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The new iPod Shuffle is STUPID

This is Apple’s newest iPod Shuffle:

ipod_4g_shuffleIt certainly looks sexy, and the fact that it comes with 4GB of storage is pretty cool too. But wait… where’s the “click wheel” that older iPod Shuffles come with?

I’ll tell you – it doesn’t exist any more. Apple has moved the Shuffle’s controls to a tiny controller embedded in the headphone cord. So you can no longer use a Shuffle with some other brand of headphones, nor can you hook it up to your computer speakers for a party, nor can you hook it up to a cassette adapter to listen in your car. You can only listen to it using Apple’s headphones, period.

To make matters worse, Apple is now proudly announcing that the new Shuffle is “the only mp3 player that talks to you”. It comes with a feature called VoiceOver that can say aloud the name of the song and the artist – just hold down the controller on the headphone cord, and it’ll give you the info. Putting aside the fact that this isn’t the first mp3 player that can do that, it’s just a stupid feature that no one asked for. Plus, the actual voices the Shuffle uses… well, they sound like “robot voices” from a bad 80s German electropop band. If you want your mp3 player’s voice to sound like something off of a Kraftwerk album, Apple has you covered. If you’re looking for one of those voices that’s almost indistinguishable from a human voice… oh, how disappointed you’ll be! I also can’t wait to hear how it deals with non-English artists! I can hear it how: “El Chai-ah-yow-choe by Tie-toe Puh-en-Tee-tee”

You can also use VoiceOver to switch playlists, a first for the Shuffle. Multiple playlists for the Shuffle is pretty cool, and a feature that’s been lacking for some time. But again, using VoiceOver to do this is the wrong execution of the right idea.

I dunno. Maybe if I played with one of the new Shuffles I’d like it. But as it stands now, it looks like the next generation of iPod Shuffles are going to be a giant bucket of fail! I guess when my Shuffle dies, I’ll either pray that old versions are still being sold… or just get a Sansa Clip.

Read more about it at Engadget here (be sure to watch the video and also check out the thrashing it gets in the reader comments!)

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Go Local, Honey!

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “food hippie”. I will never go vegetarian. I think the Kashi people are a bunch of left-wing America haters. I think organic food is mostly a ripoff. I don’t care how much carbon was belched into the air by airplanes delivering my British cheese or Chilean plums. And while I do agree that farmer’s markets are excellent sources of fresh, inexpensive, locally-grown produce, I frankly just can’t be bothered to wake up early on a Saturday morning to do my shopping.

There is, however, one “localtarian” thing I do agree with, and that’s honey.

Continue reading “Go Local, Honey!”

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The Curse of the Colonel (Revisited)

In this History Blog post, I talked about the various “curses” in the baseball world, especially the “Curse of the Colonel”.

In a nutshell, Japan’s Hanshin Tigers baseball team always seemed to have the same “snakebit luck” as the Chicago Cubs. The Tigers just never seemed to be able to win it all, despite being a rich, major market team with many fans. Back in 1985, however, the team won the Japan Championship Series (Japan’s version of the World Series). In a fit of celebration, a swarm of fans ran to the nearest bridge. As the crowd screamed out the number of a player, a fan resembling him would jump off the bridge and into the river. But there was a problem: a big reason the Tigers won the Series was the bat work of an American player, Randy Bass. And there weren’t any Americans around to jump off the bridge when Randy’s number was called. A few fans took matters into their own hands and ran to the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken. There they stole the fiberglass statue of Colonel Sanders that stands outside many Asian KFC restaurants. So when Bass’ number was called, the jubilant crowd heaved the statue off the bridge and into the water.

Since then, the Tigers have posted one of the worst records in Japanese baseball. Many were convinced that the Colonel had “cursed” the team. A few fans even pooled money to dredge the river in hopes of finding the statue. Alas, the statue was never found, and the Tigers continued to lose…

But now there’s hope! The statue has been found! You can read all about it at Yahoo! here, but the gist of it follows:

A diver checking for unexploded bombs from World War Two in the river as part of a clean-up found the Colonel’s top half on Tuesday, minus his hands and glasses but still sporting his trademark string tie and grin.

The Colonel’s smile might have widened if it could on Wednesday, when his bottom half was recovered and reunited with the top. “It’s only a statue, but I felt as if I was rescuing someone,” a worker told reporters after the lower half was found.

“When I heard the statue had been found, I felt that history had ended,” Yoshio Yoshida, 75, Hanshin manager at the time, was quoted by the Asahi newspaper as saying. “Recalling 1985, I’d like them to achieve the dream of being Japan No. 1 again.”

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New football league wants Vick

How come I haven’t heard of the “United Football League” at all until now? Is this real? Who’s behind this? When did this happen?

The fledgling United Football League, set to play in four cities beginning in October, will officially announce its four head coaches at a press conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

In addition to former New York Giants coach Jim Fassel, who will lead the Las Vegas team, the UFL has hired Dennis Green as San Francisco’s coach, Jim Haslett for Orlando and Ted Cottrell for New York. All except Cottrell have been head coaches in the NFL.

It is also believed the league is trying to have former NFL quarterback Michael Vick play in its inaugural season. Vick is scheduled to be released from prison in May but faces a suspension from the NFL for his conviction related to dogfighting.

via New football league will try to sign Vick – Other sports- nbcsports.msnbc.com.

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The end of the megapixel race

For the past couple of years, I’ve been saying that the “megapixel race” between camera makers to push out cameras with ever more megapixels is silly and counter-productive. Although megapixels are important, they’re only a small part of what makes a digital camera good (or bad).

It seems that I was right. Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging’s SLR planning department, has officially declared 12 megapixels to be “enough for covering most applications most customers need”. And Ars Technica agrees:

Throwing more megapixels at the digital imaging problem is akin to bumping up the processor speed on a motherboard with a slow bus and small amounts of RAM, or adding a turbo to a small engine on a car with lousy brakes and wobbly suspension.

It’s about time you guys listen to me! 😉

via The end of the camera megapixel race – Ars Technica.

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Dan Rooney: Ireland ambassador?

There were rumors about this a few weeks ago, and now the rumor mill is at it again:

According to a report out of Ireland, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney will be named the U.S. ambassador to Ireland.

A report in the Tribune-News indicates Rooney, 76, will succeed Thomas C Foley, who recently returned home to the US. Rooney is a co-founder of the Ireland Fund charity with Sir Anthony O’Reilly. The account also indicated Rooney helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.

That would be so awesome for Mr. Rooney! You go, Dan!

via Steelers Rooney to be named ambassador to Ireland? – Sports Rumors – NFL – Yahoo! Sports.

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The Mystery of The Bloop

During the Cold War, the US Navy created a vast network of underwater microphones (called hydrophones) to keep tabs on Soviet submarines. Called SOSUS (for SOund SUrveillance System), the hydrophones were first installed in the “GIUK gap” – the stretch of ocean between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, an area where Soviet subs were known to operate. By the 1960s, the Navy had expanded SOSUS to include most of the Atlantic Ocean, as well as many parts of the Pacific. In 1961, the system tracked the USS George Washington during her entire run between the United States and the United Kingdom. By early 1962, the system was capable of tracking the Soviet’s diesel submarines. And later that year, a SOSUS tracking station in the Bahamas played an important role in the Cuban Missile Crisis by keeping the Navy informed about Soviet submarine maneuvers around the Caribbean.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, the Navy suddenly had little use for the system. Additionally, better technology had led to the development of smaller, easier to use hydrophones that could be easily deployed in a theatre of war as necessary. Many listening stations were abandoned, and several others were condensed. Although the Navy still listens to the hydrophones, most of the day-to-day operation of SOSUS has been turned over to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who use it to listen for underwater earthquakes and volcanic activity, for monitoring whale migration patterns, and other scientific interests.

And, during the summer of 1997, those scientists suddenly became very interested. That’s because SOSUS recorded a sound that remains a mystery to this day. Something off the southwest coast of South America, at approximately 50° S 100° W, made a sound… a sound that defies explanation.

The BloopThe sound is of a very low frequency, in the range that some animals use to communicate. But here’s the thing – the sound was picked up at two different hydrophones stationed some 3000 miles (5000km) apart! This automatically rules out almost any man-made source of the noise, as a sinking ship breaking up on the ocean floor or a shifting undersea cable can’t possibly make a noise that loud. It’s possible for whale calls to travel that far through certain “thermal layers” in the ocean, but those conditions didn’t apply in this case. In short, many scientists are convinced that the only possible source of the sound is an as-yet unidentified animal. The only thing is, that animal would have to be “several times” the size of a blue whale to make a sound that loud. And an animal just three times the size of a blue whale would be truly enormous – around 300 feet long and 570 tons in weight!

Is such an animal out there? For now, we simply just don’t know.

Listen to “The Bloop” (sped up 16 times to make it audible):

[audio:bloop.mp3]

Read more about The Bloop at this NOAA page, this page at CNN.com, or this page at Wikipedia.

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Two Tribes

First there was radio. Then there was television. Lastly, there was the Internet. All three of these technologies have chipped away at the prominence of newspapers over the years. Where a big city might have once had seven or eight daily newspapers, most places are down to one or two, and even those are struggling. Radio and TV can get critical news out to people much faster than newspapers can, and the Internet has not only made much of the newspapers’ content available for free, sites like eBay and Craigslist have gutted newspapers’ once hugely profitable classified ad sections.

At times, it seems like the only thing newspapers are good for these days are the comic strips. But even these are available online, and the low cost of online publishing means that there are more strips published now than ever before. So it might seem hard to believe, but there was once a time when the few cartoonists printed nationally were held in high regard. Everyone read the newspaper every day – in many cases, people read more than one. And comic strips were not just amusing content, they were a commentary on the times. Just as people of today tune in to The Daily Show for “zeitgeist humor”, people in the early 20th century turned to comic strips.

That’s what makes the feud between Ham Fisher and Al Capp – creators of two of the most popular comic strips in American history – so remarkable. It was, in a very real sense, like two tribes going to war.

*    *    *

Ham Fisher was, by all accounts, a highly motivated individual. By the age of 20, Fisher had already been a soldier, held public office, and was an editor for a small-town newspaper in Pennsylvania. But Fisher’s first love was comic strips. He created several of his own strips during his teenage years, most of which are lost to history. But one of Fisher’s characters – a simple but virtuous boxer named Joe Palooka, based on a drinking buddy in his hometown of Wilkes-Barre – seemed to hold some promise. Unfortunately, none of the newspapers Fisher contacted were interested in the strip.

Continue reading “Two Tribes”

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Inis Beag

Inis Beag (Gaelic: “Little Island”) is a the name of an island studied by the cultural anthropologist John Cowan Messenger where there is an isolated small Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic community on one of the Aran Islands off the coast of Connemara in Ireland in his study “Sex and Repression in an Irish Folk Community.” During the period of Messenger’s study between 1958 and 1966, Inis Beag supported a population of around 350, mostly living by subsistence farming and fishing.

Messenger’s study of this island community has often been cited by anthropologists and sexologists as an example of extreme sexual repression, with sexual intercourse being treated by both sexes as a necessary evil which must be endured for the sake of reproduction, and phenomena such as menstruation and the menopause being regarded with fear and disgust.

Breast-feeding was avoided. Kissing, caressing and any affection was seen as too sexual and was prohibited. Nudity was extremely private. For a married couple, intercourse was conducted fully clothed except for genitals. Sex was also in the dark and practiced only in missionary position. Any variation of sex was seen as deviant and sinful. Although pre-maritial sex was almost non-existent, the Ines Beag didn’t have any formal sex education. Bathing was also ‘unknown’ and the average age at marriage was 36 for men and 25 for women. A man was considered a ‘boy’ until the age of 40. Dogs were whipped for licking their genitals.

The atmosphere, according to the researchers, led to high levels of masturbation, drinking and alcohol-fuelled fights.

via Inis Beag – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.