Crafty like a Firefox. (Macs for Clinton?)

In the past week, two friends and readers have informed me that GitM is acting somewhat squirrelly in the latest version of Firefox for Mac. Now, I’m a PC guy (by usage and by temperament), so I can’t troubleshoot the problem on my computers here. But, is anyone else out there having issues recently? My guess it probably has something to do with embedded videos, since that’s the only “new” thing around here lately, and most likely I’m betting the problem is either this St. Patrick’s Day post from last week or the Tracey Morgan SNL one right before it. Does anyone know if Firefox (on a Mac) hiccups with certain types of embedded videos, or am I barking up the wrong tree? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Update: Raza at High Industrial informed me that the offending party was likely the Tracy Morgan post. I’ve now removed the embedded video…Mac Firefoxers, is everything back to normal?

World in My Eyes.

Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself.” The shape of things to come? Scientists at Berkeley conceive a way to use MRI imaging to “map” images in the brain. “Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time…It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30 to 50-year time frame.

The Great Firewall, block by DNS block.

“Depending on how you look at it, the Chinese government’s attempt to rein in the Internet is crude and slapdash or ingenious and well crafted. When American technologists write about the control system, they tend to emphasize its limits. When Chinese citizens discuss it — at least with me — they tend to emphasize its strength. All of them are right, which makes the government’s approach to the Internet a nice proxy for its larger attempt to control people’s daily lives.

Forget Ohio and Texas, Sen. Clinton…Want to see a “real” firewall in use? The Atlantic‘s James Fallows explains the nature and workings of China’s “Great Firewall.” “What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother…When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside? All the technology employed by the Golden Shield, all the marvelous mirrors that help build the Great Firewall—these and other modern achievements matter mainly for an old-fashioned and pre-technological reason. By making the search for external information a nuisance, they drive Chinese people back to an environment in which familiar tools of social control come into play.

No ship that small has a cloaking device…

“‘It’s very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night,’ said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. ‘Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.‘” Dick Cheney’s soul? Tonight’s lunar eclipse? No, a great leap forward in “transformational optics”…and invisibility cloaks. The “paper-thin material…absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.

Blu-Ray Triumphant.

The 2005-2008 format war is over and the verdict is in: The winner is Sony’s Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD goes the way of Betamax. “Toshiba Corp…is planning to give up on its HD DVD format for high-definition video, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp .” (So much for the Total Hi Def compromise.) I stopped buying DVDs when the war started three years ago. Looks like it’s now safe to return to the fold.

Like a Fly on the Wall.

Outside, it’s America, with all its stirring, hard-fought, and often thoroughly draining primary election drama. Inside the IMAX at 68th St., however, it’s Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington’s U2 3D, an impressive state-of-the-art concert film of Dublin’s famous foursome doing what they do best, and in three dimensions! Anyone who’s ever thrown in The Joshua Tree — that’s millions of people, obviously — and listened to the thrilling opening strands of “Where the Streets Have No Name” can probably imagine the potential of U2 filtered through an IMAX sound system and projected in multiple dimensions. All I can say, it’s pretty darned cool. If you’re not at all a fan of the band or their music, I’d guess you’d enjoy the 3D-effect but might get bored at some point. But, if you’re at all into U2, it’s definitely worth checking out. I’d consider myself an above-average fan of the band, although I’ve probably listened to the last two albums — All That You Can’t Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb — all of twice. (“My” favorite U2 is the Achtung Baby/Zooropa/Pop period, and I thought they took a step backward when they reverted back to instant-classic-rock. But, like I said, I probably haven’t given the new stuff its due.) At any rate, U2 3D really feels like the future in concert films. As a music experience, it’s better than having the best seats in the house (and the drunk girl on her boyfriend’s shoulders in front of you — while in 3D — never actually obscures your vision.)

So…U2 3D recounts the tale of four Irishmen — arguably the biggest rock band of the last 25 years (although I’m personally partial to R.E.M.) — in the midst of a huge sold-out stadium tour on the far side of the world (South America, to be exact.) Let’s see, we’ve got Bono (Paul Hewson) on vocals, Adam Clayton on the bass, Larry Mullen, Jr. on the drums, and The Edge (David Evans) on guitar. And, that’s about it, really — It’s just the show, no backstage banter or time on the bus or anything. With perhaps one exception (the start of the encore), the guys are definitely in their post-ironic, UN high commissioner mode for the show’s entire run, and the setlist mostly reflects that. Ok, sure, I had the usual concert quibble: Despite all the rousing political numbers in their back catalog, I’d love to have heard some of their more conflicted love songs therein too (“Love is Blindness,” “So Cruel,” “Running to Stand Still,” “If You Wear that Velvet Dress.”) (And, for that matter, I kept thinking it might’ve been more fun to catch the more subversive MacPhisto or PopMart tours in 3D instead, but ah well.) But while there are very few surprises therein, U2 do a surprisingly good job of covering most of their main bases over the past three decades. You can guess most of the songs they play, sure, but, they still fit almost all of ’em in there.

And, the actual concert notwithstanding, the 3D aspect of U2 3D is particularly impressive. I didn’t really know what to expect going in, but based on Beowulf I figured there’d be a lot of Bono trying to brain me with his mic stand. But that’s not how it plays. Yes, Larry Mullen has the most hyperreal three-story drum kit I’ve ever seen. But the real magic of 3D here is in how directors Owens and Pellington use it to transpose different images over each other to fashion a unique and wholly different visual perspective, just as The Edge layers various guitar parts atop one another to create his own sonic landscape. In short, too much is not enough. It’s actually possible to watch completely different things at once, because the various shots are operating in disparate planes — We may have Bono singing in the foreground, a close-up of Clayton jamming in the middle distance, a shot of the crowd in the lower background, and a view of the screens along the upper tier, all at the same time. It’s actually a much more striking effect than just a regular 3-D image, and it indicates more than anything else I’ve ever seen that 3D technology could really create an entirely new cinematic language. (See also Matt Zoller Seitz gushing about the medium.) At any rate, look, I gotta go, I’m running out of change (although, hopefully, Sen. Obama isn’t.) But, to sum up, if you’re into U2 or 3D, see U2 3D — you won’t be disappointed. Okay, Edge, play the blues!

Babel Bark.

Blah Blah Blah Berkeley…Scientists in Hungary have apparently developed a computer program that speaks basic canine. “After analyzing digital versions of the barks, overall the computer program correctly identified the kinds of barks the dogs made 43 percent of the time — about the same as humans’ 40 percent…The software identified ‘walk’ and ‘ball’ barks better than people, although people identified ‘play’ and ‘alone’ barks better than the software.

Hmm. I don’t want to dismiss the advance of science, but that’s a pretty low success rate. (And I’d wager most dog owners can get the thread of their own pet’s barking more often than 40% of the time.) More interestingly, though, “‘I’m pretty sure this could work with any animal vocal signals,’ Molnár told LiveScience” So, when the Dolphin Wars start, you’ll know why.

Which reminds me, longtime readers may remember that Berk and I were part of the test group for the American release of the Bowlingual. Alas, that version of this technology wasn’t really ready for primetime.

Operating, Generating, New Life.

“‘This raises a range of big questions about what nature is and what it could be…Evolutionary processes are no longer seen as sacred or inviolable. People in labs are figuring them out so they can improve upon them for different purposes.’” A front-page story in today’s WP announces we’re on the threshold of completely synthetic life — as in 2008 — made from enhanced or even artificial DNA. “Some experts are worried that a few maverick companies are already gaining monopoly control over the core ‘operating system’ for artificial life and are poised to become the Microsofts of synthetic biology…In the past year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been flooded with aggressive synthetic-biology claims.

Hail Roadrunner.

“‘Nature is the final arbiter of truth,” said Seager, the Lawrence Livermore computer scientist, but ‘rather than doing experiments, a lot of times now we’re actually simulating those experiments and getting the data that way. We can now do as much scientific discovery with computational science as we could do before with observational science or theoretical science.‘” Developers tease the premiere of the first “petascale” computer, due out next year. It will be “capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second [and] akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined.” Well I, for one, welcome our new petascale overlords.