- Kevin Smith Talks About Jason Mewes’ Former Heroin Addiction
-
Since the gossip sites have seen fit to print only the portion of the Jason Mewes story I told at UPenn (that portion being what said sites seem to feel is the only interesting aspect of Mewes’ life), I figured why not put the whole tale of Jason’s battle with drug addiction into print here, where folks can get a better idea of who Jason truly is and maybe why he fell victim to heroin abuse in the first place. I’m thinking it’s gonna be at least a four-parter, and I’m hoping to wrap it up by April 6th, the day Mewes celebrates his “Sober Birthday”, when Jay will mark his third straight year of living completely drug and alcohol free.
At the least, it’s a more comprehensive profile at a guy who’s accomplished a lot more than celebrity bathroom sex; at the most, it’s an ode to a very unlikely hero of mine and a man I love (in a decidedly hetero way).
Enjoy.
- How to Get a Job in the Web Industry
-
Since I became the web team manager at Seattle Children’s Hospital, I’ve been involved in the process of hiring people for my team for the first time.
It’s certainly been interesting to be involved in the interview process from the hiring perspective. However, as I read through resumes and met with candidates, I was often surprised at how poorly they presented themselves, both on paper and in person.
So, I thought it might be useful to highlight a few pointers that might help people who are looking for a job in the web industry to (1) get to the interview stage, and (2) get hired.
Please bear in mind that while I think that these tips are fairly generally applicable, they are not guaranteed to work with every interviewer. As you can imagine, different people have different styles and preferences. Always use your own best judgement!
- Death to User-Generated Content
-
Think about the rest of the world. Writers produce stories or articles. Authors write fiction or memoir. These are words infused with meaning and romance. Can you imagine a writer saying “I am a content provider” when asked what they do?
Lately the notion that the web is about “user-generated content” has been getting more traction. With the success of MySpace and Flickr, pundits are looking for a trend. And they’ve found one in this hateful phrase. But “user-generated content” is nothing new online. In fact, it’s what the network was designed for.
So let’s not give in to the buzzphrase du jour. Let’s use the real words. Those people posting to Amazon pages? They’re writing reviews. Those folks on Flickr? They’re making photographs. And if we must have an umbrella term to describe the whole shebang, I have a suggestion. Try this on for size: Authentic Media.
(Hat tip: Gruber)
- Windows: The New Classic
-
This points to the rather delicious conclusion that Apple is casting Windows, including Vista, as the new Classic.
Boot Camp portends Apple’s intention to become a Windows-only PC manufacturer no more than Classic served as a hedge against Apple’s commitment to Mac OS X — that is, not at all.
The fear that Windows-on-Mac-hardware implies the eventual death or marginalisation of Mac OS X is baseless. Sure, third party developers could start using “Just boot into Windows” as their answer to questions regarding Mac support, but this is no more likely to be popular or successful than it was for developers whose OS X strategy was “Just use Classic.”
- The Biology of B-Movie Monsters
-
Size has been one of the most popular themes in monster movies, especially those from my favourite era, the 1950s. The premise is invariably to take something out of its usual context—make people small or something else (gorillas, grasshoppers, amoebae, etc.) large—and then play with the consequences. However, Hollywood’s approach to the concept has been, from a biologist’s perspective, hopelessly naïve. Absolute size cannot be treated in isolation; size per se affects almost every aspect of an organism’s biology. Indeed, the effects of size on biology are sufficiently pervasive and the study of these effects sufficiently rich in biological insight that the field has earned a name of its own: “scaling.”
- The Movie Gladiator in Historical Perspective
-
What can a Roman historian say about the movie Gladiator? It was the best of films. It was the worst of films. One of the best things about this movie is that it is part of a long line of books, plays, films, and works of art that keep alive interest in the Ancient World among the general public, something at which artists and writers have been far more successful over the centuries than professional historians. Unfortunately, the creative minds who do the most to shape popular views of the past often have little regard for the level of accuracy that preoccupies professional practitioners of Clio’s craft. Artists and writers mine the past for raw materials that support their own creative agenda. Few writers other than the most scrupulous of historical novelists will ever let the facts that concern professional historians get between them and paying customers.
As the worst of films, Gladiator provides a perfect example. Right from the opening scene, the inaccuracies are legion. First, there was no last great battle with the Germanic tribes on the eve of Marcus Aurelius’ death. There was a great daylong battle late in the campaigning season of A.D. 179, but Marcus died on March 17 of 180, just as he was about to launch another great military campaign. One could say that the scriptwriters needed to foreshorten the chronology here to save time in a long movie, but they certainly played fast and loose with some other aspects of the battle. I have found no attested parallel to the war dog of the Roman commander Maximus, the movie’s hero, and if there were one, it would not have been a German shepherd, a breed that did not exist in Antiquity. The use of fire-hurling catapults and mechanical dart launchers against the oncoming barbarians was certainly dramatic but probably unhistorical. By and large such weapons were too cumbersome for use on the open battlefield and were confined to more static siege warfare.
- Coming Soon: Waterworld
-
Last week a commenter pointed out Flood Maps, which pairs NASA elevation data with Google Maps and show us the various lands we’d lose if the ocean were to raise a variable amount of metres. Worldchanging hit on this at the end of March.
For some people, global warming is a hard sell. Temperatures going up by a few degrees doesn’t sound all that bad, and even results like drought or increased spread of mosquitos and other pests, while certainly unpleasant, are familiar issues. Mega-problems like whiplash/abrupt climate change, where warming leads to an ice age, can sound more surreal than threatening. But this website might change their minds. It shows something that is obviously warming-related, is already starting to happen (not just a “might happen 50 years down the road” possibility), and is a clear danger to the industrialized world’s economies and societies: a seven metre rise in sea levels.
(Hat tip: Wesa)
- The Bible Sex Quiz (Part III!)
I think this is actually a real web site, creepily enough. And yet they don’t find the irony in the quiz they’ve posted.
- MyDeathSpace.com
A new web site that, morbidly enough, lists the names, causes of death, and dates of death for people who had MySpace profiles. It’s kind of surreal seeing someone I know on that list…
- For the First Time Since the 1970s, a NASA Spacecraft Will Get Clear Pictures of Apollo Relics on the Moon
-
There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon. They always face Earth, always in plain view. Surely the Hubble Space Telescope could photograph the rovers and other things astronauts left behind. Right?
Wrong. Not even Hubble can do it. The Moon is 384,400 km away. At that distance, the smallest things Hubble can distinguish are about 60 metres wide. The biggest piece of left-behind Apollo equipment is only 9 metres across and thus smaller than a single pixel in a Hubble image.
Better pictures are coming. In 2008 NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will carry a powerful modern camera into low orbit over the Moon’s surface. Its primary mission is not to photograph old Apollo landing sites, but it will photograph them, many times, providing the first recognisable images of Apollo relics since 1972.
The spacecraft’s high-resolution camera, called “LROC,” short for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, has a resolution of about half a metre. That means that a half-metre square on the Moon’s surface would fill a single pixel in its digital images.
Apollo moon buggies are about 2 metres wide and 3 metres long. So in the LROC images, those abandoned vehicles will fill about 4 by 6 pixels.
Does anyone else think it’s sad that the Apollo mission bits left behind on the Moon are now old enough to be called “relics” without any humans being sent there since? (Hat tip: David Galbraith)
- The Food Timeline
-
Ever wonder what foods the Vikings ate when they set off to explore the new world? How Thomas Jefferson made his ice cream? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip… and why? Welcome to the Food Timeline.
(Hat tip: David Galbraith)
- Why Screaming Doesn’t Make You Deaf
-
As you scream for your favorite sports team, special brain cells kick in to protect your auditory system from the sound of your own voice, a new study suggests.
These cells dampen your auditory neurons’ ability to detect incoming sounds. The moment you shut up, the inhibition signal stops and your hearing returns to normal, so you can then be deafened by the screams of the guy next to you.
Scientists call this signal a corollary discharge. In crickets, on which the study was done, it’s sent from the motor neurons responsible for generating loud mating calls to sensory neurons involved in hearing. The signal is sent via middlemen called interneurons.
Biologists have long known that corollary discharge interneurons, or CDIs, must exist. Only in recent years, however, have they started finding them. The new cricket study is the first to pinpoint CDIs for the auditory system.
- Radiohead Reveal “Terrifying” New Album
-
The group are recording with new producer Mark “Spike” Stent (who has worked with Keane, Madonna and Oasis in the past) and in a world exclusive interview, [Thom] Yorke said that despite rumours that the follow-up to Hail To The Thief will have a political feel, in fact the opposite is true.
He said: “It’s about that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, ‘I’m sure I’m supposed to be doing something else.’ Interestingly enough it’s similar to ‘OK Computer’ in a way. It’s much more terrifying. But ‘OK Computer’ was terrifying too—some of the lyrics were.”
Writing recently on his diary at Radiohead.com, Yorke had previously said that the band are “finally getting somewhere,” and are optimistic about getting the songs right for the tour.
“Listening back to things we are doing and looking through the lyrics today and stuff it feels like we are finally getting somewhere,” he explained. “There are lots of songs. Too many to get together straight away. So we will be furiously rehearsing and writing as we go.
“I think we’ve always worked best when we aren’t bothered about making mistakes. Theres a lot of baggage about the old way of doing things that is hard to get over… all the ‘album’ crap. Just this level of pressure that is ridiculous. We’re just going to do what feels right at the time. Quite into the idea of singles at the moment (that don’t get on the radio). No grand design… wherever we are at. Some of the random stuff we have at the moment could be the most exciting.”
(Hat tip: Green Plastic)
- Apple Argues “Even a Moron” Can Spot Company Difference
-
Apple today argued that virtually any “moron” could distinguish between its iTunes music distribution service and Apple Corps, the Beatles’ record label. Lawyers for Apple asserted the company’s right to distribute music through its iTunes music store, rejecting claims by Apple Corps Ltd. that doing so violated a 1991 trademark agreement, according to The Associated Press. Apple Computer’s lawyer Anthony Grabiner said the “distribution of digital entertainment content” was permitted under the agreement, in which the two companies promised not to tread on the other’s sphere of business, saying that “even a moron in a hurry” could distinguish between the computer company’s online music business and a record label like Apple Corps. “Data transmission is within our field of use. That’s what [the agreement] says and it is inescapable,” he said. Yesterday, Apple Corps’ lawyer Geoffrey Vos had said Apple Computer’s music distribution business “was flatly contradictory to the provisions of the agreement.”
- State Cigarette Mob Can’t Kick the Habit
-
Colorado Treasurer Mark Hillman calls the deal under which the top cigarette manufacturers pay the states billions of dollars a year “a protection racket.” In truth, it’s worse than that.
The so-called Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), which resolved state lawsuits against the largest tobacco companies, is not a classic extortion scheme in which a business pays to be left alone. Instead Philip Morris et al. are paying for protection against their competitors, and they are passing the cost on to their customers, the very people whose victimization by Big Tobacco supposedly justified the lawsuits in the first place.
- Taming Global Capitalism Anew
-
One of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century was a social contract that provided far more economic security and prosperity for working Americans than had existed in any previous period. But successive waves of changes in the world economy, together with the ascendancy of a strain of economic philosophy that puts the freedom of capital above the interests of society, have placed enormous strain on the postwar social contracts of all Western countries, resulting in stagnating wages, greater insecurity and levels of income and wealth inequality not seen since the early 1900s. And even more far-reaching challenges arising from the current pattern of globalization, with its emphasis on the outsourcing of service as well as manufacturing jobs, may lie ahead.
Developing a strategy for taming global capitalism anew therefore constitutes the overriding challenge of our time. For that reason, we have invited some of the leading progressive thinkers in this country and a longtime observer of the American economy to offer their ideas on how the United States, as the major capitalist country and the major player in globalization, could reshape both capitalism and globalization in ways that build a new social contract serving the needs of working people everywhere.