Four More Wars
Politics: Disaster. I can’t believe it.
- CNN sums it up
- some cute kittens, take your mind off it
E-Paper finally on the market
Tech: … nearly. The Sony Reader EBR-1000EP. 170 pixels-per-inch is a nice resolution, and in general it looks very cool, esp. considering the E-Paper aspects (ie. looks like paper, back-lighting not required, easier to read). However – never mind that it’s only available in Japan so far, even once it becomes available in the US, its pricing structure is moronic:
All three of the Impress Watch articles say it will cost around 40,000 yen - approximately $400 USD. And this is just for the reader, subscribing to the e-book service costs $5-10/month. They do, however, have the option of just purchasing single books for 350 yen, about $3.25.
Dammit — I don’t want e-books and their DRM and lock-in — I just want a HTML viewer like Plucker or iSilo, so I can use Sitescooper!
Also, it’s not yet foldable. Once I can fold up the reader into a little ball in my pocket, then fold it out again into an A4-sized ‘page’, I’ll be a happy man.
Still, getting there — let’s hope they get a clue and kill off that DRM. Otherwise, I can’t see myself buying one, even once the price comes down.
Funny: (in a geeky way): mentioned on LWN — ‘granted, drawing circles w/ GIMP is a bit like finding 2 + 2 by evaluating the integral of 2dx over the range 0..2.’
(jm: worth noting that the same applies for Photoshop, for that matter – in this respect GIMP has emulated Adobe’s ‘you need to buy Illustrator to do that’ attitude. That’s really quite bizarre when you think about it. Wonder if GIMP 2.0 fixes that?)
Tags: aper, drm, ebr, esp, gimp, mind, paper, reader, resolution, sony, tech
Daytime Fireballs
Astronomy:
APOD: A Daytime Fireball Over South Wales. Great picture
of a fireball disintegrating in the daytime sky.
I saw a similar daytime fireball streak through the sky when I was in Fraser Island in Australia last year; a little bit smaller than this one, mind you ;) Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture in time. Very cool though!
Tags: apod, astronomy, bit, daytime, fireball, mind, picture, sky, streak, time, year
Daytime Fireballs
APOD: A Daytime Fireball Over South Wales. Great picture
of a fireball disintegrating in the daytime sky.
I saw a similar daytime fireball streak through the sky when I was in Fraser Island in Australia last year; a little bit smaller than this one, mind you ;) Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture in time. Very cool though!
Tags: apod, bit, daytime, fireball, mind, picture, sky, streak, time, year
SCO blah blah
The mother of all package tours
The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there - would they? You’d be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).
A fascinating article, from so many angles — First, the tourists:
I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. “Yeah, I’ve been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I’m a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, ‘Why have you come to our country twice?’.” …
Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: “I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It’s perfectly logical if you look at the map.” “I think he’s rather handsome too,” she went on. “Every woman does really. I’d rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself.”
And the politics:
Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, “I admire British democracy and freedom.” He held my gaze. “I very much admire them.”
… As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody - yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.
After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam’s language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.
Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.
Tags: admire, attack, country, holiday, man, mind, mother, package, time, world
(Untitled)
“Please mind the closing doors…” The doors close…The doors reopen. “Passengers are reminded that the big red slidey things on the side of the train are called the doors. Let’s try it again. Please stand clear of the doors.” The doors close… “Thank you.”
