Nathan's Occasional Blog

Japanese baseball robot can hit a 300km/h pitch, whut?:

Hiroshima University associate professor Idaku Ishii has developed a robot able to cope with some serious fastball action, able to hit a pitch coming at speeds up to 300 kilometers per hour. We’re pretty impressed with this, considering we routinely strike out during heated Engadget Whiffle Ball matches. The robot manages such uber-skilldom by instantly analyzing the imaging results from its precision cameras to determine the balls’ trajectory, then whammo, socking the living daylights out of it (that’s the technical terminoloy, honest). All of which is part of a plan to replace all humans in the sport of baseball with either mechanoids or cartoons, saving the industry millions in salaries and legal fees.

Finally a plan that makes sense to solve future contract negotiation issues in baseball.

The Dog-Powered Scooter:

Ok, so maybe Mark Schutte’s dog-powered scooter doesn’t pass the animal cruelty test, but damn, have you seen the gas prices lately? If you’re really in a rush, try the two-dog version.

But you don’t have to clean up after a Segway. 🙂

Wired News: Radio Industry Hits Shuffle:

Some observers are skeptical of the mix-and-match approach. ‘It assumes that someone will set their dial to one radio station, leave it there all day and be thrilled with the randomness,’ said Darrel Goodin, general manager of several Jefferson-Pilot stations in San Diego. ‘It runs extremely counter to the way the radio has been successful over the years. Maybe someone has found a way to defy gravity, but the odds are against it.’

Well consider myself flating in mid air then. Dude – that’s the point. Alciea and I love this new Jack station in Seattle because it essentially takes our whole CD collection and puts it on random. How is this bad?

Nice try at spin control buddy. You’re wrong.

Listen to the authorities and die:

Cory Doctorow: The people in the Twin Towers who ignored the instructions from the cops to stay put survived. The ones who paid attention to them died. Gary Wolf’s tantalizing piece in this month’s Wired concludes that the future of American security lies in ignoring the Department of Homeland Security, with its "rainbow of doom," its magic airport involuntary nudity machines, and its suspension of the Constitution and relying instead on common sense and democratic fundamentals.

Another case of Boing Boing (and Wired) telling it like it is.

North Carolina Vets Memorial Sports Goofs – Yahoo! News:

GREENVILLE, N.C. – A 7-foot granite slab that for 16 years has honored Pitt County’s armed forces veterans has carried unnoticed errors in the Latin creeds engraved in the stone’s burnished surface.

I ashamed to admit that I actually went to college in Greenville (East Carolina University – BSBA c/o 1999). Country Bumpkins.

MSN Money – Financial Times Business News: US court overturns Arthur Andersen conviction:

The decision comes too late to help Andersen, which now has only 200 employees, mostly lawyers and administrators.

…

The ruling stressed that withholding information from the government was not itself a crime. “Under ordinary circumstances, it is not wrongful for a manager to instruct his employees to comply with a valid document retention policy, even though the policy, in part, is created to keep certain information from others, including the government,” he wrote.

…

Robin Conrad of the US Chamber of Commerce said the case highlighted the consequences of overly aggressive fraud prosecutions “This is an instance where the collateral damage of over-aggressive enforcement takes its toll on the average citizen,” she said, noting that thousands of people lost their jobs after Andersen’s conviction.

As one of the guys I work with said this morning, “…and all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

Gee, nice to know now that the government has destroyed a company, burned millions of taxpayer dollars to completely destroy the investments of those same taxpayers, and trashed thousands of careers that it was all based on a bad ruling by some bungling judge. Shit people, way to go.

I mean under the prosecution’s way of thinking I shouldn’t shred my old credit card bills, etc. – I should post them on the Internet for all to see lest I destroy them and somebody want to see them (like a thief).

Friggin lawyers.

Some ideas for news aggregators:

…

Speaking of moving on, if I want to switch aggregators, OPML is definitely great. You export the OPML from one news aggregator and import it into your new news aggregator. One problem, your reading data doesn’t move. For instance, in my aggregator sometimes I leave things as “unread” because I want to come back to them later. It’d be interesting to see if I could also export my readership details.

Do you have any ideas for how to make news aggregators better?

Absolutely Scoble, I want readers to have better integration into POSTING articles onto my own blog. Onfolio is the only one so far that I’ve found to do this in a decent manner – I can use the newspaper view but still have per-item action buttons (email, blog, etc.). All the other readers I’ve seen I’d have to get out of the newspaper view and find the post I’m interested in at the feed item level. LAME. But I’m completely sold on Onfolio because it just sits in IE – call me old fashioned but I likes me a full client local app.

I also want to have embedded pictures saved with the post for offline viewing. Example: I sync all my feeds and then get on a plane without a Net connection. I want to read all my news and still have the pretty pictures from Engadget in the articles.

Lastly, and don’t really come under the topic of readers but since we’re talking about it, I want a WYSIWYG editor for creating posts. Note: having a preview button doesn’t count! I also want to be able to ping Technocrati or other serivces via Blogger. What’s up with only being able to ping Weblogs.com?

I’ll get down off the soap box now. Thanks for the chance to pontificate. 🙂

Disney World costumed characters horsing around:

Cory Doctorow: This is a video that apppears to be castmembers from Walt Disney World horsing around in character costumes — Belle performing a striptease, Tweedledee and Tweedledum administering a beatdown to Pooh, and so forth. Pretty mild stuff, and reasonably funny. Mostly notable for the fact that the characters, especially the "head" characters are pretty sacrosanct when they’re onstage. 5MB Quicktime Link (via MeFi)

It’s the last 5 seconds that are the best! 🙂

w00t! is a favored non-word in Merriam-Webster’s books:

Cory Doctorow: Merriam-Webster has published a list of favorite non-words, w00t! Is number three. w00t!

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement
4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway
6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."
7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

Link (via /.)

W00t!

State will make art collectors pay use tax:

The Department of Revenue said yesterday that it will begin to aggressively pursue art collectors who do not pay the taxes they owe on works purchased out of state. The agency said it will first launch an educational campaign to make sure collectors know they owe the tax, then vigorously enforce a law that has been largely ignored by the art world since it went on the books in 1935.

The DOR also decided yesterday that collectors must pay taxes on their out-of-state purchases even if they are on display in museums.

As the son of an artist this is simply appalling. Art is an aesthetic enhancement of an area, just like a nice couch or piece of furniture. I can understand a sales tax, but a “use tax”. WTF? If you want to get more technical you can also view art as an investment vehicle. Look at the auction houses – you don’t see the prices of major works falling do you? Nope.

If you click on the “sound off” link there’s some interesting responses from folks … most of which I completely disagree with. This idiots complain about folks trying to duck taxes where possible and use loopholes. Right, and I’m sure NONE of those people who wrote have ever fudged a deduction figure on their taxes for how much they donated to Good Will last year. Nope, they all LOVE paying taxes and do it with glee. BULLSHIT.

My dad and I had a conversation when he was out visiting a few weeks ago about the future of art collecting and what the demographics are of folks who are buying these days. Now don’t get me wrong, I love art and have a bunch of it hanging on my walls (mostly from my dad but we have made a few purchases) but I’ll be damned if I am going to pay a friggin’ use tax for the privilege of the government letting me look at art I already own!