In high school, I had an obese teacher who claimed to have once been the cheerleading coach for Madonna, who had graduated from my high school some 20 years previously. For years I wrote her off as a compulsive liar–it wasn’t the only hardly-believable claim she made. In retrospect, it would have been very easy to either verify or repudiate  her claim, as the school no doubt would have had records, but at the time it never crossed my mind to do so, and now it would require more effort than I really feel like putting into it (that is to say, it requires any effort at all, which is by default too much).

I bring this up because Yi noted that  Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.

Source: xkcd.com

This, my friends, is the intersection between the internet and mass media at its finest:

It’s fun! It’s free! And it’s available on the internets… until Sunday.

I think that’s my one lament about it, actually. It’s only up for a week. The last episode will only be up for 48 hours. Which may be brilliant on Joss Whedon’s part–the lack of availability may very well encourage people to buy it. But I would have liked to see that fact advertised more heavily, and I would have liked to have seen the entire thing up for one more week.

Granted, that may very well have to do with the fact that I’m tearing my computer apart on Friday night to move to an apartment that won’t have internet until Monday. No, wait, scratch that, I’m tearing my computer apart Saturday morning. Right after I watch the Dr. Horrible denouement.

A friend of mine from grad school works at a company that promotes magazines.  Apparently the P.R. director got approached by the editor of this magazine:

It’s called Cats in Space, and I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.  It even beats out SparkleWorld. Seriously. I hope it’s real.

Actually, one of the even better things about CiS is its parent site. This high-quality publication is hosted by the similarly high-quality awesomecats.com. Content-wise, awesomecats performs its function of being a site about, well, cats. If cats are your thing, it has a decent collection of resources–if you can get past the horrible page design, at least. And the sad thing is, people have obviously very specifically spent a fair bit of time on the design of the site. The header, for instance, is beyond my Flash capabilities. Not that I’m some flash guru by any means, but somebody had some good quality bonding moments with Flash over that header. And they obviously try to offer a reasonable range of services. Why, I could register wasabijane@awesomecats.com if I so chose, or even have an awesomecats.com website of my very own!

Actually, this is what I find the most telling. Look at their site features: 5K free web space is but one example. For you non-techy people, this randomly selected image is 4K. A single-spaced, one-page Word doc is likely to be at least 25K. This blog post is probably more than awesomecats can handle. And, even more telling, the first line of their site features reads as such: “No knowledge of web design or HTML is required to create websites.” No kidding. But then, I think the only ones who would take them up on such an offer are people like the creators of Cats in Space.

…and anyway, I was always more of a dog person.

Sally pointed out this blog, which features strange maps and their function. I must admit I find it fascinating. This map, in particular, is a startling reminder that reality differs greatly from our perceptions thereof; this map, on the other hand, fills me with empathy for the designers. I’m actually working on a similar map for a conference program at the moment, so I can honestly say, given the design problem (too much text, too little room), the designers could have done worse.

Facebook has a feature that allows you to give virtual gifts to your friends. Most of these cost $1 and are pretty generic and benign–a guitar, a birthday cake, or, once, a piece of paper.

On occasion, a company will sponsor a gift, which will be free but probably pretty obviously branded. For the release of Indy 4, for example, there was a free fedora with the Indiana Jones logo attached. I support that sort of thing–actually, being a poor, broke grad assistant, those are the gifts I’m most likely to give.

Today’s free gift is a bottlecap with a mountain sketched on it. I don’t think I would have known or cared what it actually was had it not been for the attached sponsorship: Coors Light.

Here’s the thing: Facebook’s original audience was college students, and I suspect that the majority of users are of age. But an increasing number of high schoolers are using it. I realize I’m in the minority in that I’m not particularly fond of alcohol… but does it really mean that such companies should start to *sponsor* free gifts? I mean, one of the only banned types of clothing in my school district growing up was t-shirts advertising drug and alcohol use. Is it unfair to ask Facebook to have similar standards–to attach some sort of age confirmation software to certain gifts?

Again, I realize I’m in the minority on this, and really, it’s a very small issue. I just figure that teens get enough of these messages elsewhere. Do we really need this on Facebook too?

Minor point of irritation: corporately sponsored recipes. You know, the kind that comes in those recipe books you can order with 5 proofs of purchase, or the ones on the packaging for your preprocessed food.

Today, I think I lost a few brain cells by looking at one.

Continue reading “Stickin’ it to the man”

So… apparently they’re making a print volume of Wikipedia now?

I’m actually kind of torn on how I should feel about this. On the one hand, this almost completely contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia what it is: a triumph of collective intelligence–a living, very searchable document. You can’t put something like that into a book. You can’t put hypertext into print, nor can the general population collaboratively edit the printed word (unless they’re publishing it on Kindle). It is a useful document precisely because it isn’t printed.

On the other hand, a printed version would be great for archival purposes. I’ve wondered what a hypothetical alien archaeologist would say about our generation; we’re leaving increasingly fewer traces of individualism. Even my own hypothetical grandchildren may or may not get to see photographs from years of my life; it simply depends on the state of technology. Maybe .jpgs will no longer be valid file extensions in fifty years. Guess what: there went the last three years of my life, if I never got them printed. So an archive strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for future historians.

Regardless, though, who do they actually expect to *use* this?

Lore Sjöberg has just summed up the entirety of social networking in a column about Twitter:

“The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes.”

If I ever go back to school after I finish my Master’s, it will be for programming. I’m getting sick of taking hours trying to figure out what any trained programmer could do in minutes. Case in point: I now have a favicon. It took me minutes to make and probably about a dozen attempts to actually get functioning–and since it only worked after clearing my cache and I have it uploaded in two places with several lines of code copy-pasted in, I’m not even sure what’s actually making it function. But this site’s starting to look like something now; and, in the end, there’s nothing like that feeling of “Problem: Solved!”