TEDx Melbourne was Awesome

Saturday, 17 January was definitely “a day of TED” in Melbourne [1].

TEDx Melbourne

Over forty of us TED geeks got together at Monash University and spent the whole day watching our favourite TED talks, talking about those talks, and also watching a live talk on rebuilding faces (through engineering assisted surgery) given by Dr. Ninian Peckitt of ComputerGen Implants Limited. The video of Dr. Peckitt’s talk will be uploaded to the web some time soon.

What I loved most about the day, though, was meeting and talking to all the people who were there (search for #tedx or #mted on Twitter and you’ll find a whole bunch of them). In between the talks we managed to swap stories on how we got hooked onto TED, we talked about what each of us is doing personally and professionally – we’re a fun bunch doing a lot of fun things, by the way – and, of course, we talked about the talks themselves. [2]

So a million thanks to the organizers who did a wonderful job planning and then running TEDx Melbourne. I’m sure this event will becomes a regular feature from now on – maybe with groups of us taking turns to organize it each time – and I’ll keep you posted on this blog every time such an event does take place.

Meanwhile, Shawn Callahan has written about this on his blog as well so make sure you check that out. Also, keep an eye out for the post-event survey that Cheng is in the process of putting together.

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[1] This despite the fact that they didn’t include one of my all-time favourite TED talks: ‘Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes’. Oh well. Next time, perhaps :)

[2] My apologies but the over-use of the word “talk” in this blog post was inevitable!

Roland Emmerich to Direct Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ Series

Variety reports that Columbia Pictures has won the screen rights to the ‘Foundation’ series of books written by Isaac Asimov. Asimov is one of my all-time favourite authors and ‘Foundation’ is one my all-time favourite series of book so the fact that they’re in the process of developing these books for film – presumably a series of films – is awesome.

Unfortunately the director they have chosen to do so is Roland Emmerich. Now Emmerich isn’t a bad director – ‘Stargate’ (1994), ‘Independence Day’ (1996), ‘Godzilla’ (1998), ‘The Patriot’ (2000), and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ (2004) are all good films – but the ‘Foundation’ series is much too awesome to be made into simply a good series of films. And thus I am…concerned.

That said, what is cool about Emmerich’s films is that they manage to depict very well the epic scale of the stories being told. Further, the epic nature of these stories is brilliantly supported by superb special effects that don’t get in the way of the storytelling (think: ‘Star Wars’ prequels as a case in which the CG got the better of the story being told).

What all of those movies lack, then, are deep, complex, meaningful characters that you find yourself caring about…well, with the exception of Benjamin Martin’s character (played by Mel Gibson) in ‘The Patriot’. Okay so the characters aren’t all that bad (you could even say that some of them are good) and, yes, you do end up sympathizing with them (and the predicaments they find themselves in) but they are pretty one-dimensional. Indeed, most of the conflict that makes Emmerich’s films interesting occurs, not because of the way the characters are written, but because of the stories themselves.

*Realization dawns on Ameel*

Ah.

Which is why, I suppose, that Emmerich is the perfect director to tell Asimov’s stories. Why? Because Emmerich makes the kinds of stories that Asimov writes.

Let me explain: Asimov was never good at writing characters that were deep, complex, and meaningful – indeed very few science fiction authors are – but he did tell awesome stories on a very grand scale.

For example, the Foundation series – which spans a period of about 500 years – contains only one deeply-written (though not very complex) character in Hari Seldon and only one complex (though not very deeply-written) character in Golan Trevize. What you get instead is an excellent, nay mind-blowing, story that is worthy of the the special “Best All-Time Series” Hugo award. And since this matches so well the types of stories that Emmerich likes to make into films…this could actually work really well!

And thus I am now…excited :)

TEDx Melbourne Schedule

The TEDx Melbourne schedule has been published:

Schedule

09:30 - Get checked off the list and get your name tags
10:00 - Introductions
10:30 - 'Do schools kill creativity?' - Ken Robinson (2006)
11:00 - 'Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?' - Dan Gilbert (2004)

11.30 – BREAK (30 minutes)

12:00 - 'My stroke of insight' - Jill Bolte Taylor (2008)
12:30 - 'How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes' - Philip Zimbardo (2008)
Bonus video: 'A 3-minute story of mixed emoticons' – Rives

13:00 LUNCH (1 hour)

14:00 - 'Our priorities for saving the world' - Bjorn Lomborg (2005)
14:30 - 'The art of collecting stories' - Jonathan Harris

15:00 BREAK (30 minutes)

15:30 - 'Sliced bread and other marketing delights' - Seth Godin (2003)
16:00 - GUEST SPEAKER: Ninian Peckitt - 'Rebuilding the Face' + Q&A

16:30 BREAK (30 minutes)

17:00 - 'The mystery box' - J.J. Abrams (2007)
17:30 - 'Why we age and how we can avoid it' - Aubrey de Grey
18:00 - Wrap-up + Bonus video: 'How I built my family a windmill'- William Kamkwamba

Further details

More details on the TEDx Facebook Event page. Oh, and we’re up to 83 confirmed guests :)

Chay Magazine Issue 2

The second issue of Chay Magazine is now out. This seems to be a small edition – only five articles, all of which are listed on the front page – but that’s five more articles on this topic than would otherwise have been written. Good job, folks!

Meanwhile, they are now accepting submissions for Issue 3, which is on the topic of sexual diversity.

TEDx Melbourne Details

There are ten days to go to TEDx Melbourne marathon! Thanks to Monash University entry to the event is now free and there are already over sixty confirmed guests :)

Here are the basics:

Date: 17 January, 2008
Time: 10am to 7pm
Location: Lecture Theatre H1.25, Building H, Monash Caulfield campus

For more details visit:

There’s still time to nominate your favourite TED talk on the TED Facebook app (there’s a link on the Facebook group page) so make sure you do that soon.

See you there :)

Biases in Communities - Even the Scientific One

Awesome blog post by Lee Kottner on the Cocktail Party Physics blog on the “old guard” or “old boys’ club” attitude that tends to permeate through religious or specialist knowledge communities. In this case, of course, she’s writing about the scientific community:

…Richard Dawkins' selection of writers for the new Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is damned odd, if not downright insulting. For one thing, there's nary a mere science writer among them; they're almost all scientists…

…And, of course, there are too few women, three, to be precise…

Make sure you check it out.

Further Rant on BBC Article on Zeb & Haniya

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I had a few issues with Syed Shoaib Hasan’s recent BBC News article on Zeb & Haniya.

As expected, that article was picked up by a number of Pakistani blogs like PakPositive and Vajood and I thought it might be useful to include here the comments I left on one of those blogs because it further explains my issues with the article:

I don't understand the relevance of Nadeem Paracha's comments in this article. Was this a news report about Zeb & Haniya or a review of their music? This is aside from the fact that saying their music is "good, not extraordinary" is actually quite useless because it doesn't mean anything. I mean, really, what does it mean when you say that someone's music is "good"? That's too general, too relative, and basically a cop-out. And why does Paracha "caution" people about their music? Is he afraid they'll like it too much and will think it's "extraordinary"?

The reason I'm getting so irritated by this is that this is the only time I've read an article about Pakistani musicians in which their music has been reviewed by a "leading music critic" or by any critic for that matter. And, personally, I don't think it's a coincidence that the only time this has happened is the only time a female duo has been discussed. I don't remember *anyone* talking about the quality of the music of *any* male artist, duo, or group in an article like this *ever* in the past. Do you?

BBC News Report on Zeb & Haniya

The BBC’s Syed Shoaib Hasan just published an article on Zeb and Haniya on the BBC News website. And while it’s awesome that Zeb & Haniya are getting this kind of international news coverage, I don’t particularly like the angle that Hasan has taken with this story.

As it stands, the article has the “Ooh, look! Pakistanis aren’t all terrorists – some women are allowed to sing!” tone and that really pisses me off. This despite the fact that political commentary in a story like this was inevitable. The phrase “girl band” in the title, ‘Pakistan girl band creates a stir’, ticks me off as well.

The article then makes a needless reference to Bollywood in its first sub-heading (“Ooh, look! They watch Indian movies…they must be normal people!”) and contains this sentence:

Addicted to their Bollywood movies and Pakistani pop music, many are at ease with privately imitating their idols.

Right. That exactly what all Pakistanis are like.

Hasan also keeps calling the duo “Pakistan's first all-female music band” which is not accurate.

Worst of all, though, he goes and quotes the eminently patronizing Nadeem Farooq Paracha who is, apparently, “Pakistan’s leading music critic”. I’m not sure why Hasan did that because Paracha’s sole contribution in the article is to put Zeb & Haniya down (in his usual eminently patronizing style) which is particularly irritating as this is supposed to be a news report and not a music review.

I mean, WTF? Why couldn’t this have been a straightforward article about a couple of female musicians who are doing well in Pakistan. Wasn’t that news enough? What was the added benefit of talking about how good or bad their music is? (This is like writing an article about a new female politician in Pakistan who is doing quite well and then getting a quote from a political analyst who says something like “her policies are good, but they are not extraordinary”.)

All those issues aside, though, I’m glad the article was written because at the very least it gives widespread and much-deserved coverage to Zeb & Haniya and their music.

Sexism in Advertising

If you, like me, felt that some of the ads you saw this year were particularly sexist – a few even disturbingly so – you weren’t wrong: Alex Leo lists the ‘Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can’t Shake’.

I guess not much real changed has occurred [1] since the Media Education Foundation produced Jean Kilbourne’s awesome ‘Killing us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women’ back in 1999. (You can watch all of it on Google Video, by the way.)

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[1] Except for a lot more awareness of the issue – thanks in particular to people, groups, and websites like Feministing and copyranter to name just two.

So…I Have Tonsillitis

After waiting three days with (increasingly) inflamed tonsils I finally went and saw a GP this morning and what I'd begun to suspect is now official: I have tonsillitis.

Why did I wait three days before visiting the GP? Because inflamed tonsils don’t necessarily mean tonsillitis, and since I didn’t have any of its usual sings and symptoms, it could have been a viral infection that I wouldn’t have been able to medicate anyway.

As it happens, I started developing some of the symptoms by yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, by then I’d already already made an appointment with Dr. Michal Lum at the Metropolitan Medical Centres Carlton so that was that.

Now I’m on a 12-day course of penicillin (specifically penicillin V) and am taking iboprufen for the inflammation. Here’s hoping things gets better quickly because this is turning out to be quite painful and I’m feeling rather miserable. Such is life.

My HP Printer Driver has MPD

My HP printer driver has Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Why? Because while my printer – an HP Deskjet F4185 All-in-One – scans and copies everything just fine, its printing functionality is seriously messed up.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say I want to scan a photograph: I’ll put the photo on the scanning glass, turn the printer on, wait a bit for Vista to recognize the USB-connected device, run the HP Solution Centre software, and click the ‘Scan Picture’ button. The scanner with then do a quick scan of the entire scannable area after which I will select the bit I want scanned and will click ‘Accept’. The photo will now get scanned and saved to the ‘My Scans’ folder. Nice and simple, eh?

Now, let’s try printing a document: I’ll start Microsoft Word, type in some text, and click the print icon. This will pop-up the print dialogue box and I’ll select ‘HP Deskjet 4100 series’ from my list of printers. I will then wait about 4-5 minutes while Word “connects” to the printer. Once it does, I’ll click ‘Print’ and my document will get printed immediately.

Yes, for some reason the scanner driver connects and communicates with the computer just fine (and pretty much instantaneously) but the printer driver takes ages to do the same thing. Now if that isn’t MPD – in the computer software sense, of course – then I don’t know what is.

The good news: This is a “known issue” that HP is working to resolve.

The bad news: They haven’t fixed it yet.

The interim solution: Either I be willing to wait 4-5 minutes to print every document (which will be a real pain) or I copy the document(s) I want printed over to Nadia’s netbook (an Acer Aspire One that’s running Office 2007 on Windows XP) and print them off in just a few seconds.

Such is life.

Public Webcams: More Melbourne Cams

After writing about all those public webcams, I thought I'd look around for other Australian feeds and, sure enough, there are plenty more out there:

Also, I found a few other webcam lists that are worth checking out:

And finally, if you really want to geek out, NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor (STS 126) is currently delivering equipment to the International Space Station (details here) and you can watch everything they're doing live on NASA TV :)

Public Webcams

I love public webcams that show you what's going on in the rest of the world in realtime. And while there are plenty of practical applications for such video streams -- like checking surfing conditions on remote beaches, keeping an eye on traffic, or general security and surveillance -- I particularly love the ones that are there either for tourism and marketing purposes or simply there for the heck of it. For example, I love the new Shiba Inu Puppy Cam that's been making the rounds of the websphere recently.

There are lots of public camera feeds (or streams, whatever you want to call them) availble on the Internet and one of the best places to find them is via the EarthCam website. Otherwise just search Google for, say, "live webcams" (remembering to ignore the adult ones) or download something like Webcam Saver that shows you a whole bunch of streams from around the world as your computer's screen saver (though this software is trialware so you have to pay for it if you want to keep on using it). If you want more specific user-created streams, check out Ustream.Tv and maybe Justin.tv as well.

Australian Webcams

There are a number of Australian webcams too, and though the live Melbourne skyline camera is currently inoperative, you can see awesome time lapse montages of the city -- showing an hour's worth of photos taken over the previous hour -- on OMNIConnect's Melbourne Webcam page.

For more practical stuff, you have the Port of Melbourne cameras that show you shipping traffic from the Shipping Management Centre in Melbourne and surf conditions from the Port Lonsdale Lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. You can also view the latest traffic conditions within Melbourne on the CityLink website: click on the 'CityLink Webcam' link at the bottom of the right column of the CityLink home page or view all the video streams on this page (which refreshes every ten seconds but doesn't have any labels on the photos).

Good stuff.

UPDATE: I wrote about some more webcams in a follow-up post.

New Keyboard

I spend a lot of time on the computer and do a lot of typing so, as you would expect, keyboards are very important to me. Unfortunately, the keyboard that came with the new desktop PC that I bought was terrible. It was loud and clacky, it wasn't very comfortable to type on, its multimedia keys were both irritatingly-placed [1] and only minimally configurable, and its Home-End and Page Up-Page Down key pairs were in a non-standard location.

So today I finally got sick of it and bought myself a nice, comfortable keyboard that I am really enjoying typing on. I got the Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000 which is comfortable, well-designed, completely configurable (if you download the IntelliType Pro software that goes with it), and low-cost. I've used it in the past so I knew what I was getting though, in general, all of Microsoft's hardware products are pretty awesome.

Ah yes, life is good.

[1] For example, its sleep button (which would put the computer into the new Vista sleep mode) was located in the top-left corrner where you would normally find the Escape key. It took me a whole week to stop putting the computer to sleep when all I wanted to do was close a dialog box! Most irritating.