] PERTH is one of two spots in the world being considered
] for development of a space elevator, a new concept in
] space travel which it is claimed would make possible
] tourism on the Moon.
]
] A space elevator - an alternative to rockets and shuttles
] - would consist of a 100,000km ribbon of super-strong
] carbon-based material.

The West Australian

Unfortunately when I got to the end of Daredevil, I found myself making comparisons such as that. Oh, sure, it's got lots of butt kicking in it and the movie tells how Matt Murdoch became the Daredevil and, more importantly, Elektra's boyfriend, but in the end it was just another crappy performance by Ben Affleck. It was definitely better than "Batman and Robin," but then again, what isn't? Here are the main complaints that I, a comic fan-boy, have against the movie. You can decide for yourself if they're enough to turn you off.

1. Daredevil has a really cool sonar-like effect to replace his vision, but apparently it doesn't work on his hair. Every time you see the adult Matt Murdoch (the day job persona of Daredevil) he has this thing going on with his hair.

2. The "Elektra: Assassin" storyline originally took about 3 years (30 monthly issues or so) to tell but they crammed the whole thing into this movie. Along with Daredevil's origin. Yeah, it shows. Apparently they planned on only being able to make one movie.

3. The script was written by the same people who translate Japanese technical manuals into Engrish. Ok, maybe not, but they went to the same school.

4. Ben Affleck doesn't know how exclamation marks are supposed to change the inflection in your voice.

5. What was going on with Jennifer Garner's costumes? Cleavage is normally supposed to be a narrow gap, but if her breasts had been any further apart they'd have been on separate women.

So, as you can see, only 5 little things for me to bitch about upon first recollection.

Dolemite

Of the $1.1 billion in boxed chocolates that Americans are expected to buy on Valentine's Day, very little will be untainted by the scourge of child labor. Although some who buy those bonbons will do so without knowing the sinister history of their purchases, others, like the chocolate makers, will have known for at least two years, if not longer, that cocoa beans imported from the Ivory Coast -- used to make nearly half the chocolate consumed in this country -- are harvested in large part by children, some as young as 9, and many of whom are considered slaves, trafficked from desperately poor countries like Mali and Burkina Faso.

Bittersweet chocolate

There is no connection between Cayce and Case; no meaningfulness. Gibson explains that as part of his novelist craft, he goes through a complicated artistic ritual in order to summon his characters out of the ether. In this ritual, coming up with the right name is the crucial first step. And the process by which he came up with Cayce, he declares, had nothing to do with Case. "Cayce" was its own "found object" -- much as the name Case, from "Neuromancer," was also a found object, inspired originally by Case pocketknives.

Nodal point

So when a company that actually made money offered to pay to fly me to Atlanta, put me up in a fine hotel and take me to dinner and then spend a day talking to me in complete sentences that did not contain verbs like "clean," "wake" or "leech," I had but one thought: "Choo-choo-choo, I'm back on the gravy train."

The chicken show

I hate posting /. stuff to here, because I don't want memestreams to become just another slash, but this was a link from there that I found interesting. One funny thing...

Japanese Manga consumers purchase thick, black and white, cheap digests to read on a long train commute and dispose of them when they're done. American comic consumers purchase expensive, thin, full-color pamphlets to read on the toilet and then save them in boxes forever.

Ok, so who's been spying on me?

Anyway, I think the most important thing to note here is that the US comics industry was in the position that the current Japanese Manga industry is in today - but for the US it was 50 years ago. In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham published a book and went before Congress to talk about the ill effects of comics on America's youth. At that point, single issues of some comics exceeded the million copies per month mark. That's more than the New York Times has ever had its circulation. Then Congress threatened the industry - either regulate yourself, or we'll regulate you. Half the publishers closed their doors on the comic book industry. Even though this happened, though, the 50s changed America's culture to one of sitting on our asses in front of the tv, so while one could say the decrease would have happened, anyway - just as the Japanese are facing a decline due to video games - it did have a heyday of its own.

The article/interview also makes a good point in that Manga is a disposable media while here in the states comics are mainly a collectible media. Many of us consumers have been discussing the fact that comics are falling further and further into the niche of collectors only and that there is rarely a mainstream product that comes along to attract new consumers. I don't think the answer is in creating disposable media, but in exposing others to the great stories available in comics. The article agrees and mentions the need to lower prices and achieving an economy of scale, but doesn't point out the geographic advantage that Japan has - it's much smaller. Distribution adds an incredible amount to the price of comics here in the US, especially since the industry has switched to common carriers (UPS, FedEx). Until a few years ago, Diamond Distributors ran trucks across the US, but it's just so friggin' huge that it cost too much - even more than having 100 lbs. of comic books shipped via UPS to you each week.

Anyway, I could go on about this forever. Many of you who know me IRL can attest to my total comic book geekiness.

Post Script: OK, I'm going to post this information as a followup since at dinner I got some looks of "your numbers are beer induced hypotheticals." In reality, my numbers really are way off... they're low.

From The Comic Book In America, by Mike Benton, published by Taylor Press, First Printing.

p. 41: By 1946, comic-book reading was an established habit - some might say an addicti... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Why does Manga succeed where US comics fail?

WOW. This one is a huge surprise to me.

[Health Minister Micheal] Martin said the health department surveyed opinion among Ireland's 3.8 million people, about 70 percent of whom don't smoke, and decided that designating no smoking areas within pubs simply wouldn't work.

Ireland plans to ban smoking in pubs

Please read and rerecommend. I want this to get as much coverage on the site as possible, and I want feedback.

Currently the privacy policy says that your reputation tables are private. This reflects the fact that I think what you read ought to be your own business.

However, what you recommend is not exactly the same as what you read, and this is reflected in the reputation data. When you recommend something you are telling the site that you like it. Telling the site implies that you don't mind the site knowing. In fact, you want the site to know. If I do a little digging I can see who you got an article from, directly. This is a bit of an oversite. Something that can be "matured" out of the code. Thats one direction to go in from here. Keep the reputation data as private as possible.

However, if I monitor the site, and I see a certain person recommend an article, and then you rerecommend it, I'll know where you got it from. I do this often enough, in an automated fashion, for long enough, and I'll get a pretty good understanding of who you are reading. The site can't protect you from this. By recommending articles you are making them public. By making them public, you are giving up some of your privacy.

The only way to truely protect the fact that you are reading someone's recommendations is to never recommend their recommendations. They will still show up in the agent, but this information, I think, is private and ought to stay that way.

However, and as I've hopefully illustrated, the recommendations are public in a very real way. What I want to ask the site is if the recommendation DATA ought to be public too.

The reason I want to ask you this is because Rattle has assembled another visualization. This visualization is interactive. You can see a graph of the people who are highly connected to you, click on their names, and see a graph of the people who are highly connected to them, and so on.

Right now this data is amusing but not all that rich. There are about 15 people who regularily post to the site, and they hold all the reputation capital. Everyone's graphs look pretty similar, because we are all really recommending content from the same 15 people, even those of us who don't often recommend content and who aren't often read.

This is going to change.

As this site scales, clusters are going to form. I think the one that currently exists will always exist, but there will be others. People will begin to have different perspectives on the data, based on their interests. Thats what this site is designed to do.

And as those different communities of interest begin to form, the maps of the reputation data rattle is developing will become richer, and you will be able to surf through MemeStreams via the reputation system, hopping from person to person in search of interesting ideas.

I think this is a very compelling feature set, and I want to enable it. But, I've promised to keep your reputation data private. All of it. This promise may not have been very well thought out, but I did make it. So I can only break it with your permission, and that is what I am asking for.

I want to publish your recommendation related reputation data. Your clickthrough related reputation data will stay private. What is published is the number of times you have rerecommended articles from another person on the site, in the form of a graph.

Its similar to the graph on the "Visualizing Memestreams" page, but it is labelled, and interactive.

An important privacy question

Most alarmingly, an examination of the research that has been conducted so far into TIA reveals that even while the project has been charging ahead, only token attention has been paid to perhaps its most critical aspect -- privacy and civil liberties protection. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is taking the lead on TIA, has stymied the efforts of outside groups to find out more about TIA's protections.

Scary update on what's happening here - good to see that Congress is concerned about constitutionality and privacy, bad to see that the administration is still trying to side-step those checks and balances.

Total Information Awareness: Down, but not out

After a six year hiatus, Cobain and Dougans have emerged with a new sound and spiritual awareness. The Isness is a modern-day exploration in psych-rock, complete with sitars and mellotrons. Elements of the old FSOL sound are sporadic and noticeable, however this album is quite a diversion from their previous endeavors.

If you don't have a subscription to emusic, you can get a 14 day/50 download trial for free. There are several reasons why you might like emusic, though:

1. They distribute unaltered MP3 format files, legally, with royalties paid to the artists who supply them.
2. They support open source by actually having download clients available for linux/*nix as well as Windows, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.
3. They don't carry current Billboard Chart hits. I think that resonates with most memestreams users. They do, however, have a good 80's one-hit-wonder library, and I'm all about that.

Dolemite

Future Sound of London - The Isness