Category: Stuff

As I wrote in comments to the last post, I think we’ve discovered the Rosetta stone for English, and it’s {}.

These are curly brackets, squiggly brackets, worms, curlies, curly parenthesis, and braces. Conversely, braces are suspenders, or pairs of pheasants. I wrote, seeking a map, and discovered a journey, instead.

How serendipitous, then, to receive an email, last night, from Joe Clark about the publication of his new e-book on Canadian English, Organizing Our Marvellous Neighbours: How to Feel Good About Canadian English. According to his email, the book should hit the streets today.

Knowing Joe, the writing should be colorful. Or is that colourful? He spent time organizing the efforts, but to those across the sea, he’s really spent time organising the effort.

Even when there are no differences in spelling or meaning, cultural differences can have a significant impact on our use of English. I recently ordered a book through Amazon UK, and marveled at the emails telling me it’s progress, up to and including when it was “dispatched” (not sent), and through the Royal Mail, no less. I must do it again, it was like a verbal carnival ride.

Or would that be fun fair dobby?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Stop the Cap! is a web site and weblog dedicated to the fight against broadband caps. From the Mission Statement:

We feel the current usage caps being considered by broadband providers are unreasonable, some moreso than others. Those below 10GB per month are outrageous. Others which may run above 100GB a month also represent a concern because of the future direction of the Internet. Consumers who exceed those caps may face immediate service termination or greatly overpriced “overage” charges for additional bandwidth, which we oppose. The industry’s marketing campaigns have always emphasized that among the benefits of subscribing is fast access to streaming video and audio, gaming, downloading songs and video, and other bandwidth intensive services. It should come as no surprise that customers have used their service exactly as their marketing intended.

From the Talking Points page:

Most cable systems plan to exempt customers from accessing content they own or control through their online portals. This represents an end run around Net Neutrality – a plan to allow big corporations to control the infrastructure and discriminating against the traffic they don’t own or control. Independent producers and businesses not affiliating with a cable company will have a hard time selling a business plan in a world where bandwidth caps make accessing those independent products and services prohibitively expensive.

There’s considerably more at the site. Excellent. (via DSL Reports)

• Exposing science fiction writers to science David Levine writes about Launch Pad, NASA’s program to expose science to science fiction writers.
• Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets lists great ocean weblogs.
• Photojojo covers strange photo projects. The squished people don’t do anything for me, but I do like the little people, big world photos.
• You’ve all watched the Large Hadron Rap. Of course you have. James Turner at O’Reilly has an interview with science-rapper Katherine McAlpine. Speaking of which, I have a bet that the Large Hadron Collider won’t generate a black hole that destroys us. Any takers?

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Popular Mechanics has an excellent article of the dirty little secret of HDTV: that there are no true standards or specifications in place defining what exactly is “high definition TV”. Because of this, the article’s writer, Glenn Derene, writes, the quality of broadcast we get from providers, varies. Considerably.

For instance, compression techniques can differ, with fast action shows needing more updates than “talking head” shows. Compression can degrade with the faster shows, than the ones that are more “static”, and with fewer moving parts. This explains to me why the news shows are the best looking shows on my HDTV.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

From GigaOM:

There are other participants, some that are well known, like HP with its HP MediaSmart Connect, or TiVo. And some are upstarts, like Vudu, Zv, Verismo and Sezmi. But the future belongs to Amazon, Netflix or Apple. It’s still too early to tell which one will win the race to your big-screen TV, but they all have the right combination of size, recognition and content to get there.

The move to stream video to your TV from the Internet it too new to declare a winner. For instance, of the set top boxes the author of the article mentioned, he forgot a major one: your PC.

When the prices of computers drop into the 400 dollar range, and even Apple sells the Mac Mini at a reasonably affordable price, expect to see more computers hooked to TVs. Through our computers we can not only get iTunes, Unbox, and Netflix WatchNow, we can also access cbs.com, abc.go.com, Hulu, and a host of other video streaming sites.

The opening shots in this battle have just been fired. We ain’t seen nothing yet.