Kittywood Studios: this explains so much.

[Via James Nicoll]

Dry Ice Pits on Mars.

After their splashdown in the Pacific, the Apollo 11 astronauts had to fill in their customs paperwork upon their arrival at Honolulu airport, just like every other inbound traveller.

I can't help but notice that the one section of this paperwork that might have been considered of some practical importance – i.e. the part asking about the possibility of spreading disease – had to be answered TO BE DETERMINED, what with the astronauts still being in quarantine at that point.

[Via The Brooks Review]

File under 'Famous last words': Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers, network security specialists say. [...]

"We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back," says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. "We think it's benign. But we just don't know." [...]

Retaliation for Stuxnet, or someone too high up the chain of command to be told what to do getting a bit careless with their USB drive and bringing in some malware they picked up on their home PC?

Steven Levy's obituary for Steve Jobs is probably the best all-round non-technical summary I've read today of the life of the man who changed computing:

The full legacy of Steve Jobs will not be sorted out for a very long time. When employees first talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field," it was a pejorative – they were referring to the way that he got you to sign on to a false truth by the force of his conviction and charisma. But at a certain point the view of the world from Steve Jobs' brain ceased to become distorted. It became an instrument of self-fulfilling prophecy. As product after product emerged from Apple, each one breaking ground and changing our behavior, Steve Job's reality field actually came into being. And we all live in it.

Detractors will say – correctly – that few of Apple's products were truly the first of their kind. The Apple II was competing with Commodore's PET, the TRS-80 and a host of Z80-based S100 bus systems. The Mac and the Lisa were inspired by the Xerox Star. The iPod wasn't the first portable MP3 player. The post-1997 Macs increasingly used industry standard PC components, to the point where since the switch to Intel processors you could use your Mac as a bog standard Windows PC if you were so inclined.¹ The iTunes Store wasn't the first online music store, it was just the one that benefitted from being slickly integrated with the world's best selling MP3 player. The iPad is far from being the first tablet computer the world has ever seen.

And yet … in between genuinely groundbreaking devices like the original Mac and the iPhone, Jobs and Apple kept on producing computing devices that were better designed, worked better and were continually updated instead of being milked for profits. If Apple didn't make something first, it had an enviable track record of making it better. "It Just Works" was the slogan: it wasn't 100% accurate – computers are complicated machines doing complicated things, and there's a limit to how far even Apple can keep them from falling over at the most inconvenient moment possible – but Apple have come closer to making the slogan reality than any other IT company in the microcomputer era.

Doing that once could be down to luck. Doing it two or three times would be a neat trick. Pulling it off umpteen times over the course of some thirty-odd years tells you that the company had something special. With all due respect to Woz and Jef Raskin and Jonathan Ive and Tim Cook and the many people who made MacOS X the nicest desktop Unix system in creation and created all the other minor miracles Apple has produced over the last 15 years, it's pretty clear that Steve Jobs was that something special.

Here's to the crazy ones!

1. Though it's a terrible waste of a nice computer to not use it to run MacOS X like Steve intended. ↩

The Daily Mail on the Amanda Knox verdict: you couldn't make it up!

[Via MeFi user Artw, posting to this MetaFilter thread]

The relaunch of Delicious (minus several useful features) has resulted in another wave of interest in Pinboard. Co-founder Maciej Cegłowski welcomes the newcomers:

For any bookmarking site, the fan subculture is valuable because it makes such heavy and creative use of tagging, and because they are great collaborators. I can't think of a better way to stress-test a site then to get people filling it with Inception fanfic. You will get thoughtful, carefully-formatted bug reports; and if you actually fix something someone might knit you a sweater. And please witness the 50 page spec, complete with code samples, table of contents, summary, tutorial, and flawless formatting, the community produced in about two days after I asked them in a single tweet what features they would want to see in Pinboard*. These people do not waste time.

* See also: this.

Best. @Reply. Ever?.

[Via @davepell]

Jason Scott found a Facebook exchange that neatly encapsulates the pros and cons of the latest round of changes to the way Facebook operates.

Over at collision detection, a post on squid sex that includes the phrase "This behaviour further exemplifies the 'live fast and die young' life strategy of many cephalopods." Of course you want to read the rest.

In the preface to a new edition of Good Times, Bad Times, former Sunday Times and Times editor Harold Evans finds one small consolation in the wake of his having left the News International empire:

On my departure from the Times I became a non-person, and it proved a very happy experience. For years my birthday had been recorded in the Times, a matter I felt more and more to be an intrusion into private grief. After my resignation, my name was left out of the birthdays list. I then came to regard each passing year as not having happened since it had failed to be recorded in the paper of record, and I adjusted my stated age accordingly. More recently my name has been put back in the birthdays list, which is a pity. Perhaps this new edition of Good Times, Bad Times will generate another act of rejuvenation.

Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of Jane Eyre is about 90% of the way to being excellent. Michael Fassbender is a terrific Mr Rochester, Mia Wasikowska does well enough as our heroine,¹ and there's a fine supporting cast featuring the likes of Judi Dench, Jamie Bell and Sally Hawkins.

There are really only two problems, so far as I can see. First, in a film that clocks in at two hours, there's not quite enough time for the plot and the relationships to develop. Not just Jane and Rochester, but Jane and St John Rivers and his sisters: I didn't feel enough of a sense of how thoroughly Jane had settled into her life with her new family by the time the prospect of going off to be the wife of a missionary came up. Fassbender and Wasikowska make their on-screen relationship work despite the lack of time, but it all feels a little rushed.

"Rushed compared to what?", you might ask. Which brings us to the second problem. My point of comparison is the 2006 BBC miniseries,² which not only had the advantage of twice the running time but (more importantly) featured hugely accomplished lead performances from Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson. Fassbender is almost up there with Stephens, but Ruth Wilson was a revelation in her first major TV role; the chemistry between 1996's Edward Rochester and Jane Eyre took the entire production to another level. Mia Wasikowska, fine as she was, wasn't quite at that level.

For all that, the 2011 version is a handsome, highly enjoyable adaptation that's well worth a look.

1. The simple fact that the actress is only 21 herself reminds us just how young Jane was when she set out in her career as a governess, but Wasikowska's performance is much more than her age. ↩
2. Previously. ↩

I'm sufficiently unhappy with Safari's performance since the introduction of version 5.1 to give this a try:

Annoyed by Safari 5.1's tendency to spontaneously reload pages when you didn't ask it to? There's a workaround for it, but it introduces a few problems of its own. Some Safari extensions will not work, and some of the new gestures won't work either. [...]

Given how many extensions were broken anyway by the 'upgrade' to WebKit2 in Safari 5.1, I'm willing to risk losing the use of a few more extensions if it results in a more stable browser.¹ I hope Apple have thrown a bunch of people at this problem and are going to roll out Safari 5.2 with WebKit2.1 ASAP, or I'm going to have to learn to live with OmniWeb's lousy Applescript support all over again, or else switch to Google Chrome and rewrite my various Applescripts one more time.

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. So far, so promising. But it's very early days. ↩

Abroad: they do things differently there…

Swiss animal lover Priska Küng runs a kind of matchmaking agency — for lonely guinea pigs that have lost their partners. She lives with around 80 of the furry, squeaky little creatures, in addition to six cats, a number of rabbits, hamsters and mice in the village of Hadlikon, some 30 kilometers from Zürich.

Küng, 41, rents out her guinea pigs, a service that has been in high demand in the Alpine nation ever since animal welfare rules were tightened up a few years ago. Switzerland has forbidden people from keeping lone guinea pigs because the animals are sociable and need each other's company.

As a result, the sudden death of a guinea pig, shocking enough in itself, can also place the hapless owners outside the law if they only had two of the pets. [...]

[Via The Awl]

Introducing Pablo Fanque:

Anyone who has ever listened to The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [...] will know the swirling melody and appealingly nonsensical lyrics of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," [...]

For the benefit of Mr. Kite
There will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque's Fair – what a scene
Over men and horses, hoops and garters
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
In this way Mr. K. will challenge the world!

[...]

While true Beatlemaniacs will know that Mr. Kite and his companions were real performers in a real troupe, however, few will realize that they were associates of what was probably the most successful, and almost certainly the most beloved, "fair" to tour Britain in the mid-Victorian period. And almost none will know that Pablo Fanque – the man who owned the circus – was more than simply an exceptional showman and perhaps the finest horsemen of his day. He was also a black man making his way in an almost uniformly white society, and doing it so successfully that he played to mostly capacity houses for the best part of 30 years. [...]

"Pixels" by Patrick Jean is both beautifully put together, and guaranteed to make fans of arcade games of a certain age feel terribly nostalgic.

[Via Making Light (Particles)]

We can but hope that The Muppets will live up to the high standards set by this latest teaser-cum-parody trailer.¹ I can't help but notice how much fun Chris Cooper looks to be having playing a character by the name of Tex Richman. I'm thinking he's probably not one of the good guys.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. If you're wondering about the target of the parody, see here. ↩

Emily Lakdawalla has put together a slide showing "all the big stuff in the solar system, to scale. Or, as one commenter put it:

Beautiful

[It ...] demonstrates very nicely what I've always said: the Solar System has just four planets!

#1 – David – 09/15/2011 – 12:58

Alderaan shot first!

[Via Daring Fireball]

Harlan Ellison is trying to prevent the release of Andrew Niccol's In Time, on the grounds that Niccol's film rips off one one of his better-known short stories:

Ellison says the new film is based on his multiple prize-winning 1965 work, "Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman" which the complaint calls one of the most famous and widely published science fiction short stories of all time.

For years, according to Ellison, he has resisted producer interest in adapting this story into film, but in late 2010, Ellison's company, The Kilimanjaro Corporation, entered into an agreement with a third party to create a screenplay based on the story so that it could be sold or licensed to a Hollywood studio. Now, Ellison says that In Time jeopardizes an official film adaptation of "Repent Harlequin!"

Ellison says the similarity between the two works is "obvious" and quotes critics such as Richard Roeper who have attended advanced screenings and seem to believe that In Time is based on "Repent Harlequin!"

Both works are said to take place in a "dystopian corporate future in which everyone is allotted a specific amount of time to live." In both works, government authorities known as a "Timekeeper" track the precise amount of time each citizen has left.

The complaint goes on to list similarities in the features of the universe as well as the plot surfaces — the manipulation of time an individual can live, the type of death experienced by those whose time runs out, rebellion by story protagonists, and so forth.

For what it's worth, "Repent Harlequin!", Said the Ticktockman is one of my all-time favourite short SF stories; when I saw the trailer for In Time a few weeks ago, it didn't remind me of Ellison's story in any respect – not the storyline¹, not the motivation or actions of Justin Timberlake's protagonist, and certainly not the tone and style.² The central issue in Ellison's story isn't so much that everyone has a strictly regulated amount of time to live, but that everyone is forced to live those lives in a highly regimented manner imposed from above in order that society stays on schedule.

Put it another way: Timberlake's character fights back against a society where a powerful elite tries to control how long he's allowed to live by taking up arms and kidnapping a young woman. Ellison's Harlequin disrupts his society by showering factory workers with thousands of jellybeans to throw off the Ticktockman's production schedule.

[Via The Medium is Not Enough]

1. Insofar as it's possible to discern the outline of the story from the trailer along. ↩
2. Again, to the extent that one can tell from a trailer that comes in at a little under two minutes. ↩