Status-Q

I found a link to this lovely video clip on Engadget. Having worked in tech support in my youth, I think this is brilliantly done. Update – this was taken off YouTube, but has re-appeared – splendid! I’ve updated the link above. Many thanks to John for finding it again.

I was getting some laser engraving done by the nice people over at Trilogy Lasercraft, a nearby company. They showed me some of their machines in operation, and they’re great fun to watch. This was for another customer:

They cut and engrave lots of different materials, but paper and card form quite a big part of their business. The light that you see is not the laser, which is infrared and invisible. It’s the flaring of the paper particles that are burned off.

There was a rather wonderful story this week about a British academic being wrestled to the ground by an Atlanta cop for crossing the road in the wrong place.

The bespectacled professor says he didn’t realise the “rather intrusive young man” shouting that he shouldn’t cross there was a policeman. “I thanked him for his advice and went on.”

At this point, some words were exchanged and things got somewhat more physical, with Professor Fernandez-Armesto being handcuffed and taken away, the cops even going so far as to confiscate his box of peppermints, and the good professor spending eight hours in a cell. It’s truly an incident of which P.G.Wodehouse would be proud.

The jaywalking rules, I think, are rather sensible in the context of the grid-like road layout of most American cities, and I flout them only rarely, usually when I’m walking in situations where any sane native would expect to drive, and the road system has been designed accordingly.

But what’s delicious about this story is its revelations about the nature of policing, and the public’s expectations of it in different countries. Having been stopped twice by police in rural parts of the U.S. (for the more serious offence of speeding, I regret to say), I have found them to be polite and professional, and tolerant of batty Englishmen who didn’t know the speed limit on the open road. I have witnessed incidents which suggest that their urban colleagues are rather more hard-line. But at least they were present, visible, and taking action, which is something we could probably do with rather more of here in the UK, where crime rates are generally higher.

Professor Fernandez-Armesto seems, in retrospect, rather to have relished his experience. In a Sunday Times article he says:

… I remain lucky to be in America, in a gloriously liberal university with wonderful students and colleagues. So it grieves me to see the anti-Americanism with which I grew up renewed around the world. In a small way my own story, much to my regret, is reinforcing resentment of America. After being the surprising quarry of the cops, I became the almost equally surprising quarry of the world’s media.

Almost all the reports concentrated on the excesses of police zeal, and dwelt on the crudities and savageries of life in US cities, without mentioning any redeeming features. I would like the world to understand America better, just as I work hard in my classes and my writing to help Americans better understand the world. But the licensed brutality and barbarism of so many security agencies over here — from the Atlanta police upwards — keeps making the task harder.

Will all the outrage my case generated make any difference? I want to think so, but fear the force of official defensiveness, intransigence and incapacity for self-criticism. The mayor of Atlanta has announced an official inquiry into the way I was treated; but inquiries mean delay and delay is the deadliest form of denial. The best way to reassure visitors would be to issue orders to the police, reminding them that visitors may not always know state laws.

See What every Brit should know about jaywalking for more information.

Excellent…

I’ve written before about some of the great talks available online from the TED conference. Here are a couple I’ve just watched, and would definitely recommend:

• Dan Gilbert talks about what really makes us happy, and the research that shows how bad we are at predicting what really makes us happy.
• Oxford Statistician Peter Donnelly explores the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics, and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.

Both good stuff. And the wonderful thing about having a Mac Mini sitting under my TV as a PVR is that I can use iTunes to subscribe to the RSS feeds of things like this and watch them from the comfort of my sofa…

Today’s fun YouTube movie…

Lasse Gjertsen claims that he can play neither drums nor piano. But, boy, can he edit a video!

Treadmills can be so dull if you just run or walk on them. This should give you some ideas for the next time you’re in the gym…

Larry Lessig, as always, gave a great keynote speech this morning at LinuxWorld, which touched on many topics, but a key focus was the following idea: that kids will always be creative in whatever medium is available to them. Nowadays, the medium is digital media, and playing with it and remixing it is what they will do, making use of previous creations in much the same way that jazz musicians have always played variations on older themes. It’s foolish, and counter-productive, to try and stop them.

As Hollywood, the RIAA, governments, and others try to stamp out unlicensed use of copyrighted materials, and copyright everything under the sun, in the vain hope of preventing piracy, they are also doing something more serious; they are turning the natural creativity of youth into a criminal act. What does this do, in the long term, to young peoples’ perception of the rule of law?

Anyway, as one of his examples of remixing, he played the rather nice ‘love duet’ between Bush & Blair created by ATMO as part of their ‘Read my lips’ series. It’s only a short clip – I recommend the 4M Quicktime Movie. Very clever.

I was going to post a picture or two from a boat trip yesterday in Cape Town, but I emailed some snaps to John and he beat me to it.

I’ve taken to carrying a little IXUS 750 with me almost everywhere I go, and one of the things I’m appreciating more and more is its ability to record video clips. I’ve never been one of those people who likes to spend much of their holiday looking through a camcorder viewfinder. I have a very nice camcorder, but I normally only use it for making corporate demo videos; I don’t carry it around with me.

Occasionally, however, there are scenes which require something more than a still image, and it’s great to have something on my belt which can record them. Here are a couple of little Quicktime clips from yesterday:

• The Cape Town Waterfront (10MB)
• A life on the Ocean Wave (9MB)

(You might want to right-click and download them. They won’t stream very well unless you have quite a fast connection.)

I borrowed a digital-8 camcorder from a friend – thanks, William! – because I wanted to salvage some footage from a few old Hi-8 tapes, which will soon be completely obsolete and unreadable.

The main thing I wanted to save was a little 2-minute clip about BrightBoard, the project which formed the bulk of my PhD work. This ‘video figure’ was done at the end of 1995 to accompany a paper I presented at the CHI96 conference. Click the picture to see a much younger and thinner Quentin… [12MB Quicktime H.264]