Listen To These Podcasts, Damnit!

I haven't had an mp3 player since college and it's one of those luxuries that's starting to gnaw at me now. If I weren't so prone to breaking them or having them stolen I'd be on that bandwagon quicker than a drunk Ewok on Al Roker's leg. But these days it's not music I want to fill my ears, it's the overwhelming podcast schedule I've set that demands their services. These aren't your average throwaway programs highlighting the hottest consumer technology or celebrity gossip though--these programs will make you smarter. Guaranteed.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

Presented by the New England Skeptical Society, SGU promotes critical thinking on many of society's hot-button issues. Magnetic bracelets, the links between autism and vaccines, psychic mediums and so forth are all in the crosshairs of this panel of scientists and professional cranks. They also discuss science in an easily accessible way, so you don't have to be a massive nerd to grok (though it helps).

Intelligence Squared

This is the Oxford-style debate show from NPR that, unlike Fox News, truly gives both sides of an issue a fair and balanced forum to argue their points then lets the audience discuss which side "won" the debate. Pretty good stuff, though sometimes the audience votes with their hearts rather than their minds and the obviously superior-yet-perhaps-socially-contentious argument loses out. Whatever, still a good source of info.

Material World

A science program from the BBC that covers a lot of ground--all told in funny British accents. Haha! No really, a good listen.

Naked Scientists

Another science podcast, these guys have a primary weekly theme and dive into it pretty deep before tackling smaller topics and news from the various scientific disciplines.

This American Life

Last, but certainly not least, my favorite podcast and definitely my favorite NPR offering is Ira Glass' wonderful weekly broadcast from Chicago Public Radio, This American Life. This show is all over the place, but excelling wherever it goes, being just at home exploring social issues as it is just telling fascinating stories about people who call this country home. They ran two incredibly informative programs about the financial meltdown and, recently, about the healthcare costs that everybody should listen to now. NOW!

--Matt

Just When You Think He Can't Be Any More Amazing, Sagan Pulls You In Again

I have no clue what impetus lay behind the current Carl Sagan push on the net, but I like it and am glad to see this extraordinary man and his efforts to popularize science receiving renewed attention over a decade after his death. Actually, for me, it dredges up some bittersweet emotions. I realize now that perhaps I'd be a happier person had I applied myself to mathematics in high school and pursued a career in the sciences.

So then this morning along comes the following clip of an interview with Niel DeGrasse Tyson talking about how Carl Sagan showed his young self a smidgen of care and encouragement, which lead to him becoming a physicist. Wow. Sagan rocks.

--Matt

Playing Telephone

I was just listening to an old 2002 podcast (episode #90) of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life--definitely one of the more worthwhile bits of broadcast out there--and the week's theme was telephones. However, as always, Ira Glass and his crack team of producers took that innocuous everyday item and wove a compelling tale about it and the power it has. This time the main story concerned a Beverly Hills father and son's strained relationship: son's using drugs in an increasingly big way and letting everything else fall to the wayside while father stands by supporting him, seemingly impotent to stop it. Or was he? In a gutsy move that would almost certainly see the FCC knocking on his door, dad wiretapped his son's phone with a voice-activated tape recorder and listened to all the drug talk and party plans, the increasing loss of empathy and subsequent rise in arrogance. He had intended only to use the recordings to intercept his son before the little bastard could get into any real trouble, but the tapes ended up really saving the kid's life after a windstorm revealed the eavesdropping apparatus and he was able to listen to what he really sounded like.

Heavy stuff, actually. It got me thinking, what if my parents were taping my phone conversations? Would they have been worried for me? Probably not, I hope. I mean, most of my phone calls concerned lost Japanese gold on Manila's Corregidor Island, RPG characters for our Friday night dungeon crawls, what twist this week's episode of Babylon 5 was going to take and whether or not my friend Justin's stepfather was the Unibomber. The only drugs talk we ever had was about rare, ridiculous, questionably effective Native American drugs we were going to order out of this or that catalog, but never got around to doing.

There, I've come clean. That's all the sordid business I ever got up to on the phone in high school. I never used the phone to call in any orders for fine Venezuelan cocaine. Never used it to plan any purse snatching sprees. Never used it to ask a girl on a date. Though, thinking about it now, had I done even one of those things, maybe high school wouldn't have sucked quite so badly.

--Matt

Roll D20 For Saving Throw: Geeky Coolness...SUCCESS!

Last Saturday's D&D event on Market St. in SF orchestrated by my former coworker and assisted by yours truly was a smashing success by our meager standards. Heck, we got a nod from Laughing Squid. That's something. Considering that we were, in our minds, sure the cops would put the kabosh on our little stunt before the dungeon crawling got started, yeah, going four hours straight sans any fuzz-related interference, hobo fights, ex-con chess jockey brawls or being hit by the frequent MUNI buses that whizzed by inches from Jason's DM stand was damn impressive.

Since the dawn of time man has wondered whether or not one can actually get away with anything on Market Street in broad daylight. The answer: A resounding YES!

We started about an hour later than planned, owing to problems getting tables, chairs and Jason's vast--VAST--array of D&D paraphernalia from Hayes Valley to the Powell-Market intersection. Our rescuer was City CarShare and their no-fuss, affordable brand of short-term auto rentals, from whom we snagged a pickup truck for thirty-minutes. After dropping Jason and the stuff off then returning the truck I walked back to the scene of the crime and found our three invited players had come--plants who pretended not to know Jason and made it look like we'd genuinely snagged some members of the public to sit and roll the dice. That little gambit worked, actually, and before long we had two homeless guys come sit down to play...with mixed results.

This was pretty much the player group, minus the unhinged homeless dude who came by to backstab the others.

The first man, a middle-aged Chinese dude, had been involved in a fistfight with a clearly mentally unstable gentleman not thirty minutes before taking a seat. Although he'd never played the game before, the man was a natural role player and ended up being more effective a participant than even the three plants. His friend who came about an hour later was another matter altogether. This guy sat down and started to play, but from the outset made it very clear he would be working for the enemy, promptly attacking the four other players in the middle of an encounter. I suppose he was role playing--the role of the contemptuous jackass. No matter though, the Chinese guy annihilated him and pretty much every other combatant to boot.

The playing field and Jason, in all his "SM" glory.

Did I mention Jason was wearing what essentially looked like a stylized burka? Yup, straight out of a Spirit Halloween store and adorned with this persona's initials on his cape, for one day he was not a dungeon master, but a "Street Master."

Me and a proper filmmaker got footage of the whole thing, my role focusing mostly on getting crowd reactions and conducting interviews. Look for an edited video on YouTube someday soon.

--Matt

Uh, Am I the Only Person Who Thinks This Isn't a Hot Idea?

Any post that begins with a disclaimer can't be kosher, but here goes: I am not a racist. Now, having said that, and with nothing to back up the statement, let's get down to the brass tacks.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the governing body of IP addresses and domain names, has announced it is ready to implement web addresses utilizing non-roman characters. In other words, if you want an address using Farsi, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc. then hooray, now you can. ICANN argues that since half the world's internet users speak and read languages that aren't roman character-based it makes sense, but I have to wonder if it was ever a problem that needed fixing. During my entire cumulative three years in Japan I never once heard anybody complain or express confusion at roman character URLs. Of course, that was only one country, but I believe virtually anybody with the resources and savvy to really utilize the internet at least know the roman alphabet enough to enter an address. Again, I can't really say for sure and the article doesn't explicitly say or link to any info on just how squeaky this wheel really is.

I don't think this is a particularly good idea. With this change I believe the internet will begin to fragment along ethnic lines and effectively lock out massive segments of the web to anybody without the foreign language input plug-ins to access sites of a specific address language. If, for some reason, you think it's no big deal to switch to another language input (using the language bar you probably don't have activated) I suggest checking the international settings in your control panel. There are a hell of a lot of foreign input types. This move will expand the internet by creating mirrors using separate foreign language addresses, and these alternate versions of the Unicode address pages may even contain different info. But you'll never know.

Welcome to the age of internet ghettos.

--Matt

Guantanamo Guards Give New Meaning to AC/DC's "Shook Me All Night Long"

I've been meaning to post about this for almost a week now, but, like a lot of things last week, it got backlogged....

Breaking News: I'm in a cafe now typing this and a black woman who looks to be in, at most, her late twenties came in pleading to use the phone. She called 911 saying that a man was dragging her up and down the street beating her. I don't want to say right away I don't believe her, however, she looks surprisingly unscathed for a woman who just went through that. Her daughter, a girl of eleven or twelve, is with her now. If that actually just happened...damn. The human species is such a savage creature. I'm practically ashamed to be one. Matt Lopez: documenting the atrocities.

Right, back to the matter at hand. The piece I wanted to comment on comes from the Think Progress political blog and concerns the music that Guantanamo torturers used to deprive captives of sleep and generally drive them nuts. Considering that the guards were blasting Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Rosanne Cash and "rap music" at ear-splitting volumes inside the detainee cells, it's a pretty open-and-shut case of human rights violation. I mean, Rage Against the Machine...'nuff said.

Naturally, these and many more artists are pissed that guards are using the fruits of their creative loins to cause pain unto others and have filed a freedom of information act suit to declassify the exact soundtrack of despair being used against detainees. Good for them! Man, if any of my creations were used to hurt anybody I'd track down the perpetrators and unleash hell on them with extreme prejudice. Just how anybody could hurt another human with my Animerica articles or paintings is beyond me--vicious papercuts, perhaps?--but if they did, ho boy. Doom.

--Matt

Not a Current Affair

Today marks the 130th birthday of the Edison light bulb--break out the cake and candles--and I was just over at the NY Times archive site checking out the actual article they ran in 1879 to announce the invention. Or was it his invention? Well, actually, no. There were several incandescent bulbs before Edison came along, he merely purchased the patent from Henry Woodward and changed the filament material to produce a longer-lasting commercial model. It's the 19th century version of taking a toaster and slapping an alarm clock on its face.

I'm going to try not to get too up in arms about this, but then again, when have I ever restrained myself: Thomas Edison is a dick, his career was built on the shoulders of other, more creative men, and he doesn't deserve the reverence this society gives him. Too harsh? Perhaps it is, however, from what I've been reading and what I recall from history class the man is, in my eyes, in the same boat as Columbus--being held aloft as an Ameican hero--minus the Native American slavery, rape and genocide. Really, Edison was a cunning businessman first and mediocre inventor second.

Now, you're probably thinking now that anybody with 1,093 patents in their name can't be that dull. But have you looked at his list of patents? The only really unique--and "unique" is the key here--inventions of his that ever had a lasting effect on the world were the first phonograph, the carbon microphone (the mouthpiece on phones until the 80s) and the...the...ummm. Holy monkey balls, I think those are the only things he ever really invented that weren't bought patents, improvements on existing designs or were invented by one of his Menlo Park employees for which he took the credit!

On the other hand, the man also bankrupted filmmaker Georges Méliès by bribing a London theater owner to procure a reel of his film A Trip to the Moon, the first sci-fi film in history, copy it, then run screenings in America. Yes, folks, Thomas Edison is the world's first film pirate. I think the RIAA would like to speak with you, Mr. Edison. Next, Nikola Tesla, Croatian genius and inventor of our current power grid run on AC, once worked for Edison, who promised him $50,000 to perfect his DC generation plants. Upon completing the project and asking for his money Edison told Tesla it was all just a joke and there would be no money at all. In fact, he wouldn't even give him a raise from $18/week to $25/week. Hahaha! That is such a fucking knee-slapper, Edison! Then, of course, there's the famous War of the Currents where Edison put his pitiful DC power grid up against the Tesla/Westinghouse AC grid and lost spectacularly, but not before doing some batshit crazy stuff to try and prove his point. How nuts? He electrocuted cats, dogs and a Coney Island circus elephant to show that AC was more dangerous!

Why do we always do this in America? Are we so desperate for heroes that dicks like this have to be hoisted high and whitewashed? I'm absolutely loving what Tesla had to say upon Edison's passing:

"He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene...His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90% of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense."

Take that, Edison!

--Matt