I just finished my final script for Writing for New Media. It’s not an entire story, just a couple of scenes. I need to run and print it now, but I’m really getting close to be done for REAL!
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3 Days and Several Projects to Go
Only 3 more days and a few more school projects stand in my way for leaving to Utah. Anna wants me to bring the dog – which pretty much means I’m bringing the dog. I’m really sick of the dog. Would you like a really nice dog? I just don’t have time or interest in giving her the attention she needs.
Jim Hill has an interesting conspiracy theory about how Roy Disney and Stanley Gold have reportedly recruited members of the Jim Henson family to help out with their bid to oust Michael Eisner.
From Jim Hill Media (archived):
You see the strategy that’s emerging here? “Michael Eisner can’t get Steve Jobs to agree to a Pixar contract extension. But Roy Disney — who’s a friend of John Lasseter — can.” And “Michael Eisner missed out on closing a deal to acquire the Jim Henson Company (again) in May. But the Henson family is willing once more to do business with the Walt Disney Company … provided that Michael Eisner is out of the picture.”
This is really an ingenious strategy on Roy and Stanley’s part, don’t you think? Getting Disney shareholders to overlook the modest gains that the corporation has made over the past year by pointing out how much better the Walt Disney Company could theoretically be doing if Michael Eisner weren’t in the hot seat.
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How to Make a Diamond
From Wired:
“Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel.”
Wired writer Joshua Davis reports that two companies, Gemesis and Apollo are synthetically producing diamonds. Apollo’s diamonds have reached a level so close to traditionally mined diamonds that they are almost indistinguishable. In fact they are only identifiable because of the fact that they are too perfect.
This leads to the inevitable question, “How will consumers feel about them? The mystique of natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful – De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply.”
One gem wholesaler states, “If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America. It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid.”
Jef Van Royen, a senior scientist at the Diamond High Council, disagrees. He contends that, “If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone. It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week.”
The article continues by pointing out that selling diamonds as gemstones is just the tip of the iceberg. Next up: the computing industry, where diamonds could theoretically be used as semiconductors.
Silicon processors are limited by the fact that as processors get faster they also get hotter. Eventually the technology will lead to processors that get so hot as to melt the silicon.
Diamonds on the other hand could handle the heat. In order to form microchip circuits, however, positive and negative conductors are needed and diamond is an inherent insulator – it doesn’t conduct electricity.
From the article:
But both Gemesis and Apollo have been able to inject boron into the lattice, which creates a positive charge. Until now, though, no one had been able to manufacture a negatively charged, or n-type, diamond with sufficient conductivity. When I visit Butler in Washington, he can barely contain his glee. “There’s been a major breakthrough,” he tells me. In June, together with scientists from Israel and France, he announced a novel way of inverting boron’s natural conductivity to form a boron-doped n-type diamond. “We now have a p-n junction,” Butler says. “Which means that we have a diamond semiconductor that really works. I can now see an Intel diamond Pentium chip on the horizon.”
The interenet is changing the way election campains in the States are run. Of course if you are a miserable failure then you probably want to stay as far away from that thar interweb as possible.
Search the web for miserable failure.
Quite possibly the coolest cell phone yet. Actually I don’t know how it compares to other phones but it looks pretty cool to me.
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Trouble Brewing in Sandy, Utah
Anna’s family has just moved to Sandy, Utah. I hope they realize what kind of troubled people they are now living with.
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David Cronenberg on Alias
Via Amy’s Robot Blog:
David Cronenberg was on Alias last night, playing a neuroscientist with an experimental method for recovering lost memories through the use of drugs and lucid dreaming. The episode itself is almost an homage to Cronenberg’s ideas and visual style…as Sidney undergoes DC’s process, the show turns into one of the more visually and conceptually cinematic bits of TV I’ve seen in a while, full of Cronenberg’s illogical logic, layered realities, and of course the requisite bit of Cronenberg’s nonsensical corniness. In any case, before the experiment gets started, DC’s character offers a nice little monologue about simulation, postmodernism, lucid dreaming, and fake bacon. Because [Amy is] nice people, [she] offers you this:
David Cronenberg on Alias talking about postmodernism and reality [mp3, 2.5 mins, 1.8 mb]If you missed him this week, he’ll be on next week, too.
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Google Toolbar Installed
My Google Toolbar is now installed! Try it for yourself. The Google toolbar makes it extrememly easy to make blog posts while simultaneously surfing the web.
Apparently the MiMail Worm is also targeting Disney Sites. Now I REALLY hope that guy falls off a cliff… or gets hit by a bus…. or gets hit by a bus at the bottom of a cliff … or maybe a really fast train. Whichever.