Interesting Stuff

I’ve recently had several fantastic experiences that, until I noticed them happening, I would never have imagined. They were absolutely thrilling:

It all started when I was watching some late night TV, alone and in the dark. Reruns of The Untouchables were on, and I was sipping my chamomile tea as Eliot Ness tried to track down the moonshiner passing off wood alcohol as real hooch. As he walked through the alleys, the steam floating up from the Chicago sewers and the steam from my tea mingled, the darkness of the alley and the darkness of my apartment blended together, and suddenly I was experiencing a TV show in a way I had never done before: I was right there, with the steam blowing in my face and the darkness encroaching in on my periphery, just like Ness!

A few weeks later, I’m reading a book. I don’t have a fireplace, so I’m curled up next to the oven instead (it’s surprisingly cozy when you open the door and prop your feet up on it). As it turns out, I’m rereading my favourite parts of Fahrenheit 451. I hold the book close and cherish every word as the amber glow of the methane flame licks my feet, and I say aloud, “play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out” (the line is spoken by a woman holding illegal books to her chest shortly before she is lit on fire, and alludes to an actual event in which a similar thing happened). Again, I suddenly realize that I am experiencing the book in an interactive way that I had never conceived before.

This evening, Rob, Dave, and I went to a midnight showing of Fight Club. I was a bit sleep deprived because I was up until 2:30 last night playing Munchkin at the office, and had to wake up pretty early this morning. So now, it’s 12:30 AM, I’m very tired, and am taking in a movie that discusses insomnia and passive consumerism. Again, I felt like I was participating in the movie, in a way I had never experienced before.

If you can notice when it happens, this sort of thing metamorphoses the media and synthesizes an interactive experience. The feeling I got from realizing this and relishing the moment was fantastic. I need to look for this more often!

To get it out of the way, 32 people were killed today by a gunman at Virginia Tech. No one seems to have any more details yet, and I really can’t speculate on anything here.

The Democrats have tied military funding to a withdrawal of troops in 2008, though Bush plans to veto this bill. Expectations are that the Democrats will then try to tie such funding to measurable progress in Iraq itself. This seems unlikely to happen, however, because six Iraqi cabinet members resigned in protest of Prime Minister Al-Maliki’s close ties to the United States. These resignations were called for by Moqtada Al-Sadr, who also organized rallies in Baghdad in protest of the current government. This is a pretty big blow to Mr. Al-Maliki, but the government is expected to remain intact.

The European Union has reproached Russia for its heavy-handed crackdown on protesters, which ostensibly included beating reporters and passers-by, as well as arresting chess legend Garry Kasparov. I’ve caught bits of Russia becoming more USSR-like, but this has brought the issue to a head. President Putin has been locking down the country slowly but surely, with the latest move to pass laws of questionable constitutionality restricting the rights of protestors. Russia is gearing up for an election, and I honestly don’t know how these measures will affect it.

Finally, some good news for a change: the former Duke lacrosse players have been found wholly innocent of raping a stripper at a party. Unfortunately, they have already been found guilty in the eyes of the media, have received death threats, and can no longer safely return to Duke. Can anyone at Duke comment on how the student body has perceived these events?

Rob pointed me towards an interesting experiment that the Washington Post did: they got a world-class violinist to pose as a busker outside a D.C. subway. It turns out that almost no one stopped to listen or give him money, although several people realized that he was better than a typical street performer. You can listen to the whole 45 minutes of music, and it’s pretty nice stuff.

In keeping with the general theme that lots of people seem to be idiots these days, I just found an excellent blog that I wish I’d heard about months ago. This guy has been chronicling how Verizon employees don’t know the difference between dollars and cents. Literally. The short version is as follows: when he signed up for their data transfer service, he was told by 3 different salespeople that he would be charged 0.002 cents per kilobyte, and got them to put that in writing in their records of his service. He was subsequently charged 0.002 dollars per kilobyte, and went through 4 customer service representatives, including a supervisor and a floor manager, without finding anyone who understood the difference between the two. Thankfully, he eventually got someone higher up to realize the mistake and reverse the charges on his bill.

He also links to the story of another person who had pretty much the same thing happen to them, though they haven’t gotten the charges reversed yet. The audio (embedded as a YouTube “movie”) is amazingly exasperating: it basically comes down to the customer service people agreeing that there is a difference between 2 dollars and 2 cents, but that 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents are the same. This story has apparently appeared on all sorts of news/blog/&c outlets. Verizon has subsequently “changed” their rates from $0.002/kB to $2.05/MB.

I apologise for how ignorant many Americans are about the world in which they continually meddle. Some of us actually know the answers to these questions, and we’re trying to bring the rest of the country up to speed. I hope Americans will eventually know the answers to these and other similar questions, and that we can someday start making the world better instead of worse.

My favourite part is how he introduces himself as the Prime Minister of Australia and then everyone labels Australia as a terrorist country to invade. I can’t stand how the woman at 5:47 doesn’t realize that calling Arabs “diaper head” might be offensive. and my least favourite part is how the guy at 8:54 says he doesn’t think Kyrgyzstan is a threat, but would support an invasion anyway. It’s exasperating how stupid people can be!

First, I want to point you all to an excellent JibJab song about the farce we call the news these days. Their stuff is so great. Also, here’s a quick illustration of Bush’s approval ratings (edit: note that the bottom of the graph is at 20%, which is a bit deceiving). Also, Senator Joseph Biden has an excellent speech about Iraq and the lack of an exit strategy. These last two were found through StumbleUpon, which I mentioned recently.

Finally, I have a question that shouldn’t be too hard to answer: a lot of people seem to be passionately against Hillary Clinton. They don’t want her to be president, they don’t even want her to be a senator. I got to see a video feed of when she was interviewed at Google, and she seemed like a pretty normal politician (she sidestepped many of the questions, but no more than any other politician I’ve seen). Other than that and the fact that she’s married to Bill Clinton (about whom I know a little), I know nothing about her. Why are so many people opposed to her? Is it just because her husband had an affair? Is it because she has some crazy beliefs that I’m unaware of? What’s going on?

I’ve recently been watching several shows about the wildlife in other parts of the world, and it’s been absolutely fascinating. Last week there was a 3-hour special on the National Geographic channel about the Galapagos Islands which was amazing. I just finished watching Expedition Borneo on the Discovery Channel. There was another program on PBS about Galapagos earlier this week, too. I don’t want to go to Borneo (too many insects, leeches, venomous creatures, and diseases), but it would be really cool to go to Galapagos someday. In the meantime, I’m thrilled to see these things on TV.

There’s a really cool plugin for Firefox called StumbleUpon that I recently got into. The idea is that you tell it topics you’re interested in, and it then shows you websites about those topics. You can rate sites (“I like it” or “I don’t like it”), and it then refines its ideas of these websites based on your recommendations (so that it can choose whether or not to show them to other people with similar interests). If you’re looking for some interesting new websites to play with, give this a shot.

I had dinner with Michael and Robert yesterday, and somehow Michael mentioned in the conversation that E.T. was made into a video game for the Atari 2600, and is widely considered the worst-selling video game of all time (they apparently buried tens of thousands of cartridges in a landfill because it was the most profitable way of getting rid of them). Well, we actually managed to find a copy of this game and play it, and there’s a reason why it didn’t sell well. Here is a synopsis of the game, as best we could piece together by reading the manual and playing it:

• You control ET. The object of the game is to get ET to collect 3 pieces of telephone and phone home. Telephone pieces are hidden at the bottom of large pits that you can fall in.
• The location of the pits appears to be uncorrelated with anything else on the screen: you can fall into a pit without seeing anything unusual on the screen, and you can step into the differently colored parts and only sometimes fall into a pit.
• You can extend your neck to levitate out of and over the pits. Also, sometimes you can extend your neck to change zones. We’re not sure what a zone is (we think it’s like a mode), but we often cycled through the “eat candy zone” and the “call Elliot zone.” One zone changes the terrain around you, which is confusing as hell. Sometimes you can also change zones by moving in a different direction. We have no clue about this.
• Moving around costs energy, and the amount of energy you have left is displayed at the bottom of the screen. When you run out of energy, Elliot comes by and gives you 1500 more units. This means that the game ends either when you win or when you get bored and stop playing. To the best of our knowledge, you can never lose.
• If the FBI man catches you, he takes you to the Parthenon and steals all your candy.
• If you manage to call Elliot while in “call Elliot zone,” he will come and take your candy. He will then pretend to run off and find a piece of telephone for us. We don’t know why he does this, however, because he never actually returns with one.