Archive for January 2010

Presenting Shakespeare with a Ballpoint: the iPad

Apple’s secrecy produced another big open secret: they were developing a tablet, and they made it official yesterday. Steve Jobs acknowledged the hype (which one presumes wasn’t supposed to exist at all) when he showed The Wall St Journal quote. However, the resulting massive buildup of hype produced an anticlimactic ‘meh, tell us something we didn’t already know’. 

The device will only be available in two months, which in turn means this press conference was little more than a means of stemming the flow of leaks – yes, we’re working on a device, but no, it’s not ready yet, and yes, we’re building on what we’ve already done with the iPhone, but no, it doesn’t use facial recogniation software to control different accounts for family members, nor does it have a tactile interface.

In a sense (and this is written in fairness to the meh) what Steve Jobs did yesterday was travel back in time and present Shakespeare with a Bic rollerball: a rather useful technological achievement, but something that in the future we won’t be too wowed over. We aren’t that wowed over it now, and that is my point. 

Because we’ve been exposed to tablets in film and television for over twenty years, part of the excitement prior to the announcement came from the fact that these things were finally real. In fact, the devices in the Star Trek shows between 1987-2005 were called ‘padds’ (an acronym) and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn the iPad was named in recognition of this. In Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels series (set between the 2040s and the 2170s) they were called ‘slates’ and ‘pads’ alternatively. They are high tech devices, but they are like 20th Century rollerball pens. They are meant to facilitate our use of our networked high technology, and be so ubiquitous in the future that they are taken for granted. 

A Star Trek Padd

From Virtuality
 

So when Steve Jobs says this is the best thing he’s ever done, and when Jonathan Ive is on video saying ‘it’s magical’, this is where they’re coming from. The iPad would have lived up to its hype and then some were this the year 2000, but no. The iPhone announcement was a big deal in 2007 because nothing operated like it at the time, and it hinted at where the technology was going. Three years later, they’ve managed to produce extra large versions with a ten hour battery life. 

Other companies will also be producing electronic tablets, but one imagines that Apple’s will be superior in ease of use and aesthetics – and these reasons are why the hype was so great. Apple makes beautiful objects. (What most people skipped was that they are now making their own chips, which is a big deal). 

Jobs ended his presentation by telling us that the company seeks to exist at the intersection between technology and the liberal arts. 

This was a great reminder of the importance of the liberal arts, and the statement came with embedded snarkiness. Businesses like Microsoft, in the words of Jobs, ‘have no taste’. Most businesses, for that matter, put little stock in the value of the arts. Further, most politicians put little value in the arts, and those students who wish to study the liberal arts at a post-secondary level are told they are jeopardizing their future. We have a very arts-unfriendly society, and a resulting population of imaginatively im
poverished citizens. Citizens, in turn, whose imaginations are so blighted that they seem mystified by Apple’s success. They’re all like, ‘Apple, wow, how do they keep coming up with hit products?’ In producing attractive things, Apple has both ignored the academic post-modern attacks on the idea of beauty, and wowed the business world by becoming a fifty-billion dollar company. 

While Jobs was introducing the iPad, Margaret Atwood was at the annual Davos conference to accept another award, and planed to deliver a speech, which was cut for time. As introduced by Jane Taber at The Globe and Mail: “Margaret Atwood was poised to tell the world’s business and political elite today that politicians have ‘done their best to finish’ off art.”

I am thankful that Apple’s example exists to counter the tasteless lack of imagination of our ruling elites.

From here, Apple now has to bring us electronic data sheets, as represented in the new series Caprica. The iPad is a twenty-five year old idea for which the technology has finally been developed. The Caprica data sheets appear to be where we go from here.

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Url rewriting with .htaccess updated for 2010

Last week I uploaded the newest version of my website, and promptly ran into a problem I didn't understand. Had I been able to find this solution through the searches I initiated, I would have saved myself both some time and some undeserved annoyance with my webhost. 

My site uses .htaccess redirects to make the url's clean and predictable, as well as transferable from previous versions. In the past, the redirects were done using the following:

RewriteRule ^home/$ http://timothycomeau.com/?page=home

That is 'home' is an alias for the full url that follows. 

This didn't work with my new host; rather, inputing 'timothycomeau.com/home' rewrote the url as the full url I was trying to hide (http://timothycomeau.com/?page=home). With the help of my host's tech support, I was told that the use of the full url was the problem. Rather, I needed to write my RewriteRules this way:

RewriteRule ^home/$ /?page=home. 

When I did this, the url's behaved as I expected and wanted them too.

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The craziness. January 2010 so far.

Vancouver, not known for a place of a lot of snow, was awarded the 2010 Olympics in 2003, probabby for places like Whistler, which are known to be ski resorts. Seven years and global-warming denial later, there’s concern there might not be enough snow. Meanwhile, protesting the Olympics is forbidden, and the Prime Minister shuts down Parliament using them as an excuse.

The Olympics seem to be a diaster in the making. What was supposed to be Canada’s pride will instead be its embrassement. Remember the last Canadian winter olympics, Calgary ’88? The Jamacian bob-sled team? Vancouver seems a little Jamacian bob-sled at this point. The whole thing will be one day summed up with, ‘what were they thinking?’

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A massive Earthquake destroyed Haiti. That’s not hyperbole. A country has been blank-slated. One thinks of Kobe, and Iran, the Tsunami, other places which suffered devasting earthquakes in recent years. Yet those places had an infrastructure that could absorb the devastation. Haiti, it was well known, was already a sociological diaster before this. The tsunami this earthquake has unleashed is that of North American white guilt. Pat Robertson says something dumb (as usual) and people get all self-righteous about it, which is kind of beside the point considering 100,000 people have died. That number is too large to make sense of. 

I’m not sure if Haiti has just become the defining event of the decade (ala a day in September 2001), or just another tradgedy that will be off the radar in six months.  It is especially reminiscent of the Tsunami, coming three weeks after its fifth aniversary. For televsisual North America, it’s another go on the tradgedy-o-round, and people for whom budgets are already tight due to the economic situation (brought on by overpaid, ignorant fools) are now expected to donate out of survivor’s guilt. 

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Jay Leno, an overpaid throwback to the 20th Century (television and a car collection?) is given back his late night television show because the only people watching tv are those who were already adult in the late 20th Century. Conan O’Brien, who makes the Internet Generation laugh, is shafted in the process. I just hope this means Conan goes to HBO or something and can start using swears in his humor. 

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Some girl from Los Angeles who’s name means Monday in German had plastic surgery, which is too bad because she was quite attractive. Now she’s just generic. Why do hot girls always seek to erase the very unique qualities that make them hot? That, of course, is a rhetorical question, because we all know the answer is they’re spoiled idiots. 

Actually, to answer that rhetoric: I always feel like the answer is better schooling, actually. I imagine a soceity where education means enabling talent and predisposition, teaching the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of human history (that includes things like mathematics, meditation, exercise …). The goal of education should be to stretch the minds and imaginations of children as far as they can be stretched, to borrow the phrasing of someone I read once. 

Instead we have a dehumanizing education system which enables and encourages mediocrity. So potentially beautiful people are ruined, their superficiality becoming something they cling to, and develop their identities around their physique instead of growing mentally (and changing thus). Through surgery they change their appearance, thereby supposedly changing their personality. Everyone an Easter Egg, an empty shell, and everyone changing the decoration, every few years. 

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RT’ing Michael Ruppert on Haiti

Michael Ruppert writes:

Jan 13, 2009 — Remember Katrina and Rita? Those hurricanes that prompted a government response which made most of us ashamed to be American? I am certain that the global response to a devastation far worse, as a result of the Port Au Prince quake, will make Bush's Follies look like a well-oiled machine. Not only is the situation on the ground worse; the governments that might send massive aid are financial and economic basket cases. With the death toll already circling 200,000, and almost all critical infrastructure destroyed, the effort needed would have broken most governments before the collapse. It would take a Marshall Plan. So fuggedboudit. The UN can't help much either. No one can. There will be so many stories of courage, heroism, sacrifice and love to arise from this tragedy. At some point I can just see good souls all over the Gulf with private boats trying to do what they can. Take some fresh water and medical supplies in. Maybe pull a few out before anarchy and disease consume everything. It reminds me of a line Jeff Bridges once spoke: "You human beings are at your best when things are worst." — That is exactly what must change in us.

We will see lots of footage of aid flights and stories about how other nations are rushing to assist. But it will not be possible to hide the fact for long that Haiti is becoming — or has become — a mass grave. Haiti is a stark, cold, and unforgiving metaphor for what we all face… all to soon. We need to listen to and acknowledge the suffering of the Haitian people so that someone might acknowledge ours when the time comes. What happens in Haiti needs to be watched cosely and learned from by those with the stomach for it. The journalist in me wants to be there, right in it.

Our message is spreading quickly. Every day I receive maybe 10 to 15 friend requests on Facebook from all over the world from people who have just seen "Collapse". Almost all say something like, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way." — almost all are in their twenties. I spend as much time as I can with many to share a few words and bond across a cyberspace that now hums with a lonely echo. An awakening is taking place. Collapse has been invited to the Berlin International Film Festival and I've heard that it is going to be mentioned in one of the largest U.S. weekly news mags this week. Collapse has announced many new theatrical openings around the country and finally in some foreign cities. The awakening has started before the panic that will come… if not over Haiti then over what's coming this year. The faster we reach people, the less damage will be caused by the panic. It is my prayer that the panic can be averted, even if loss of life cannot. There is still time.

MCR

http://mikeruppert.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti.html

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There will be oil, or not

Endless Oil – Technology, politics, and lower demand will yield a bumper crop of crude
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_03/b4163046952385.htm

As Leonardo Maugeri, a senior executive at Italian oil major ENI (E), puts it: “There will be enough oil for at least 100 years.” Many analysts and industry executives have little doubt that there’s plenty of oil in the ground. “Only about 32% of the oil [in reserves] is produced,” says Val Brock, Shell’s head of business development for enhanced oil recovery. Shell estimates 300 billion barrels and maybe more might be squeezed out of existing fields, much of it once thought beyond retrieval. Peter Jackson, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ London-based senior director for oil industry activity, has reviewed data from the world’s biggest fields. His conclusion: 60% of their reserves remain available. […] The price spike of 2008 may lead to similar results. Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, an environmental group, notes that the U.S. car fleet shrank by 4 million in 2009, thanks to scrapping and reduced sales. He expects that shrinkage to continue, reducing the U.S. fleet by 25 million cars by 2020. He also sees a cultural change occurring in which more people, especially the young, don’t see owning a car as a necessity. “We are now looking at something new, a shift in the way people think about automobiles,” he says. “That means less oil use.”

U.S. oil consumption dropped by 9% over the last two years. The recession certainly hurt demand, but many analysts think oil use in the West has peaked and will not rebound to previous levels. The Energy Dept. sees the consumption of oil-based fuel in the U.S. flattening out in the coming decades. “Are people going to use energy differently in the next [growth] phase?” asks Goran Trapp, head of global oil trading at Morgan Stanley in London. “If so, the people forecasting [strong] demand increases are going to be surprised.”

// Contrast this with a report by Terry Macalister, from 9 November 2009:

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. […] But as far back as 2004 there have been people making similar warnings. Colin Campbell, a former executive with Total of France told a conference: “If the real [oil reserve] figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets … in the end that would suit no one.”

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I’m not sure Jeremy Rifkin has the intellectual gravitas to write a book like this

I mean, I read the dust-jacket blurb today and understood it instantly, which is kind of bad for a 688 page book. Nevertheless, I feel like it's probably a must-read, and it would be nice if this was what everyone was talking about at the beginning of this decade, rather than all that world-is-flat and we're-all-going-to-die-for-xx-reason shit we've subjected to for the past ten years.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

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Canada, just another country of squandered potential ruled by an idiot?

To quote myself, from December 2008, during the first prorogation, with added emphasis today. With The Economist weighing in, (ici et ici)  it's clear that our international reputation has begun to be damaged.  

There's also a joke which seems apt, considering the circumstances. "Did you hear about the Canadians who won gold medals at the Olympics? They had them bronzed."  
 

The reason the Conservatives are currently dominant despite the weakness of their official numbers is because they don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings, and one can hope that this works out to our collective advantage when they draw the knives for Harper’s back. If not, as Adam Radwanski pointed out, we’re in even bigger trouble than we thought, writing: “If Conservatives are not at least seriously discussing the replacement of Stephen Harper before Parliament returns on Jan 26, he truly has succeeded in creating a cult of personality’. The last thing we need is a Maurice Duplessis holding this country back from the wonder of the 21st Century, as that dictator of Quebec did in the 1950s. However once he died the resulting Quiet Revolution rushed the province from the 19th into the 20th Century within a decade, and tried to follow-through by upgrading itself into a nation-state.

 

If Harper manages to enforce a nightmare of feel-good 20C Reagan-Thatcher bullshit on us while the US resurrects itself from its social catastrophe, and Europe continues to set an example for what a mostly enlightened society could be, the end result will probably be a dramatic national révolution tranquille in twenty years, by which time the rest of the world will be used to thinking of us as just another one of those third world countries of squandered potential ruled by an idiot. The talent of this country will continue to apply for US-work visas to escape the ignorance of this place. Eventually, Canada could come to resemble the southern United States, too ignorant and stupid to understand the hell we exemplify to others.

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johnnyblog

I'm guessing that johnnyblog is a Conservative operative. A series of comments on Rick Mercer's piece reprinted in the Globe & Mail, which appeared originally on his blog. 

This is how the Conservatives operate … try to dominate and set the agenda of the conversation by belittling the opposing view through being the loudest assholes in the room. Out of politeness we keep our mouth shut and let them bluster like fools when we should be telling them to fuck right off, or openly mocking them.

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