Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Cthulhu!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for! I now present the second installment of…

Meet a Magical Horned Creature!
This Week: Cthulhu! (a.k.a. Tulu, Clulu, Cighulu, Kulhu, etc.)

An artist's pitiful attempt at evoking the paralyzing terror of Cthulhu.

Meet the Great Cthulhu and be glad he doesn’t speak any human language, because he would otherwise be quite offended at your inability to pronounce his alien name. If you’re trying to communicate with other hominids, however, the commonly accepted pronunciation nowadays is “ka-THOO-loo”.

Describing Cthulhu is a bit like an atheist trying to describe God, because it’s nearly impossible to figure out where to begin. And in all honesty, their origins are pretty similar. Cthulhu, like God, first appeared in some hallucinogen-inspired writing some years ago and has since inspired a cult-like following. More specifically, he (or maybe she? or it?) debuted in horror and science-fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, as a mythic cosmic entity who crash-landed on Earth eons ago and subsequently coaxed the development of all sentient life. But unlike God (or so I hope), Cthulhu is really, really ugly.

Being a cosmic entity does have its drawbacks. Once the stars began to drift out of alignment, Cthulhu “died”, though not in the usual sense of the word. He cast a spell to protect himself and his spawn, so instead of dying he went into some sort of magical suspended animation and is now waiting for the stars to realign to make his comeback. Without a physical body, he communicates with people through their dreams, where he chants something along the lines of “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagi fhtagn” (sic). Thankfully, he and the similarly un-pronounceable city he lived in, R’lyeh, both sank to the bottom of the ocean, so at least for now we don’t have to stare at his terrifyingly ugly corpse all the time.

And just how ugly is Cthulhu? He’s described as a slimy, green combination of “an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”, with a “pulpy, tentacled head” and a “grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”. He’s also as big as a mountain. To get an idea of what he might look like, just imagine a gargantuan Davy Jones + a gargantuan pterodactyl + a gargantuan amount of Nickelodeon slime, and then make it ten times uglier and bigger just for good measure.

Possible relations to Cthulhu: Pirates of the Caribbean Captain Davy Jones, Jedi Master Kit Fisto, and a man with an octopus on his head.

If you think the story of Cthulhu is all imaginative folly, a series of ultra-low-frequency, deep oceanic sounds recorded in 1997 nicknamed the “Bloop” indicates otherwise. Scientists are pretty sure that the sounds were biological in origin, but the bloops were also so loud that only an animal several times the size of a blue whale could’ve made them. Clearly, no other explanation exists, other than the fact that Cthulhu is real.

One of the several recorded "bloops", sped up 16x and probably around 1,000,000 times quieter. (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 8.5*
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)
*I was considering giving Cthulhu a 9, but he seems a tad too undesirable to be rated that close to a lovely unicorn.

Amazon.com's Paradox of Choice

I love online shopping. There’s so much choice.

I hate online shopping. There’s too much choice.

Case in point: I’m going to be frolicking around the world for a month starting mid-August, and I’ve been trying to buy a nice camera to record all the gloriousness. With a nice camera must come decent lenses, and in an effort to buy the most versatile, best quality, least expensive, and just-pompous-enough piece of hardware, I come across something like this on Amazon:

Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX VR Zoom Nikkor Lens
$202.70

55-200 mm is apparently pretty versatile, Nikon sounds like a high-quality Japanese brand, $200 dollars isn’t too steep, and it’s got a few pompously unintelligible letters at the end to scare off those unsavory plebeians. My needs and ego satisfied, I’m just about to add this to my cart, until I scroll down further and see the “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” section and see something like this:

22% buy the item featured on this page:
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX VR Zoom Nikkor Lens
$202.70

16% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED IF AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor Lens
$166.20

At this point, I’m already changing my mind because the second listing is almost forty dollars cheaper. But then it’s missing the “VR” at the end! I have no idea what “VR” stands for, but I want to keep all my letters! Worried, I read on:

10% buy
Sigma 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 DC Telephoto Zoom Lens
$159.99

Holy sweet and sour soup! A Greek letter comes into play!

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor Lens + UV Haze Filter
$164.95

You can even do combinations? Amazon.com moonlights as a Mongolian BBQ!

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX AB CD EF GH ZX THE PWN Zoom Nikkor Lens
$179.95

10% buy
Nikon 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 BMW M5 VIPER ZR1 Zoom Nikkor Lens
$190.55

10% buy
Alpha 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$201.00

10% buy
Beta 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$200.99

10% buy
Delta 55-200mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens
$200.98
…

And before I could finish reading the whole list, my brain proceeds to explode in a graphic illustration of the Paradox of Choice:

Spencer Pratt, the universal result of brain malfunctions.

We Need Another Cold War

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and I couldn’t help but feel slightly depressed that that the first decade of this millennium is almost over and our world isn’t even slightly similar to Stanley Kubrick’s space-faring visions in Space Odyssey: 2001. I couldn’t help but wonder: if we still can’t travel regularly to the moon and beyond, then what on Earth (quite literally) have we been doing for the last four decades? Thus I decided to open up my mental filing cabinets, in addition to a few tabs of Wikipedia, to figure out what we’ve been up to since Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps. Join me on a trip down memory lane, one decade at a time, to relive some of the most significant cultural and technological achievements of the last century.

Why aren't we there yet?!

1999

This is a year perhaps better defined as the one before 2000. Dozens of woefully ignorant psychos are building Y2K-proof homes in remote forests, while new cults herald the return of Jesus, aliens, and sentient dolphins. The Backstreet Boys release Millennium. DVDs are just beginning to gain some traction against the still dominant VHS format, and NASA seems like it just can’t keep track of its Mars rovers – it loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander within a span of two months.

1989

A quick jump of just ten years before 1999 and the world is already unimaginably different. Though the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse and the Berlin Wall is being dismantled, the threat of Communism is still a very tangible presence in the United States. The phrase “George Bush” isn’t yet synonymous with all things evil, but is rather the name of a President who would have an 80% approval by the end of this year. Tape cassettes are still the best way to store music. NASA and the European Space Agency are busy fending off budget overruns as they’re trying to complete their joint venture, the Hubble Space Telescope.

1979

The United States is in the middle of its second oil crisis, which means that small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars are suddenly extremely popular. Chrysler prophetically asks the U.S. government for a $1 billion loan to avoid bankruptcy. Michael Jackson releases his first blockbuster solo album Off the Wall, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing. The Apple II is the platinum standard of “home computing”, but is in all honesty a glorified graphing calculator. Voyager I, which, in thirty years would be well on its way to exiting the solar system, is just now flying by Jupiter to give us our first look at the planet’s rings and moons.

The icon of a revolution.

1969

The Vietnam War. Hippies protesting in college campuses all over the country. The very first Wal-Mart opens, the very first Brady Bunch episode premieres. “Computers” are known as “workstations”, and running on just the very first build of Unix, they can’t do much at all. Slide rules are an engineer’s best friend, but addition and subtraction you still have to do by hand. Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this technological backwardness, America also managed to fly some guys onto the moon.

A whole bunch of guys playing with these is how we got to the moon.

2009

So what have we been doing for forty years? It seems like simultaneously a lot, yet not much at all. Our personal lives have improved drastically with the popularization of computing technology, but at the same time the Apollo 11 moon landing still seems like a pinnacle of human achievement. Black-and-white photographs of the Saturn rockets and the Lunar Module still look surreally like scenes from a sci-fi movie, yet the rockets and spacecraft were designed with slide rules. Why does sending men to the moon now seem as much a pipe dream as it was back then?

Both congressional and presidential belt-tightening has severely impacted NASA’s operations in the past few decades, and the slowing global economy looks like it’ll only make things worse. But with trillions of dollars now invested into “stimulating” our flagging economy, space exploration is still being inexplicably neglected. As with infrastructure expansion, money spent on space exploration would similarly create thousands of new jobs. The long-term benefits of the cutting-edge technologies developed in new space programs would far outweigh those produced in other government projects, and if the Apollo program was any indication, space exploration has the added benefit of training and inspiring engineers in all levels of education.

According to our government, a new moon program would cost too much.

Furthermore, though the Space Race was born in the midst of an epic ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States, space exploration has since then become a surprisingly effective vehicle for international cooperation. From the formation of the European Space Agency, to NASA and the ESA’s collaboration on the Hubble Space Telescope, and to the fifteen-nation joint effort on the International Space Station, conquering the final frontier has brought together countries with even the most hostile of histories. Expressed best by Indira Ghandi, who at the time of the Apollo 11 landing was prime minister of India, “I fervently hope that [the lunar landing] will usher in an era of peaceful endeavor for all mankind.”

Perhaps most importantly, though, Space represents something gloriously intangible, a worldwide dream of mankind that has persisted unchanged over thousands of years. In no religion is Heaven anywhere but the sky. It is Ra’s ocean, Zeus’s mountain, the high court of Emperor Huang Di. NASA’s space programs have been named for Gods because these endeavors symbolize not just man struggling to escape from his terrestrial, mortal shackles, but also the possibility that one day he too, through sheer ambition and bravery, can join the ranks of the Pantheon.

Lost In Google Translation

I dropped by the bookstore the other day, and after threading carefully through the hordes of excited middle-school kids clustered around the Twilight and Naruto sections (even though I did consider joining them…) I inevitably wound up in some variant of the Computers / Business / Economics / Reading Material for Intellectual Elitists aisle. The manager must have been addicted to Gmail or something because nearly all the books on the first display shelves were about Google – about how revolutionary it is, about how it’s changing our world, about how Google is demonstrating that the technological singularity is near. Admittedly, I do use Google about twenty-six hours a day, but I still have my doubts about how advanced Google’s machine-learning, artificial intelligence, and (insert computing buzzword here) technologies really are.

So I’ve devised a test to find out if Google’s juggernaut A.I. lives up to its hype. Using its automatic translation software, I will play the Rumor Game with these two paragraphs. If you’ve never played, the Rumor Game is simple: you have, say, ten people in a line, and the first person starts a rumor that he whispers into the next person’s ear. This continues down the line until the rumor is transmitted to the last person, who then says it out loud, and everyone has a good laugh at how distorted the original message has become. Instead of whispering, though, I will translate the text into a different language each time, and then finally translate it back to English where we’ll see how much of the original content is still understandable. Here we go,

To Chinese:
我扔掉的书店有一天，经过仔细线程通过成群的兴奋初中的孩子围绕黄昏和火影忍者节（即使我没有考虑加入他们... ）我不可避免地清盘在一些版本的计算机/商业/经济/阅读材料的知识精英过道。经理必须是Gmail或上瘾的东西，因为几乎所有的书的第一展示货架左右谷歌-如何革命，这是关于它如何改变我们的世界，如何表明，谷歌是技术奇异接近。诚然，我不使用谷歌关于二十六小时一天，但我仍然有我怀疑谷歌如何先进的机器学习，人工智能，以及（在这里插入计算机行话）技术真的。
所以，我已经制定了一项测试，以找出如果谷歌的主宰人工智能辜负其炒作。利用其自动翻译软件，我将发挥的传闻游戏这两个段落。如果您从来没有打过，谣言游戏很简单：你有，比如说， 10人一行，并以第一人称开始传言，他悄悄进入下一个人的耳朵。这种情况持续下去，直到下线的传闻是转交给最后一个人，谁然后大声说，每个人都具有良好的笑如何歪曲原始邮件已成为。相反的窃窃私语，不过，我将翻译文本不同的语言，每次，然后把它终于回到英国，我们会看到有多少的原始内容仍然是可以理解的。在这里，我们走，

To Serbian:
И бацају књиге једног дана, након пажљиво нарезано кроз тхронгс загрејани децу од око јуниор средњој школи вечери и Наруто секција (чак и ако нисам размислите придружио им ...) И неизбежно ликвидација у неким верзију рачунара / пословни / економског / читање материјала пролаз у елитне образовани. Водитељ мора бити Гмаил или зависност, јер су скоро све књиге по полицама први приказ Гоогле - Како до револуције, то је како се мењају наш свет, како то показују да је Гоогле је технологија у близини једнину. Тацно је да не користе Гоогле 26 сата на дан, али ја још увек има моје сумње о томе како се Гоогле Напредна машински учење, вештачке интелигенције, те (овде убаците рачунар жаргон) технологију стварно.
Стога сам развио тест да ли Гоогле вештачка интелигенција је кључ да живе и до његових хыпе. Користите аутоматско превођење својих софтверских ћу играти игру гласина две тачке. Ако још нисте играли, гласине о игри је једноставна: ви сте, на пример, 10 особа, а његова странка на прву особу за покретање гласина, он је тихо у следећој лицу ухо. То се наставља све док се линија је пребачен у последњих гласина, који је тада рекао гласно, свако има добру смијати о томе оригиналну поруку је постала искривљен. Уместо шапутање, а ја ћу превести текст на различитим језицима, сваки пут, а онда напокон вратио у Великој Британији, ми ћемо видети колико је изворни садржај је још схватљиво. Идемо,

To Arabic:
يلقي الكتاب الأول في يوم من الأيام ، وبعد narezano بدقة ساخنة خلال حشود الأطفال في جميع أنحاء المدارس الاعدادية ، وأمسيات Naruto القسم (حتى لو لم أكن النظر في الانضمام لهم...) والتي لا مفر منها تصفية بعض الصيغة الكمبيوتر / العمل / الاقتصادية / مواد للقراءة في مرور النخبة المتعلمة. ويجب أن يكون الزعيم Gmail أو الإدمان ، لأنها كلها تقريبا رفوف الكتاب الأول عن طريق جوجل -- كيفية قيام الثورة هو تغيير في عالمنا ، وكيف تبين أن غوغل للتكنولوجيا في القريب المفرد. وصحيح أن غوغل لا تستخدم 26 ساعة في اليوم ، ولكن لا يزال امامي بلدي شكوك بشأن كيفية جوجل متقدمة آلة التعلم ، الذكاء الاصطناعي ، و (هنا تضاف بلغة الكمبيوتر) التكنولوجيا حقا.
ولذلك ، فإنني وضعت لاختبار الذكاء الاصطناعي جوجل هو المفتاح لترقى إلى مستوى الضجيج. استخدام الترجمة الآلية لبرامجك الشائعات تلعب لعبة نقطتين. إذا لم تكن قد لعبت حتى الآن ، ما تردد عن لعبة بسيطة : كنت ، على سبيل المثال ، 10 شخصا ، والوفد المرافق له لأول شخص لبدء شائعة ، فهو هادئ في مواجهة المقبلة الأذن. ولا تزال حتى هذا الخط الذي ينقل الى الشائعات ، ثم قال بصوت عال ، والجميع يضحكون جيدا الرسالة الأصلية أصبحت مشوهة. بدلا من أن يهمس ، وأنا لن ترجمة النص في لغات مختلفة ، في كل مرة ، ثم عاد إلى المملكة المتحدة ، وسنرى كيف المحتوى الأصلي لا يزال على البال. يذهب ،

To Finnish:
Kirja on ensimmäinen päivä, kun narezano huolellisesti lämmitetty kautta väkijoukkoja lasten kouluissa kaikkialla keskellä, ja iltaisin Naruto osa (vaikka en ole sitä mieltä, yhdistämällä ne ...) ja väistämätön selvitystilaan joidenkin kielen tietokone / business / taloudellinen / käsittelyssä materiaalia läpipääsy on koulutettu eliitti. Johtajan on oltava Gmail-tai riippuvuutta, koska ne ovat lähes ensimmäinen kirja hyllyt Google - kuinka vallankumous on muuttaa maailmassa, ja miten se osoittaa, että Googlen tekniikka on lähellä yksikössä. On totta, että Google ei käytä 26 tuntia vuorokaudessa, mutta minulla on silti omat epäilykseni siitä, miten Googlen kehittynyttä Machine Learning, tekoälyä ja (tässä lisätä kielellä tietokone)-tekniikka todellakin.
Siksi olen kehittänyt testi tekoälyä on avain Googlen aihetta melutaso. Käyttö machine translation ohjelmistoja huhuja, pelata peliä kaksi pistettä. Jos se ei ole ollut tähän mennessä huhuja siitä, että peli on yksinkertainen: te, esimerkiksi 10 ihmistä, ja valtuuskunnan hänen ensimmäinen henkilö aloittaa huhu, se on hiljainen, kun vastassa on seuraava korvalla. Ja jatkaa tätä linjaa siirretään huhuja, hän sanoi ääneen, ja nauraa makeasti kaikki alkuperäisen viestin on tullut vääristynyt. Sen sijaan, että kuiskaamalla, ja aion kääntää tekstin eri kielellä, ja jokainen kerta, palasi Yhdistyneeseen kuningaskuntaan, ja näemme, miten alkuperäinen sisältö jää mieleen. Mennä,

Finally, to English:
"The book is the first day, when narezano thoroughly heated through crowds of children in schools across the middle, and in the evening Naruto part (although I do not think a combination of them ...) and the inevitable liquidation of some of the language of computer / business / economic / reading material for the passage has been trained in the elite . The director must have a Gmail or a dependency, because they are close to first bookshelves Google - how the revolution is to change the world, and how it shows that Google's technology is close to the unit. It is true that Google does not use 26 hours a day, but I still have my doubts about how Google's advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence, and (here insert the language of computer) technology indeed.

Therefore, I have developed a test for artificial intelligence is the key to Google's rise to the noise level. The use of machine translation software to rumors, to play a game of two points. If it is not so far been rumors that the game is simple: you, for example, 10 people, and his delegation to the first person to start a rumor, it is silent in the face of the next ear. And to continue this line moved to the rumors, he said aloud, and a good laugh at all of the original message has become distorted. Instead of whispering by, and I intend to translate the text in different languages, and each time I returned to the UK, and we see how the original content remains to mind. Go,"

(Insert a good laugh here! This is also unsurprisingly similar to some of the stuff at engrish.com)

Highlights:

Original: “the manager must have been addicted to Gmail or something”
Mistranslated: “the director must have a Gmail or a dependency”
Google is implying that Gmail and dependencies are mutually exclusive. So forget rehab, just get a Gmail account instead!

Original: “Admittedly, I do use Google twenty-six hours a day…”
Mistranslated: “It is true that Google does not use 26 hours a day…”
That is indeed true.

Original: “but I still have my doubts about how advanced Google’s machine-learning…”
Translated Quite Well, Actually: “but I still have my doubts about how Google’s advanced machine learning…”

Case in point: Though Google might be very well capable of taking over the English-speaking countries of the world right now, it doesn’t seem like it’s quite ready to take on the rest. Just imagine if “surrender, now” was mistranslated into “all your base are belong to us” all over again.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has his eyes on the prize. He also likes to wear that pimp-cape to work on casual Fridays.

Meet a Magical Horned Creature: Huey Long!

Since this blog’s current subtitle (subject to change) implies that I’ll be writing about “pop culture, accountants, and magical horned creatures”, and since the number-crunchers at Google and Microsoft in my last post are more or less accountants, then that means I’ve been unfairly neglecting the magical horned creatures section of this website for the last two weeks. In an effort to ameliorate this journalistic travesty, I now present the first of what might become a multipart series:

Meet A Magical Horned Creature!

Where I’ll try and introduce you to a new magical horned creature, either real or fictional, in each installment. Disclaimer: just because you can’t see the horns doesn’t mean they’re not there.

This Week: Huey Long!

Admittedly, this guy’s horns were pretty discreet. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t magical. He was a crazy ass mofo with a congruously silly name, who you might remember in your U.S. History classes as the governor of Louisiana who nicknamed himself "The Kingfish".

He was self-conscious about his horns, so he Photoshopped them out.

Why, though, of all the magical horned creatures to talk about, did I choose him? Well, first and foremost because his name is pretty funny. And also, because I’ve been poring through The Glory and the Dream by William Manchester, a densely-packed, fifteen-hundred-page narrative history of America from 1932-1972. It’s like the Lord of the Rings of U.S. History, the ultimate combination of length, detail, and utter confusion, though unfortunately without attractive elves or talking trees. Anyways, I ran into Huey (his full name is actually Huey, not Hubert) a few chapters ago, and though this entire section of the book is overshadowed by the awesomeness known as Franklin Roosevelt, Huey still managed to stick out like a hobbit in the NBA, a small but hilarious gem floundering around in a sea of giants. Here’s a brief synopsis of his life:

Huey Long was born in 1893, in Winnfield, Louisiana, and it didn’t take him long afterwards to realize how baller he was. He was an excellent student in high school, so excellent, in fact, that he ended up getting tired of his principal and circulated a petition to get him fired. Huey was promptly expelled, but somehow still managed to win a debating scholarship to Louisiana State University.

The scholarship apparently didn’t cover textbooks that Huey couldn’t afford, so he dropped out of school almost immediately. After living an unglamorous life as a travelling salesman for a few years, however, Huey then felt that his career choices might broaden if he attended law school. So he enrolled at Tulane Law School, but instead of spending the typical three years there, he took classes for eight months, convinced the board to let him take the Louisiana State Bar, and passed. He became a lawyer at the age of twenty-one, an achievement that, apparently, had never and has since never been repeated in the state’s history.

He ran for governor twice, in 1924, where he lost, and 1928, where he won. He was always a champion of the poor, as his campaign slogan was “every man a king, but no man wears a crown”. His Share the Wealth program was American socialism at its finest (or worst), and he subsequently ravaged large corporations as governor. He collected enough taxes from the rich to expand the state’s infrastructure from thirty miles of paved roads to 2,500, zero large bridges to twelve. He opened up night schools to teach 175,000 illiterate adults how to read, and mind you, this was all during the worst part of the Great Depression.

How did Huey do all this? Well don’t forget this man was crazy. Throughout his stint as governor from 1928 to 1932, and later as Senator from 1932 to 1935, he centralized Louisiana’s government to revolve around, well, himself. All police departments reported directly to him. He bribed all the judges in the state, including the Louisiana Supreme Court justices; those who wouldn’t comply with his demands were removed through underhanded tactics like district gerrymandering or brute force. Newspaper critics who angered him were often beaten, kidnapped, and jailed. Right before his Senate election, Huey’s secretary’s husband threatened to sue Huey for “alienation of affections”, a.k.a. fucking his wife. And you know what Huey did in response? He flew the man up on a plane, waited until the election polls closed, and then had him brought back down. I have no idea how Huey managed to get him onto the plane in the first place, but I assume it was something along the lines of a free vacation to the Caribbean.

How I assume Huey convinced his secretary's husband
to get on an unexplained flight.

Huey then planned on moving into the White House with the election of 1936, but thankfully he was shot the year before. I say “thankfully” because otherwise he really might have won and turned the country into a communistic monarchy, or something. Capitalism was saved, FDR could continue his million years as president, and men everywhere could go back to work comfortable in the knowledge that Huey Long was no longer out seducing their wives.

Before I conclude, however, there’s one more anecdote that I think is worthy of mentioning. Huey, being the only Southern governor who treated blacks as equals during the 1930s, was immensely unpopular with the growing Ku Klux Klan. When the KKK’s leader threatened to come into Louisiana and march/protest/campaign against him, he replied with the following, which I think is much more potently demonstrated by a bad illustration:

He gets baller status in my book.

Magical Horned Creature Rating: 5 (+1 for being nonfictional)
(On a scale of 1-10: 1 being a rhinoceros, 10 being a unicorn)

Google Chrome OS vs. Microsoft Gazelle: Awesome New Ad Campaigns?

In a slightly more technological aside today, I'm loving the renewed Google-Microsoft tension after the announcement of the Google Chrome OS (link). It's the long-awaited extension of the Google Chrome browser, which itself was already an indirect attack on Microsoft Office, since Chrome was basically made to handle Gmail's web-based productivity software. The new Chrome OS isn't targeted directly at the PC and is meant for netbooks instead, but with an official label as an "OS" there's no doubt that Google has pulled all the stops and is charging at the Microsoft Windows stronghold with its spears drawn and trebuchets loaded. Yes, trebuchets. Trebuchets are awesome.

Actual schematics of Google's takeover plan. On the left is a trebuchet, which will swing Chrome-bombs (which I shall now dub Chrombs) at Microsoft Windows.

Microsoft has its own netbook-OS answer, though, with Microsoft Gazelle (a long, detailed, research report here). Tons of other places have already written on the technical details of the two proposed systems, but what I'm looking forward to most doesn't have anything to do with the systems themselves. What I really, really want to see are the ad campaigns that Microsoft and Google are going to concoct for this epic battle.

Will there be a new Google Guy created in the spirit of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads? Or better yet, will Google accent its fun-loving, multi-colored image with the similarly-colored Teletubbies?

A new target demographic!

How will Microsoft respond? It's now stuck in the middle of a brutal bashing from both Apple and Google, so will it just say "fuck it" and go back to its ill-fated Seinfeld + Bill Gates lunacy? I can only imagine, but this is going to be one helluva entertaining media battle.

uhhhmm.

From MJ's Memorial

This was probably the saddest scene from today's memorial service, when Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, after having been shielded from the media for so long, finally spoke. If I remember correctly, this was right after the group performance of "We Are the World" and the eulogies of Michael Jackson's siblings, who recalled experiences like watching the 1980 Grammys together, of Michael crying because had won only one, and then saying to LaToya, "Watch, LaToya...I will become the biggest and greatest entertainer of all time." Well, you sure as hell did, Michael. The very best wishes to your children.

Paris Jackson, Michael's 11-year-old daughter,

"Ever since I was born, my daddy has been

the best father you could ever imagine. And I

just wanted to say I love him so much."

Edit: I'm not sure what to think about Al Sharpton's participation in this whole thing, especially when I see how nearly all the performers on stage were African-American. Does he have anything to do with Michael Jackson, other than the fact that they're both black? I just hope that he wasn't doing anything more sinister than being the self-serving idiot he always is.

Help! Twitter is Running Me Ovesdfghjkfsf;;’

Due to lack of initiative to go to the library and check out some proper reading material, I’ve recently started to devour the slightly outdated Time magazines lying around my kitchen counter. Usually, my despairingly short attention span limits me to just the Briefing section, which includes my favorite “Pop Chart” page – a quick, chuckle-inducing chart depicting recent popular events on a scale of “Shocking” to “Predictable” to “Shockingly Predictable” – but the Time 100 issue finally motivated me to actually open up the magazine’s main section. I was looking forward to be enlightened on the cultural significance of Michelle Obama, on why Manny Pacquiao matters, on what on earth a man named Van Jones is doing to our environment. Instead, the first piece I ran into was one on Twitter, of all subjects, written by Ashton Kutcher, of all people (link).

For the uninitiated (including myself), Twitter is apparently the new online social-networking phenomenon, the unofficial heir of Facebook’s reign over the internet. “Twitterers” announce “Tweets” of 140 characters or less to the world in this new form of “micro-blogging”. Why? I have no idea. But Ashton described it as “a new and completely original form of communication,” and likened Twitter.com’s creators to the greatest inventors of the modern era: Samuel Morse (inventor of Morse Code), Alexander Bell (the telephone), Guglielmo Marconi (the radio), Philo Farnsworth (the videocamera), Bill Gates (most of your computers), and Steve Jobs (the rest of your computers). Really? Twitter is as significant an “invention” as the telephone? Is this another elaborate Punk’d setup?

Here I was, reading something more than a more paragraph long for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I was bored after the first sentence. I wanted to flip to another page, maybe just skip to the end to Joel Stein’s commentary, but then I realized in a minor but “holy crap!” epiphany that even though I had never used Twitter, I was doing the exact same thing as one of its members. I had finished reading the first 140 characters or so of the piece and wanted to move on. Thus Twitter itself isn’t an invention, but rather a reflection of the pace of our world. As our computers, our phones, and the internet process more and more data at quicker and quicker speeds, so must our brains; and Twitter seems to fit our rapid-fire thought-processes perfectly. Its potential as a platform for massive, grassroots-level communication is enormous, and it’s even been credited with enabling the recent protests in Iran (link). It’s like a blog, but quicker. It’s like a forum, but simpler. But I wonder if it’s really all that great.

Twitter is by nature a chaotic mess – on the macroscopic level, the website serves as a completely open forum for discordant and repetitive tweets and twits and twats; on an individual level, you never have to worry about making any sense when posting. Conan O’Brien’s new Late Night Show features a segment called “Twitter Tracker” in which an overzealous announcer reads the oh-so-(not)-exciting Tweets of celebrities, including gems like:

“Just got some bomb grub at Burger King” by Brody Jenner, and

“At Pete’s coffee in brentwood…love this place” by Cash Warren.

Is this meaninglessness really the “completely original form of communication” that Ashton was referring to? While there are instances, like the Iranian protests, especially suited to Twitter’s populist brevity, the vast majority of the information on Twitter smells awfully like spam. Twitter is engaging not because it’s communicative, but because it actualizes our exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies. Like reality shows, it allows us to peek into the lives of celebrities – like the more popular Facebook and Myspace, it allows us to pry into the lives of our friends.

Traditional prose, however, lets us do things impossible otherwise. It communicates subtleties, expresses emotions, and most importantly tries to make sense. Writing forces us to think critically and to analyze. It lengthens our attention spans and trains our patience. This is why I’m slogging painfully through this new blog, not to captivate readers but to relish in this sense of accomplishment I feel after writing a few hundred semi-meaningful words. Instead of introducing me to Twitter, Ashton Kutcher has inadvertently convinced me to sit down every once in a while and work through something longer than a paragraph and more meaningful than a tweet. Then again, I might just get bored halfway through and turn this thing into a celebrity gossip site instead.

@zhangstar: saw some articles about twitter and wrote a lengthy blog entry on the magic of traditional prose. probably no one will read it

The twitter guys sharing an

awkward, homoerotic moment.
(Image from Time Magazine)