators" that incite as well as train some
obsessive teen players to be violent.

> I've been on 60 Minutes and in Reader's Digest this year
explaining how an
Alabama teen, with no criminal record, shot two policemen and a
dispatcher
in their heads and fled in a police car--a scenario he rehearsed
for hundreds
of hours on Take-Two/Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto video games.

> I have sat with boys in jail cells, their lives over because of murder
convictions, after they, with no history of violence, have killed
innocents
while in a dreamlike state. Said one cop who investigated such a
murder
in Grand Rapids, Michigan: "The killing was like an extension of
the game."

> The video game industry, through its lawyers, its spokesmen, and
its head
lobbyist, Doug Lowenstein, the president of the Entertainment Software
Association, all say it is utter nonsense to suggest that what is
dumped
into a kid's head hour after hour, day after day, year after year,
could
possibly have behavioral consequences. Cigarette ads can persuade kids
to smoke, but interactive simulators in which these same kids
punch, hack,
bludgeon, and maim affect not a wit their attitudes and behaviors,
notwithstanding the findings of the American Psychological
Association,
published in August 2005.

> The video game industry says Sticks and stones can break my bones,
but games
can never hurt me. Fine. I have a modest proposal for the video
game industry.
I'll write a check for $10,000 to the favorite charity of Take-Two
Interactive
Software, Inc's chairman, Paul Eibeler - a man Bernard Goldberg
ranks as #43
in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America - if any video
game company
will create, manufacture, distribute, and sell a video game in 2006
like
the following:

> Osaki Kim is the father of a high school boy beaten to death with
a baseball
bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The killer obsessively played a
violent video
game in which one of the favored ways of killing is with a bat.
The opening
scene, before the interactive game play begins, is the Los Angeles
courtroom
in which the killer is sentenced "only" to life in prison after
the judge
and the jury have heard experts explain the connection between the
game and the murder.

> Osaki Kim (O.K.) exits the courtroom swearing revenge upon the
video game industry
whom he is convinced contributed to his son's murder. "Vengeance
is mine, I
will repay" he says. And boy, is O.K. not kidding.

> O.K. is provided in his virtual reality playpen a panoply of
weapons: machetes,
Uzis, revolvers, shotguns, sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, you
name it.
Even baseball bats. Especially baseball bats.

> O.K. first hops a plane from LAX to New York to reach the Long
Island home of
the CEO of the company (Take This) that made the murder simulator
on which his
son's killer trained. O.K. gets "justice" by taking out this
female CEO, whose
name is Paula Eibel, along with her husband and kids. "An eye for
an eye,"
says O.K., as he urinates onto the severed brain stems of the
Eibel family
victims, just as you do on the decapitated cops in the real video
game Postal2.

> O.K. then works his way, methodically back to LA by car, but on
his way makes
a stop at the Philadelphia law firm of Blank, Stare and goes floor
by floor
to wipe out the lawyers who protect Take This in its wrongful
death law suits.
"So sue me" O.K. spits, with singer Jackson Brown's 1980's hit
Lawyers in Love blaring.

> With the FBI now after him, O.K. keeps moving westward, shooting
up high-tech
video arcades called GameWerks. "Game over," O.K. laughs.

> Of course, O.K. makes the obligatory runs to virtual versions of
brick and
mortar retailers Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, and Wal-Mart to steal
supplies and bludgeon store managers and cash register clerks.
"You should
have checked kids' IDs!"

> O.K. pushes on to Los Angeles. He must get there by May 10, 2006.
That is
the beginning of "E3" -- the Electronic Entertainment Expo -- the
Super Bowl
of the video game industry. O.K. must get to E3 to massacre all
the video game
industry execs with one final, monstrously delicious rampage.

> How about it, video game industry? I've got the check and you've
got the tech.
It's all a fantasy, right? No harm can come from such a game,
right? Go ahead,
video game moguls. Target yourselves as you target others. I dare you.

> Jack Thompson is a Miami lawyer who has for 18 years been involved
in efforts
to stop the marketing of adult entertainment to minors.

> It is unlikely that Thompson's proposal will actually be turned
into a game,
as most videogame companies do not simply accept proposals from
individuals.
We'll keep you updated, however, as it is very likely that there
will be some
sort of response to Thompson's proposal from members of the
videogame industry.

>

-------------------------------------http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

As a former kid on the G, I say, you poor kids on the G...

Did It Ever Return? No It Never Returned.: "

A Manhattan-bound commuter reports on a unique F-train ride this morning:

I'm on the F train into Manhattan and after Bergen Street it stops at Hoyt-Schermerhorn. Everyone's confused until the conductor finally gets on the intercom and completely clarifies by saying 'um, apparently we're at the wrong station.' So they just make the train a G instead....



Maybe the MTA can use their surplus to buy their conductors subway maps.

On the upside, at least a G finally came.

F Line [MTA.info]

"

(Via Gawker.)

Newark Liberty International Airport Terminal A travel tips: "

The line for going through the security checkpoint at

Terminal A
of

Newark Liberty International Airport splits into three lines
after you get through the ID check.
When you get to the decision point, they all look the same,
but don't be fooled.

             ID  / 3 ----------------------------------X
>>>-----------|--  2 ------------------------X
           check \ 1 -------------X

Take line 1.
As you can see, it is a much shorter wait than the others.

If you observe carefully as you get into line, you'll see that all
the people in business suits are in line 1.
That's because the business travelers
know this secret and the tourists don't.

The lines are uneven due to space constraints.
In reality, the corridor looks more like this:

             ID  / 3 -----------------------------------XXXXXXXXX---
>>>-----------|--  2 ------------------------XXXXXXXXX  XXXXXXXXX 
           check \ 1 -------------XXXXXXXXX  XXXXXXXXX--------------
                                  XXXXXXXXX-------------------------

(I still call it Newark International Airport,
since that's the name it had when I lived in New Jersey.)

"

(Via The Old New Thing.)

Frakking hilarious.

Finally an employment service for...: "

Finally an employment service for the rest of us: cronyjobs.com.

"

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Vet's obit: "send acerbic letters to Republicans": "Cory Doctorow:


This Chicago Tribune obit for a veteran called Theodore Roosevelt Heller contains the best admonition to mourners I've ever seen: 'In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans.'

Link

(via Santheo)"

(Via Boing Boing.)

Apple's "One More Thing" venue in San Jose is out of Wifi & Mobile Phone range, so I'm forced to watch the babelfish translation of the German coverage from the simulcast in London.

I found a great page on installing pine in OS X.

I'm feeling nostalgia here. That and scrolling in pine is of course faster than in Apple Mail, and it uses the built in localhost sendmail facilities to send messages, as opposed to having to connect to an external smtp server.

Hungarian Wins "Nobel" Prize for Bird Poo Breakthrough: "

Hungarian scientists may have missed out on this year's Nobel Prizes, which have been handed out over the last week, but one Magyar super-genius is getting world-wide attention for his research. József Gál and his German collaborator Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow received this year's Ig Nobel Prize in fluid dynamics for an application of complex theories of physics to the pressure sometimes found inside penguins. In their 2003 study 'Pressures Produced When Penguins Poo: Calculations on Avian Defecation,' Gál and Meyer-Rochow examined photos and other evidence and concluded that penguins crap with a force of up to 60 kilopascal, which is four times higher than the stress measured in the rear ends of humans about to make a major movement.

Gál, who teaches at Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, told New Scientist that penguins have always been known to defecate with great force, so that their waste is propelled far from their nests on the Antarctic ice. Now, thanks to their work - which you can read here - we know exactly how much force. Meanwhile, Gál's collaborator stressed that the research had been embraced by the field. '[Everybody] understood that examining the physical properties of the release of fluids through small orifices was something of general importance.' Not only that, but there also seem to be valuable commercial applications for the findings.

"

(Via Pestiside.)

For future reference...

Shanghai: Dumpling Debate: "

Responding to a recent post about the Nan Xiang dumpling house in Shanghai, travel writer Matt Gross had this to say:

The thing about Nan Xiang is that each of the three or so dining rooms has its own kitchen, with its own recipe, so the quality of your dumplings depends on where you sit. The best, supposedly, are in the top-floor, lefthand rear dining room; I had them and they were goddamn yummy -- but still not transcendent. As I wrote in my own Shanghai piece, the dumplings at Nanjing Xiao Long Bao on Taikang Lu are better. Most important, however, is the takeout line: It’s awful. Just unimaginably bad. We’re talking heavy, flavorless balls of dough here. That hundreds of people (including me, once) wait for up to an hour for these worthless wads is a culinary tragedy. Yeesh.

Seems that reserving a spot is the way to go, and be sure to ask for the recommended dining room. And visit the other joint for comparison. If you have your own dumpling recommendations, send 'em in to tips@gridskipper.com.

The Ten-Point Escape Plan: Shanghai [New York]

Previously: Soup Dumpling Nirvana, Bun-Squirting Goodness, La Villa Rouge, Jean-Georges Shanghai, Chinese Greek

"

(Via Gridskipper.)

Poll: 50% say Congress should consider impeaching Bush if he lied about Iraq: "

And the hits just keep on coming.

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.


The poll found that 50% agreed with the statement:


'If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him.'

"

(Via AMERICAblog.)

The Fish in Brown Sauce at New Green Bo that Allen saw

The Fish in Brown Sauce at New Green Bo that Allen saw
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

The centre dish at Tony's birthday dinner. A much lusted over delicacy at our favourite Chinatown haunt, which almost caused the table to rise to fisticuffs when the measure of the Brown Sauce was impugned in the context of a previous engagement at New Green Bo.

Land of Make Believe: "

October 10, 2005
For the moment, it's back to business-as-usual for Easy-motoring Nation.
Yet 73 percent of oil from the Gulf of Mexico remains 'shut in' or unavailable because of hurricane damage, and about 63 percent of natural gas production. Prior to the hurricanes, 24 percent of the nation's non-imported supply of crude came from the gulf. There are also eight refineries still shut down representing 2.1 million barrels a day of refined product capacity (900,000 barrels a day of gasoline, 500,000 of diesel and heating fuel, and 200,000 of jet fuel).

For the past month, the European Union has been sending two million barrels of crude a day to the US out of its own emergency reserves. The original deal was made in the brief lull between Katrina and Rita. It took a while for those tankers to get here. The EU imports over 15 million barrels of oil a day itself, somewhat more than the US did in pre-hurricane times.

The Federal government has loaned the oil companies crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The SPR contained 700 million barrels of crude when the hurricanes hit. The US uses 20 million barrels of oil a day, of which we produce altogether about seven million barrels ourselves. It is unclear how much oil is coming out of it now, but the last time a president tapped the SPR (Clinton) one million barrels a day were released.

These actions have beaten down the price of crude oil on the various futures markets. At the same time, gasoline pump prices have leveled off from the refinery squeeze. I doubt that the motoring public is driving a whole lot less. The commutes haven't magically gotten any shorter out in Dallas and Denver over the past month. The national fleet of SUVs has not been changed out either.

What's happening, therefore is that we have entered an eerie hiatus. Some band-aids have been applied to our oil and natural gas supply injuries and the bleeding seems to have stopped. But the truth is that our energy supplies are badly compromised and at the worst time of the year -- just as we slide into the home heating season. Here in the northeast, we have barely had to turn on the furnaces yet, but that will change in a week or two.

In the background of this scene, the global oil production peak lurks -- meaning that there does not seem to be any surplus production capacity anywhere in the world, including OPEC's big gun, Saudi Arabia. So all we have here in America is a temporary appearance of normality. When the furnaces go on, the WalMart aisles will be empty. If there is any reduction in car trips, it will be because Americans are making fewer visits to the Big Box stores. There will also be fewer trips out to visit the model homes in the new subdivisions.

Another unpleasant truth about the situation is that the US public wants to pretend that everything is okay as much as its leaders do. The public is not so much being misled as demanding that its leaders in government, business, and the news media continue a game of make-believe -- that we can still run a cheap oil economy without cheap oil.

"

(Via Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler.)

We draw the line here.

We draw the line here.
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

Yes, those are mousetraps surrounding the microwave.

We suspect a mouse is trapped under it.

I went up to Jeanne's this evening to see Rebecca, in town for a wedding.

I miss having her around.

In fifteen minutes, she managed to sell me on the concept of Portland, Oregon. (pronounced oregin, I'm told)

Bec, you've got a helluva silver tongue...

BORK BORK BORK BORK

Bork Borks Harriet: "Oh, those right wingers. They moaned and complained for years about the treatment Robert Bork got when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The term 'bork' was created as a result.

Well, well, well. Look who's doing the borking now:

Robert Bork - whose nomination to the high court was rejected by the Senate in 1987 - called the choice of Miers 'a disaster on every level.'

'It's a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you're on the court already,' Bork said Friday on MSNBC's 'The Situation with Tucker Carlson.' 'It's kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who've been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years.'

Those wingers are really starting to eat their own. This is what happens when the enforcer, Karl Rove, is too distracted to keep everyone in line."

(Via AMERICAblog.)