One Trick Pony

The Koffka Ring optical illusion will have you doubting everything. If you can’t trust your own eyes, what body part CAN you trust?

Thanks to Geek Press for the link.

Newsday.com - British Musician to Pay in Lawsuit

“LONDON — What price silence? Six figures, as British musician Mike Batt found out when he included a one-minute silence on the latest album by his rock group, The Planets.

Batt agreed Monday to pay an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust, after publishers of the late American composer sued him for compensation, claiming he had plagiarized Cage’s 1952 composition, “4′33,” which was totally silent.”

Imagine that. This guy included a track on his album with 1 minute of silence on it and jokingly called it “1:00″ and gave co-authoring credit to John Cage…and so Cage’s estate sues. Another symptom of how dysfunctional the copyright system is!

In case you missed it on the news, here’s our Commander-in-Chief at his very best. Words fail me.

I’m on a roll in getting some new pages up on the web. First up was something I’ve meant to do for a long time: Adapting and Enhancing Existing Webquests. That one will be used in EDTEC 470 and was the centerpiece of the workshop I did in Kansas City last week. Also brand new is Teaching and Learning with Faraway Partners, a mini-WebQuest I needed for EDTEC 570. It took up 2 hours of last night’s class and I think it went very well.

And earlier today, I did a makeover on the very old but very popular series of WebQuest About WebQuests pages. I saved one of the old versions just to show the difference. I nuked the Resources section of the page and moved the links into the Process section, which is more in keeping with today’s format. Also added a cool Javascript timer and tarted up the color scheme. All very gratifying!

What a drag. We drove by June’s Mom’s now-uninhabited house this afternoon and walked in to find the kitchen floor under two inches of water. The floors in the living room were buckled up and the carpet was soaked and musty smelling. Turns out that the plastic hose feeding water into the icemaker in the fridge decided to spring a leak. It had probably been dribbling away for close to a week.

We called one of those companies that do nothing but clean up after incidents like this and they quickly sucked up the water, tore up the carpet and hauled in a flotilla of dehumidifiers. We’re going to have to replace a lot of the floor, get new carpeting, and have the place repainted. The silver lining is that this got us off the dime in sprucing the place up and getting it ready for sale. It’s all insured. Still, what a drag.

Remember those personalized ads directed at Tom Cruise as he walked through the mall in Minority Report? I’m not convinced that that will ever happen, but if it does it will require that each person only hears his/her own ads. The technology for that, HyperSonic Sound, is apparently already here!

Why HSS?

There are many reasons. The first and most important is the ability to direct or focus sound into a tight beam, similar to the beam of light from the flashlight described above. No other audio reproduction device available today provides this unique ability. The opportunities for applying this characteristic to the reproduction of sound are limitless. Think about the ability in a museum to direct the narration about a specific display only to the people standing directly in front of it.

Hmmm… imagine what kind of party games you could create if you were able to whisper different things into the ears of each participant simultaneously. Could be interesting.

While I was teaching tonight, Alex was wrestling with this assignment to write a teen version of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. You can see his struggle on tonight’s entries at http://www.alexdodge.net. After first writing up a long warmup and then a very short list of demands, he winnowed it down to “there’s already a human rights declaration, teens are human, that’s all we need.” He was proposing just handing that in, but I imagined that his teacher might look at that as taking the easy way out even though he arrived at it after lots of thought. He left voicemail asking for my opinion so rather than wait until I got home, I launched iChat and we were instantly in touch.

Me: Sooooo,,,,, looking for a quick way to get this assignment done, eh? I don’t think your teacher would go for it.

Me: Bye kiddo

A: bye!

Such an ordinary conversation. Hardly worth blogging. But someday he’ll be in college or sitting at a desk somewhere and I hope we’ll continue to chat. The content will change, the medium will get more intense. But just for the archives I wanted to save one conversation here. I like being a Dad.

From CNET.com: Microsoft’s New Deal with Uncle Sam.

“On Wednesday, the Bush administration is scheduled to publish its proposal to increase the security of the Internet. Properly titled the “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” it’s said to talk with great earnestness about helping home users safeguard their computers, about thwarting online intrusions into business systems, and about providing better training to federal network administrators.

“But, according to people familiar with the draft report, it pays scant attention to Microsoft, which has been responsible for more online security woes than any other company in history.”

For the last two weeks my inbox is getting around 20 e-mails a day due to Microsoft’s neglect. Both bots and humans are writing to me to say that I’ve been sending out mail with an infected attachment. I haven’t sent anything, of course; I’m in the address book of some Windows user who is infected with the Klez worm. As a Mac user, I’m immune to that but it doesn’t stop my name from being put into the From: field of these tainted messages. According to the article, it’s been estimated that four Windows-based infections — Nimda, Code Red, SirCam, and Love Bug — cost us $13 billion in lost productivity and lost data.

Microsoft should be held more accountable, but that’s not going to happen during this administration.

I’m thumbing through Foundation PHP for Flash by Steve Webster. What a terrific book! It assumes that the reader has already become comfortable with Flash and goes from there to a very readable introduction to PHP and MySQL. Very nicely done.

My head is spinning with what I could do with a Flash front end and a MySQL backend. One project I’d like to work on is a version of the Glass Bead Game. A couple of years ago I worked up a version of GBG using Inspiration. But how much cooler it would be if the beads were drawn randomly from a database that others could contribute to, and completed games were stored for later viewing. With these three tools, it shouldn’t be that hard. If only I didn’t have to sleep!

Andy Ihnatko has captured my feelings perfectly.

“The TV gets turned off now and will remain off for 22 hours or so.

“Once again, my flag means what it’s meant to me ever since I was a kid: my flag is the flag that my fellow Americans abandoned - in many forms and in great quantity - on the surface of the Moon. Once again, my flag symbolizes the power of what’s possible when 250,000,000 people all want the same thing…and they’re lucky enough to live in a country where that actually matters.”