Serial Experiments iMac

Look on my awesome, ye mighty, and despair.

Also, do not cross a man with nothing to lose.

NetNewsWire

The planet's best RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, just got a ton better. I was leery when Brett announced that his little program that could had been bought by online aggregator NewsGator. I assumed that heralded the end of development. I am happy to be proven wrong. The new beta 2.1 adds a remarkably sophisticated synchronization mode with the web-based NewsGator system. Now, no matter where you read your feeds, each viewer knows what you've read, so you don't waste time cutting through a thicket of repeats when you switch machines. Because I regularly rotate among 3 machines in a day, this is fantastic for me.

I haven't explored all of the boundaries of the synchronization yet. It looks like adding or removing a feed in one place is automatically reflected it to all others. But can the home client download unread messages collected at the always-on webserver, even if they've already gone stale from the feed? That would make a convenient way to keep up with ALL of the news for the day, not just the stuff that's still being fed when I get home.

Cartoon plate tectonics

Here we have noted (and awesome) comic book artist Neal Adams pushing a theory that tectonic subduction is a fallacy, and that landmass reformulation instead occurs by continuous planetary growth. As is the hallmark of all good science, he uses loaded language to dispose you against the opposition view ("Well, it is a preposterous and even stupid idea").

The site features a bundle of little quicktime animations depicting his theory of planetary growth. These argue persuasively that landmasses indeed change, but I'm not as sure they support his hypothesis. It seems to me that if the planets were continually growing, they would be simultaneously flattening and losing density. I don't believe that to be borne out by the facts. I also doubt that a geologic theory which requires an ocean-less Earth can be made to mesh with the current ocean-based biologic origin theories.

Animation can be used to show almost anything, which is why it exists. After all, it would be very hard otherwise to have a whistling, anthropomorphic mouse piloting a steamboat. Adams' animations are interesting to watch, sure, and bring up some good talking points about crustal movement. They don't, however, convince me that he's got a better game than the traditional tectonic plate guys.

Jury Duty

Today's jury duty was a bit of a fizzle. 3 cases out of 11 ended up calling for jurors, utilizing less than 30% of us. So it ended up being a long day of alternately glaring at the broken coffee vending machine and the sign barring jurors from leaving the waiting room. Come the end of the day, my headache had billowed into thunderstorm proportions. This dependence on caffeine makes me suspect that I would have a tough time attempting to scratch out a frontier existence. When the revolution comes, they may as well shoot me first, for all the good I'll be in a place that no longer imports freshly roasted coffee beans.

One day/one trial, they said, so I'm off the hook now. That's for petit court, mostly criminal cases. Near us was housed an opaqued room where the grand jurors convened. Apparently that stint goes for a solid month. Makes me wonder how they pick the poor slobs for that duty.

Smoosh fan

I have lately been enamored of Seattle-based band Smoosh (warning, noise link) comprising two rather young girls named Asya and Chloe. Are they sisters? 10 years old? 15? Do they produce their own music? These are mysteries to me, but (probably) not due to a lack of available reference. I'm actually hesitant to find out the answers.

I live in fear of bumping into a quote from the girls saying something like: "I really hope you enjoy Quack, our most lyrically complex work to date", which would totally blow the illusion. I prefer the think of the girls as practicing a form of musical glossolalia. They string together series of syllables, Eno-like; it resembles language without dependence on depth or meaning. I worry that were I to believe that they were taking their lyrical content seriously, I would lose the ability to enjoy their surprisingly sophisticated sound.

If that sounds like something you can enjoy, I urge you to check them out. Just don't peer too closely at the man behind the curtain.

Schadenfreude Interactive, GmbH

And here you thought creativity in games was dead.

Update: It wrinkles.