Via Peter, I see that Apple is rumored to be introducing aluminum Macbooks. Great! I think aluminum looks cooler, and it may even dissipate heat better (although, somewhat counterintuitively, it seems to make for less durable computers).

But are they really trying to claim that an aluminum shell is somehow more ecologically friendly than a plastic one? I mean, yes, aluminum can be recycled. But it consumes a huge amount of energy to produce aluminum in the first place. If we're considering carbon footprint as part of our ecological assessment, the plastic case almost certainly comes out on top.

It probably doesn't matter too much either way. The case is the least environmentally problematic part of the computer. Apple is RoHS-compliant, so they're doing what they can with respect to the internals, but that's still a much bigger issue than what the shell is made of.

Be sure to check out Julian's article over at Ars on the fight between DISH Network and Freetech, makers of a satellite receiver box that, with a custom firmware, can be made to receive DISH Network's satellite programming without a subscription.

I'll just add that the situation is very similar to the one that's faced the console modchip industry for years. Modchips, which alter the behavior of videogame consoles, are typically sold with a firmware that only makes legal functionality possible — running Linux on the unit, that sort of thing. The vast majority, though, are then reflashed by their owners with custom firmwares that enable piracy and other illegal operations. Because it's much easier to distribute illegal software without getting caught than it is to distribute illegal physical objects, this provides a sneaky way of shipping around proscribed devices. The DMCA is in part an attempt to fight this tactic, but it necessarily gets into the murky area surrounding what an object — one that has some legitimate uses — is intended to do.

The problem's likely to get worse, incidentally. A consequence of ever-improving chip performance and ever-falling prices is that more and more device logic is placed into programmable memory rather than dedicated circuits. This confers some real benefits — it makes it easier to design the devices, for one thing, and to fix them if a bug is found. But it's relatively easy to rewrite or override that logic.

It's all pretty interesting, I think, particularly when viewed as a blurring of the lines between the physical and virtual worlds. The net's ability to facilitate the distribution of forbidden information is well-known; this is a case where one could say that forbidden objects are being transmitted. The animating spirits of the devices — the essential things that make them forbidden — have been abstracted from their physical substrates, and consequently can move around with all the speed, anonymity and reproducibility that the net has to offer.

This has to be a joke. To seriously propose this would reveal a level of idiocy even greater than we've seen among recent vice presidential candidates. That, or a brazen and desperate desire to hand billions of dollars to defense contractors.

Via Brian.

This video is making the progressive blogospheric rounds:

It's good! But I've gotta say: if you grew up going to a church with a halfway-competent minister — someone with some charisma and some time spent in seminary — this clip is going to sound pretty familiar. That's not to diminish it, but the cadence and patterns are amazingly similar to what I listened to every Sunday growing up. This guy's got talent, no doubt, and his message is an indisputably important one. But it's a well-trodden form. I guess I just want to point out that if you find this experience particularly moving, you can probably enjoy it on a weekly basis a few blocks from your house. It'll be a bit more Jesus-y, but the delivery and rhetorical structure will be just as satisfying.

And I say all this as a kid who grew up Presbyterian. The Frozen Chosen! I can only imagine the firestorm that a Baptist with some book-learnin' could bust out.

ALSO: This speech happened on July 1. Weird.

Once again, I pretty much lost track of the debate by its end — I was typing furiously and drinking too fast. But I guess I agree that Palin seemed to be merely a bit dim, rather than so cartoonishly stupid that you'd hesitate to trust her with solid food.

She did regress in at least one respect, though: her pronunciation. She managed to say the word "nuclear" perfectly correctly during her convention speech. But last night she adopted the "nucular" formulation favored by grade school boys and our current president. Here, check it out.

Palin at the RNC – Nuclear, clearly

Palin at the Debate – Nucular contamination

There are a few ways to react to this. Wolfson linked to this piece at Language Log today, which perceptively notes that:

Ordinary people, faced with what are for them deviant, "wrong", bits of language, see nothing but a mistake, period. They are resistant to the linguist's idea that there could be a rationale for the "mistake", even a system to it, or that, in fact, the very same thing could result from different sources or represent different systems. (This attitude presents a tough challenge when we teach beginning linguistics courses -- not only when we talk about dialects, but also when we talk about language acquisition. One of the hardest lessons for many students is that instead of saying what's wrong, what people "can't" or "won't" do, they should be describing what people *do*, and making hypotheses about *why* they do that.)

On the other hand, this is stupid. It's nuclear. Everybody knows that. Perhaps someday the situation will become sufficiently muddy that a postmodern assessment of the word's pronunciation will become appropriate. But we're not there yet. Right now if you press people — even those who say nucular — most will grudgingly admit that there is a correct pronunciation of the word, and that it doesn't rhyme with "tubular".

Also, it's worth pointing out that linguistics is dumb and the classes I had to take about it in college were awful. So there.

No, I prefer to subscribe to a theory along these lines: namely, that the choice to use the "nucular" pronunciation is increasingly a deliberate one, at least among politicians. I suspect that it's going to eventually become a sign of party allegiance on the right, a little piece of deliberate ignorance designed to subtly defame members of the "Democrat Party".

The only other explanation I can think of for the discrepancy in Palin's pronunciation is that her convention speech was spelled out on the teleprompter (which she didn't use, mind you!) FO-NET-I-KAL-LEE. I suppose that's plausible enough — you can take your pick between that or the deliberate mispronunciation explanation. As it so often does when examining modern conservative behavior, it's a toss up between stupidity and malevolence.

One of the least appealing conventions of our internet culture is the whitepaper. The idea that the addition of a .pdf extension somehow adds authority to the ramblings of every self-described "SEO expert*" and "social media evangelist" is an idea that's as pernicious as it is ridiculous.

For an especially blatant example of this you have only to go read the new whitepaper on bandwidth caps over at GigaOM. Or, better yet, go read my response to it over at TechDirt. I didn't get into any of the economic arguments contained in the paper — that's not exactly my area of expertise — but I have a sneaking suspicion that lines like "it is impossible to determine a product's unit cost before determining its price, since unit costs change with volume" are complete nonsense.

I haven't had time to write at TD for a while, but this piece of crap was sufficiently infuriating that I couldn't help myself. Even if you're bored silly by the topic of bandwidth rationing, Wikipedia plagiarism is always good for a laugh.

* Seriously, anyone whose business cards feature the letters S-E-O in sequence ought to be thrown into a fucking volcano. With the exception of people from Korea, I guess.

Last week I was too busy being outraged at the internet to spend much time pestering people about the Halloween story contest. Despite this, a few more folks have expressed interest to me privately. The supernatural literary juggernaut presses onward! Remember: the deadline is October 27 — that's three weeks from today — and the democratically-determined winner gets a hundred bucks.

Now! On to more sources of spooky inspiration. I said I'd be heading backward in time, and I'm sticking to that. We started off with Hellboy, then touched on Lovecraft, the latter being a major source of inspiration for the former. Let's do the same thing for Lovecraft and talk about the author that most influenced him: Poe. I know, I know: it's obvious. But it's also unavoidable. I mean, c'mon — just look at the guy.

I picked up a copy of Poe's collected works this spring, and have been intermittently working through his short stories since then. Here's the thing: a lot of them aren't really very scary. Some of his most famous works, like The Pit and the Pendulum, are relatively shallow, shlocky nonsense that reads like it was plotted by an eleven year-old.

Of course, many others are more effective. But even when reading those better stories I frequently find myself thinking that the protagonist would have benefited from growing up under the regime of an older brother, whose cheerful abuse might've forced his younger sibling not to be such an unbelievable wuss.

But that's the point, really, and what makes Poe relevant. In his best stories the terror he describes is almost exclusively psychological in nature: if only the narrator could control his unsteady nerves, or escape his obsession, or even just smoke a bit less opium, everything might be okay. But he can't, so it won't.

The guy's also got a knack for doomed love stories. Or, more precisely, stories that occupy a doomed love affair's epilogue, when hope is gone but a terrifying supernatural ambiguity is just beginning. Those are the ones I like best. Luckily for me there are a surprising number that fit this description — including, of course, The Raven. But my favorite non-animated work is Ligeia, which is not only a good exemplar of the form but also includes the poem The Conqueror Worm, which is pretty great in its own right (and which has also served as inspiration for a Hellboy story).

Poe's pleasantly located in the public domain, so there are a bunch of ways to get the story:

• There's the online text, of course.
• There's also a Librivox audio recording of it (64kbps mp3, 128kbps mp3). Convenient, but Poe's filigreed sentences are essential to conveying his narrator's state of mind, and they're hard to follow when read in the deliberate manner of Librivox contributor Peter Yearsley. (Yearsley's style works well on some other stories, though, so I intend to get back to him.)
• Finally, if you've got an iPhone or iPod Touch you should really go grab Stanza, a free book reader that makes available a large and similarly-cost-free collection of public domain works via Feedbooks. Incidentally, if you have a Kindle or Sony reader (or just something that takes PDFs), Feedbooks has you covered, too, no extra app required.

Okay! Enough with the big names. Next time we'll creep forward, then lurch fully back into the twentieth century. Then I don't know what, but it'll be scary.

I only mentioned Man Factory's Street Fighter concept album in passing at first, but having given it some more attention (and having done so at Ezra's recommendation), I feel like I should push it a little harder: it's pretty clever and catchy, and is really more of a straight-up rock opera than a mere concept album. Its brevity left me a bit confused at first, but I now see that this is just the first of three planned "rounds".

It's a free download — what have you got to lose?

I'm not a regular reader of the Corner, but I've found myself stopping by after each debate to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. And, with apologies to Brian — this is his gig — it really just makes no goddamn sense:

Saturday Night Live recently did a terrific sketch on the bailout bill in Congress. Shortly afterward, the sketch — which had been available on NBC's website — disappeared. The sketch mocked a wealthy couple who profited off subprime mortgages named Herb and Marion Sandler, and it turns out there really is a wealthy couple named Herb and Marion Sandler who made billions off of subprime loans, and speculation was that offending the real Sandlers was the reason for pulling the sketch.

So now the sketch is back up, without any mention of the Sandlers. But as the L.A. Times notes, what's really curious is that the re-edited sketch removed any satirical references to Barney Frank's involvement in creating the economic crisis:

In the original skit Sandler addresses Frank, saying, "And thank you Congressman Frank as well as many Republicans for helping block Congressional oversight of our corrupt activities."

To which Frank replies enthusiastically, "Not at all!"

That's all gone. I'd love to hear an explanation for that.

Okay, here's an explanation: when you edit a character out of a scene, it's awkward to leave in lines that have other actors interacting with that now-nonexistent character. I realize this may seem like kind of a technical point, but I assure you that even those of us who are not professional screenwriters can, with diligence, grasp the dramaturgical logic underlying NBC's decision.

I've got no opinion of the decision to edit out the Sandlers, incidentally. Aside from the Barney Frank impression it was a pretty lousy sketch anyway — making it shorter is a generally good idea.

Alright! The Halloween story contest continues, and so does my posting of sources of inspiration / incessant pestering.

So far I've put up stuff from Hellboy, Lovecraft and Poe, and my plan was to continue in that vein. But I think that three classic horror authors in a row would be a bit too much. What are we, fancy? Instead, let's take a break to laugh at my expense.

I didn't watch a lot of scary movies growing up, but the few I saw were enough to provide a reliable font of terror into adolescence. One is Critters, which a cruel babysitter watched on our local UHF station while taking care of me, and which I still think is probably a sort-of-legitimately frightening movie (though I haven't watched it since). The other one involves Garfield.

I thought for a long time that it was the Garfield Halloween special that had freaked me out, but the internet insists that I'm wrong. Having googled around a bit, things have become clearer. That (Emmy award winning!) special had a scary old man and some decent ghosts, but it wasn't the sort of thing that'd really traumatize a little kid. It turns out that I was thinking of the TV adaptation of Garfield: His 9 Lives, a collection of Garfield-inspired short stories that seems to have been the high point of literary pretension related to the Garfield phenomenon.

Some of the stories are comic, but this one is actually sorta spooky, and downright terrifying by when judged by the sensibilities of an eight year-old. I still don't do well with things-transforming-into-other-things.

So yeah, ha ha, that little kid's Garfield-related horror is very funny. Easy to say if you didn't see the TV special! But think back and consider your childhood reaction to... The Secret of NIMH!

Not so brave now, are you, tough guy?

Julian is killin' it over at Ars — be sure to check out his latest. It's not exactly surprising that the content industry would lie about the economic impact of piracy, but it's fascinating to read Julian's account of how the numbers they quote were born. He's done a real service to us all by hunting this story down.

This bit, from near the article's end, raised my eyebrows:

... as Yochai Benkler has argued persuasively, IP is an input to innovation as well as the product of innovation. So under certain very specific conditions, "piracy" can produce net gains. While it seems extremely unlikely that this is the case in the aggregate—IP theft almost certainly does impose net economic costs—simply calculating lost sales and licencing fees, assuming someone could produce a credible figure, would not provide a complete picture of the economic impact of IP infringement. It would give us, at most, one side of the ledger.

Julian is smart to be conservative when making this point, but I suspect that those "very specific conditions" aren't all that specific at all. My hunch is that experience born of unauthorized use of IP provides necessary context to a huge variety of wealth-creating endeavors, even when the unauthorized use doesn't lead directly to the resulting innovation. This could take the form of a mixtape in a touring band's van or an automotive engineer checking out how the other guys built their throttle body; either way, the point is that there's a constant background hum of infringement that's innocuous and absolutely necessary for our society's continued functioning, but which is usually only considered during the drafting of RIAA press releases.

Say... does anyone have a spare cord that looks like this?

It's called an IEC plug, and it's the same type of connector that goes into most desktop PCs. The only trick here is that this is a male connector, not the incredibly-easy-to-find female version. It's simple enough to order one, but I'd feel stupid paying $7 shipping on an item that costs $1.50.

If you've got one lying around, perhaps connected to some ancient piece of unused equipment, let me know. Yes, I will be destroying it. But I can undestroy it afterward! And it's for a good cause: I need to force a smoke machine with an intermittent controller switch to stay in the on position — a noble calling for a humble cord if ever there was one.

My friend V made this video and asked me to pass it along:

Scary! And of course it's hard to argue with the basic point that Sarah Palin is less qualified to run the country than the average Model UN participant.

The video implicitly makes another, more subtle point, too: Vladimir Putin may be a vampire.

Write your own "blood for oil" joke — I'm too terrified to do it.

I told you I wasn't crazy; now Kriston grudgingly agrees.

I needed this. Just last Sunday Mrs. Gray looked at me with unbearable pity, asking me if I really thought it was normal to get my hair washed after it was cut. "Oh, honey," she said, and I was sure I was right to be ashamed.

Yesterday I tweeted this video, in which a bottle is neatly divided by tying a string around it, igniting the string, and plunging the bottle into cold water. The thermal shock causes the heated portion to fracture, producing a surprisingly clean break.

I'm in the market for some cheap candleholders, you see. I ordered a bunch of votive candles yesterday for the Halloween party, but getting glass holders would have drastically increased the shipping cost, so Emily and I decided to improvise. Something a bit less uniformly shaped will probably look creepier, too.

Cut beer bottles are an appealing option, since we produce those at a much faster clip than we do, say, tiny perfectly-shaped food jars. This page seems to be a pretty definitive clearinghouse of information on how to cut bottles. Even though the author expressed skepticism about it, the burning string method sounded appealing to me. Or cheap, anyway.

Well, I gave it a shot yesterday. Eventually, it worked:

It took about ten attempts, though. It does seem like the sort of thing that, with practice, could be mastered. What made the difference for me was banging the bottle into the sink's bottom as I plunged it into the water. But it didn't work when I tried it again with another bottle, and at that point I gave up.

There are other problems with the method, too. You'll need to wear gloves and eye protection, of course, and work in a ventilated area, which can be a pain to find and set up. On my successful attempt the top of the bottle shattered, which was contained by the water but still not fun to clean up. Acetone isn't all that pleasant a thing to work with, and will inevitably get on your gloves, requiring you to take them off before lighting the string. Alternately you can keep a candle burning from which to light the string, as I did, but then you'll have to be sure to keep it clear of the acetone. And of course you still might light your gloves on fire if you aren't careful.

In short: it doesn't work that well, and it's kind of a pain in the ass. I think we'll be pestering friends to save jars after all.

Tim's article about the social changes that self-driving cars might make possible is fascinating reading (so is his earlier installment of the series, in which Tim discusses the history and present state of robotic car technology). But I wonder about the conclusion that Ryan draws from it:

I think the net effect of autonomous vehicles on suburban areas would be to make them denser (I think the net effect of a lot of things on suburban areas will be to make them denser). As important as those shifts, I suspect, would be the boon such vehicles would be to explicitly urban areas.

Taxis and car-sharing services are very much complements to walkable urban life. Cheap and effective autonomous vehicles would likewise be complements to urban life, but in a much more significant manner. It’s hard to overstate the negative effect of parking on dense, urban areas. When fighting against dense, new development, NIMBYs cite parking and traffic concerns first, second, and third. Given the value of urban land, parking has massive opportunity costs. Street space in urban areas is very limited and is currently given over almost entirely to driving lanes and parking lanes. If self-driving vehicles freed up much of that space, it would make room for large increases in transit right-of-way, bike lanes, and sidewalk space.

I think the less parking/more density argument being put forth is a bit optimistic. Obviously self-driving cars would be phased into the fleet on the road slowly. So long as that's the case, it's hard to see how self-rearranging, super-dense parking lots can be made to work. We'll have to wait for the entire fleet to turn over — a process that, given the steadily increasing quality of modern cars, will take longer and longer as we wait for robot cars to arrive. I can see how a car that's easier to share — or even just one that can drop you off and then go its merry way — could help reduce the amount of parking we need and build. But it doesn't seem likely to make a significant difference during my lifetime.

The more immediate consequence is this, though: if automated carsharing drives down the cost of taking a trip in a private vehicle (you don't have to pay for the full upkeep or purchase of the vehicle, or pay for a driver's time); and if not having to spend time piloting the car drives down the personal cost even further, won't that encourage more trips in private cars? And won't that actually encourage suburban settlement patterns?

Don't get me wrong: I think self-piloting cars will be a boon to everyone. It's just hard for me to see how easier locomotion from arbitrary point to arbitrary point will push people toward the dense settlement patterns that Ryan favors. There's a widespread perception that city schools are bad and that having a yard is nice. I really like living in a city, but I'm not sure that either of those ideas is wrong. If you tell people they can have it all — and better, that it'll all be delivered BY ROBOTS — they'll take you up on the offer.

Adrienne gets personal email from strangers. So do I — with a name as nondescript as mine, it's inevitable.

I love getting those emails, though. In particular, I've become a frequent recipient of pickup-basketball-scheduling emails among a group of devout young Asian teens & twentysomethings. It was all pretty boring until I started getting updates about their star-crossed mission trip to Kyrgyzstan. Plane delays! Lost luggage! The constant, unshakable faith that God cared deeply about their travel arrangements, and had a good reason for abruptly altering them. It was quite a rollercoaster ride, but everything ultimately worked out: they got their luggage and Kyrgyzstan is, presumably, now a Christian nation.

I've been remiss. I apologize. It's just that I've been busy: with work and meetings, but also with getting sick. It's not, I'm pleased to report, one of my signature cardiovascular ailments — no, this seems to be a Cosi-born illness, and so far has just made me tired and in need of a more manly alternative to the phrase "my tummy hurts". Also, Charles and I have been having something of a Halo 3 renaissance, and that's taken up a fair amount of time.

But all regularly scheduled activities continue: chief among them the Halloween short story contest. I've made some progress on mine, and can now assure you that as a fiction writer I am both long-winded and terrible. Still, it's something.

The essential details, for those only now paying attention: the deadline is a week from today; there's no minimum length; stories may be submitted anonymously; and the winner of the resulting popular vote gets $100. It's easy.

My absence from the internet stopped me from posting more inspirational Halloweeniana, so now I'm going to have to pick up the pace. My last offering was particularly lame, so let's return to one of the classics: M.R. James.

Some of James' stories are pretty creepy — The Ash-Tree is probably the best one I've read on that score — but that's not the thing about his work that I most enjoy. James taught at King's College and Eton, and composed many of his stories as part of the English tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas Eve (yuletide, they call it, just to further British things up). It's a tradition I'd never heard of before, but one that sounds pretty great.

As you might imagine, James was bit of a tweedy academic; naturally, many of his protagonists are, too. Their tales generally go something like this:

"Ho there, Wedgelington! What brings you to the Antiquities Department of Chestlethwick College?"

"Well met, Asterforthe, old bean! To your question: as you can see, it's this blasted urn I've happened across while touring the countryside. By the queerness of the inscriptions I presume it to be Etruscan, or Norse, or perhaps Oriental in nature..."

"Yes, I expect you're right..."

"...But for the life of me I can't prise the infernal thing open! I find myself confounded — utterly flummoxed!"

"Perhaps if I just use this ornate silver dagger..."

——AN UNPLEASANT INTERLUDE COMMENCES——

"Well! That was certainly a rollicking supernatural adventure!"

"Quite so."

This is a bit unfair. Even if James' supernatural horrors lack some of the existential threat of later authors, they're still plenty spooky. His stories have satisfyingly unambiguous conclusions, but still manage to express themselves with nuance. The foreshadowing is immediately identifiable, but not irritatingly so. The pacing gets to the point, but isn't hurried.

They're good, solid ghost stories — and oh so British. If you've ever watched the Indiana Jones movies and wished that Marcus Brody had been given his own spin-off, then you'll probably enjoy these.

More good news: James' work is in the public domain, and many of the stories are available as free recordings, courtesy of Librivox. The narrator is Peter Yearsley, whose British accent and languid style complement the text perfectly. Here are the audio versions of James' first major collection. I suggest downloading them and sticking them on your iPod for the next time you're traveling at night.

I suppose I should pick one story, though, so we may as well go with Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad. It embodies all of the Jamesian traits I described above, is considered among his best efforts, and has an incredibly creepy title (borrowed from a Robert Burns poem, but still).

Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

• Text
• MP3 @ 64kbps - 23.9MB
• MP3 @ 128kbps - 47.8MB

Michael Pollan was on Fresh Air a moment ago. It's part of his world/public radio tour in support of Farmer In Chief, last week's NYT Magazine article asking the next president to adopt better agricultural policies. I heard him giving pretty much the same spiel on a Philadelphia-area NPR station over the weekend, too.

I don't want to quibble with the man's larger crusade, but he keeps making one particular point that really bugs me. Pollan is fond of pointing out that since 1960 the average American household's spending on food has dropped as a share of income, from 18 percent to 10.

I'm pretty sure this is dumb. Or half, dumb, anyway. I'm sure food has gotten cheaper in absolute terms, and that those savings have been paid for in animal suffering and environmental destruction.

But it's also the case that household income tends to increase faster than the rate of inflation, while human nutritional requirements do not. Wikipedia says that real median income has increased about 30% since 1967. Unless I'm missing something, that means that if a family used to spend $1800 on food, today they spend $1300 — not $1000, as Pollan implies. If median household income data was available for 1960, rather than 1967, you can bet that the differential would be smaller still. And if you consider the fact that household size has declined from 3 to 2.6 people since 1967, the gap shrinks even more.

Of course, the picture is much more complicated than just a dollar amount. I'm sure we eat out a lot more, eat more processed food, eat more meat, pay more for specialty food and less for staples, and generally eat in ways that support Pollan's thesis. But this particular argument about income is a bit dishonest, and I wish he'd quit using it. Nutritional needs do not scale with income.

This is a pet peeve of mine with economic arguments about consumption in general: they tend not to pay any attention to the limits of human biology. This is why I'm similarly suspicious of estimates of exploding per capita bandwidth consumption. Yes, our bandwidth needs will continue to increase. But the human nervous system has its own bandwidth limits, too. Maybe there'll be one more video resolution revolution — HDTV2, let's say (pending the invention of a more confusing acronym). But to go beyond that will require video walls — they look cool in Total Recall, but why would you pay for something larger than your field of view? — or three-dimensional holo-whatnots. I'm sure the latter will be popularized eventually, but I'll probably be pretty old and confused by then.

The human fovea has a finite number of neurons, and we're already pretty good at keeping them busy. Personally, I think that household bandwidth use is likely to level off sometime in the next decade or two — there's only so much data that a human body can use. Our bandwidth expenses as a percentage of income will then start to fall, both because the growth in demand has slowed and because income continues to rise, but also because the resource itself will continue to get cheaper as technology improves.

That won't constitute proof that we aren't spending enough on bandwidth, though. It'll just mean that we've found some other stuff to spend our new money on, rather than simply ramping up our budget linearly. (My guess: hyper-ipods.)

So Dunkin' Donuts is building LEED-certified buildings, huh? With earthworm composting for the waste material? Fascinating. As a longtime veteran of the Donut Wars (Immobile Assault Division), my first instinct is to add this to the tally and see how Dunkin' — the hated foe of me and my fellow partisans — now stacks up against my beloved Krispy Kreme.

Here's the updated pro-Dunkin' list, which I present in the spirit of temperate objectivity:

• Ubiquity
• Distinctly uncoffeelike coffee (that is still strangely compelling)
• Has now broken with the donut industry's rapaciously anti-environmental past, apparently

I may be missing a few points. But what is not on this list — what is never on the list — is "excellent donuts". It's a bit mystifying to me, even after speaking to Matt and Michael about it at length. Dunkin' Donuts seems to be this store that Northeasterners like to get coffee from in the morning. It happens to have the word "donut" in its name, and yeah, if you ask for a donut they probably have some in the back.

But — with the exception of the cake donut perverts, who frankly should be rounded up and hospitalized — I've never heard anyone defend Dunkin's donuts on the merits. Stacking the franchise up against Krispy Kreme is therefore bizarre, like saying McDonald's is better than a steakhouse because the latter doesn't keep a plastic slide out front. If you want to make a comparison based on the crucial "has a fun slide" metric, it should be between McDonald's and, say, a waterpark. Or, to bring the analogy home, between Dunkin' Donuts and a real coffeeshop. Instead the Dunkin' bullies choose to pick on poor Krispy Kreme (too busy making excellent donuts to defend itself!), rather than take on the coffeeshops that would surely spell their rhetorical doom.

But I won't belabor the point. By now I can see that I'm on the wrong side of history (it's something of a family tradition). But those of us who truly love our donuts will keep the faith, and wait patiently for the day when Real Americans are ready to emerge from behind the silence of the glaze curtain and cry Hot Donuts... NOW!

Halloween! Words! Contest! Okay, inspiration.

I'm a big fan of old-timey radio — it's just one facet of my having been approximately 80 years old since birth. I am deeply resentful of the fact that The Big Broadcast doesn't provide podcasts, and am prepared to draft a curt letter to that effect on my IBM Selectric. Perhaps I'll send it to my local paper's editor.

The best old-time radio isn't very spooky, it's true — cowboys, detectives and comedy teams are the order of the day. There are a decent number of supernatural programs, but WAMU tends not to play them. Those that I've found online are almost all awful. One exception, though, is Beyond Midnight. I won't claim to be a connoisseur, but it seems to be pretty good, aside from the discordant shilling for a defunct laundry additive named Bio-tex (which is sort of fun in its own right). And it's considerably easier to listen to than even the audiobooks I've posted in the past — creeping woodwinds and alarmed brass can go a long way toward punctuating a tale of fright.

Here's an episode that I particularly liked. Emily and I shut off all the lights and listened to it over dinner, and it was great.

Beyond Midnight – Let Me See Your Face

The episode page can be found here. More episodes are here.

ALSO / WOW: Check out the Internet Archive's Old Time Radio Collection for much, much, MUCH MUCH more.

ALSO ALSO: Apparently Beyond Midnight is of South African provenance. I'm not sure why, but I find this interesting; maybe you will, too.

Any smart marks will get a kick out of this Ta-Nehisi Coates comment thread. It makes me wonder why I don't watch wrestling anymore — but only briefly, then I quickly remember that the industry's in a fallow period, lacking in talent and filled with junk. A more persistent puzzlement: why haven't I spent more time geeking out over, say, The Rockers with Spencer? Between the grittiness, emotion and highbrow disdain, pro wrestling seems suited to his unique style of connoisseurship in a number of ways.

For a while now I've been trying to convince Charles that he ought to jailbreak his iPhone. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to do so, exactly, and the reasons that might motivate Charles to take my advice have been even murkier. Getting a free terminal app is reason enough for me, and running Bittorrent off my phone has a certain novelty. But these days most users' needs are pretty well taken care of by the App Store.

Well, I've got a better justification now: comics. As you might imagine, there's a robust trade in pirate scans of comics on the Bittorrent tracker sites. It's easy to partake, and, for me at least, a fairly guilt-free experience: downloading back issues has propelled me to dramatically increase my actual comic purchases. For instance, I'd been a little curious about Hellboy when I first heard of the series. But after downloading the complete run, I find myself buying every new BPRD TPB the moment it's in stores (and slowly but surely picking up physical copies of the older books that I'd first read electronically). In my case, at least, the net effect is clear: comic piracy has allowed the industry to extract much more money from me than it otherwise would have.

We're still a ways off from digital comics competing with their physical counterparts — much further than for books, I'd say. But it's still nice to be able to catch up on storylines that you'd otherwise only hear about on Wikipedia (or text boxes signed "– ED"). And having a huge collection of idle reading on your phone is pretty great. It's hard to make myself suffer through an ebook on a tiny screen, but for some reason the prospect of a comic seems more appealing.

The iPhone turns out to be surprisingly well-suited to the task, too. I won't claim that it isn't a little tough on the ol' eyeballs, but the resolution of the screen makes it just possible to read issues in landscape mode without zooming. And of course you can always do the normal pinch-to-zoom operation that's offered by mobile Safari.

Enough evangelizing: how do you do this?

In comments, Ben suggests August Heat as a good scary story. I'm glad he did — it's excellent (and a very quick read). Go have a look.

Only four story-writing days left! Hopefully you all aren't as desperately behind as I am.

Megan doesn't care for Matt Taibbi's takedown of Byron York, in which Taibbi makes it sound like York has no idea what he's talking about with respect to the financial crisis.

Naturally, I have no idea about any of this stuff other than feeling vaguely hostile toward Byron York. Still, I was a little uncomfortable when I first read that exchange: Taibbi's scolding about credit default swaps came at a time when a lot of other people on the internet were also suddenly speaking knowledgeably about the financial meltdown and the rarified financial instruments to blame for it. That wave of spontaneous expertise seemed to occur suspiciously shortly after the air date of an episode of This American Life that discussed the crisis and CDSes in particular.

Which is not to say that TAL is wrong; I listened to that episode, too, and it seemed excellent! But it's been both amusing and off-putting to see so many people brazenly parroting the same single News Source White People Like. I have no idea if this criticism actually applies to Taibbi, but the conversation between him and York certainly made it sound like it could.

UPDATE: Since Megan kindly linked back to me, I should probably add that while I can't be sure that my speculation about Taibbi's argument is correct, it's very clear that York's pathetic line about Freddie and Fannie is a regurgitated conservative talking point — a particularly lame, objectionable and well-debunked one at that. It seems likely that both sides of that conversation were blindly reciting other people's arguments.

If you're anything like me you really don't appreciate the games that your television service providers play with you. It would be nice, for instance, if Comcast didn't compress its programming to within an inch of its life. It's a lousy way to treat your customers.

But even more grating is various broadcasters' habit of jacking the volume way, WAY UP whenever a program goes to commercial. For a while I dismissed this as the sort of paranoid anti-corporate rambling that I enjoy indulging in but only sort of believe. But at this point the effect really can't be denied: if I'm watching a live broadcast I almost always have to turn down the volume when it breaks for commercial.

It sure would be nice if we could make them stop these hijinks, and in fact there's some proposed legislation that aims to do exactly that. As you might expect, the guys over at the Tech Liberation Front think it's outrageous that anyone would try such a thing — markets(!), etc. Most recently they've been quoting AV columnist Ken Pohlmann, who has a similar perspective but has different motivations: he's worried about Congress accidentally messing with his audio quality. And he thinks there are easier solutions, anyway:

At the broadcast and distribution end, as part of the ATSC standard, Dolby Digital has built-in loudness-normalization parameters. Using these protocols, any receiving decoder will recognize the metadata and adjust the sound to proper levels. All Dolby audio signals are controlled by these parameters; when used properly, they ensure consistent levels across one channel and between many channels. True, some engineers and producers aren’t setting the metadata properly, but that’s a simple matter of education and experience.

It's sweet that he thinks this is just a big misunderstanding — a few audio engineers who are tryin' awful hard, but still learning their craft. My perspective is a bit more cynical. Anyway here's Adam Thierer, the author of the TLF posts:

As I pointed out in my essay on this, the thought of FCC bureaucrats sitting around squandering their time and taxpayer money on this nonsense is really appalling, and I can’t wait to see the reams of paperwork they would spit out when they have to open an proceeding about how “excessively noisy or strident” ads will be defined, measured, and then penalized.

I remain unconvinced by these arguments. The CALM Act (PDF) doesn't specify what the penalty for violation of its admittedly vaguely-worded volume requirements would be — presumably that and other details would be up to the FCC to decide. So it's hard to say how good this specific regulatory proposal would turn out to be.

But even if this specific attempt ultimately falls short, there's nothing incoherent or impossible about the basic idea of telling broadcasters not to blast their ads at us. Nobody is saying that enforcement has to be undertaken at great government expense, or that such a regulation would have to apply to anything other than commercial messages. All you'd have to do is say that channels may only broadcast commercials at a volume X% greater than the average volume of their noncommercial programming (as the CALM Act basically does), and that citizens who receive programming that is consistently in violation of that regulation are entitled to collect civil damages not to exceed $Y per documented instance. There: no need for government monitoring; no interference with the audio fidelity of non-ads; no incentive for "gotcha!" enforcement of single technical mistakes; but a credible threat of class-action suits that would almost certainly dissuade broadcasters from playing these petty games with their customers.

It's not rocket science, and it's not unreasonable. I understand that TLF's knee-jerk response is to oppose any regulation whatsoever, especially if it's coming from the FCC. But Thierer's favored solution — having everyone buy audio-normalizing hardware — seems considerably more ridiculous to me than asking the FCC to say "knock it off!"

My professional journalist friends are professionally obligated to, well, be professional. Although this precept serves them and their readers well nearly all of the time, I think it will prevent them from analyzing the Ashley Todd affair with the thoroughness it deserves. So, unencumbered as I am by such considerations, let me try to clarify the lesson that should be drawn from all this: College Republicans are the fucking scum of the earth.

I say this not to insult Republicans in general. I disagree with members of the GOP about a lot of things, but recognize that nearly all of them are perfectly good, reasonable people. But in my experience, folks who become involved in the party's machinery at a young age seem to be intensely despicable at a much higher rate than their more mature fellow travelers. I was hesitant to be skeptical of Todd's account, at first — skepticism is not generally an appropriate way to respond to the claims of a victim of violent crime. But if the picture was sort of suspicious, Todd's campus affiliations left me feeling even more dubious about her story.

College is a time for quixotic idealism. That's not to say that young people can't earnestly hold conservative beliefs, of course. But if a person is passionately pro-life or nutty for Nozick, he or she is, at that age, much more likely to become involved in an advocacy organization that tries to further those ends directly — it's easy to find such organizations on a college campus, after all. Normal people get involved in politics by first caring about an issue, then realizing that the best way to achieve their ends is to organize their efforts under the umbrella of a larger party. That doesn't happen all at once, though.

Who opts to instead immediately begin working for a demographically unpopular political party, where your chief activities will involve writing little-noticed op-eds and arranging speaking honoraria for recently disgraced administration officials? Often, the answer seems to be those with a Machiavellian enthusiasm for reaching the levers of power. These are not good people.

Why don't I think the same criticism thing applies to the young Democrats? Well, to an extent I'm sure it does. But I think it's probably easier to be a starry-eyed College Democrat. You can participate in various organizational efforts motivated by an idealistic conception of participatory democracy — registering new voters, that sort of thing. There will be a lot more of you, too, making participation more appealing to the sorts of people who want to get laid rather than the sorts of people who want to screw others — you'll be surrounded by more normal people, in other words. You'll also probably have less funding per capita and, by virtue of your numbers, more internal tension and examination, making it harder to twist inward into a tight little coven of aspiring conspirators.

But of course I'm speculating here. Besides, there's no reason to get defensive; hijinks like those of Todd and Francisco Nava speak for themselves. Maybe the College Democrats are every bit as despicable as their Republican counterparts. But if they are, then they seem to at least be a bit more competent about it. Give them credit for that. There are few things more pathetic than a liar who's not yet adept at her craft. Someone who tries to inflame racial tensions to further her political ends is one of those things, though.

UPDATE: Tim writes to remind me that not all College Republicans are horrible people. Well, alright. I overstated things a bit. But my point remains: fewer young people are attracted to the organization than to its Democratic equivalent, and to some extent they come for different reasons. Some of those reasons are not healthy.

A few others things. First, credit where due: much of the conservative blogosphere has from the start approached this story in a restrained and thoughtful manner. Second, those saying that Todd's refusal of medical attention was a clue to the hoax are wrong — I've refused police offers of medical attention after getting hit by a car (twice, in fact). If something bad has happened to you and you're pretty sure you're okay, sometimes you just want to go home (if you haven't got health insurance and are unsure who'd be footing the bill, this goes double). Third, Todd seems to now be alleging a history of mental health problems. Depending on how this claim turns out, my feelings about the hoax may become very muddy indeed. The territory where "couldn't help it" begins is murky, and, from a practical standpoint, not necessarily coextensive with "should be excused".

I apologize; I'm totally fascinated by this Ashley Todd business. I can't stop.

The latest development appears to be her claim that she was in some sort of psychogenic fugue state when she scratched the B in her face:

Unfortunately I am unable to speculate as to the veracity of such a claim; the DSM-IV doesn't say anything one way or the other about sufferers' tendency to send out Twitters containing pre-fugue exposition.

But not really! I've been vague about the scary story contest deadline from the start, saying it was today but not specifying a time. This was by design: obviously some of us might wind up scrambling to finish. I'm no exception, I'm afraid — Halloween party prep has begun in earnest, consuming a lot of the weekend. Although I'm almost done with my story, I'm not there quite yet.

If, on the other hand, you are a responsible person who can meet deadlines, then my hat is off to you. Go submit it! Just visit halloween.manifestdensity.net — it's a simple little drupal site I stood up on Saturday morning. I realize it probably seems like overkill, but this struck me as the best way to keep things anonymous. Just register for an account. You'll then be able to submit your story and to view and vote on other people's stories. Even if you're not writing anything, I'd still encourage you to head over there and create an account so that you can help rate stories. It should only take a second.

Those of you who are fighting the good fight and powering through your tales' conclusions: I'm grateful, and looking forward to reading your stuff. Let's shoot for the end of tomorrow night, okay? That means that ideally everyone who's planning to participate will have submitted some text by Wednesday morning.

As I mentioned, work has begun — last night Becks, Ficke, Emily and I found ourselves standing in my garage, drinking beer, discussing the best way to make realistic bloody handprints (given aqueous paint and a hydrophobic surface), and finishing the process of corpsing a skeleton.

Tonight we're going to begin moving stuff over to the house. If you'd like to participate, please shoot me an email. There are a lot of fun things to do, from engineering the fog chiller to carving pumpkins (we have at least 8 more to carve, thanks in part to a generous donation from the Ben Charitable Trust (for pumpkins)).

Also: if, for some reason, you weren't on the evite, you almost certainly should be. My method for assembling names was comically incomplete: I typed each letter of the alphabet into GMail's "To:" box, then took the auto-completed addresses that seemed appropriate. It's already become clear that this led to some embarrassing omissions. If you're one of them, I apologize. Email me (thomas.j.lee at that big email providing domain owned by Google) and we'll set things right.

Another day, another music-sharing flash widget that uses RC4 to encrypt its MP3 URLs but keeps the key in the SWF.

I realize I've never made good on my promise to explain how I would build a secure Flash music player. Partly I forgot; partly it's just that it's an impossible problem, and proposing incremental improvements to the situation isn't very satisfying.

But look, you can at least half-ass it. Right now if someone gets a hold of the MP3 URL the jig is up — they can repost it anywhere else and help themselves to your bandwidth. You can improve on this situation, at least, by serving a dynamic playlist filled with URLs that are only good for the current user. Either throw each URL away after one use (admittedly problematic for repeating a song without additional trips to the playlist server); or, better yet, find the song by hashing its unique identifier together with the user's IP and user agent (again, in the dynamic playlist generation script). You don't have to move any files around, you just have to write a script that looks up the requested hash in the database and then pipes out the MP3 from its secret location. There's no need for encryption, even. Season with additional querystring parameters and column indices to taste.

"But Tom!" you cry, "Can't an enterprising jerk like yourself then write a script that reverse-engineers this process and automatically creates URLs that are compatible with their use agent/IP combination?" Well, yes — although the salting algorithm (and song identifier, potentially) will remain secret, so you're going to need a rainbow table, which usually costs money. But also no, because you made a note in your database when the browser talked to the playlist server. So strangers can't come in — they have to have at least asked for that playlist first.

Of course, if they went after the MP3 they would done so have, anyway. So yes, securing the file against individuals is still hopeless — I hope I never implied otherwise. But at least reposting or emailing the link won't get them anywhere.

The downside to all of this is that you're going to have to stop using a big dumb CDN. But look, it's just not that hard to stand up a dead-simple EC2 LAMP instance to serve your playlist creation script and pipe stuff out of S3. Elasticfox, people.

Oh, and one other thing: for god's sake, ban jackasses like me the first time you see a naked curl user-agent string. I never remember that -A flag until I absolutely have to.

The stories have arrived! Some of them, anyway. You can read the first three entries here (sorry for the earlier access restriction, it's now publicly available). If you've got a moment, go give 'em a read. I'm very pleased to already have three contributions — I think there'll another one or two, at least, that trickle in later.

If you have any trouble submitting, viewing or rating, drop me an email or leave a comment here.

UPDATE: Whoops — I had the wrong URL. Sorry about that, the link's now fixed.

With all the hustle and bustle, it's all too easy to forget...

Via @binarybits