News You Can Bruise

Not since two-years-ago's beached mola mola, or a-year-ago-today's text adventure documentary, have so many people let me know about something as the Sun server farm in a shipping container. A million cyberpunk fantasies--fulfilled!

Speaking of pictures of animals, a few new ones added to the cute animal picture proto-weblog, including one magical picture that has both a rhino and a shipping container. Clearly that needs to turn into a real weblog, but I've got other things to do, and I'm not even doing them.

"You know what would be awesome would be if a container ship went right underneath us."
"Yes, dear."

It almost happened, too.

I'm a quarter-century old now. I got lots of great stuff for my birthday including a bookcase, a Moleskine notebook like I bought for Sumana in Belgium, and a Lego container ship (okay, I bought that for myself). It turns out I'm much, much better at putting together Lego sets than I was when I was a kid. I know to organize the pieces ahead of time instead of just opening all the bags, dumping them on the table, and getting started.

The container ship's probably the biggest Lego set I've ever put together, and it only took me about 2.5 hours. It was a pretty easy set, though, since 1/3 of the pieces turn into shipping containers. If I had more pieces I'd make hollow double-size shipping containers and have them carry tiny Lego pieces across the Lego ocean to my Lego model of Hong Kong.

I had some extra pieces left over, so I decorated some of the shipping containers with lights, and my ship is now the only container ship to have a plank. Arrrr! Actually I think I know where the plank pieces are supposed to go, but I'd rather have a plank.

A Lego container ship: my fanboy fantasy? No, it's an official set! It's all brand-named and I like my Lego sets generic (I never even applied those NASA decals on my space shuttle set), but I'm thinking about getting it or at least giving broad hints that it would look nice on my desk. If there was room on my desk.

Lego and Maersk might have some Scandanavian corporate synergy; maybe the container ship set was a cross-promotional deal. Update: Looks like it's been going on for a while, along with other promotional tie-ins.

That's probably my favorite spam. I love the steampunk nanotech idea of stuffing a plastic extrusion plant into a shipping container, raw materials fed in through a pipe connected to a nebulous "International Trade System". The only problem is that it appears not to exist except in spam.

But I'll tell you what does exist is solar cookers, a real New Cooking Technology for the Third World. They are trivial to build, and you can use them to cook and to purify water. In the ultimate mockery of Mother Nature, there is even a solar refrigerator. Am I the only one who thinks there's a vast untapped market for science fiction about this kind of thing? Is this what's in all those Bruce Sterling books I've never read?

On my way to Bakersfield on the I-5, I passed two big container trucks from some fancy gardening store I never heard of. Then I passed another such container truck. Then I passed a pickup truck with a bed full of tacky nude statues. Then I passed a Webvan-sized truck from some "custom horticulture" store or some thing. I think someone should nip down to Beverly Hills and see what's going on at al-Fassi's old place.

Kevin passes along the happy news that the new season of The Wire is all about shipping containers. Apparently there are also some cops, but they just run around looking in shipping containers. "I suspect that in the season finale, it will be revealed that the shipping container did it," says Kevin.

I wrote a little piece of doggerel about the idea of a deposit requirement for copyright, inspired by Seth's comments on the subject. Aaron Schwartz responded with another bit of doggerel, and I just polished off a third in response to it. All of this is taking place via email, which feels pretty weird to me, but most likely it will eventually go onto the web and I'll feel better. (Is this some new psychosomatic ailment? Phantom weblog entry?)

I sort of got sound to work on my computer. I got ARTS and ESD to stop fighting over control of my sound card. The big problem now is that the sound card they were fighting over is the lame sound card welded to my motherboard, and not my real sound card.

My American Science and Surplus catalog arrived today. I haven't read it yet. I haven't made much progress on Baudolino, either.

I have been thinking a lot about shipping containers. I want to write a near-future science fiction thriller dealing with a fiendish plot to do with shipping containers. I've been coming up with interesting things someone sneaky could do with them, but they're getting pretty silly, the sort of thing you would see if there were a Batman villain whose gimmick was shipping containers. "Now, Batman, I'll crush you slowly... between two shipping containers! Then I'll make my escape in my boat... made of jerry-rigged shipping containers! Gotham City will be mine... I'll ship it to Singapore!"

One tiny beneficial side effect of the dock lockout here in SF: I am surrounded by shipping containers!

One of the most pressing problems of modern piracy is where to hide the booty. Development and ecotourism mean that even the most isolated beaches will eventually attract visitors. Here's a simple burial technique using equipment any modern pirate ship should already have.

Put the booty into an empty shipping container you have lying around. While en route to your next raid, simply lower the shipping container into Davy Jones' locker and take a note of the GPS coordinates (do this at night to avoid your activity showing up on spy satellites). If your container won't sink, fill unused space with sand, silt, or any other dense material; you can use ballast water if your booty is gold or otherwise waterproof. Years later, you and your shipmates can retrace your steps, raise the barnacle-encrusted container, and claim your prize.

Unsolved problems: are shipping containers watertight enough? What about trawlers?

I used to think that those shipping containers that said "SEALAND" on them were bound for or somehow associated with Sealand, but I saw so many of them that this hypothesis soon became untenable. Sealand is actually the name of the company that makes the containers. Shipping containers are a great and very basic innovation, and if you're handy with the arc welder you can transform a couple of them into a house.