From With Ratings Tight, TV Networks Vie For Richest Viewers:
The TV sitcom “The Office,” a documentary-style parody of corporate life, will return to General Electric Co.’s NBC in September despite a weak ratings performance. NBC’s “Committed” — a higher-rated sitcom about two neurotic twentysomethings — won’t be back.The primary reason: Rich people like ‘The Office.’
Of course, really rich people like the original British version better.
The Most Important Fifth Wheel recounts the history of the steering wheel — and of driving in general:
A word here about the concentration required to control a car in those early days. Once you had hand cranked the engine, got it chugging and quickly jumped back into the driver’s seat, you released the hand brake, depressed the clutch pedal (which might also be the brake pedal, but let’s not get into that), put the car into gear and lurched forward.There was no ‘gas pedal’ to press with your foot. The so-called ‘accelerator’ pedal on the floor merely released the engine governor which kept the motor turning no faster than a ‘decent’ 650-700 rpm. You used that pedal sparingly and only when in top gear.
Meanwhile, using a series of brass levers on some device in the center of your steering wheel you would then try to slow the engine down enough to make a proper gear change by ‘retarding’ the spark. On some cars you might have a lever that allows you to crudely adjust the flow of fuel through the carburetor. Forget the cell phone! See if you can get into high gear and achieve, say, 20 miles per hour without wrecking.
Early cars didn’t have steering wheels:
The first automobiles, more than a century ago, were driven with “tillers,” basically a steel shaft with a brass or wood handle on top. In 1900, Packard was the first American car to introduce a steering wheel instead of a tiller.
Early drivers sat on the right:
Incidentally, most American cars, like the European ones, had right-hand drive until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. Then it apparently began to dawn on everyone that the driver no longer had to lean out the right side of the vehicle with his whip hand. The only “horses” were those under the hood, and since the left side gave better visibility on American roads… hey, why not?
Narrowcasting Your Show looks at some “long tail” TV startups:
Ken Lipscomb, chief executive of the Atlanta-based company, says DaveTV will offer more than 100 channels featuring 100,000 hours of licensed programming, much of it specialized fare such as illegal street racing and bedtime stories read by an on-screen narrator.The hog video will be on the company’s ‘bbq’ channel, featuring more than 1,000 barbecue-related programs. Initially, DaveTV will only be available for viewing on a computer. But the company promises a set-top box for about $200 that will allow downloads to be played on televisions.
Also getting into the act, a company called Brightcove Networks will let customers avoid buying a separate set-top box and instead link their TVs to newer computers that run Microsoft Windows Media Center software.
In Robot Child-Herders, Chris Anderson explains how the Roomba gets kids to clean up their toys and tires them out before bed:
This works with three magic phrases:
- "Roomba’s coming out tonight. Clean up your toys or Roomba will eat them!"
- "If you can clean them up fast you can stay up to watch Roomba!"
- "Here goes Roomba. Don’t let him touch you!"
The uttering of these three sentences results in the perfect end to an evening. The kids scurry around and pick up every last toy (it’s the tiniest Lego pieces that get eaten the fastest), then race around the room jumping over Roomba as it drives from wall to wall, randomly changing direction just often enough to make the game fun. (We’ve told them that if Roomba runs into them it will think that they’re a wall and not clean there, which may or may not be true.) Then, after 15 minutes of this, they’re bored and ready for bed.
From No Wrong Answer: Click It:
Professor Ross Cheit put it to the students in his Ethics and Public Policy class at Brown University: Are you morally obliged to report cheating if you know about it? The room began to hum, but no one so much as raised a hand.Still, within 90 seconds, Cheit had roughly 150 student responses displayed on an overhead screen, plotted as a multicolored bar graph — 64 percent said yes, 35 percent, no.
Several times each class, Cheit’s students answer his questions using handheld wireless devices that resemble television remote controls. The devices, which the students call “clickers,” are being used on hundreds of college campuses and are even finding their way into grade schools.
But can the professor phone a friend? And does he have a limited number of lifelines?
Super Water Kills Bugs Dead describes a new product, Microcyn, that sounds too good to be true:
A California company has figured out how to use two simple materials — water and salt — to create a solution that wipes out single-celled organisms, and which appears to speed healing of burns, wounds and diabetic ulcers.The solution looks, smells and tastes like water, but carries an ion imbalance that makes short work of bacteria, viruses and even hard-to-kill spores.
Developed by Oculus Innovative Sciences in Petaluma, the super-oxygenated water is claimed to be as effective a disinfectant as chlorine bleach, but is harmless to people, animals and plants. If accidentally ingested by a child, the likely impact is a bad case of clean teeth.
[...]
According to Hoji Alimi, founder and president of Oculus, the ion-hungry water creates an osmotic potential that ruptures the cell walls of single-celled organisms, and out leaks the cell’s cytoplasm. Because multicellular organisms — people, animals, plants — are tightly bound, the water is prevented from surrounding the cells, and there is no negative impact.While super-oxygenated water is nothing new — Microcyn has its roots in efforts to decontaminate nuclear reactors’ cooling pipes, according to Alimi — it is typically effective for only a few hours after it is formulated. To keep it handy, hospitals and labs must invest in extremely expensive machines costing $100,000 or more.
Oculus has developed a new formula with a shelf life of at least a year, which opens up an array of potential applications.
And unlike prior formulations of super-oxygenated water, Microcyn is pH-neutral, so it won’t damage healthy tissue. This has prompted successful experiments in the treatment of challenging wounds like diabetic ulcers.
Ooh, this could be good. John Cleese writing Aardman film:
Monty Python star John Cleese is writing the next feature film for Aardman Animations, the makers of Wallace and Gromit have announced.
[...]
“It will be great comedy adventure about a pre-historic culture clash between two tribes, one comparatively evolved tribe, and one un-evolved tribe,” he said.
I’ve enjoyed each season of Project Greenlight, and I’m sad to read Chris Moore’s statement about the end of this season:
Last night was probably the last new episode of Project Greenlight ever. I am sorry to be reporting this here, but anyone reading this blog is a devoted and loyal Project Greenlight fan. You have been loyal and vocal and true fans of what we have tried to do, so I want you all to know the truth first. Although the movie FEAST awaits release, the ratings of this year’s Project Greenlight show will not warrant bringing the show back. It is possible that Dimension will do the movie again, which could mean there is a contest again next year. However, my gut is telling me that without the whole three-headed monster of the TV show, contest and film, there is little chance of Project Greenlight continuing.
When I was studying French many years ago, we watched a few episodes of French in Action in class (on VHS tape):
The storyline of an American student and a young Frenchwoman’s adventures in Paris and the French countryside is reinforced by Dr. Capretz’s on-camera instruction.
It was surprisingly good. (And Mireille was très jolie.) It was also brand new at the time. Now, it’s all on-line.
And there’s a similar Spanish program, Destinos, and a German program, Fokus Deutsch.
From As Rich-Poor Gap Widens in the U.S., Class Mobility Stalls:
A substantial body of research finds that at least 45% of parents’ advantage in income is passed along to their children, and perhaps as much as 60%.
The article contends that we don’t live in the meritocracy of our cherished American myth, because “Americans are no more or less likely to rise above, or fall below, their parents’ economic class than they were 35 years ago.”
But that argument presupposes that, in a meritocracy, a father’s income wouldn’t correlate with his son’s, which is ludicrous, because a father and his son aren’t two random strangers with nothing in common; they’re father and son. Children inherit much more than money from their parents.
I’d heard of the 20Q, but I didn’t know its backstory:
Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17 years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener’s genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000 synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that learning into the chip in the orb. In other words, this sphere is a handheld version of Burgener’s Twenty Questions web site. (Because it knows about fewer objects than the web version, it gets confused less often, so its success rate is ironically higher.)
The toy is remarkable. Because it is so small, so autonomous, its intelligence is shocking to the unprepared. Most children can’t stump it, and if you stick to objects it will stump smart adults about 80% of the time with 20 questions and most of the time with an additional 5 questions. I love to watch people’s reactions when they think of a ‘hard’ thing, and after a seemingly irrational set of questions you are convinced are dumb, the sly ball tells you what you had in mind. (For instance, it can correctly guess ‘flying squirrel’without asking ‘does it fly?’) People who play chess machines won’t be surprised, but just about everyone else is tickled. It feels like the future.
(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)
Indian publisher, Amar Chitra Katha, puts out comicbook versions of classical Indian literature, like the Ramayana.
Frankly, it’s more than a bit odd to see centuries-old religious texts presented in the same style as The Amazing Spiderman — until you realize that they pretty much read like superhero comics.
iStopMotion sounds like fun:
This is a very cool application that creates stop-motion and time-lapse videos. For years my kids and I have been making claymation episodes, doll and figure animations, paper cutout sequences, and fun time-lapse movies with our family handy-cam, but our primitive method of simply blinking the on-button has always been less than satisfactory. Our brain-dead way creates three problems: the interval is too long (jerky movement), you can’t see what motion should be next, and you can’t edit out goofs when you make a boo-boo — which is 100% certain.iStopMotion software is a much better way to do animation, and it solves all three problems. You connect a live video feed from your camera to your computer (via USB or Firewire) and then you control the film from your keyboard — or this is cool — via voice command! After you capture a frame, the program overlays that frame as transparent layer over the current camera view so you can see exactly where you need to move next. You can even request the last 5 frames (onion skinning animators call it) to get a sense of direction and trajectory, which allows a very fine tuning of the motion. And you can edit mistakes, and do redos on the fly. All this is simple enough that my 7-year-old could instantly manage it. Yet it is sophisticated enough that film students use this software for thesis projects. Making time-lapse films is even easier.
I feel like Kevin Kelly is reading my mind when he writes about Costco:
Costco has become my personal shopper. I do some research, then I buy what they sell. Like all discount chains they have professionals working full time looking for deals/quality. But what I like about Costco is their niche — which is my niche. They consistently find a bargain in the ‘highest common denominator’ bracket. What they seem to aim for, and what I am happy with, is the highest quality common quality. Not the very best, not the cheapest, and not mediocre either, but a good brand-name bargain in the high middle. They consistently deliver a great price on a very popular and competent item. It’s neither optimization (the top model with the most features), nor is it minimization (cheapest per feature) nor plain thriftiness. Rather Costco aims for some sort of consumer satisficing, to use Herb Simon’s term: a high quality that is just good enough, but at a low-end price.They make shopping easy by eleminating the tyranny of non-essential choice. You don’t have to waste cycles trying to scrutinize similar models or brands. They do that for you: ‘here’s the good enough one you need’ they say. The typical Wal-Mart store will have 80,000 unique stock items; the typical Costco will have only 3,500.
Right now I shop there almost weekly.
From Neither Fools Nor Cowards:
‘The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.’— Sir William Francis Butler