Sewers of Babel : Codecoater

For those of you who read diesel sweeties, this is big big news... R.Stevens got syndicated. Apparently it starts in January, so start keeping your eyes peeled (and watch the news page for more details). He announced the possibility a while ago, which is I guess why people like George Lucas's flunkies have started paying attention. But apparently it is for sure.

Good news! I have gotten word from United Features this week that Diesel Sweeties is in fact going to be a successfully launched newspaper strip in January. All the final deals and such are being signed this month, so I can't tell you the exact cities just yet. I will tell you that they are extremely cool cities and that they number more than ten but less than a trillion. They are also in the U.S.A. and Canada.

This means that starting next month, you'll be able to read DS strips twelve days a week. I put in a special request with the universe and requisitioned a whole pile of surplus days no one was using. (We got a bulk deal on unused Thor's Days from the 1300s)

This site and our oddly-formatted web comics are not going anywhere. The only changes are going to be extra comics and new places to go read them.

If you haven't yet checked out DS, you can still get in on the groundfloor and get your very own proof that you liked DS before they sold out. (Scroll down on the above newslink to see a kindof lame, but still dear to my heart campaign. I'm proud of him, this is a big big thing for webcomics.

This guy takes video clips, parses them into soundbyte portions and mashes those portions together to make fascinating music videos from them. He effectively composes sound via video. It makes me feel cozy like people are doing what other people said we would be doing when the internet was born. Makin' stuff. Makin' more stuff. Sharing it with others. Learning.

A recent study suggests that a certain kind of virus may increase the body's production of fat cells. From Scientific American:

"Ad-37 is the third human adenovirus to increase adiposity in animals, but not all adenoviruses produce obesity," Whigham and her fellow authors write in their report presenting the findings in the current issue of the American Journal of Physiology. Although it remains unclear exactly how Ad-37 adds fat, it joins a growing list of such viruses, including canine distemper, Ad-5 and Ad-36.

Ad-36 has been shown in an in vitro study by researcher Nikhil Dhurandhar of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center to help human cells go from having the potential to store fat to actually storing it.

So... what I'm curious about is that if, as they say, energy is neither created nor destroyed, and the conventional wisdom is that the way to avoid increasing weight is by using more calories than we intake, then what exactly does this finding say about the way our bodies respond to our energy needs? If given a constant intake/usage rate of 1/1, we introduce the virus, does this mean that the body would be "forced" to either slow down or eat more? Or is it that when a normal body (unaffected by the virus) is at a percieved 1/1 intake/usage rate (percieved by the relative stability of body mass and muscle-to-fat ratio), that it is "wasting" a portion of this intake; when this normal body is then exposed to the virus, the body ceases this "waste" of calories and starts storing it as fat?

There has recently been a lot of criticism about Wikipedia and its ability to deliver factual information given the ad hoc "anyone can edit" nature of the site. Many of these criticisms are sound. It is true that some malformed edits may last for a significant period before others get into the process of revising the information. It is also true that the people involved (being anyone who catches a fancy) do not have the kind of accountability in their writing to incentivize a well formed piece that do the authors of traditional encyclopedic entries. Equally, there exist improper incentives like editing ones own or an enemy's biography.

Yes, it is true that Wikipedia cannot, and will never, guarantee authoritative information from any given article. It is also true that traditional encyclopedias cannot, and will never, provide the context from which the information in a given article was formed. For those of you who are unaware, Wikipedia does not only let (nearly) anyone revise an article, it also lets anyone see the history of edits that formed the article. It also provides a forum for discussion about an article outside the context of direct editing.

Yes, Wikipedia is not an authoritative source to be cited verbatim. However, when is there cause for using even the traditional encyclopedia as a source for citation outside the context of parlor discussion? Both Wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias are references that help us find our way to knowledge, they are not there to satisfy our search.

Further, the main focus of attacks on Wikipedia flaws has been over edits to biographical information. Wikipedia is not alone in having problems discovering fact from fiction when it comes to people's lives. It will always be difficult to be authoritative on this kind of information due to the human propensity to adjust the facts as they were in favor of how they sound when it comes to the way a person is characterized in text. At least when something is misrepresented in Wikipedia there is a chance to see the discussion either directly through the page edit history or indirectly through the talk page. We don't have to wait for The Smoking Gun to catch wind.

When the Internet first came out, we all heard people saying "you can't trust what you read on the Internet." That is no less true today than it was back then. It is no less valid than the old saying "take everything you hear/read with a grain of salt." Newspapers are known for their biases. Even peer-reviewed journal articles will be subject to incestuous referencing and skewed reporting of results. So where do we go for authoritative information? The wise will recognize that gaining knowledge and understanding information come through an ensemble of approaches throughout life that let us pick and sort through what is presented to us, to determine what is relevant and right, to then return the result of this experience back into our cognitive tool-set.

I would hope that incidences of misrepresented information in Wikipedia articles would not have the effect of increasing people's mistrust of information on the Internet. That would be a highly miscalibrated response. Wikipedia has a power to help us reveal the way in which we produce knowledge; of course this process is going to include inconsistent, underdeveloped, or even erroneous results. Those who see Wikipedia articles as a finished product are off-base; it is less a presentation of the finishing line than it is a glimpse into the machines of our minds. It highlights the power of the individual in the plight to understand and communicate that understanding. We are human, these highlights are often mischievous, ugly, manipulative, or tragic. The value of Wikipedia is less realized as a tool for gaining knowledge than it is as a tool for understanding how we come to consensus on this knowledge, however imperfectly.

I just noticed on Lessig's blog[1] that he has been figuring out how to make available his presentations to those of us who are unfortunate enough to miss the live performance. This is a Good Thing[TM]. I remember his Free Culture presentation that Leonard Lin worked up from his audio and slides in 2002 and I'm glad to see that the wait is over for more. The Free Culture presentation is a great example of how accessible Lessig makes even sometimes complicated ideas. His style is witty, informative, and compelling. He hates to be called this, but really - he is so entertaining it is hard not to think of him as a Copyright Rockstar.

Anyway, he has decided to make all the rest of his presentations available to a wider audience but is having a bit of trouble getting the process streamlined. The file for this presentation on Google Print is a 85MB torrent, which is quite large for a simple video file, but I have faith he will figure out a better way soon enough. If you get it soon, it should download very fast as the torrent is quite active (I was surprised to see that it just completed, total time about fifteen minutes).

Hm. Just trying it now, I seem to be having a strange difficulty playing the mp4 file. When I tried it in winamp, I could hear the sound but could not see the video. When I tried it in divx player, I could see the video but had error messages on the sound. The file wouldn't play at all in TheCoreMediaPlayer. Check for updates if you are interested, I'll work on it a bit and see what I can figure out. (I mess with my system a lot so you may very well have more luck than me. )

[1] If you are not familiar with Lawrence Lessig, he is a prominent figure in the fight for more reasonable copyright law.

There is a recently released vulnerability in Windows that has been called the worst ever. The reason is that it does not require the user to open an executable; malicious code can be installed on the computer simply by viewing an image in a browser or explorer.

Microsoft has not yet released an official patch. There is an unofficial patch available, but I am not going to give an opinion, as I do not have the technical knowhow to analyze the code.

There is a workaround provided by Microsoft that will help protect you until Microsoft releases an official patch. I would suggest that you do this, as it does not limit the functionality to an average user and it clears up most of the worry (apparently if one opens an infected file in the Fax Viewer or Paint, one can still be infected so be careful about that.)

1. Go to Start Menu
2. Select "Run"
3. type "regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll" (without quotes)
4. This disables the starting of the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer when links to images are opened.

For additional information:

Summary from TheReg.
Security and technical history of the vulnerability unfolding.
FAQ
Article that suggests this affects all versions (not just XP and 2003, like the Reg suggests).

Update: After reading much, much, much too much on the topic (being responsible for family's computers is sometimes a bit of a headache ;-), I feel confident in recommending the unofficial patch to keep yourself as safe as possible until the official patch comes out. It can be found here, and a lengthy discussion about the topic here (much of which should be taken with a grain of salt, for example, one does not have to unregister the dll at each reboot, that wouldn't make any sense considering that MS suggests rebooting after unregistering!)

It seems so simple: Make copying television shows and CDs (for personal use) legal. I mean, making this act legal does not make sharing the files legal. Nor does it make downloading files improperly (without obtaining a license through purchase or explicit permission) legal. It makes using devices like PVRs and iPods legal. That's it! People still have to buy cable and CDs, they can just do more with the product. I can see why TV producers have a hard time with the concept: their money is made on ads, and simple recordings allow the viewer to skip past these ads. But the sellers of CDs should have no problem with this. It increases the utility of their product, which should promote a subsequent increase in demand for the product.

Yeah yeah, I know all the arguments that if people rip they will share. Well, that isn't the point is it? The point is whether banning ripping has a significant and effective impact on copyright infringement with respect to the loss of utility caused by the ban. Since all it takes is one person to break the law to seed the file-sharing networks, the answer is obvious. This is not an effective means to promoting the legitimate market for copyrighted material. I'm happy to be in a country that recognizes this.

The question remains whether they will levy a tax on devices that have potential for infringement. I'm against this approach also, because I think it distorts the market for consumer electronics. If someone has a convincing argument to the contrary, I'd love to hear it.

Pandora rawks. Check it out. They had this whole music genome project thing, which appears to have resulted in some really fabulous preference-based radio streams. I'd pay for it. That's pretty high praise, from me. Check it out. Now.

edit: About the name, they use Pandora in reference to curiosity, and as our current society favors the curious, the legend of the box is no longer brought to mind, instead, we find discovery. Neat, huh?

And just to be more clear: It is a site where you can stream music from a seemingly very well chosen array. What you do is pick an artist or a song and it then takes the elements of that to choose your next song. You can tell Pandora that you like the selection or not or just let it keep playing songs for you. If you tell it that you don't like a song, it stops playing that song and chooses another for you, using the fact that you didn't like that particular song to help make future song decisions for that station. If you tell it you like the song, it will use that information as well, in the end bringing you new music in a fashion tailored to your tastes.

I love it, I've had a dearth of good new music and this is opening my world back up without any headache of wading through gobs of obscure facts. This is just music, just for me.

Popcasts:

Popcasts is an aggregator of the most popular podcasts from many different directories and ranking sites, all on one page.

For those of you who are in to that kind of thing. Filter filter filter.