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Blinks

Saturday, 09 February, 2008

Arts and crafts

• The Amazing $1 Pocket-Ready Tripod Trick (via Photojojo): How to make a device that works like a tripod but is much more portable. (There's also a video tutorial.)
• Love Vintage (via Emma): Advertises the Sydney Vintage Clothing, Jewellery and Textiles Show (next one is 11-13th April 2008 at Canterbury Park Event Centre, Canterbury Racecourse, King St, Sydney. (I must take Lizz. And Elsie.) You do need to purchase tickets.
• The Indie Singer-Harpist Who Met the Orchestra: Interesting article about Joanna Newsom and the making of Ys, and how the orchestrations were adapted for a live performance with an orchestra.
• A Fine Romance, My Friend, This Is: An article reflecting on the romcoms of yore and how they've changed. I love this quote:

  Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment. It required movie stars whose physical appeal was matched by verbal dexterity and a vital sense of idiosyncrasy. They were not real of course: Who ever met anyone like C. K. Dexter Haven and Tracy Lord, the central pair in “The Philadelphia Story”? They were better.

• Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work: Explaining moments of epiphany—those “aha!” moments that all creative people long for:

  Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process. Just as an oyster wraps layer upon layer of nacre atop an offending piece of sand, ultimately yielding a pearl, innovation percolates within hard work over time.

Technology

• Datamancer's Steampunk Laptop: HP laptop inside a beautiful Victorian music box-type case. (*Drool* *drool*!) Guan says it should be the prize for the next Sam the Pirate Month.
• Put a stake in it: Apparently you can cut up to 10% of your electricity bill by turning off certain “vampire” appliances that run all night.
• Trapped in the grid: A review of The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr looking at how the internet has changed everything (much the way electricity did at the turn of last century). He predicts a rise in software as service. I didn't understand the entire review but it did have some interesting things to say.
• Better Than Free (via Fish): The internet operates on the principle of making copies. As the old economic model was selling copies of stuff, what will money-making look like in the future? The author of this article looks at “Eight Generatives Better Than Free”: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability. Wonderful thought-provoking stuff.
• In CBS Test, Mobile Ads Find Users: Soon we will be receiving location-specific ads through our mobile phones (e.g. Want some lunch? The best sushi is just around the corner!). Luckily this is currently being modelled as an opt-in thing ...
• The Coming Wave of Gadgets That Listen and Obey: Speech-recognition technology in mobile phones, televisions, etc. So you can search for things just by using your voice, turn your voice mails into emails, find the song you want to play while you're driving (most attractive application for me!)
• Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels: In response to the government's very stringent controls on web browsing (they recently banned Flickr), some Chinese bloggers are striking back, posting tips on how to get around the firewalls.
• Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless: An article that's not just about Amazon's Kindle e-book reading device, but about the comparison between Kindle and the iPod, whether the book industry is in decline and whether people are, in fact, reading less. The second last paragraph makes a good point:

  The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

  (My goodness, the Mac thing is starting to feel like peer pressure ...) It is interesting to think that Amazon is “replacing the book business with the reading business”; it makes me think about my attachment to the physical object that is the book. Music is an aural medium, but books are firmly entrenched in ink and paper and beautiful binding. Granted I do a lot of reading online now, but it's still no substitute for books and the pleasure you feel upon seeing rows and rows of those beautiful volumes on your shelves—a library, a treasure trove. Maybe in the future there will be more places like Hill House.

Relationships

• Three parents produce one embryo: Bioengineering and reproductive technology takes another leap. This enables couples to reproduce without passing on diseases of the mitochondria to their children. What will this mean for the kids though?
• Hitting It Off, Thanks to Algorithms of Love: Researchers hope to find the secret of “the science of attraction”—the right formula for arranging the perfect match.

Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. Their parents, sometimes assisted by astrologers and matchmakers, supervised courtship until customs changed in the West because of what was called the Romeo and Juliet revolution.

(And apparently people aren't too good at picking their own mates online.)

Other

• RZIM Questionnaire on Apologetics in Australia (via Jean who says):

  The questions have been written by Peter Grice (of “Think Christianity” in Qld), in partnership with the Ravi Zacharias ministry team. They want to put together a catalogue of apologetics work across Australia, which—God willing—will be a tool to serve our brothers and sisters doing apologetics gospel work. (They've already done one for New Zealand, and that was very helpful!)

  So if apologetics is one of your interests, take the survey and encourage your friends to do likewise.
• New Food Formula: Tastes Fine, Kills Worms: Kraft Foods are developing a line of products that incorporate a natural pesticide into their foods to kill intestinal worms. It's harmless to humans but fatal to the worms. The product is to be sold in certain third world countries where worms are a problem. Apparently they reformulate foods for certain countries to improve health (e.g. putting extra vitamins in Tang, iodine in cheese, etc.)
• The end of menstruation: One drug claims to free women from their monthly periods forever. But it's got certain feminist thinkers all worked up because they claim that menstruation is an integral part of being a woman. I'm not sure what to think of it from a Christian point of view. On the one hand (keeping in mind that Eve's “curse” in Genesis 3 had nothing to do with menstruation), periods are annoying and it's wonderful that God has given us the tools to improve our lives through medicine and science. On the other hand, I worry about the effects of tinkering with the body's natural functions. Still, if the drug was shown to have no nasty side effects, would it still be a good idea to embrace it?

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