A Sunday Miscellany

Well, I’ve had a very busy weekend here in Melbourne–which I may get around to writing up at some point later tonight–and now I’ve made it back to my hotel/apartment, and it seems like a good time for me to do a little bit of value-added linkblogging. So, no theme, just lots of things that I found interesting:

First up, in the “the Internet brings me very interesting things to listen to” category, we have the New York Academy of Sciences weekly podcast “Science and the City“. I’ve gone through a couple of these on the trip, and was glad to spend the time. If I weren’t trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of really expensive hotel bandwidth and the “acceptable use” filter at work, I’d probably have grabbed a whole bunch of these for listening to on the plane ride home. As it is, I’ll be going through the archives and cherry-picking when I get home.

I’d recommend the Stuff of Thought, Mood Disorders and the Brain’s Perception of Danger, and The Science of Coffee from the recent broadcasts.

I liked reading Jeff Ford’s thoughts on readings–I haven’t actually heard Jeff read, but I think I might get some cognitive dissonance hearing his prose in his geographically-specific accent (I bet that issue won’t exist with the new book, though)–but the commenter who said that Parke Godwin was a fabulous reader really made my day. I have a special place in the corner of my head where I keep Waiting For The Galactic Bus and The Snake Oil Wars, which I read at exactly the right point in my life. Sadly almost all of the satire not only still applies, but is still necessary. However, imagining a great reading of some passages from those books is making me smile right now.

Remember when I told you about Shadow Unit? Well, first, go read some more of it. Second, I note that it got plugged on Boing Boing. On the one hand this makes me happy, since it will surely mean that lots of people who wouldn’t have known can now be part of the audience. On the other hand, the comment thread at the boingboing entry makes me sad–they just don’t get it, and that both saddens me, and makes me feel a lot less like the boingboing audience are “my people”.

However, Steve Brust, not shockingly, gets it, and the people reading his LJ for the most part are demonstrably of The Tribe.

I recommend reading the Freakonomics/NYT survey piece on “Is manned space exploration worth the cost?” It’s a long piece, but there’s a whole bunch of interesting packed in there.

All the answers contain different takes on the problem, but I guess I’m a romantic since the bit that resonated the most with me was this one:

Exploration is intrinsic to our nature. It is the contest between man and nature mixed with the primal desire to conquer. It fuels curiosity, inspiration and creativity. The human spirit seeks to discover the unknown, and in the process explore the physical and psychological potential of human endurance.

I’m sure there are people who would get the same reaction from the “return on investment” answers, but they probably aren’t fun at parties.

This bit is just to check if my wife is reading this.

I see in B3n’s blog where that Mahna Mahna song–you know the one, from the Muppets–is actually from the soundtrack to an Italian sex travelogue of Sweden.

Quoting from the Muppet Wiki (and how great a world we live in that has such wikis in it!):

“Mahna Mahna”, originally titled “Mah-Na Mah-Na,” was written by Italian composer Piero Umiliani for an Italian documentary about life in Sweden, titled Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso (Sweden, Heaven and Hell).

And from the plot summary of that movie at IMDB:

Edmund Purdom narrates a pseudo-documentary about sexuality in Sweden. It shows contraceptives for teen girls, lesbian nightclubs, wife swapping, porno movies, biker gangs, and Walpurgis Night celebrations. It also examines Sweden’s purported drug, drinking and suicide problems. It features the original appearance of the Piero Umiliani’s nonsense song “Mah Nà Mah Nà” which was later popularized by “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show”.

Doot doo da doo doo…

On one of my co-op work terms (while I was doing my undergrad) I was going through a Tetris addiction, and it’s as likely as not that any given customer I dealt with during that term was talking to me while I was playing Tetris.

I eventually burned it out–kind of like scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds–but I wonder if I’m in danger of a relapse now that there’s free 3-D Tetris available online.

Maybe not… but if there was a way to rotate the playfield in all three dimensions….

Ars Technica had a story recently about some current research into telecommuting. Here’s the important bit:

Timothy Golden, associate professor in the Lally School of Management & Technology at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sampled 240 professional employees from an unnamed medium-sized company to observe how telecommuting affects employees who stay in the office. Golden found that in-office employees took less satisfaction in their jobs and felt less of a relationship and obligation to their company as the number of telecommuting coworkers grew. In-office employees in his study became disappointed at having fewer and weaker relationships. They also got frustrated at a perceived increase in workload and difficulties that telecommuting can present to finishing projects and building strong working relationships.

Excuse me Mr. Golden, but… um… SHHHHHH!. Don’t tell them.

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the office this week about stupid party kid. Apparently if your party gets out of hand, causes around $20K worth of damage, and requires more than 30 cops to get under control, you too can become a local celebrity.

I love this bit, though:

The BBC’s Phil Mercer in Sydney says the teenage host said he hoped his mum and dad would not find out what had happened.

Ah, youth.

(Check out those articles in the right-hand See Also list–apparently party damage from “parents away kids parties” is around 134 million pounds a year in the UK. I know a couple of people–Scott and Dana, I’m looking at you–who could have used these statistics to make a “it could have been a lot worse” argument back in high school.)

I think I liked clowns when I was a kid. In fact, I think I was basically pro-clown until Tim Curry scared the piss out of me.

Apparently I was in the minority in this.

Possibly the researchers are asking the wrong questions. For instance instead of polling for reaction to clowns, they should be polling for relative reactions to clowns versus, say, mimes. I bet clowns come out ahead on that one. Damn mimes.

During some “in pub” discussions with the Aussies this week, I mentioned a vague recollection of reading a sociological study of pub etiquette online during my school days. The next day I recalled this and was motivated to see if I could dig up that old link.

Well, I found it. Passport to the Pub: A guide to British pub etiquette published by the Social Issues Research Centre.

It’s got a fancier web presentation than it did the first time I read it–it’s got to be close to a decade ago now–and apparently a snazzy cartoon cover, but the contents are the same, and are worth a read if you’ve ever spent any time in, or had any interest in, pubs.

Here’s a teeny bit, which seems to also apply in Oz:

The rules of round-buying

• In any group of two or more people, one person buys a ‘round’ of drinks for the whole group.
  This is not an act of altruism. The expectation is that the other member or members of the group will each, in turn, buy a round of drinks.
• When each member of the group has bought a round, the whole process begins again with the first member.
• If the group is seated away from the bar, the person who buys the round acts as ‘waiter’. ‘Buying your round’ involves not only paying for the drinks, but going to the bar, ordering the drinks and carrying them back to the table.

(Perhaps ironically, I was able to find this document again by way of a BBC article about the dangers of drinking in rounds.)

One of the things I keep hearing this week is how Australia doesn’t have a lot of big animals (although I certainly wouldn’t want to take on a fully grown kangaroo!) but that it has a lot of really deadly little ones.

I was somewhat relieved to note that of the creatures listed in Cracked’s 5 Most Horrifying Bugs In The World, none are native to Australia.

I’ve got enough to worry about without a three-inch hornet shooting flesh-melting acid into my eyes, or a ravening horde of blind ants stripping my flesh.

(NOTE: You see the video on there that they warn you not to watch? Don’t watch it. This is not a dare. Don’t watch it.)