(no subject)

[pearwaldorf]

More iMac porn. So apparently IT Director got a sweet deal on the new iMacs (to be fair, he is buying 70 of them to outfit the two computer labs the department maintains), and I'm getting a 24 inch model. They'll be here in a couple weeks. I'm so excited.

For those of you who don't give a shit I'm getting an iMac (ie, everybody), have some links.

Interview with Anthony Bourdain. 's okay, it's not great. But it did tell me some things I didn't know.

The Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, is now most likely extinct. That makes me very sad. Apparently Douglas Adams wrote a book about them, his one nonfiction work.

'I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a blind man trying to live in a discotheque. Or several competing discotheques.'

`Well, it's worse than that, isn't it? Mark said. 'Dolphins rely on sound to see with.'

'All right, so it would be like a deaf man living in a discotheque.'

'Why?'

'All the stroboscopic lights and flares and mirrors and lasers and things. Constantly confusing information. After a day or two you'd become completely bewildered and disoriented and start to fall over the furniture.'

`Well, that's exactly what's happening, in fact. The dolphins are continually being hit by boats or mangled in their propellers or tangled in fishermen's nets. A dolphin's echolocation is usually good enough for it to find a small ring on the sea bed, so things must be pretty serious if it can't tell that it's about to be brained by a boat.

`Then, of course, there's all the sewage, the chemical and industrial waste and artificial fertiliser that's being washed into the Yangtze, poisoning the water and poisoning the fish.'

`So,' I said, 'what do you do if you are either half-blind, or half-deaf, living in a discotheque with a stroboscopic light show, where the sewers are overflowing, the ceiling and the fans keep crashing on your head and the food is bad?'

'I think I'd complain to the management.'

'They can't.'

'No. They have to wait for the management to notice.'

I think I'm going to buy this book.

For something a little less depressing from China, take a look at Mr. Wu's robots. Apparently he's not had any formal schooling, but he's made all these amazingly elaborate robots. Wait for the double-take--you'll know it when you see it.

"The monkey spent the remainder of the flight in the man's seat and behaved well," unlike many a child I've had the misfortune to sit near on international flights.