think or thwim

Todd Snider talks about the time one of his songs was plagiarized. It’s a funny story.

Ronan Keating’s version of If Tomorrow Never Comes:

Bridge over the Elbe River in Germany

This bridge is over the Elbe River near the city of Magdeburg, Germany. Two shipping channels were connected with an elevated section about 1 km long. The boats go up at one end and down at the other using locks. The Elbe’s depth varies with the seasons making it impassable by large barges at times, so they bypassed it by going up and over. The picture was taken on the day of the inauguration in 2003.

This animation from the Panama Canal Authority shows how they work:

There is a panorama at Flickr.

Update

Chris reminded me that I should have linked to deputydog’s list of hardcore boat lifts.

Doris Lessing’s reaction when she was notified that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature: “Oh Christ! … I couldn’t care less.”

Friday night she gave her acceptance speech. In it she contrasted the children she saw in Zimbabwe starving for knowledge with more privileged children in the UK.

I am standing in a doorway looking through clouds of blowing dust to where I am told there is still uncut forest. Yesterday I drove through miles of stumps, and charred remains of fires where, in 1956, there was the most wonderful forest I have ever seen, all now destroyed. People have to eat. They have to get fuel for fires.

This is north-west Zimbabwe early in the 80s, and I am visiting a friend who was a teacher in a school in London. He is here “to help Africa”, as we put it. He is a gently idealistic soul and what he found in this school shocked him into a depression, from which it was hard to recover….

The rest is at The Guardian.

She goes on to say some not-so-kind words about the privileged kids wasting time on the internet instead of reading. Ironically, I read her speech on the internet. Perhaps the net is too new for Ms. Lessing, currently age 88, to fully appreciate. Is she aware that fully 88% of the internet is not porn? I believe that about 6% of the remainder is not tech/gadget sites. That’s quite a bit of space left for literature.

While I was writing this, my 5 year old crawled into my lap and asked me what I was typing. I told him about the speech and explained what Ms. Lessing said about African schools. I told him that some kids don’t have any books, but they want to learn really bad. They can’t afford paper or pencils, so they write their letters in the dirt with a stick. My son was clearly concerned.

He asked “How do they pick them up?”

“They can’t. It’s dirt. They can’t take them home to show their parents or save them in a notebook. Look at how many pencils we have, and look at all these books. It’s no good that we have all these books and they don’t have any.”

After a pause to consider how many books we have, he agreed. “It’s no good. What should we do?”

“Why don’t we send them some of our books?”

“How can we?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what the address is. I was going to find out how to do it later, but first I want to finish telling everyone that looks at my website that they should read her speech.”

“Maybe someone will see it and know the address. If they put it on the internet, we’ll know where to send them.”

If you know the address, please let us know.

:: 3 Quarks Daily

This 20 minute film examines our consumer culture and it’s hidden costs.

Leonard’s inspiration for the film began as a personal musing over the question, “Where does all the stuff we buy come from, and where does it go when we throw it out?” She traveled the world in pursuit of the answer to this seemingly innocent question, and what she found along the way were some very guilty participants and their unfortunate victims.

(Thanks Rosen)

Bill and Rebecca Goldsmith live in Paradise, California which explains the name of their internet radio station, but I think the name would be appropriate even if they lived in Death Valley.

Bill Goldsmith:

I have been in love with radio all of my life, and spent 30-odd years dealing with the conflict between my vision of radio as an art form and my FM-station employers’ vision of radio as a conduit for advertising. I have watched the medium that I love turn from an essential part of the process of connecting those who love making music with those whose lives are touched by it into a mindless background hum of advertising and disposable musical sludge.

With the advent of the Internet, we were finally able to bring to life the radio station I had always wanted to work for (and listen to): commercial-free, passionate, and embracing a wide universe of musical treasures, from the classic rock artists I grew up with to the latest indie discoveries, with a liberal sprinkling of world music, electronica, jazz, even classical. We have slowly built up a loyal audience and have been able to support ourselves while living our dream.

I’ve been a listener on and off since 2002 and have recommended it to my friends because I like a lot of the songs they play. However, until a couple of weeks ago I’d never registered to take advantage of all of the features at the site. Now that I’m registered, it’s much better. Here’s an example:

I’m listening and they play a slightly creepy sexy smooth tune I’d never heard before. Here’s a sample (use headphones):

I think to myself “that is a slightly creepy sexy smooth tune, and I’d like to have it.” I go to the Radio Paradise page where the playlist is at the top of the page and see that it is Goodnight Moon by Shivaree. You may recognize it from the credits of the movie Kill Bill, but it was new to me.

I click on the title and get all the information I could ever want about the song including comments from other registered users of the site. I give the song a rating of “8″, and see that the other 558 people only thought it was a 7.5. Then I click on the Amazon link where I can buy the album with one click. I did manage to find one improvement I’d like to see: a link to the downloadable mp3 of the song for 99 cents which is what I actually bought. They also have a link to iTunes, but I won’t buy DRM crippled music.

Bill and Rebecca don’t have advertising, but rely on affiliate links like I do. My purchase gave them a small referral fee of about 6-8 cents.

Last week a reader told me “I really dig your version of the Internet.” I really dig Bill and Rebecca’s version of radio.

Ferguson Hill makes these high fidelity horn speakers. UK £9950.

Recommended power is only 3-50 watts. “They reproduce music with a high level of clarity, detail and dynamics, are highly efficient, and will go loud with just a few watts (5).”

Dynamic range is 150Hz - 20KHz with no subwoofer or crossover, but they also make a matching clear acrylic subwoofer.

If you don’t have room for 5 foot diameter speakers in your room, they also have a similar bookshelf system for £495.00. Still quite a conversation piece.

:: Tech Temple

Kevin Kelly paraphrasing Tim Berners-Lee’s post about the Giant Global Graph:

An operational Semantic Web, or World Wide Database, or Giant Global Graph, or Web 3.0, will make possible millions of seemingly smarter services. I won’t have to re-tell each website who my friends are; once will be enough. If my name shows up in text, it will know it’s me. My town will be a town on the web — a place with definable characters — and not just another word. That ubiquity enables any references to my town to link to the actual information about the town. The apparent smarter nature of the web will be due to the fact that the web will “know” more. Not in a conscious way, but in a programatic way. Concepts and items represented on the web will point to each other and know about each other — in a fundamental way they do not right now.

Read the rest at Kevin Kelly’s website: kk.org

My suggestion to you is to not click on this link if you have anything important to do. Onslaught is similar to Desktop Tower Defense, but combinations of turrets produce more powerful weapons. Here’s a list of all the combinations: Link