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I have been reading the BBC reporters' log occasionally to get a flavor of dispersed events as they unfold.
"The port of Umm Qasr is being de-mined by dolphins attached to cameras. Apparently they go down and see something suspicious, then come back and tell their handler there's something suspicious. He then gives them an explosive charge, they take it down, put it next to the suspicious object, come back, it blows up, and then they go down and look at it again!
"It sounds implausible, but the Australians are using them, and everyone around here - including a very senior American commander - says it works. I hope to see it for myself when the Sir Galahad gets to Umm Qasr. "
Photos of Hong Kong residents wearing masks to avoid SARS today from Big White Guy.
For the most part, the rave reviews of Ben Willmore's book on photoshop studio techniques don't go far enough. I say this based on the first three chapters, plus chapter 10 on channels. I was going to give you a report on my first skiing vacation but when I woke up it turned out I haven't been skiing yet this year. Must have been a dream, so you'll have to settle for Ben Willmore's great book.
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure chefs in three-star restaurants don't use cookbooks. They write cookbooks!
Ben Willmore is a Photoshop-teaching chef par excellence, and the result is a delicious mixture of Photoshop food for thought and, of course, action. I'm really learning a lot from Ben Willmore's Photoshop Studio Techniques [buy at amazon] and I highly recommend it.
Speaking of such books, I notice that Andy King has a new service, the Web Page Analyzer which will analyze your page and give you great messages like "Congratulations, your page will load in real time and people will be able to read it," "Warning Will Robinson! People will never see your page", or words to that effect. Back on Feb we gave our first impression here on thedailychannel of Andy's valuable book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization [buy at amazon] . and noted his accompanying website: websiteoptimization.com . If you don't have the book yet, there's still time. Rumble over to amazon.com and send a copy speeding your way.
Absolute Rage is the 14th in the series of legal thrillers starring NYC Assistant DA Butch Karp, his wife Marlene, herself a lawyer (retired) turned vigilante, their linguistic prodigy Catholic teenager Lucy, and their large heroic Neapolitan Mastiff dogs, Gog and his mom Magog.
Marlene is trained as a private investigator, Butch is trained to prosecute murderers, Lucy is trained to speak several dozen languages, Lucy's Vietnamese gangster friend Tran is trained to kill enemies in the woods, and the dogs are trained to rip the balls off male attackers, but only on command.
It would be a shame if all of these skills were to go to waste and, happily (or unhappily for the victims), they do not. To make matters (even more) interesting, Lucy also meets her first real love interest, a young MIT freshman.
This novel, Absolute Rage [buy at amazon] . by Robert K. Tanenbaum, in spite of a full load of peculiarities in plot and action, was filled with many cliches. Nonetheless I turned pages straight through all the way to the end, almost without stopping, just as I did with the other books in the series.
Do you have fond memories of the quantum-electronic effects and superfast supercomputers promised by Josephson junctions? Perhaps not, but supercooled superconductive computers were once a vision of the future.
Although the quantum effects discovered by Josephson haven't led in that direction (supercomputing), they're still quite interesting mathematically, and one of the chapters in the second section of Steven Strogatz' book Sync: The emerging Science of Spontaneous Order [buy at amazon] tells the story of Josephson's great discovery, and his eventual disappearance from the world of physics. Strogatz also gives a very clear description of a unique form of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate, in which all the electrons are synchronized together and behave, in a funny quantum way, as if they were just one. The cool thing about this, and one of the things that makes science so great, is that decades ago it was postulated that it might exist according to theory, and then eventually it turned out to be a real thing.
Can't beat that!
Well, actually that may not be strictly true, there WAS the recent story of the talking fish. What really got me was the reasoning of the guy who said "This is going to be talked about for a long time to come, unless it's somehow verified as a hoax, which is hard to imagine, since the proof has been eaten up."
Thanks to the dual miracles of modern electronics and the invention of internet data packets, I have just read the first ten pages of Thomas Levenson's new book, "Einstein in Berlin", which you can also do.
In a change from our usual viewing habits, we rented the National Geographic video Inside the Pentagon. Here's a piece of irony: construction of the Pentagon began on September 11, 1941, sixty years to the day before a terrorist-driven Boeing 757 slammed into the newly renovated side of it, killing 184 pentagon workers, and of course the passengers of the airplane. The passengers were mentioned briefly in the video.
The video would not have suffered by including more portions of the gigantic Pentagon, and omitting some clips of the chatty Donald Rumsfeld. A fascinating omission: Iraq. All the talk was of 'new types of threats' and 'dispersed enemies'. And I don't believe the visual story would have been harmed by seven or eight charts and graphs showing troop numbers, ship and plane counts, and dollar budgets for the services.
Still, if you want to widen your perspective on peace, war, and the United States, get Inside the Pentagon [buy at amazon] the National Geographic video. (90 minutes).
I have been reading Umberto Eco's new novel, Baudolino, ever since I got it for a Christmas gift in 2002: Thanks, Toni! I read The Name of the Rose years ago and found it interesting but a little tedious. Baudolino is fresh and open, not a bit boring.
What recommends the book? Eco's characters demonstrate medieval reasoning at work. Their mental process isn't so different, but the elements of action and aspects of world they select as they think and speak -- reveal a medieval focus and life which is quite different from our own modern perspective.
That's their inner life, but Eco does "crowd scenes", too. As Baudolino travels around Europe (in addition to making him a liar Eco has given him the gift of picking up languages and slangs, a wonderful authorial device) he sees, hears, and discovers the social, religious and political fabric of his age.
Poor young woman: she got a parking ticket for parking in the red zone and it was 65 bucks! Be careful out there. At least she wasn't fat, though. When I got home, my 11-year-old son was reading an article on obesity in Asian children to his mom.
I picked up Ben Willmore's book on Photoshop 7.0 Studio Techniques the other day and read the chapter on Photoshop channels, Chapter 10.
All of Adobe's programs are good, but at a free Adobe conference I attended last year, when a speaker asked "How many of you use Photoshop", all fifteen hundred people raised their hands.
The wonderful children's book 'Walter the Farting Dog' arrived earlier this week. I sat right down and read it straight through, laughing out loud many times.
The art is interesting, giving a feeling of collage, with the gaseous emissions foreshadowed by the book's title painted in quite subtly. Audrey Coleman has really captured, in Walter's slightly pained blue eyes, an evocative expression of embarrassment and obvious discomfort. There's no doubt about it, this is a great bedtime read
Walter, the Farting Dog [buy at amazon] . by William Kotzwinkel and Glenn Murray, Illustrated by Audrey Coleman.
The sequel to Ben Willmore's Photoshop 5.0 and 6.0 bestsellers arrived today: Photoshop 7.0 Studio Techniques. This was part of the winnings from my failed New Years Resolution not to buy new books, but it was well worth the (admittedly mild) anguish and the wait. Within half an hour I had turned down the corner on a page with a useful tip: Page 493 gives you the screen capture keystrokes for Mac OS/X (and Windows too).
I used to enjoy Ben's email newsletter of Photoshop tips (he still puts it out). You have to pay attention to someone who has helped tens of thousands of people to learn Photoshop. Well of course you could ignore him but it would be silly: Ben's writing style is wonderfully light and enjoyable and his generosity is huge. If you don't want to get the book just now, visit his companion website at digitalmastery.com and browse through some of Ben's tips on how to use Photoshop.
Did you ever wonder why you can't fall asleep when you go to bed an hour early? Amazingly, there's a good mathematical reason, which Steven Strogatz explains in the third chapter of his new book: Sync, the Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. More than that, along the way he provides a lively account of how mathematicians and other scientists think and work together.
That phrase just popped into my head, but it points up, one of the many small, subtle yet powerful clarifications Strogatz brought me.
No insight is gained if the model is as perplexing
as the phenomena it's supposed to describe.
A sentence every modeller ought to commit to memory. But unfortunately not the right one. Instead, I was thinking of the role description plays in scientific research. You must describe the world first, in enough richness for your theory to explain something. Certainly that is a missing step in most of the social sciences. But wait -- what about the leap? I look up Galileo and find the reference immediately in the book's excellent index.
Galileo would not have discovered that a body in motion tends to stay in motion (the law of inertia) if he had been content to describe what really happens (friction causes things to stop). By disregarding the inessential, he discovered the most fundamental law of mechanics.
Even though I've only read the first three chapters, I know that I can recommend Sync: The emerging Science of Spontaneous Order [buy at amazon] . by Steven Strogatz. The third chapter alone, which describes a broad range of sleep research, is worth the price of the book.
Did you ever wonder why cicadas all come out together, every 17 years?