Month: September 2007

Web abuse

Rideau Canal

Spam is terribly frustrating stuff, partly because of how it is inconvenient and partly because of how it is a cancer that wrecks good things. (See previous: 1, 2, 3) The ideal internet is a place of free and honest communication. Spammers create the need for extensive defenses and scrutiny which take time to maintain and diminish that openness and spontaneity.

If you think the spam in your email inbox is bad, just consider yourself lucky that you do not also have to deal with comment and trackback spam on two blogs, a wiki, YouTube videos, and a half dozen secondary places. There are even phony marketing bots on Facebook now: keep your eyes peeled for ‘Christine Qian’ and ‘her’ ilk.

In the end, while decentralized approaches to spam management are time consuming and annoying, they are probably better than centralized systems would be. With the latter, there is always the danger of the wholesale manipulation and censorship of what is able to find its way online, or be transmitted across the web.

Paprika

While the plot is definitely nothing special, the visuals of this film make it entirely worthwhile. Paprika is whimsical, quite beautiful at times, and capable of provoking widespread and audible amusement in the audience. This is a film that should only really be seen in theatres, given how much of the appeal and personality resides in the artwork.

One factor distinguishing Paprika from the wonderful Studio Ghibli films that seem to dominate the mass market for anime in the west is the way in which it has a bit of a dark edge to it at times. Nothing like Perfect Blue, but there were some scenes that would not have been in a PG-rated film, if they had not been animated.

Paprika is playing at the Bytown Theatre for the next week or so.

Spook Country

Ottawa War Museum entrance

William Gibson is an author who burst into the world with a brilliant first novel, then never did anything equivalent again. Neuromancer is a remarkable piece of science fiction and marked the starting point of the cyberpunk sub-genre. Unfortunately, Gibson’s further forays into that terrain – which extended across about twenty years – never produced something of even moderately comparable quality.

Recently, he has moved on to writing technology-centred books set in the present. Spook Country, which I finished today, is his latest such work. It follows Pattern Recognition, his first novel of this type, and improves on it to a certain extent. As such, it is probably the best thing he has written since Neuromancer. Like Pattern Recognition, it is better at setting up a mystery than it is at revealing an interesting solution at the end. Part of what made Neuromancer so remarkable was the strength of the characters. There was no danger of confusing them or having them become blank nothings. Spook Country‘s most significant flaw is that, for all but a few characters, there is no such definition, and thus no such interest.

If you have never read Gibson, and have any appreciation for science fiction, I recommend reading Neuromancer. If you have read it already, you would be well advised to give Spook Country a try. If you are a technologically inclined Vancouverite, you are likely to find every page addressing you directly.

Decimal time

Parliamentary stonework

Time has been discussed here before. As it stands, it is a lot like the imcomprehensible currency system in England before a Pound became 100 pence. Unlike currency, however, time has relatively good reasons for being confusing. The day, the year, and – to a lesser extent, the month – have some kind of basis in the astronomical reality of our planet. Having years of a sensible length is especially important, if we want the heavens to be at all easy to keep track of.

Of course, revolutionaries are known for overthrowing the staid traditional order. As such, there have been efforts to revise time. The French Republican Calendar is probably the most notable example. It confused millions of people for a good number of years, both after the revolution and during the Paris Commune.

A few other examples of decimal time can be found here. The oddest, perhaps, is ‘Swatch Internet Time‘ which sought to do away with time zones altogether. Sir Sandford Fleming would not be amused.