That's How It Happened

Jonathan Green gives this modern eyewitness account of secret ritualised duelling known as "academic fencing". Its stylized format has changed little since Mark Twain observed it. Despite dubious legality it is alive and well in German universities. The raison d'etre of this swordplay is the deliberate creation of a schmiss or duelling scar. These scars are considered by the bearers as a mark of courage and nobility, and by outsiders as an indication of semi-latent Nazi tendencies. In March a medical conference is beng held for the first time in Freiburg, for doctors who wish to tend to such duelling injuries.

Update: I cross posted this to metafilter and in among the many comments was this awesome video featuring real schmisses:

Labels: duelling

Take one thumbdrive with a broken case, a pinch of air drying modelling clay, and a left over snail shell from making snail porridge, and you have this snail thumbdrive. It's still perfectly functional, as the clay is a good thermal conductor. Even so, for this prototype, I only risked an 8Mb thumbdrive. It looks great, but it is hard to get it docked in some awkward USB ports.

Labels: snail thumbdrive howto

Bandwagon is an automated iTunes backup service using Amazon S3. Best of all, they are offering free storage for 1 year for bloggers who link to them before they launch on Thursday.

Post-diluvian google maps. Adjust the sea level and plan your next property purchase with global warming in mind.

An open source cola recipe.

Alternative opening sentences for A Tale of Two Cities is a must click for all fans of Ex Libris.

So long since I've done this, but my words of the day are avocation (a hobby), and moleosophy (divination through moles and blemishes).

Ben Goldacre, junior doctor, Guardian journalist, and bad science blogger, reports on the success of one of his readers in bringing evil poo "doctor" Gillian McKeith to justice. She has been banned by the ASA from using the word "Doctor" in any of her advertising, on the basis that her "doctorate" came from a non-accredited correspondence school in America. Goldacre takes her apart, rightfully highlighting her cargo cult "science" beliefs, litigiousness, and fraud. As suggested by Tom Coates, I'm linking Goldacre's article, but not McKeith's website, but hopefully she'll have to take down drgillianmckeith dotcom shortly.

Using the new Yahoo Pipes service, I have remixed the boingboing feed, to exclude all posts by all the authors, unless the post is about a SecondLife mash up, of something from Disney, and a subway map, with added DRM. In other words, just the good posts. link

Viacom recently had 100,000 clips removed from Youtube, which understandably made a lot of headlines. But it turns out they're not the only copyright holders defending their work.
Searching Google for the phrase "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by" reveals only 1,120 hits from youtube.com. But they come from a lot of different sources:

BBC, NHK, Disney, Comedy Central, Warner, FIFA, IWC, Sony, Paramount, the Emmies, the RIAA, Discovery, National Film Board of Canada, ESPN, Fox, Universal, Apple, the NFL, Equity, MLB, Marvel, NBA, CBS, Lucasfilm, C-SPAN, Turner, Lion's Gate, HBO, Atlantic, MTV, Pixar, NHL, Bruce Lee, WWE, New Line, Scientology, the Oscars, Vincent Gallo, the Raelians, and the Rolling Stones

Most worryingly for the big GOOG, even eeepybird.com have had their Diet Coke 'n' Mentos videos taken down. If all these corporations and individuals continue to disallow their work to appear on Youtube, there will be nothing left to watch, except videos of kittens and lonelygirl15. Admittedly some of these are just keen litigants, like Gallo, the Raelians, and L Ron Hubbard, but the MSM broadcasters are clearly serious about preventing their work appearing for free.

Labels: google, youtube

This is unnecessarily complex, but I've begun a separate sneaker-blog at sneakerplay. Leave your email in the comments if you need an invite.

Thumb's Up, a new show on VBS.tv is an awesome example of something that wouldn't work on conventional TV. The sole premise of the show is watching David Choe train-hop and hitchhike across the US, like a modern Kerouac.

Meet Yuki-Taro, an autonomous snow clearing robot. He scoops up snow drifts, and converts them into hard packed ice blocks, suitable for making igloos.

Labels: sneakers

It seems impossible that one man could have invented the ollie, the kickflip, the heelflip, the caspar, and the modern skateboard shape. Rodney Mullen is the Marion Tinsley of skateboarding. This three part biography contains all Mullen's best video parts, and incredible commentary from his peers and admirers. It's 20 minutes of insight into the mind of a peculiar kind of genius. The most amazing documentary about a sportsman ever.

Labels: rodneymullen

The old Nissan Qashqai ads have garnered a lot of attention, but I'm loving the new TV spot even more:

The director gets full marks from me for having paid attention to how an actual skater kickflips.

While I wait for my invite to the joost beta, Vice Magazine have launched their own online TV channel called VBS. Naturally it rules.

Labels: vice

The whole internets seem to be in a froth about Steve Job's plans to ditch DRM. I want to go on record as saying I couldn't possibly care any less about DRM. If I want to buy DRM free music, I can, from a record store. And if I want to steal DRM free music, I can, via BitTorrent. Why anyone would bother to buy music from iTunes is a mystery to me, and I'm not going to waste one second worrying about digital restrictions placed on people who do choose to buy from iTunes. On my first day at secondary school an older kid said to me "There's no problem with drugs here....you can get anything you want.", and that's exactly how I feel about DRM.

Labels: DRM, itunes

Microsoft employee Jim Gray went missing in his boat off the coast of San Francisco on Sunday. Based on an idea proposed by Matt Haughey, when James Kim went missing, friends of Gray have leveraged the power of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, to have volunteers search satellite images for signs of the missing boat. In theory it sounds like a good plan; so good in fact that the search process has become mainstream news in its own right. Even Nature have reported, that this effort "will make future responses to natural disasters even smoother and better coordinated." In my opinion the search process is fundamentally flawed, and a complete waste of time and emotional energy.
Searching a satellite image for signs of the boat is a similar process to searching a chest x-ray for signs of tuberculosis (TB). If you, dear reader, as a civilian had to scan chest x-rays for TB, it would take you minutes to review each film, and your overall sensitivity and specificity would be exceedingly low. It wouldn't matter how many different civilians tried to do it. Adding additional untrained reviewers would only increase the time spent, while marginally, if at all, increasing the sensitivity, and substantially decreasing the specificity of the review process. As an actual doctor, but one who rarely looks at chest x-rays, I can review a film in around 30 seconds, and would have a reasonable sensitivity for TB, and reasonable specificity. But give films to an actual radiologist, and he or she can review them at a rate of 10-20 per minute, with a far higher sensitivity and specificity. The radiologist, because of years of training, can entirely abandon any search strategy or conscious cognitive processing, in favour of pure "pattern recognition".

If you look at this actual satellite image of an area where Jim Gray might or might not be adrift, you'll see a lot of white flecks, that might or might not be bits of boat. To an untrained reviewer the noise to signal ratio is high. In the high res image (click to enlarge) it takes a long time to carefully check each fleck for possible "boatness", and even then you can't be sure. An expert reviewer though, could use pattern recognition to review this image in only a matter of seconds, and say accurately whether there is any boat there, or whether these flecks of white are all wave crests, and seagulls.
I don't know how many images have been uploaded, but well meaning volunteers have now scanned them 100,000 times, and suggested 2,000 possible images for further investigation. At a conservative estimate, that represents more than 500 man-hours of searching. The 2,000 "flagged" images now need the attention of an expert reviewer, in order to direct coast guard helicopters to real possibilities. However, because the Mechanical Turk effort relies on different people reviewing images multiple times, it's likely that that single expert reviewer could have viewed all the individual images within an 8 hour shift, sometime on Sunday, shortly after Gray was reported missing. I'm sure that no-one at NASA or the coastguard is actually bothering to review the results of the Mechanical Turk search.
While Web 2.0 has accomplished a lot of wonderful things through online collaboration, having non-experts search in this way is utterly unconstructive. It's a modern day version of praying for Gray's safe return.

Update 7/2/07: The Mechanical Turk search finished yesterday, and involved 530,000 individual images; many more than I had anticipated. Despite this, I don't believe for a second that the process will help find Gray's missing boat. Here's a collection of 5 of the most promising images. None of them, to my non-expert eye, seem to have any obvious boats in them, despite the fact that there must have been hundreds, if not thousands of boats off-shore from San Francisco during the time these pictures were taken.

Labels: jimgray, mechanicalturk

25 years after first dining in a Pizza Express, I finally figured out the inspiration for their rather ornate logo.

Labels: logo, pizza, typography

Various intellectuals reveal their Guilty pleasures. Hitchens lives up to his reputation as a prig, claiming The Simpsons as his guilty pleasure, despite apparently not owning a TV.

Classic "Correction and clarification", as the Guardian make the same mistake as the rest of the nation:

We were wrong to say that Jonny Wilkinson's ex-girlfriend has been squired about town by Dec from Ant and Dec (Where has Jonny been? G2, page 3, February 1). It is Ant who has been doing the squiring. Dec was married in July last year.

The only sure fire way of distinguishing the two, is on the basis of position. On TV, Ant always stands to the left of Dec (as the camera sees it).

Labels: antndec

After much experimentation, I have perfected Wylie Dufresne's, allegedly patented yoghurt noodles. At WD-50 a broth is served with a squeezy bottle full of lemon yoghurt. Squeezing the yoghurt into the broth turns it into "noodles" (pictured here in action). Determined to try it, I ordered some transglutaminase from MSK and set to work. After many failed attempts I hit on the formula. To make the noodles you blend two tablespoons of transglutaminase into 25mls of olive oil, then add 250mls yoghurt slowly, while blending, until you have a thick gloopy paste. Leave it to "set" for 15 minutes. Squeezing it into hot broth activates the enzyme, which immediately binds the milk proteins in noodle form. In this case I made chilli noodles, in a ginger and spring onion broth, with a tian of spring greens, crab, and a chorizo foam. The foam is made from chicken stock, simmered with homemade chorizo, and lecithin. Blending it with a hand blender makes a very light stable foam.

Labels: moleculargastronomy, wd-50