One such term is the “Rube Goldberg machine“–I’d say that less than 10% of the people who I drop that term around in Real World conversation¹ have any idea what I’m talking about.

This was recently brought to mind in some discussions of one of the OK Go videos–I found myself explaining the Rube Goldberg reference a lot.

If it comes up again, instead of pointing people at the Wikipedia entry, I shall instead point them to the recent Golden Age Comic Book Stories entry which has lots of examples of Goldberg comics–including some from the Stupid Questions series, and some of the classic machines.

Like this one:

1. As opposed to my online associates, who tend to have a more eclectic pool of general knowledge.

• The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns” the way I might say “they usually cost around $9.99″.
• Sticking with astronomy for a second, allow me to point out a couple of recent hits from APOD. There’s the photo of what should be called the “Dragonhead” Nebula. There’s the video of the sun exploding. And then there’s the one they claim is of ‘fogbows’, but which everyone who ever read Kirby comics knows is a friggin’ BOOM TUBE.
• While we’re in space, I would be remiss to not mention the story about Voyager either having a glitch, being taken over by aliens, or possibly becoming self-aware. Get your V’ger jokes ready and lock up the bald women, I guess.
• Moving away from space, let’s talk about connections¹. I think the first thing that really made the “six degrees of separation” thing real for me was seeing the chart that came with that King Crimson box set, showing how all the members of Crimson were related to basically everything cool in music. From there it was a short step to the notion that all the cool people are connected by a small number of steps. Hold that thought. I know I’ve mentioned my love of Lapham’s Quarterly before, but this chart showing connections between famous people of letters might be my favourite single page yet. Who knew you could connect John Ruskin to Harriet Beecher Stowe in two steps? Or Byron to Hemmingway in as few? And I just love what’s happening in the bottom right of the chart.
• This link isn’t really for me, but I bet some of the audience will appreciate it. Everything’s supposed to be on Tumblr, right? So there must be a gender-flipped equivalent…
• Well, that’s a pretty solid response to anyone who says graffiti is always just vandalism. Warning–you can get lost in that link for quite a while if you’re not careful. (Anyone know where in Toronto that Banksy one is?)
• Once again Hollywood attempts to adapt Dick. I am prepared to be unimpressed. (No, I’m not even pretending to have an open mind any more.)
• I am, however, trying to keep an open mind about the forthcoming adaptation of (former HGPA member) Bryan O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books, despite Michael Cera’s undeniable punchability. If you’ve read the books, you might be interested in a photo-tour of some of the real places in Toronto that show up in the books².
• If you don’t know how to remove hiss, crackling, and popping, from an audio file with something like Audacity or GoldWave, then there’s no point in trying to listen to SCOOBY DOO AND THE MYSTERY OF THE STRANGE PAW PRINTS over at Mr. Kitty’s Crazy Music Emporium right now. If you do, it will take about two minutes to make the audio listenable, and you can marvel at how Frank Welker’s voice is instantly recognizable across decades. Whether you listen or not, you should go over now to experience the cognitive dissonance of Cyrillic Scooby.
• Buy this book. You won’t regret it. That is all.

1. I can’t even type that without hearing O Fortuna in my head.
2. I recently had a chance to drive around some of the less public places that serve as settings for stuff in the books, in a short tour given by the guy who is the real-world analogue of Wallace from the books. Because, you know, all the cool people know each other.

1. …and present it with the lamest excuse ever, but let’s not get off on a rant.

1. I wonder if the dude would make armour for yappy dogs, because I know someone… actually forget I was thinking that, that kind of amusing myself would probably get me killed.

Comic books are good for children’s learning
Parents should not “look down” on comics as they are just as good for children as reading books, a new study claims.

…

Professor Carol Tilley, from the department of library and information science, said that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, and children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books.

…

“If reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or comprehension, readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic and cultural conventions.

“And if you really consider how the pictures and words work together to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature.”

More details at the Telegraph.

And all of that doesn’t even address how comics can make kids consider careers in genetics, molecular biochemistry, and advanced exoskeleton engineering.

1. Some might say “addiction to”…

So you can imagine how I feel about Jeff Moser’s multi-stage explanation of how AES came about, and how it works.

Everyone should check it out, since there’s not really anyone (at least in the “First World”) who doesn’t depend in some invisible way on AES every day. And Moser has carefully constructed his lecture in a series of increasingly technical iterations–my grandmother would probably be able to follow the first two “acts” in Moser’s explanation–with exit points along the way for people who reach their geek limit.

Actually, how far you go through the panels without bailing is probably a reasonably reliable indicator of your geek level. (Of course if you make it past the end, and into the annotated sample code, then you’re a Big Serious Geek.)

Update: Apparently Cory and I are similar geeks in some way, since he picked the same frame I did to illustrate his pointer when BB got around to linking to this.

I’m talking about Carla Speed McNeil’s comic Finder.

Why should you read it, you might ask?

Well, I think it’s one of the best straight up science fiction comics out there, and I’ve been following it for more than ten years now. Don’t you trust me? Extremely well-rendered characters in a fully realized world, and being used to tell compelling stories. What’s not to like?

If thematic precis and stylistic comparisons are your hooks, then the Wikipedia entry on the series has this to say about the content (along with lots of other info, of course):

Finder tends to focus on the primarily Western/liberal social norms of and media consumption habits of its urban characters, seen from the viewpoint of their aboriginal neighbors, and on all her characters’ strategies, chiefly through travel or artistic endeavor, to escape the often quite intractable limits their societies (and others) place on them.

The series makes allusions to various genres of science fiction and fantasy; apparent influences include Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delany, and cyberpunk for thematic content, and a wide range of work for the visual aspects, from old horror comics and simple line cartoons to the science fiction work of MÅ“bius.

There’s also the argument from authority: Some time ago McNeil made the jump to digital, I think on the web-to-collection model. And this year she won the Eisner (kind of like the Oscar or Grammy for the comics world) for best digital comic. The comic has deserved an Eisner for a while–it deserved one in the print world, where I think it was previously nominated something like seven times, and it has won other awards, but at least listen to the voice of the Eisners now.

And, of course, since Finder is on the web now, you can go and read a bunch of it online to get a feel for the work. (Note that the later series are web-serialized as roughs.)

I have to admit I don’t actually read Finder online–I like it too much to pause after every page, so I prefer to wait and get each story in one complete shot. I’ve enjoyed each of the eight collections so far, and two of them are among my all time favourite comic collections. (If you’re a book person, you really must read some of this story.)

If you don’t do digital comics, you can still check out the printed stuff at a ridiculously low price until the end of August: the hardcover omnibus that collects the first three collections, which normally costs $30US is on sale for only $15 until then in an Eisner-inspired sale. I recommend you spend the money–that’s like two beers worth of money, in exchange for a great read, in a very high production value physical object.

If nothing else, at least read the two page introduction. It will take a second, and it might hook you.

Oh, and I don’t know if she still does it, but back in the day when I ordered some stuff direct from McNeil, she included some of her original roughs in with the order as lagniappe. Here’s what they look like (mild spoilers for one of the later stories):

Anyway while watching the latest video, I noticed a particular prop, for reasons that are about to become obvious, that I think might illustrate the level to which the filmmakers are taking O’Malley’s work as a guide, and being loyal to its spirit. (If you’ve heard my previous comments on adaptations, the generally positive tone of this post might surprise you.)

Allow me to illustrate with three images.

This is from a photo I just snapped² of one of the pages of original art–I have a few of these in my collection–from the second Scott Pilgrim book. Because this is just a snap, you won’t really see all the blue pencil stuff that you could see under the inks in real life.

This is how the same page looks in the printed book³. The visible differences are really just the background colour and the text on the cover of NOW–whatever other post-production cleanup might have been done it’s not visual to a casual inspection.

And this is an image I made by grabbing a couple of frames from that latest video blog⁴ showing one of the movie props:

So yeah, if you were to judge from just this one data point, you’d say we’re looking at a pretty loyal adaptation. Hell the only thing they changed–adding the cheap, sexy toques bit–is perfectly in line with the spirit of the thing.

Of course you don’t have to judge by just that one data point–if you know the comics and are interested in the adaptation the check out the other stuff at the movie site. If you don’t know the comics, I can only recommend that you check them out–they’re pretty great.

1. For very generous values of “Halifax”–dude lived more the woods than I do, but I guess it’s all relative–he was an urbanite compared to say Darwyn Cooke
2. I should probably have scanned it but that would involve moving all the crap I have piled up on top of my scanner at the moment
3. The scanner is still covered, but the Internet being what it is downloading an illegal digital copy of the book took less time than it would to clean the scanner, and my conscience is free since I’ve bought that particular book like a dozen times.
4. this, by the way, is why the bottom of the text looks weird–the angles didn’t quite match, and I’m not OC enough to worry about distorting the images to make them match

The book focuses on just what cool things our eyes are, and on how they got that way. Lots of what’s in it is well, well beyond what I expect Sarah to understand, but there were lots of things for us to talk about anyway.

In honour of the fun we had going through that book, I present one of the best optical illusions I’ve seen in a long time.

So, how many colours would you say are in that image? (You may ignore the single black pixel in the center–that’s not the point.)

Unless you’re colour-blind the answer is obviously 4, orange, pink, a cyan-like blue, and a green from the yellow end of the green spectrum.

Except there’s not. There’s only three.

What you are seeing as blue and green are actually the same colour. You can open the file in an image editor to confirm this¹–what you see as blue and green are all actually pixels with an RGB value of (0,255,150).

Look, I’ll zoom in a bit on the picture:

For me at least, you can start to see the trick break down at that level–it kind of looks like the inner section is blue, the next green, and then the outer one is a third colour–a combination of the blue and green.

If I zoom in again, on the edge of the section I’m seeing as blue, I get this:

Now you can see that the colour is actually a bluish green. This is the only shot of this set in which you can actually see the colour of the pixels–both the cyan-blue, and the much more yellow green that appear in the first image are actually pixels of this bluish green colour, but the contrasting colours trick your brain into perceiving the pixels as two quite different colours.

I think that’s pretty cool.

(I got the image from Buzzhunt. No idea where they got it from.)

1. Yes, I actually did this.

• I’m quite impressed at the 16-year old (from the city where I did my university days) who managed to isolate plastic eating bacteria that can decompose plastic bags in a few months for a science fair project. The projection to a possible industrial solution is very interesting, although I’m not as blasé about the waste products as he is–even if it really is just water and CO₂¹, there’s still some work to be done to sell that at an industrial scale without adding yet more to our industrial carbon dioxide problems. Still, pretty damn impressive for a teen science fair, that’s for sure.
• I do wonder if all the people colouring things green to show support for Iranian democracy realize that they are symbolically aligning themselves with Moussavi–I suspect a large number never stopped to ask “why green?” Even of those who do know it, I wonder what percentage have any idea about Moussavi’s history. See previous Shirky comment on technology speed. Supporting democracy and the protestors seems like a good idea to me, but that doesn’t mean shutting down the critical faculties on the question of how to support them. (Oh, and if you want a cold-water-in-the-face antidote to the “Twitter is changing the world” meme, try this.)
• Generally speaking, I love when reviews of non-fiction books take on the entire sweeping area that the book being reviewed attacks, and attempt to place the book in a larger context as part of the review. Of those reviews I particularly love the ones that you can learn a lot from without ever actually reading the book in question. For instance, Laura Miller’s review of Richard Bernstein’s book The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. The book sounds like something that would be interesting to read, with occasional bouts of being frustrating, and I’ll probably get around to it at some point–if for no other reason than to use it as part of a program of mockery of one of my friends who has a definite pro-Asian bias in his female aesthetics. That’s not really relevant to the fact that I quite enjoyed reading the review.
• In Alaska, you make your own fun on the long, cold winter nights, apparently. For some reason the pictures in that gallery make me think of Wondermark.
• I wonder how many people know even the basics of US-Cuba relations that are laid out in the recent Nation article. There were a few things in there that I hadn’t been aware of on the history side. I wonder about the progression of US-Cuban relations over the near term future. I’m inclined to be cautiously optimistic, but serious experts in Cuba (whom I’m related to by marriage) indicate that they don’t see much potential for any change in the near term.
• There’s certainly a portion of the population² for whom the received wisdom about the NSA is that they’re a scary-competent organization, who’ve recruited the best minds for a couple of generations, and who are probably a decade ahead of what’s public knowledge about cryptography and related fields of research. Certainly if you read something like Bamford’s Puzzle Palace, you’re left with the impression of a very competent organization that was very good at its brief… at least up to the end of the time period the book covers. Given that, it’s very interesting to read an article by a former CIA analyst who challenges that with an utterly different message: that the agency is “a secretive, hidebound culture incapable of keeping up with innovation, or even working with industry”. That fits in with another set of my prejudices–about large organizations, agility, and competence–and thus pleases me. Especially the bits about the “spectacular failures” of the projects with the MBAesque codenames.
• You know how passive RFID tags work, right? You send a radio signal at them, and the signal powers up the chip, which can use that power to send a response. Pretty simple. Well, now we’ve got some people saying “hey, there’s a lot of radio waves around all the time in the air–why not design some tools to essentially do that same turn-it-to-energy trick and then use that continual harvesting of tiny bits of energy to charge a battery?” Or, in simpler terms: can we make cell phones that charge themselves out of thin air?
• I am vaguely interested in the Longbox project. I mean I hate DRM as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is like Cory Doctorow or something), so I’m not particularly interested in trading my first-sale-doctrine-enabled, reusable, loanable, transportable, obsolescence-proof physical comics for a locked up digital file, but that might not matter. And it might not because the Longbox guys made the very smart decision to support existing non-DRM files, even though they will mostly represent pirate content. I would write at length about why this was a very smart idea if this weren’t a linkpost, but for the short version let me ask this: would anyone have become interested in iPods if they couldn’t play your existing MP3s? And how many of those were legitimate content? Q.E.D. Additionally, were the price correct, I could easily see myself doing more “taste testing” in the digital space for things I would eventually buy in a print collection–although I suspect my retailer might not be happy to hear me say so.
• I am already mildly disturbed at having had two non-trivial ant incursions into the house already this year. I don’t need to be worried about migrating fire ants invading my territory, than you very much.
• Here’s a pretty reliable test for whether or not you’re a Canadian computer geek: read this. Now, while you were reading that, did your pulse pick up? Face flush? Feel little thrill of adrenaline? You’re a big old computer geek³.
• It’s funny because it’s true.
• You know what might work even better than Buddy Christ marketing to get people to go to church? Free beer!

And, since you can’t really top religion making itself into an SNL commercial parody, that should probably do it for tonight.

1. What about heat? Required? Released?
2. The “tinfoil hat” cypherpunk types. You know who you are.
3. If any of those reactions occurred primarily in response to the machine working on the LHC calculations, then you might actually be a big old physics geek. Further testing would be required.

With that in mind, here’s a list of a few things that caught my eye during my little bits of hotel-room surfing after the child goes to bed:

• The Pirate Bay trial, and aftermath, has been keeping me amused for a while. The reveal that the presiding judge was a member of several copyright-protection groups was very entertaining, but the subsequent reveal that the judge assigned to check the first judge for bias had to be removed for… wait for it… bias, has my howling with laughter on the inside.
• The Surrogates was a decent comic from Top Shelf a while back–I enjoyed it. The trailer for the movie version makes me think the movie could also be quite good. I promise to try to evaluate the movie on its own merits and without reference to the comic, but I expect to fail.
• My still-suprising-me amusement with Cracked.com continues with their 7 WTF Military Weapons You Won’t Believe They Actually Built piece. As an aside, I was somewhat disturbed to find a basis in fact for the Nazi War Wheel.
• I am officially getting Really Fucking Tired of that special mocking irony. You know who you are. Some thing are So Bad They’re Good, and some things are just rubbish.
• I’m not sure who I want to show the Wu Note Project images to. I’ve got friends who know the Wu, and friends who would know what was being referenced, but I’m not sure those Venn diagrams overlap. Still, if you get it, it’s a lovely thing.
• Back in the day when my guardo camino and I decided to grab a flick our personal slang distinguished two basic categories of movies, depending on what state we were in. We either wanted to get a “thinker”–which basically meant any movie that featured quality writing and acting–or we wanted to get “something with explosions and boobs”, which category should be self-explanatory. It appears the internet has made that second category more efficient, removing the need for the movie infrastructure, and just reducing things to the real lowest common denominator. Men are so simple.
• Yet another reason to be proud of Wisconsin: deny your kid necessary medical attention in favour of waiting for divine intervention… GO TO JAIL. ’nuff said.
• Attention all those who think the private sector, and competition automatically results in better service and lower prices: Beer costs more in all-private-all-the-time Alberta than it does in monpoly-government-vendor Ontario. Just saying.

Considering this as an attempt to adapt Eisner’s work, and speaking as someone who owns & has read the entire Eisner Spirit oeuvre (in the DC Archives editions) this is an abomination upon the face of the Earth.

Considering this as just an action movie, and not thinking about it as an adaptation of anything, it’s still a terrible, terrible movie. (And I liked Sin City, except for Clive’s voice overs).

The phrase “directorially self-indulgent” pops to mind.

Lots of cute women, though.

Speaking of Darwyn, his first adaptation of Richard Stark‘s¹ Parker stories is coming out soon. I was already pretty jazzed about it, just from the mental pictures I had of how it would look, but the fact that there’s a preview online that shows just how great it will look has upped the jazz level. (I wonder if Darwyn will be at the FCBD thing tomorrow…)

I’m also pretty happy with the reissues of the Parker books that the University of Chicago are doing. The first six already out, and three more on the books already. I wonder if they’ll do them all–it would be nice to have a uniform edition.

1. a.k.a. the recently deceased Donald E. Westlake