Month: March 2007

Over at my friend Lisa’s site — On the Face — there’s an article about Miriam Libicki’s autobiographical comic book series Jobnik! (“Israeli slang for someone who did their mandatory army service in a low-prestige job – like clerk or a truck driver”).

Lisa writes:

Raised in a religious home in Ohio, Miriam immigrated to Israel as a teenager and volunteered for service in the IDF. Classified by the army as excessively emotional and sexually ambivalent, and possessing poor Hebrew skills, she was not considered suitable for a job in Intelligence or as a medic, so instead she was sent to do clerical work at a base in the middle of nowhere. “The service was unbelievably boring, but I don’t regret it, mostly because that experience was the inspiration for my comics. Army service exposed me to an aspect of Israeli society that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.”

A sample:

To see more, there are five-page samples from each book in the series at Miriam’s site.

Based on the picture on the right, Sir Richard Branson either:

• lost a bet
• is celebrating the fact that phone number portability has finally come to Canada.

Time to start investigating my options! All right, mobile phone service providers — which one of you wants to cut an influential Canadian blogger a deal?

If you’re thinking about switching, Torontoist has a little “how-to” article.

File this under “we always believed it, but now experiments have confirmed it”: here’s a snippet from an Online Journalism Review article based on an eye-tracking study whose purpose is to drive better news article layout and design:

George Brett knows you’re staring at his junk, dude.

Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed.

Well, duh…

Here’s the not-so-obvious and somewhat disturbing follow-up:

Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.

After reading that I had these two reactions:

• Euuuuuugh!
• I think I just came up with an idea for website that’ll make me rich!

[via Kottke]

Shutdown Day: March 24th, 2007

“It is obvious that people would find life extremely difficult without computers, maybe even impossible,” reads the site for Shutdown Day, “If they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?

Shutdown Day takes place on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 and challenges everyone to see if they can survive for 24 hours without their computer. The site contains more information about this one-day exercise, a survey where you can indicate whether or not you’ll take part and a link to this video with people abusing hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of laptops in some kind of posturing that’s meant to approximate rebellion:

Speaking as a programmer, a technophile and an Asian, I would like to formally denounce Shutdown Day. It’s obviously some kind of wacko protest thing created by Neo-Luddites. I probably will spend the day away from my computer, but only to round up these techno-peasants so that they can be put to work in the Coltan mines.

A Modest Proposal

You want a day I can get behind? No Poetry Day. Modern poetry is self-indulgent crap written by NEMS (non-essential members of society), and many of us go for months without poetry with no ill effects. We could take turns standing in front of a group of our peers and even say how long we’ve gone without poetry, AA-style. It would rock.

As for those who would counter me with Audre Lourde’s line, “Poetry is not a luxury!”, I would gladly agree: luxuries are things people want and will pay big money for. Poetry is neither.

Think fast: what’s wrong with the pie chart titled Should we let US troops land at Shannon on route to Iraq? taken from the Irish Times, shown below?

Look closely: although the graph’s text correctly reports that 67% of the respondents said “no”, the graph’s graphics make it appear as though the “no” votes are in the minority. Pictured below is a proper rendition of the data, which took me mere seconds to do using Excel:

Not being familiar with the editorial slant of the Irish Times, I cannot say for certain whether it’s a FOX News-like selective view of the truth or mathematical illiteracy (a.k.a. innumeracy) on the part of the graphics editor. Indymedia Ireland thinks it’s the former.