News You Can Bruise for 2007 July

This changed at the MAKE table where I did something I'd never done before: I took something (an iron) apart with someone explaining what I got out of it. The someone was named Mike and I don't remember his last name.

I removed a motor from an iron. I attached it with alligator clips to the wire poking out of a stripped laptop supply. The motor turned. That's all it took to change my attitude. There's nothing special about wires; it's just electrons. I knew this on an abstract level, but I'd never done it before, and without a little guidance I wouldn't have been able to identify the motor or hook it to the power supply without killing myself.

Anyhow, I now think I could build a robot out of spare parts. But the other thing I found out is that they have to be the right spare parts. There is no Turing completeness for hardware, and there's only so much you can do with the stuff in an iron. However now I'm interested in going through the big electronics catalog I got mysteriously in the mail.

The time bank was usually a BBS door (note to today's youth: terminology makes no sense) that let you deposit some of today's time and come back to collect it later. I had one of these on my BBS, but I never put any structured thought into when they're useful. Andy and I just liked having more doors than any other local BBS.

I remember using time banks occasionally, but I'm not sure why. Looking back on my previous behavior (which I barely remember), I imagine I'd use the time bank just before logging out of a BBS--it's not a big time investment to pop over to the time bank, and you can use the extra time later to download a huge file (possibly as much as a megabyte!).

A couple callers to my BBS hoarded time: they'd call in just to deposit all their time in the bank, and continue this every day until they'd reached the maximum balance. Seems like, strangely enough, a waste of time.

It should be possible to do some trendy Freakonomics-like analysis of time banks. I can't think of any analogous situations, where an allotment of time is made fungible within certain limits. Any ideas?

This CD has absolutely NOTHING to do with selling corporate gift baskets. It's a trick. It is really about selling "information" over the internet. If you are interested in that, then buy it. But know that you are first being tricked by the title, so I don't know if I would trust the product. I bought the EXACT SAME cd, only the title was about selling "cranberry juice" instead of "corporate gift baskets". I threw it away.

On the other hand (from a review of Your Internet Business - Sell Diaper Cakes In Your Spare Time):

I've finally made my first million! Hot cake is an understatement! Diaper cakes is the new wave and you could be getting in on the bottom!

The best thing is you don't even have to buy this CD set 'cause Diaper Cakes sell themselves!!

But probably my favorite spam-product is The Mega How To Earn Extra Money, Success Principles and Sales Models for Pictures Of Aliens Businesses 3 CD Power Pack. You've got pictures of aliens and you're scraping the bottom of the marketing barrel figuring out how to make money off them!

Seriously, Amazon, get this crap off your store. PS: diaper cakes are real. Flee!

I figured out it was Julian fairly easily, though I briefly considered it as a birthday present from Elise.

Thackeray contributed hundreds of short prose items and drawings to Punch in its early years. These attracted little notice except for one drawing: this became famous because nobody then or since has been able to see the point of it. A rival magazine helpfully offered five hundred pounds to anybody who could explain the drawing. Nobody could.

Citation needed! This sounds like the "Cow Tools" of the nineteenth century, but I can't find it or anyone else talking about it online. Internal evidence from TOBoHP says the cartoon is from 1841 or 1842, and all of 1841 is on Project Gutenberg. But I don't see the point of most old Punch cartoons, which makes it impossible for me to see the one that never made sense to anybody.

Update, much later: Mystery solved!

Then I'll have enough stuff to release a little album, pretty much ten years to the day since the release of Nowhere Standard Time. (I don't know when exactly it was, as NYCB archives don't go back that far and July 1997 is missing from my mail archive. It doesn't matter. Stop tearing apart your ARCHIVE directory looking for the exact date, me. PS: I was still working on it on 7/14. That's as close as I got.

Speaking of NST: before she went to commune with the cabbages, Sumana bunched up the video I shot on my California trip (most of it shot by accident), and turned it into a music video for NST's "Relativity". It's the all-time second Google Video You Can Bruise. Enjoy it, if you can.

There were claims through the nineties that "corporate espionage" was the next big moneymaker for the military-industrial complex after the fall of the Soviet Union, but it never amounted to much and even I could tell that it was a poor substitute for fighting commies. Very few people made a living cracking computers over a network; it was mostly amateurs looking for thrills.

Today, computer crime is big business, but the games have disappeared. I've got an idea for a modern-day game about computer crime. Instead of ripping off faceless corporations, you're defrauding the general public. You can set up phishing and malware sites, create botnets, send out spam, sell fake pills, etc. Pitfalls include spam filters, ISP shutdowns, vigilante activity, and mob hits.

Would this game be fun? I'm pretty sure it would be fun by the standards of the 80s cyberpunk game, but that's not a terribly high bar to set. Here's a card game called "Botnet" that looks fun but is a little lower-level than the game I'm thinking of.

I'm also interested in RAND-like entities; I can think of two of those off the top of my head. The Foundation is a lot like RAND, which makes sense since they come out of the same ideology. There was also a Star Trek: Voyager episode which had a RAND-like group of mercenary aliens (inc. Jason Alexander) but, typically, didn't do anything interesting with them. That's all I got.

Oh, speaking of the Foundation, there's a fun book by Donald Kingsbury called Psychohistorical Crisis which is written as if Asimov's psychohistory had caught on as a common science-fictional trope instead of being a one-off. It would be interesting to see some psychohistory stories as they'd have been written in the 60s or 80s.

And just to take this entry further off its original point, I find it interesting that psionics used to be fairly common in science fiction (thanks to John Campbell) and now it's kind of tacky and pushes your story towards fantasy. But you can see a residue of it with all the telepathic characters in Trek and other science fiction TV shows.

"Charmed, I'm sure."
"What does that even mean?"
"I think it's a veiled insult. 'Well, I can't be bothered to check my own mental state, but...'"