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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 27 declined, 7 accepted (34 total, 20.59% accepted)

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Submission + - Ask SD: Project Scope and Length for MLB Robot Ump

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "The League Championship Series (LCS) of baseball are upon us, and numerous sports media pundits, armies of fans at comment boards, and TV people are openly debating the possibility of robot umpires coming to the MLB, to either replace or enhance the human umps' work on the field. Question: what kind of project are we reasonably talking about here; what would the scope and length be from planning/design to user testing/implementation (presumably in a spring training/minor league setting)? What kinds of hardware (video scanners, touch-sensitive bases/foul lines, etc.) and software would be required?"

Submission + - Portrait of Binney (newyorker.com)

Submitted by nightcats
nightcats writes: This New Yorker article contains a portrait of crypto-mathematician Bill Binney and his ThinThread NSA program, which he claims had the ability to detect and forerstall the 9/11 attacks, had it been in place instead of the Trailblazer program, which withered on its vine during the Bush years.
Spam

Submission + - Next Spam Craze: Finger Lengthening Products (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "It turns out that all those penile lengthening schemes and products that have filled our spam bins for so long are completely misplaced: what we men really need are finger-lengtheners:

The longer a man's fourth or ring finger is compared to his index finger, the more likely he is to be judged attractive by women, according to a new study.

"

Submission + - Kaku's Dark Prediction for the End of Moore's Law (salon.com)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "An excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book appears at salon.com, in which he sees a dark economic future within the next 20 yrs. as Moore's law is brought to an end when single-atom transistors give way to quantum states. Kaku predicts: "Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.""
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Never Trust Your Spell Checker, Lesson DCXVII (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by nightcats
nightcats writes: In a bad economy, publishers often bring the axe down on editors and proofreaders first. And every so often, it costs them big time. But at least the rest of us get to laugh. The opening paragraph of this BBC story says it all:

An Australian publisher has had to pulp and reprint a cook-book after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.


Idle

Submission + - Beta Coffins on Sale at Wal-Mart

Submitted by nightcats
nightcats writes: Describing it as a "limited beta test," Wal-Mart announced its plans to offer coffins to its shoppers. The question, of course, is: how quickly can Death get to RC and will it ever go gold? In the Wal-Mart world, of course, beta comes with a price: $900 for a Mom or Dad coffin, all the way up to $2900 for a bronze sarcophagus. The Wal-Mart logo says it all: "save money, die better."
Books

Submission + - 30th Anniversary of The Dancing Wu Li Masters (dailyrevolution.net)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "It has been 30 years since Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters first appeared in print and made quantum physics entertaining, humorous, and comprehensible to the general reader. Over the following decades, the book became a classic of its type and a model of how you can present modern science to a popular audience without distorting or dumbing down the essentials. There is a brief review here."
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - Put Down That Red Bull, Geek! (idealbite.com)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "Ideal Bite has a feature recommending eco-friendly energy drinks for geeks: "try an all-natural energy drink before you suck down another Red Bull. Eye openers like açai and guarana now come in tasty drinks, ready to give you the speed you need to work it on the dance floor."

And if you're staying up all weekend to read Harry Potter, you'll be ready."
Technology (Apple)

Submission + - Confessions of a Mac Fanboy: Criticism of Apple (dailyrevolution.net)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "Apple momentum is now in juggernaut force: later this month, expect to see new iMacs — arguably the best desktop hardware out there. And we're 3 months away from Leopard, with its new previewing, file management, backup, and workspace features. All dizzyingly cool, but let me add a few admittedly petty recommendations: Can we fix the traffic light? You know, the window control buttons that correspond to Windows' dash-square-X protocol? I don't care that Apple has them on the left side of the window (anyone who knows me knows I lean left, anyway), but should I need a Geiger counter to find them on a laptop display? Make them big and easy to get to...not like in Windows, but more like Linux/KDE. Here's a lesson straight from Windows: for god's sake, can't we have the ability to resize a window in all corners/sides? Apple gives you one (lower right). Re-naming files: This is a big one, because we do it all the time, especially those of us who take a lot of pictures. You unload your camera's contents into iPhoto and want to give the files unique names. Here's how it works now: You drag the picture to the desktop. You select the file "P7004305839045.jpg" or whatever, and hit Enter. You're ready to edit. But the whole file name is overwritten as soon as you start typing, so you have to remember to put the correct extension in at the end. Why not set the default so you're overwriting only the file name prefix, but not the extension? The current one (in this case .jpg) can remain, and if the user wants to change the format, he can but doesn't have to. Make sense? Make friends with the Penguin: OS X has a UNIX / BSD core and runs X11. Google has a Linux version of Picasa; Firefox, Opera, Real, and other major software providers make Linux versions of their major products. Can't Apple make Linux versions of Safari, Quicktime, and iTunes? They're all free for Windows users: what's the problem, Steve? Can't afford the geeks to do it with? The day I see a Linux version of iTunes, I'll know you're serious and sincere in what you say about DRM. Death by a thousand charges: Two dollars to get an 802.11n driver; $30 for Quicktime Pro every time there's an upgrade (I've paid that twice so far, for v6 and v7, in the space of less than two years); $100 for dot-mac when Google gives me equal or better features NC; $100 a year to get to the front of the line at the Genius Bar. Do your shareholders have you handcuffed to continue this money-bleed, in exchange for them looking the other way when someone on exec row fiddles with dates on stock prices? Be careful, Steve: it could alienate people who might otherwise be attracted to your good stuff. I can say for a certainty that it's beginning to alienate this one-time Mac fanboy. Much as I love Apple hardware, and as much as I'll take a long, close look at those new iMacs later this month, the likelihood is that my next desktop machine will be a PC running Linux."
Enlightenment

Submission + - Book Review: "The Starfish and the Spider" (dailyrevolution.net)

Submitted by
nightcats
nightcats writes: "Cindy Sheehan is leaving the anti-war movement to which she gave so much life, energy, and focus. She will be back, no doubt, in some form. I wish her well in restoring herself and renewing her own life. But I firmly disagree (and this is a blue-moon moment) with William R. Pitt that "Anyone glad for her departure from activism is celebrating a disaster." While I doubt I'd use the word "glad" to describe my own feelings, certainly "relieved" qualifies. At any rate, in no way does "disaster" describe this moment. Quite the contrary: this woman endured everything from divorce to death threats to arrest to public taunting and ridicule from the mass media; it is time she retreated and renewed. There is also a broader theme to this, which I am going to explain with a book review. Yes, a book review. The book is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The authors are Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, and they have written one of the most crystalline gems of social insight that I have seen in any non-fiction these past 20 years. In a mere 200 pages of text, these two Stanford grads provide more clarity of perspective on our society, its group psychologies and cultural transformations, than you are likely to get from a shelf full of punditry or a year's worth of television. I do not think I am overstating the case for this book: it is the most important and clarion piece of non-fiction to arise in this first decade of the 21st century. It is a book made for, and by, its era. The metaphor of the title is a comparison of "top-down", hierarchically-structured groups and organizations, such as we are all familiar with in corporate America and government (that's the spider, who can be made lame from the loss of its legs and dead from decapitation); and the fresh wave of decentralized, leaderless, or non-hierarchical organizations that have become such a force in society over the past decade of the Internet (this is the "starfish," which can be chopped up into numerous pieces, each of which will respond by growing a new organism or member). The book opens with a heady analysis of how a starfish phenomenon evolved in one particular category: the P2P file sharing services in the Napster/Grokster model. The authors show how the early versions of these spontaneous organizations got stuck in "spider" mode, and were therefore eventually trapped and killed by big corporate media and its legal juggernaut. But these Napster-type experiments benefited from such attacks by a response of ever-increasing differentiation, diversification, and "starfish"-style regrowth. Brafman and Beckstrom finally lead the reader to the eMule service, which took decentralization to the point of anonymity and total leaderlessness. Big Media cannot attack an entity like eMule, because it has no head, no governance, no bank accounts: there is nothing for a legal or corporate machine to assault, except for individual users of the service, who, aside from being virtually innumerable, are mostly children and rarely wealthy. The authors go on to reveal both the beauty and the danger inherent in the starfish-mode of organizational being, drawing examples as diverse as Wikipedia and al Qaeda. Along the way, they present portraits of environmental groups, activist organizations, online merchants, and Internet services. But if this book stopped with mere sketches of eBay, Alcoholics Anonymous, Apache, craigslist, Goodwill Industries, and IBM, then it would be merely an interesting intellectual snack for the MBA crowd. The Starfish and the Spider becomes a banquet of cultural insight because it digs past the surface that so many pundits and social commentators stop to admire. Brafman and Beckstrom turn the starfish on its back, examine it in varying light, carry it into vastly disparate environments, and constantly ask questions of it. In doing so, they discover some principles and characteristics common to starfish organizations and the people who inspire and influence their growth. One of their most fascinating discoveries is in the figure of what they term "the catalyst." It is here that we are brought back to Cindy Sheehan (this is my own connection, so if you think it's a stupid association, don't blame the authors of the book). The catalyst is the person who founds a starfish group, the one who gives it form, ideas, value, focus, and meaning. Examples of catalysts that Brafman and Beckstrom offer are: # Granville Sharp, leader of the abolitionist movement against slavery in England # Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who founded the women's suffrage movement that Susan B. Anthony later took up with still greater energy # Craig Newmark of craigslist # Bill Wilson of AA One thing the authors point out is that a catalyst is like the architect of a house: he's essential to the long-term structural integrity, but he doesn't move in. In fact, when the catalyst stays around too long and becomes absorbed in his creation, the whole structure becomes more centralized. So one common feature to the life and health of a growing decentralized movement or organization is that the catalyst almost always leaves or at least recedes into the mesh of the whole, once the group has matured enough to work autonomously and to withstand assault. Whenever a catalyst attempts to assume a traditional, CEO-type of leadership role, the organization loses its dynamism, its life as a starfish, and becomes a centralized, hierarchical spider — much easier to mark, and then suppress or assimilate. For a corporate entity, this may not necessarily be a bad thing: growth-as-profit, after all, can be nurtured in a traditional corporate management structure. But growth-as-message can become stilled or silenced when there's a top dog in place, approving this, denying that; or simply being a figurehead in a particular place as the focus of activism or just attention. The anti-war movement has benefited enormously from Cindy Sheehan's presence, personality, experience, and energy. We have admired her from afar for some two years now: I first wrote about her here (note also that the fractiousness and in-fighting that Sheehan noted in her parting statement existed way back then, too). Since then, however, the movement has grown, thanks largely to Sheehan's example and leadership. But I agree with Brafman and Beckstrom, that a time inevitably comes for every starfish organization when its formative human force must retreat. In our own democracy's formative stage, George Washington had to decline the crown that his followers attempted to place on his head. Other catalysts have had to spurn a crown or a corner office, and always for the good of the whole, for the sake of the movement's continued growth. Since Sheehan first camped out in George Bush's backyard, Code Pink, IVAW, and hundreds of other "starfish arms and legs" have formed around her and taken on their own life in the anti-war sea. It is time that these organisms were allowed to share in both the light and the tribulation, the accolades and the calumny. The blogosphere — itself a starfish organization — has benefited from Sheehan's influence and example. I think she recognizes this as well, and thus chose Daily Kos as the forum for her parting message. It is perhaps only seemingly ironic that the world wide web is perhaps the least "spidery" vehicle of communication on earth today. Only on the Internet, for example, could you find a science writer for a stodgy paper like the New York Times writing a scathing indictment of the Bush administration — it happened today. As Brafman and Beckstrom point out in their book, this kind of seeming chaos is unique to a starfish-style organization: "When you give people freedom, you get chaos, but you also get incredible creativity." Even on the website of a spider organization like the New York Times. Clearly, we probably need more chaos; and we certainly need more creativity. Congress has failed to carry out the will of the people, because it cannot respond to the fluid movement of the starfish; it is too mired in its own iron-stranded matrix of excess, corruption, deceit, and self-indulgence. As the authors of The Starfish and the Spider indicate, we can only overcome the turgid inertia of Washington politics by redoubling the starfish energy of the anti-war movement. In other words, it is time for a catalyst to step into the background, so that the whole is given renewed life. And so that a long-suffering and heroic Mom can once more feel the quiet joys of private life that the rest of us so often take for granted."

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