Look, I know that everybody’s very concerned about the disappearing honeybees. For the record, I am pro-bee: I enjoy consuming their sugary vomit both on toast and in tea. And out of all the invertebrates I think they run the best alternate reality games.

But the last couple of weeks have seen a ridiculously large portion of the internet devoted to concern about them. It’s difficult to find a comment thread that doesn’t have someone chiming in about the fucking bees. “This is somewhat OT,” they’ll say, “But have you heard about how cell phones are killing bees? I’m just as concerned about [Bush administration malfeasance / a blogger code of conduct / Sanjaya getting voted off Idol] as anyone else, but if we lose the bees we’ll have bigger things to worry about.”

This is frequently accompanied by a quote from Albert Einstein that, in an oddly contemporary, half-colloquial formulation, opines about the agricultural importance of honeybees, despite Einstein seemingly possessing no particular expertise about either subject (at least when the bees in question are traveling at less than the speed of light). I’m skeptical of this quotation’s provenance, but I do kind of like the idea of attributing random boosterism to history’s great thinkers. For instance, did you know that Rene Descartes is frequently credited with coining the phrase “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”? Or that John Donne was fond of composing epigrams pointing readers to the climatecrisis.net carbon calculator? It’s true! I’m pretty sure I read it on Wikipedia the other day.

Well, relax. According to a marginally-more-reputable source, the bees are probably going to be fine. As we drove to Stanford, Emily and I heard a full hour-long show on NPR about the disappearing insects. I can’t find a URL for the show — this was the Bay area, so I guess it’s probably only available on the goddamn WELL — but trust me: it was authoritative-sounding.

The roundtable discussion featured an entomologist whose lab was conducting the largest nationwide survey of colony collapse disorder, another entomologist who he seemed to not like very much, and a guy who’d written a book about California bees and, I think, lived among them and learned their ways. A parade of well-meaning San Franciscan hybrid owners called in with every possible bee-killing grievance that you, I and the rest of the internet could think of — electromagnetic radiation, GM crops, pesticides, the war in Iraq — and the bee experts methodically shot down each one. “Yes, it’s disconcerting,” they’d say, “But it’s happened in the past, long before this particular [chemical / technology / front in the global war on terror] existed.” They also said that there’s no apparent correlation between affected colonies’ proximity to developed areas, and that even bees that operate solely on organic crops have been afflicted. When the bees leave their colonies they abandon the site in a hurry — other animals avoid it for a while, too, even if there’s still honey present. The experts seemed to feel that a fungus, parasite or other natural pest was probably to blame. It’s happened before and the bees have recovered.

So let’s all calm down. The most pressing bee-related problem of this spring has been and continues to be how to get rid of the threatening, probably-Africanized ones that seem to be setting up shop at the far end of my porch. Yet on this subject, the Kos diarists have remained strangely silent. Priorities, people.

UPDATE: Prompted by arguing the point in comments over at Unfogged, I managed to track down the program in question. It’s from the imaginatively-named “Forum” on KQED. The show’s archive page is here. You can download the mp3 at the following link:

Forum (KQED) – Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Bees?

I’ve taken another crack at my full-text RSS script, polishing it up for a release over at EchoDitto Labs, and in the process I finally got around to adding a much-needed feature: letting users kill excess HTML with regular expressions. This isn’t a feature for the non-geeky, but it only takes a single nerd a few minutes to work out the necessary expressions and share them with the class. The result is cleaner functionality: the algorithm used to leave some feeds with duplicate titles, comments, or other cruft. This allows you to strip them out automatically. As a side effect, your RSS reader stop thinking that old posts are new just because another dope added a comment calling for impeachment hearings.

My intention is for this project to be somewhat disruptive, forcing publishers and advertisers to realize that RSS is a legitimate way for people to read a site and not just a syndicated form of advertising. And the sooner everyone gets this through their head the better: if you publish free content on the internet, you will not be able to control how people will consume it.

But I do recognize that in the short term it’s likely to be a pain in the ass for the bloggers I like and whose bosses don’t understand how to count or sell RSS impressions. So let’s start off by picking on someone who deserves the headache: here’s a full text feed for Michelle Malkin. It uses the new regex functionality to chop off the “digg this post” junk that would otherwise be at the bottom of every entry.

The way to use this new feature is pretty simple: pass URL-encoded regexes as GET parameters named “/regex\d*/i” (if you’re going to use this, that made sense to you). Have at it, fellow geeks. I’ll get things rolling and suggest the del.icio.us tag “fulltextrss” for the fruits of your labors.

UPDATE FOR REGEX AUTHORS: Looks like PHP’s magic quotes and/or URL encoding are screwing up the use of the + character in regexes. D’oh. I’ll have to see what I can do to fix that. In the meantime, both * and {} seem to work. For now just use {1,} as a substitute and you should be okay.

This is the second goddamn time, earning it the coveted title of the worst PHP software I’ve encountered that isn’t also a WordPress plugin. Enough already; it’s gone. JP recently pointed me toward the decidedly more reputable-seeming PHPSurveyor this week, so I guess I’ll be working on a DCist template for that.

Fortunately the jerk in question didn’t do a very thorough job of trashing my site: he just killed the files in directories off the top level (sparing my blog, inexplicably) and put up some triumphal pages expressing his disapproval of US/Israeli foreign policy. Even more fortunately, my host has a backup from the 15th that they’re pulling for me for $15. For those of you using the full text RSS script, sorry — it was one of the victims. A new & improved version will be available soon at a different location anyway, though, so just sit tight for now.

And hey, you know the saying: God doesn’t close a metasploit session without opening an interesting LUG thread. So I’ve got big things planned: a nightly backup to my own RAIDed SVN repository that in turn backs itself up to Amazon S3. It’ll be great.

UPDATE: Comments closed due to spam.

One reason it’s been quiet around here this week is that we’re kicking off a new, tech-centric blog over at EchoDitto. I haven’t quite decided how I’ll handle syndicating content from that site back here — I would really like to have the things I write there in my archives.

But until I get that worked out, head over to labs.echoditto.com to keep an eye on my geeky output. We’re just getting started, but we’ve already got a few interesting posts up:

• My thoughts on the incomprehensibility of the OLPC interface
• The first installment of JP’s LCD-hanging saga
• A script I wrote for DCist to create a mobile version of a site from an RSS feed

Have a look, stay tuned, etc. You can subscribe to the entries feed here.

Well, alright: ONE giant Nazi robot. But there may also be other giant robots of differing ideologies in this movie. I don’t want to tip my hand.

Found via Dan’s Data — he’s got links to the original, full-resolution version. It’s an amateur effort put together by a group of Italian CG artists (hence the occasionally laughable voice-acting).

Mostly this is just awesome. But I can’t resist the opportunity to use a giant Nazi robot as a pretense for pontification — namely, about the capacity for entertainment produced by hobbyists to compete directly with the stuff made by professionals. I’ve argued this point in the past, but have generally met with some skepticism about its capacity to apply to movies. I like to cite the fan-produced movie Star Wars: Revelations when I make this case. It’s undeniably impressive from a technical perspective, but its lousy acting is an admitted sticking point for my larger argument.

This clip (“Code Guardian”) suffers from the same problems as SW:R — it looks pretty good, but the voice acting is lousy and the script, to the extent that there is one, couldn’t be called remarkable. Still, I think this is a temporary problem. Perhaps it’s my own prejudices showing, but I think there’s a higher barrier to producing passable CG work than there is to producing a passable action/adventure screenplay or voiceover. Becoming adept at any of these tasks requires a lot of practice and/or talent, but only one discipline requires specialized tools and training. So in a way it’s surprising to see the more technical disciplines become the first to succeed at producing high-quality hobbyist entertainment. But in another way it isn’t surprising at all.

More »

First, a discussion of Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy. I haven’t got much to add; it’s interesting stuff, though.

Second, this article on Numenta, the brain-like computing startup from one of the guys behind Palm and Treo. I’d read this Wired article on the startup a little while ago. What they’re doing is interesting, and I’m sure they’ve got some very smart people working for them. But in both articles Hawkins takes pains to poo-poo neural networks as a failed AI technology, and to distance his own “HTMs” from them. Yet after reading the descriptions of his technology (and the training and parameter-tuning it requires) and accounts of the sorts of tasks that HTMs can perform, the tech sounds a lot like multilayer perceptrons. The dog-identifying tasks he points to are really just a more advanced case of the sorts of problems they had us solve in Intro to Neural Networks.

I’m all for moving beginner toolkits out of Matlab and into the open source world — I’m excited about Numenta, and hope it does well. But there’s no reason to put down the accomplishments of those who came before you when what you’re doing seems to be a variation on the techniques they pioneered.

I’ve always maintained that Fountains of Wayne’s “Prom Theme” is the best possible music for 18 year-olds to slow dance to before just-barely-not-impregnating one another. But Cristen’s mounting a strong challenge for prom theme supremacy, as proven by the whiteboard full of geek-related promisms that’s sitting in our office (she’s planning a party). My favorites so far:

• a night 2.0 remembr
• under the C++ / under the SQL
• pwnderful 2nite

If you’ve got any other ideas, lay ‘em on me. The success of an internet/highschool-themed chug-a-thon could potentially hang in the balance!

This is an unusually bad article on net neutrality. The author seems to think that Comcast dumping consumers who use a very large amount of bandwidth is an example of the non-neutral net in action, and then argues that neutrality == piracy OMG!!!

It’s pretty lame. Net neutrality isn’t about making people pay for the amount of bandwidth they use. It’s about degrading the quality of service in a way that favors one business over another. Pretending that the two are the same is like arguing that because I can order as much food as I want in a restaurant, I should also be able to pay to make other customers’ portions smaller or their waiters surlier. There have been a lot of attempts to confuse people in this manner, but this has got to be among the weakest.

Besides, there are plenty of ways to get on Comcast’s bad side without joining the pirate hordes — try running the Joost beta on a few machines for a month and see if it doesn’t earn you an angry letter or two. Or try running through a few dozen Linux distros to find one that suits you. I bet Comcast wouldn’t like that one bit.

Incidentally, the reason people justifiably hate Comcast’s bandwidth caps isn’t because they’re anti-neutral — it’s because Comcast won’t tell its customers what the caps are. There’s no hard limit set. Comcast just sends scary letters to the top X% of users every month, then terminates their contracts if they don’t move themselves into the meaty part of the curve by the next bill. Upgrading to business service is a way around this, of course. But it’s not priced for consumers (its cost reflects expected tax benefits as well as uptime, throughput and support guarantees that aren’t relevant to the consumer market). Consequently it isn’t a particularly viable option for most people, and they’re left wondering whether Comcast is going to decide to drag its hungrier customers away from a buffet line that had been advertised as all-you-can-eat.

I’ve never been fully head-over-heels for the original, but this is an awfully nice cover. I guess it’s been around for a couple of weeks, but if you haven’t seen it, give it a look.

Via Jump Cuts. Also: Dawn Landes’ MySpace.

This graffiti may not seem very remarkable. But in a town where every other beer comes in a pint glass with an Eagles logo on it, and any group of three or more adults can be counted on to eventually disrupt the parade/checkout line/funeral they’re attending with a chant of “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!!!”, it’s kind of noteworthy.

Also, note the stray mark between the N and S in “Redskins”. That’s presumably the point at which the artist was dragged away from the wall and beaten to death.