It doesn't exist again, despite great confusion on this matter.
Next time, when the NOAA tells you there was a screwup with the sonar, you may want to pay heed to the possiblity that perhaps there actually was a screwup with the sonar and that those little bumpy lines aren't in fact streets.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Random News Generator- England
...no, we are not covering the diamond jubilee, and we just noted how cold it is over there.
Instead, let's talk about England's much-maligned CCTV cameras, the ones that give everyone there creepy Big Brother vibes... and the newest fight over them that will do absolutely nothing to allay those vibes.
Namely, the CCTV cameras are talking.
At a number of places in London, the town council of the suburb of Camden installed and activated a number of talking cameras. When someone comes into the range of the cameras, they say in an American voice, "Stop. This is a restricted area and your photograph is being taken. It will be sent for processing if you don't leave the area now." It will do this even if you are a legitimate visitor. It will do this even if you happen to live at the building being watched. Or at least, it would. It creeped so many people out to such a degree and caused them to push back so much that Camden Council wound up turning the voices off, claiming they were never supposed to be on in the first place. According to the council, the batteries were changed in the cameras 4-5 weeks ago and in the act of replacing them, the voices accidentally got turned on.
That still, of course, leaves the question of what the voices were doing even sitting there in the software to be potentially turned on. There are two reasons for that. First, Camden Council cited safety concerns- an effort to cut down on crime- though as the Telegraph noted in an article focusing on one apartment complex in particular where the cameras were activated, that complex saw no criminal activity whatsoever over the most recent year with figures available.
Needless to say, the 1984 and Robocop references have been coming hot and heavy. Nick Pickles of the group Big Brother Watch noted, "This kind of technology may be acceptable in a police state or a science fiction film, but it is absolutely not in modern Britain... The idea that a Robocop recording will tackle antisocial behaviour and crime is as laughable as it is a total invasion of privacy. Who knew councils had the authority to take your photograph simply because you walked into a communal garden?"
Which leads to the second reason the voices were in the software: this is not the first go-around in England over talking CCTV cameras. This particular innovation dates back to a trial run in Wiltshire in 2003, and has popped up at various locations across England over the ensuing near-decade. This appears to be the first implementation of them in a residential zone, though CCTV cameras in residential areas have been implemented before, notably in 2009 at an apartment complex in Torquay. The residents there appeared to be equally angry, especially since they were assessed a rent hike to pay for it. More typically, the talking cameras are employed in commercial areas to break up what is most commonly called "antisocial behavior", which generally means littering, graffiti, loitering, vandalism and things of that ilk.
Which hasn't gone totally perfectly; in 2007, a talking camera in Middlesborough mistakenly issued a warning to a mother for littering when she hadn't actually done anything wrong. The police ended up issuing a formal apology after the incident wound up on the local news.
Perfectly or not, though, the voices are there, and while they may have gone away in Camden, at least for now, England can count on them speaking up again.
Instead, let's talk about England's much-maligned CCTV cameras, the ones that give everyone there creepy Big Brother vibes... and the newest fight over them that will do absolutely nothing to allay those vibes.
Namely, the CCTV cameras are talking.
At a number of places in London, the town council of the suburb of Camden installed and activated a number of talking cameras. When someone comes into the range of the cameras, they say in an American voice, "Stop. This is a restricted area and your photograph is being taken. It will be sent for processing if you don't leave the area now." It will do this even if you are a legitimate visitor. It will do this even if you happen to live at the building being watched. Or at least, it would. It creeped so many people out to such a degree and caused them to push back so much that Camden Council wound up turning the voices off, claiming they were never supposed to be on in the first place. According to the council, the batteries were changed in the cameras 4-5 weeks ago and in the act of replacing them, the voices accidentally got turned on.
That still, of course, leaves the question of what the voices were doing even sitting there in the software to be potentially turned on. There are two reasons for that. First, Camden Council cited safety concerns- an effort to cut down on crime- though as the Telegraph noted in an article focusing on one apartment complex in particular where the cameras were activated, that complex saw no criminal activity whatsoever over the most recent year with figures available.
Needless to say, the 1984 and Robocop references have been coming hot and heavy. Nick Pickles of the group Big Brother Watch noted, "This kind of technology may be acceptable in a police state or a science fiction film, but it is absolutely not in modern Britain... The idea that a Robocop recording will tackle antisocial behaviour and crime is as laughable as it is a total invasion of privacy. Who knew councils had the authority to take your photograph simply because you walked into a communal garden?"
Which leads to the second reason the voices were in the software: this is not the first go-around in England over talking CCTV cameras. This particular innovation dates back to a trial run in Wiltshire in 2003, and has popped up at various locations across England over the ensuing near-decade. This appears to be the first implementation of them in a residential zone, though CCTV cameras in residential areas have been implemented before, notably in 2009 at an apartment complex in Torquay. The residents there appeared to be equally angry, especially since they were assessed a rent hike to pay for it. More typically, the talking cameras are employed in commercial areas to break up what is most commonly called "antisocial behavior", which generally means littering, graffiti, loitering, vandalism and things of that ilk.
Which hasn't gone totally perfectly; in 2007, a talking camera in Middlesborough mistakenly issued a warning to a mother for littering when she hadn't actually done anything wrong. The police ended up issuing a formal apology after the incident wound up on the local news.
Perfectly or not, though, the voices are there, and while they may have gone away in Camden, at least for now, England can count on them speaking up again.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
In Case You're Actually Choosing Gardening Over The Super Bowl
As Super Bowl Sunday's pregame show kicks off and we in Packer Nation prepare to formally hand over the title belt, the major complaint a lot of people have is that they don't like the matchup: a rematch of the Giants and Patriots. Some fans would rather see literally any other combination of two of the 32 NFL franchises than watch the Giants and the Patriots.
Well... you could be out in your garden.
In fact, as you may have noticed this winter (at least if you're not in Alaska or Europe; you guys can blame something called arctic oscillation), and as the USDA is indicating with their updated hardiness maps, it's a pretty good time to be out in your garden. For those that don't go playing in the dirt much, the USDA hardiness map divides the United States into a number of different 10-degree climate zones (each of which are then further divided into two 5-degree subzones apiece), based on how cold the average winter is expected to get in different areas. By knowing what zone you're in, you then know what kind of plants will survive the winter, when it should be safe to plant the ones that can't, and when to get your crops in and out of the ground.
The new map, takes into account the past 30 years, as opposed to the past 15 years used in the last map (which was released in 1990), and the map is warmer than the 1990 map, generally a half-zone warmer. That means different plants and earlier planting. The USDA, for its part, is going out of its way to stay out of the climate-change fight, but it's pretty hard to conclude anything but the blindingly obvious.
If you do play in the dirt, the interactive map is here. Once you find your zone, check what will grow in that zone. For example, I'm sitting in Zone 5, so if you're likewise, you'll want to go here.
After the game, of course.
Well... you could be out in your garden.
In fact, as you may have noticed this winter (at least if you're not in Alaska or Europe; you guys can blame something called arctic oscillation), and as the USDA is indicating with their updated hardiness maps, it's a pretty good time to be out in your garden. For those that don't go playing in the dirt much, the USDA hardiness map divides the United States into a number of different 10-degree climate zones (each of which are then further divided into two 5-degree subzones apiece), based on how cold the average winter is expected to get in different areas. By knowing what zone you're in, you then know what kind of plants will survive the winter, when it should be safe to plant the ones that can't, and when to get your crops in and out of the ground.
The new map, takes into account the past 30 years, as opposed to the past 15 years used in the last map (which was released in 1990), and the map is warmer than the 1990 map, generally a half-zone warmer. That means different plants and earlier planting. The USDA, for its part, is going out of its way to stay out of the climate-change fight, but it's pretty hard to conclude anything but the blindingly obvious.
If you do play in the dirt, the interactive map is here. Once you find your zone, check what will grow in that zone. For example, I'm sitting in Zone 5, so if you're likewise, you'll want to go here.
After the game, of course.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Not The Random Music Generator; It Just Sounds Like It
It's going to be a TED talk today. Or actually, make that a TED performance. Today you'll be meeting a guy named Scott Rikard, who last September in Miami discussed the matter of repetition in music, and the importance of same.
To prove the importance of repetition, Rikard, a mathematician, set out to create a piece of music that had no repetition whatsoever, using the keys of a piano and something called the Golomb ruler.
*The keys chosen for each successive note were selected by multiplying by successive powers of three (1, 3, 9, 27, 81, etc.), and then dropping sets of 89 from the totals until the number provided could match a key on the piano (...9, 27, 81, 243-178=65).
*The Golomb ruler is a ruler on which integers are marked off in such a way that no two distances between plotted points are the same distance apart. This was used to create pauses between notes.
The idea was to create, by way of the lack of repetition, the world's ugliest piece of music. Interestingly enough, though, the commenters on the TED website, after listening to the piece, generally figured it to be at least a little better than it was made out to be. A few even considered it to be rather beautiful, if in a really strange way. One commenter compared it to an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Judge for yourself.
To prove the importance of repetition, Rikard, a mathematician, set out to create a piece of music that had no repetition whatsoever, using the keys of a piano and something called the Golomb ruler.
*The keys chosen for each successive note were selected by multiplying by successive powers of three (1, 3, 9, 27, 81, etc.), and then dropping sets of 89 from the totals until the number provided could match a key on the piano (...9, 27, 81, 243-178=65).
*The Golomb ruler is a ruler on which integers are marked off in such a way that no two distances between plotted points are the same distance apart. This was used to create pauses between notes.
The idea was to create, by way of the lack of repetition, the world's ugliest piece of music. Interestingly enough, though, the commenters on the TED website, after listening to the piece, generally figured it to be at least a little better than it was made out to be. A few even considered it to be rather beautiful, if in a really strange way. One commenter compared it to an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Judge for yourself.
Friday, February 3, 2012
The Two-Year Anniversary
Today is the two-year anniversary here at Random Human Neural Firings. If you've joined us for the first time over the past year, during the one-year anniversary I told how this blog came to be. So if you're interested.
The part that's important here is that it was created as an attempt to build a profile to try and get into professional journalism. Part of that involves writing quality pieces. I'm doing the best I can on that front; whether I'm good enough is really up to you. The other part of that, though, is getting that writing in front of the people who make such decisions.
There, I'm going to admit that I don't know enough about what I'm doing. It's frustrating. I have a marketing degree and yet I can't seem to market myself for some reason. The most I typically seem to be able to accomplish as far as getting links out there involves waiting for someone to bring up a topic that I've already covered at some point in greater detail, linking to the article in question as part of a response, and I get a couple extra hits that way. Submitting to larger places, I don't ever get responses, I don't know if I'm presenting the links to them correctly, I don't even know if, through the hit-counter statistics, the link has even been clicked.
The other thing is, with the soccer book also being worked on, I'm noticing that I'm not accomplishing as much marketing as I could be doing. When I get the blog post done for the day, I typically pivot straight to the book, as if to say 'okay, that piece of writing's done, now quickly on to the next piece of writing'. It's not a total waste- I am still getting book work in- but it's still a failing of mine on that front, and I need to figure out how to fix it.
That mea culpa accomplished, as with last year, what I'm going to do is provide links to what I consider to be my ten best articles over the past year, in chronological order. They are as follows:
2/14/11- The Arab World: What Next?
3/23/11- The Famewhore Experiment
4/29/11- The Tinkerbell Effect
6/8/11- Capped
7/1/11- The First Professional Wrestler
8/21/11- Stop Reading Chain Letters, Seriously, Come On
9/7/11- One Wonders How Dad Stays Rich
9/24/11- Skid Row, and Skid Row Lite
12/1/11- Getting Tough On 'Tough'
12/21/11- The Spurious French Connection
The part that's important here is that it was created as an attempt to build a profile to try and get into professional journalism. Part of that involves writing quality pieces. I'm doing the best I can on that front; whether I'm good enough is really up to you. The other part of that, though, is getting that writing in front of the people who make such decisions.
There, I'm going to admit that I don't know enough about what I'm doing. It's frustrating. I have a marketing degree and yet I can't seem to market myself for some reason. The most I typically seem to be able to accomplish as far as getting links out there involves waiting for someone to bring up a topic that I've already covered at some point in greater detail, linking to the article in question as part of a response, and I get a couple extra hits that way. Submitting to larger places, I don't ever get responses, I don't know if I'm presenting the links to them correctly, I don't even know if, through the hit-counter statistics, the link has even been clicked.
The other thing is, with the soccer book also being worked on, I'm noticing that I'm not accomplishing as much marketing as I could be doing. When I get the blog post done for the day, I typically pivot straight to the book, as if to say 'okay, that piece of writing's done, now quickly on to the next piece of writing'. It's not a total waste- I am still getting book work in- but it's still a failing of mine on that front, and I need to figure out how to fix it.
That mea culpa accomplished, as with last year, what I'm going to do is provide links to what I consider to be my ten best articles over the past year, in chronological order. They are as follows:
2/14/11- The Arab World: What Next?
3/23/11- The Famewhore Experiment
4/29/11- The Tinkerbell Effect
6/8/11- Capped
7/1/11- The First Professional Wrestler
8/21/11- Stop Reading Chain Letters, Seriously, Come On
9/7/11- One Wonders How Dad Stays Rich
9/24/11- Skid Row, and Skid Row Lite
12/1/11- Getting Tough On 'Tough'
12/21/11- The Spurious French Connection
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Up With People
Assuming you'll be watching the Super Bowl halftime show, as opposed to something like the Puppy Bowl, you already know Madonna's going to be the halftime act. As soon as she was announced, the wardrobe-malfunction cracks immediately started flying, to the point where she had to officially deny that any nudity would happen.
This would not be a matter of speculation if the NFL had gone with the most experienced of Super Bowl halftime acts: Up With People.
Founded in 1965, Up With People is an organization that has operated as a singing ensemble consisting of... well, really, you could dance around it with terms like 'positive young people' and 'multinational cast' and 'clean-cut troupe', but really, the best term is 'happy-dappy nonthreatening Glee rejects who are so cheerful it's actually creepy'. Every six months, they assemble a 'cast' and send them off to go inflict cheer on people.
That's what they are now, anyway. They were founded under far cloudier circumstances; they were created in 1965 by the Christian movement Moral Re-Armament, which was in turn founded by Frank Buchman and his 'Oxford Group'. Buchman was as happy-dappy as the Up With People derivation would suggest. This was something of a bad thing, as Buchman, over the course of the late 1930's, was too happy-dappy for his own good. In the pre-Pearl Harbor era of World War 2, as America watched the Germans and Soviets antagonize each other, Buchman backed the wrong horse, meeting with Heinrich Himmler and speaking praise of him and Adolf Hitler.
Further down the timeline, Up With People itself was co-opted by corporate interests during the 60's and 70's, on the theory that if hippie liberals were going from town to town singing happy-dappy songs, they weren't going from town to town singing protest songs and speaking out against the Vietnam War. The group was bankrolled by the same sorts of interests until 2000, by which time they had become a punchline, the corporate interests had pulled the plug, and the fees to join had become so high (so as to make up the difference) as to become prohibitive. Finding alternative funding, they resurfaced in 2004.
Then there were the parts about the cult-like behaviors such as arranged marriages and denials of sex prior to said marriages. But we'll leave that alone.
The place did give some people their start in show business, most notably Glenn Close. But if you ask Close, she will deny it. She absolutely does not want to talk about it. Nor do a lot of the other alumni.
So now that you're sufficiently squicked out, please enjoy the halftime performances of Up With People!
SUPER BOWL X, 1976- Steelers 21, Cowboys 17 (Orange Bowl):
SUPER BOWL XIV, 1980- Steelers 31, Rams 19 (Rose Bowl) (EDIT: I had originally posted a repeat of XVI's show here):
SUPER BOWL XVI, 1982- 49ers 26, Bengals 21 (Pontiac Silverdome):
SUPER BOWL XX, 1986- Bears 46, Patriots 10 (New Orleans Superdome):
This would not be a matter of speculation if the NFL had gone with the most experienced of Super Bowl halftime acts: Up With People.
Founded in 1965, Up With People is an organization that has operated as a singing ensemble consisting of... well, really, you could dance around it with terms like 'positive young people' and 'multinational cast' and 'clean-cut troupe', but really, the best term is 'happy-dappy nonthreatening Glee rejects who are so cheerful it's actually creepy'. Every six months, they assemble a 'cast' and send them off to go inflict cheer on people.
That's what they are now, anyway. They were founded under far cloudier circumstances; they were created in 1965 by the Christian movement Moral Re-Armament, which was in turn founded by Frank Buchman and his 'Oxford Group'. Buchman was as happy-dappy as the Up With People derivation would suggest. This was something of a bad thing, as Buchman, over the course of the late 1930's, was too happy-dappy for his own good. In the pre-Pearl Harbor era of World War 2, as America watched the Germans and Soviets antagonize each other, Buchman backed the wrong horse, meeting with Heinrich Himmler and speaking praise of him and Adolf Hitler.
Further down the timeline, Up With People itself was co-opted by corporate interests during the 60's and 70's, on the theory that if hippie liberals were going from town to town singing happy-dappy songs, they weren't going from town to town singing protest songs and speaking out against the Vietnam War. The group was bankrolled by the same sorts of interests until 2000, by which time they had become a punchline, the corporate interests had pulled the plug, and the fees to join had become so high (so as to make up the difference) as to become prohibitive. Finding alternative funding, they resurfaced in 2004.
Then there were the parts about the cult-like behaviors such as arranged marriages and denials of sex prior to said marriages. But we'll leave that alone.
The place did give some people their start in show business, most notably Glenn Close. But if you ask Close, she will deny it. She absolutely does not want to talk about it. Nor do a lot of the other alumni.
So now that you're sufficiently squicked out, please enjoy the halftime performances of Up With People!
SUPER BOWL X, 1976- Steelers 21, Cowboys 17 (Orange Bowl):
SUPER BOWL XIV, 1980- Steelers 31, Rams 19 (Rose Bowl) (EDIT: I had originally posted a repeat of XVI's show here):
SUPER BOWL XVI, 1982- 49ers 26, Bengals 21 (Pontiac Silverdome):
SUPER BOWL XX, 1986- Bears 46, Patriots 10 (New Orleans Superdome):
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Define "Phenomenal"
You know what's phenomenal?
Revolutionizing the way people go about saving historic buildings from the wrecking ball. That was what Lee Adler, who died on Sunday at age 88, spent his life doing. The method he pioneered in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, was that preservation groups would buy historic buildings slated for demolition and then resell them to people who would pledge to restore them. Not only did it prove to be repeatable nationwide, it got a lot of groups to think beyond saving one building at a time and on to thinking about saving entire blocks and neighborhoods.
You know what's phenomenal?
Discovering a type of fungus that eats plastic. That's what some students from Yale managed on a trip to Ecuador last year, finding one previously undiscovered type of mushroom- Pestalotiopsis microspora- that can not only eat plastic, but survive on nothing but. Given that plastic doesn't decompose, this is potentially huge, especially because it can do so in an anaerobic environment, meaning without the presence of oxygen. Or to put it another way, the kind of environment you'd find at the bottom of a landfill. The detailed findings have been published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, viewable here if you've got $20 to burn.
You know what's NOT phenomenal?
Thinking "I'm no spring chicken anymore and I really haven’t done anything phenomenal"... and responding to this by getting 107 of your online friends- or really, three of them, because most of the others got sick of it- and setting a Guinness world record for most comments on a Facebook item. Especially if most of your share of the 1,001,152 comments consist of "go". Not only is this spectacularly useless on its face, the Guinness record will very likely attract challengers now that it's out there and announced. That's what most records that get into the book are these days: something referred to as 'Guinnessport'. Beating a Guinness record for the sole purpose of beating a Guinness record, no matter what the category. Or, alternatively, creating a record. That's where all the records for things like 'most eggs smashed on forehead' and 'longest distance traveled doing The Worm' reside, as well as, of course, the record for the most Guinness records. People wouldn't be doing them if Guinness didn't give them a platform. I guarantee you that all across Facebook, groups are forming right now just to try and beat that mark even if they don't know the mark exists (how many times have you seen 'I bet this group can get a million likes'?), and sooner or later, one of them is going to do it.
That's not phenomenal, unless you count phenomenal wastes of time.
Revolutionizing the way people go about saving historic buildings from the wrecking ball. That was what Lee Adler, who died on Sunday at age 88, spent his life doing. The method he pioneered in his hometown of Savannah, Georgia, was that preservation groups would buy historic buildings slated for demolition and then resell them to people who would pledge to restore them. Not only did it prove to be repeatable nationwide, it got a lot of groups to think beyond saving one building at a time and on to thinking about saving entire blocks and neighborhoods.
You know what's phenomenal?
Discovering a type of fungus that eats plastic. That's what some students from Yale managed on a trip to Ecuador last year, finding one previously undiscovered type of mushroom- Pestalotiopsis microspora- that can not only eat plastic, but survive on nothing but. Given that plastic doesn't decompose, this is potentially huge, especially because it can do so in an anaerobic environment, meaning without the presence of oxygen. Or to put it another way, the kind of environment you'd find at the bottom of a landfill. The detailed findings have been published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, viewable here if you've got $20 to burn.
You know what's NOT phenomenal?
Thinking "I'm no spring chicken anymore and I really haven’t done anything phenomenal"... and responding to this by getting 107 of your online friends- or really, three of them, because most of the others got sick of it- and setting a Guinness world record for most comments on a Facebook item. Especially if most of your share of the 1,001,152 comments consist of "go". Not only is this spectacularly useless on its face, the Guinness record will very likely attract challengers now that it's out there and announced. That's what most records that get into the book are these days: something referred to as 'Guinnessport'. Beating a Guinness record for the sole purpose of beating a Guinness record, no matter what the category. Or, alternatively, creating a record. That's where all the records for things like 'most eggs smashed on forehead' and 'longest distance traveled doing The Worm' reside, as well as, of course, the record for the most Guinness records. People wouldn't be doing them if Guinness didn't give them a platform. I guarantee you that all across Facebook, groups are forming right now just to try and beat that mark even if they don't know the mark exists (how many times have you seen 'I bet this group can get a million likes'?), and sooner or later, one of them is going to do it.
That's not phenomenal, unless you count phenomenal wastes of time.
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