An Old Lady Fart

A Matchpoint Drive Playlet:

Me: [In the study, reading a book while the rest of the family watches Dr. Who in the next room.]

Alexa, on the desk behind me: FFFFRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPT. That was an old lady one. Ask me if you want me to give you a cheek-wobbling fart.

Me: [Stunned silence.]

Liam and Michelle deny all knowledge of the Old Lady Fart delivered by Alexa.

I have to wonder if Isaac Davidson is somehow involved . . .

American Fotoplayer

I just can't get enough of these.

We've Got Enough Paneling -- Let's Go to Mars!

A truly noble experiment, this group of astronauts isolating themselves in a Mars mission simulator outside of Moscow for over a year and a half. Wrapping one's head around the idea of living in a small, closed space with the same people for days on end is an excellent way to figure out whether astronauts -- or anyone, for that matter, because I'd still like to go to Mars as a non-astronaut -- can stand being with each other for that period of time in such a small space.

But wood paneling? Really? If Mars spaceships can't look any better than our 1970s family room downstairs, I don't want to go.

I know: It's a quibble. What matters is that they did the experiment, not what the experimental space looks like. Maybe that's all they had -- trying to save money on materials in building the setup so they could spend more money on experiments and the like.

But still: Wood paneling? Where's the steel plate with the huge rivets in it? Where's the aluminum and glass and other elements that make space-ships look, well, space-shippy, not like somebody's outdated basement?

ISP Blues

BridgeMax/Digital Bridge Communications needs to know this: My wife is fed up and isn't going to take any more.

You read earlier here about the pricing snafu, which we got fixed. Well, mostly fixed. They told us the modem was included in the new price. The next bill says otherwise. So, strike one.

Strike two is that our service is out. Out since Tuesday. It's now Thursday, 12:30 pm, and as far as I know, the tech hasn't appeared yet to diagnose the problem. Worse, the people she talks with there can't seem to fathom why having our service out for two days is such a problem. Maybe this is what customer service is coming to: squeeze the most money out, but if the customers actually excpect service, then make sure it's done in a way that's much more convenient to you than to them. When she called them Tuesday, they said, we'll send someone out Thursday. She asked for Wednesday. They said maybe. Then she had to call them Wednesday for news. Nope. We'll come Thursday. And we'll have our guy call when he's enroute. So basically my wife has to stay cemented at home so we don't miss the guy. If she leaves, as Dave Barry says of such shenanigans, the tech, hiding in the bushes, will emerge and leave a note on the door, expressing dismay that a customer couldn't obey his schedule more than hers.

Is it too much to expect promptness and competence? Why should expereinces that are prompt and competent be the exception, not the norm? I know I'm putting the cart before the horse here. Maybe when the tech comes today, the service will be competent. I just hope he doesn't mind tromping through the snow and cold for the diagnosis, because I'm sure not shoveling anything for them.

Tapeworms

When I read this piece at New Scientist this morning, I immediately thought: Tapeworms. TAPEWORMS! They are HERE among us, and there's NOTHING we can do to stop them.

Here's what the brouhaha is all about:

New Scientist is all aflutter about a new camera that hangs on a lanyard around your neck. It's programmed to take one photo every thirty seconds, unless the light meter notices a change in light, then it takes another picture, or unless the heat sensor notices you might be standing close to someone, and then it takes another picture. There's enough memory on this thing to store 30,000 images. This will be a great boon to "lifeloggers," or, as the article describes, people who want to record nearly every aspect of their lives, in entirety. Here's an excerpt:

Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has made his life an experiment in lifelogging, recording everything from phone calls to TV viewing, and uses a SenseCam wherever he goes.

"What's great about these kinds of memory technologies is that they can be very usable for ordinary people," says Henry Kautz, a computer scientist at the University of Rochester, New York, who works on technology to assist cognition.

"Once you have that mass market, that brings the prices down." Eventually, he says, a SenseCam-like device could be part of an artificial memory used by ordinary people, just as they use notebooks and planners as memory aids today.

Do we really need such an artificial memory? Do we really need to know about our phone calls, our TV viewing, our random walks through the city streets, colliding with poles (unless you're in Britain where they've started padding the poles) because you're too busy with your electronic devices to watch where the heck you're going? Not me. I'm sane enough to realize that my life is mundane enough I don't need to record my every waking moment, even if it's recorded at 30-second intervals.

But back to the tapeworms: Arthur C. Clarke, way back in 1976, anticipated such people, in his novel Imperial Earth. An excerpt:

"I must ask you, he said, "to hand over all watches, radios, and communication devices. You won't need them until you get home."

He held up an admonitory hand at the chorus of protests.

There's a good reason for this -- and for any other peculiar requests I may make. Remember, this whole program has been worked out for your benefit. If you won't cooperate, you're only cheating yourselves. Cameras and recorders -- yes, of course. Use them as much as you like."

There was a general sigh of relief at this. Duncan had noticed that most of his companions were festooned with equipment designed to capture every aspect of their experience. A couple were obviously "tapeworms," those peculiar addicts who went through life accompanied by voice-actuated recorders, sot hat nothing they said -- or heard -- was ever lost. Unless they could do this, Duncan had been told, they did not believe that they had really and truly lived.

Such backward-looking obsession was typically Terran. Duncan could not imagine anyone on his world trying to encapsulate his whole life so that whenever he wished he could recall any moment of the past. On Titan, it was the future that mattered.

Yes, I blog. I also keep a personal journal. I take a lot of photos, and it's quite likely we'll be getting a digital video camera this Christmas. But I'm far from obsessing about every tiny little aspect of my life, and in recording things in minute detail. I'm okay with the highlights, and even if I miss a few of those, life is still worth living. It is the future that matters.

Anybody Know What This Is?

Need some help from you nature-lovers out there. I'm trying to identify the round object in the center of the photo. Judging by the flowers, this thing, sizewise, is probably between that of a nickel and a quarter. It looks like chewed-up corncob. Either I or my nine-year-old son took this photo, while hiking on the Twentymile trail out at Hell's Half Acre, in Idaho's Lost River Desert. A friend of mine suggests it looks like an owl pellet, but it's a bit small, and a lot less grey, than the pellets I'm used to seeing. Feel free to chime in with your guesses.