The glamour of the media

The following was being passed around in the office a while back – this morning I’ve rediscovered my copy:

“You have never seen inside a film studio before?”
“Only once. Years ago.”
“It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is an insane extravagance, which is a sham; and horrible squalor behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no-one speaks of. There are even one or two honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, tear their hair privately and weep.”

Prater Violet. Christopher Isherwood, 1945.

America apologises

Tip of the hat to Kevin for this one: sorryeverybody.com: 49% of America apologises. Also worth a look is the whole ‘America is purple’ concept; the standard map we see has an essentially Republican America surrounded by blue Democrat brackets. But this is first-past-the-post visualisation; better is to mix a shade of purple for each electoral county. I find the result reassuring. More such analysis here.

Delicious Library is out

& I must say, it looks every bit as delicious as we’d expected. Barcode scanning is just peachy with my Sony DV camera, its annoying habit of going into standby notwithstanding – it’s fasy and accurate and so much fun, you’ll want to cough up the registration fee just to keep going after your allotted 25 additions. My first impressions of actually using the thing are also good. It’s very much a v1.0 release, and I’ve already filed a few bug/feature/behaviour reports, but… oh, just download it and see.

Delicious Monster’s site is here; Ars Technica, of all places, have an hilariously partisan review of the program here. For those who haven’t been paying attention, Delicious Library is a cataloguing application for your books, DVDs, CDs, and video games. Which sounds mundane; the application is anything but. For those who have been paying attention, yes, I started this post with an ampersand solely because I wanted to see what it looked like as a drop cap. So sue me.

One thing – it’s hard to emphasise just how much fun barcode scanning is practice. If you haven’t got an iSight or a suitable DV camera (or, indeed, a Mac), you’ll just have to believe me.

iTunes bookmarks

I’ve been thinking for a while that one of the problems with the iTunes Music Store is that there’s no analogue of the tabbed browser – you can’t skim down a list and say ‘that looks interesting… and that… and that’ without a lot of back-and-forth. Bookmarks are also a little clumsy; you can drag tracks to the Finder, but they’re those odd phobos.apple.whatever nonsense links. It works OK, but it’s not as elegant as one might like.

Tonight I had one of those ‘I wonder if you can… oh, they thought of that, and you can. Cool’ moments that are, let’s face it, the reason we like Apple stuff so much. It turns out that you can drag tracks/albums/etc to playlists. What you get is a link to the 30-second preview, but all the track information remains, so you can shortcut to iTMS results for the track, album, artist, etc. Buy the track and the link updates in some terribly cunning way that probably caused some sleepless nights for some poor coder, but was worth the toil since it’s exactly what you’d expect to happen.

So now I have a ‘Buy?’ playlist, which serves as a cache of bookmarks I might revisit when I’m feeling flush. Simple, really. I’m surprised it took me so long; oh, and this is where both my readers say ‘yeah, we know, we’ve been doing that for months.’ Tsk.

Meanwhile… what? you expected me to post about the US Presidential Election? No, sorry, I can’t bring myself to face it just yet.

Seven basic stories

Partly inspired by catching the first part of an interview with Christopher Booker on the wireless this morning, I stumbled across this delightfully jovial exploration of just how many plots there are. One phrase in particular amused me, as the author works his way down to see just how few archetypal stories one might identify:

One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.

Quite.

Sydney, 1989

Speaking of reminiscing; with all the craziness of having done an actual honest week’s work last week (no, nothing exciting, just a quick development gig, but thanks for asking) I forgot to mention a moderately bizarre occurrence on a flight back from London on Monday. Taking my seat, I was forced to interrupt a chap who was scribbling on a scrap of paper, writing ‘λ’ far more often than is conventional when doing, say, the crossword.

Eventually I concocted some sort of vague excuse to mention that my diffraction physics was somewhat rusty, and there ensued a conversation involving more than the average quotient of the word ‘Fraunhofer’. But this was not the coincidence.

The chap turned out to be Australian, and he’d taken his PhD at the University of Sydney. In the summer of 1989, he was showing students around the high-energy physics department; students from the School of PhysicsInternational Science School. Five of those students were from the UK. One of those five was me.

No, of course we didn’t remember each other – but we must have first met fifteen years ago, and not on BA1498.

Small world.

In a further coincidence, at this moment the top story on the website of the UK end of the whole shebang, the Association for Science Education, is the start of the selection procedure for the next ‘5 for Sydney’. (PDF flyer). Good luck, kids. I had a blast, and apparently it’s still affecting my life.

Random documents

With the last piece of furniture – at least for the moment – now delivered, I’ve been pressing ahead with the general project of ‘sorting things out.’ Which means, in practice, filing and chucking out. While it takes me a considerable time to build up speed in these activities, neither is without its rewards.

One completely random thing I came across today is the visitors’ guidebook for my degree ceremony, more than a decade ago. While I can remember the day at least reasonably clearly, none of it made any sense at the time since the evidently important bits were conducted in Latin. Mix in some genuinely arcane tradition – grabbing a finger and being led forward by it? – and it was all delightfully baffling. Now that I’ve actually read the accompanying notes, however, it starts to make a semblance of sense.

In the same pile of papers was my degree certificate, which makes up for the florid extravagance of the ceremony by being the least flowery formal document I think I’ve ever seen. It’s so plain, it’s not even vaguely convincing. Mercifully, I’ve never had to produce it. I doubt anyone would believe it.