Tom Shannon: The painter and the pendulum

TED visits Tom Shannon in his Manhattan studio for an intimate look at his science-inspired art. An eye-opening, personal conversation with John Hockenberry reveals how nature’s forces — and the onset of Parkinson’s tremors — interact in his life and craft.

Tom Shannon’s mixed-material sculpture seems to levitate — often it actually does — thanks to powerful magnets and clever arrangements of suspension wire.

FIFA.com looks at the latest in a growing batch of USA internationals heading overseas to test their mettle in the world’s most competitive leagues.

“The great American migration”

American players, once dismissed as merely athletic and eager role players on the old continent, have been heading across the Atlantic in their numbers of late. It seems Europe - and her biggest leagues - are increasingly recognising the value of the USA’s ever-improving talent pool. Join FIFA.com for a closer look at an intensifying migration of Americans abroad.

Here is some cool stuff, only some of which is tangentially related to American football. ;D

LED Football?!

Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts (now on ESPN LA) points to a nostalgia-inducing awesome thing: LED Football for iPhone, which is, as he puts it,

A replica of the greatest game ever, Mattel Handheld Electronic Football.

It’s also free for today only.

The more you know…

Speaking of tweeting and football, Bob Timmermann informs us,

Little known Super Bowl fact: Because New Orleans is playing in the game, the NFL rulebook will be replaced by the Napoleonic Code.

Yes, yes I am!

“Inside the Dodgers” asks the rhetorical yet vital question, “Are you ready for some baseball?”:

It’s the last official day of football season, so get it out of your system now and get ready to start watching America’s pastime.

Good gracious, yes!

Streaking Kings

The LA Kings have reached a franchise-record nine-game wins in a row and are going for 10 against crosstown rivals the Anaheim Ducks tomorrow. They’re currently in fourth place in the Western Conference.

Blaming the victims? ;)

bikecommutenews tweets,

Cyclists on busy roads a nuisance http://ow.ly/14NvT #bikenews

which prompted me to reply,

@bikecommutenews Yeah, to me, it seems like the *cars* are the nuisance on a busy road, not bicycles. :)

Noteworthy

Slashdot mentions a blog post by a computer science student who sticks with a pen and paper instead of a laptop for note-taking during class, “My Classmates Are Taking Their Notes Digitally, But I Can’t Fathom How They Keep Up”

I noticed today that as I frantically scribbled to keep up with my philosophy professor’s lecture, there was an audible hum of typing in the classroom. It was the first time I noticed that I could count more students using netbooks than notebooks to take notes in class.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to take notes with a pen and paper. As I’ve discussed previously, the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in my mind better than passive listening does, and studies have shown that it’s not just me.[…] Still, I know that my old-fashioned ways are quickly going out of style.

Or, Think(ing) different(ly).

In familiarizing myself with Linux as an OS and a community this last few years, I have of course come across the various internecine wars that have flared up during Linux’s evolution. I won’t try to summarize the kerfuffle for the uninitiated. Suffice to say that the conflicts start with the name of the OS itself (“Linux” vs. “GNU/Linux”) and blossom from there.

This is not a bad thing in and of itself — choice and change are welcome — but as a long-time Mac user approaching this personal terra incognita the result is, frankly, vertiginous. I just want to get some work done, and here I am needing to make a bunch of political choices.

Now, I don’t have to make a bunch of choices. I could go with the most popular distro (Ubuntu) and be done with it. Which is more or less what I did last year, as detailed in the post “Switching to Linux, but which one?” Then I flip-flopped between GNOME and Xfce for desktop environment.

But then the politics started creeping up:

• GNOME’s insistence on incorporating Mono-based apps, with accompanying Microsoft cooties.
• The Planet GNOME/GNU Project controversy (aka Richard Stallman vs. Miguel de Icaza).

Most recently is the discussion of replacing the OpenOffice suite with Google Docs in the Netbook version of Ubuntu (apparently not a done deal as “reported” by /.). As this comment by Qubit on that story says,

So they took a Free Software application out and replace it with a non-Free application from Google. What a great idea!

Although an office suite isn’t necessary for one to run Ubuntu, being able to create and consume office documents is admittedly a very common task. Making UNR able to interoperate “right out of the box” seems like a very high priority.

Qubit points to this essay by Bradley M. Kuhn from last month, “Back Home, with Debian!”, in which the author urges folks to switch to Debian to keep at bay Ubuntu’s apparent glee in incorporating non-free and proprietary software. His six specific reasons for moving away from Ubuntu and Canonical after several years are both damning and mirror my concerns. He sums it up:

When considering all this and taking a step back and look at the status of major distributions, my honest assessment is this: among the two primary corporate-controlled-but-dabbling-in-community-orientation distributions (aka Fedora and Ubuntu), Fedora is clearly much more software-freedom-friendly. Nevertheless, since I’ve twice gone corporate and ultimately regretted it, I decided it was time to go back home — back to Debian.

So, during the last week of 2009, I took nearly two full days off to reinstall and configure my laptop from scratch with lenny. I’ve thus been back on Debian since 2010-01-01. Twelve days in, I am very impressed. Really, all the things I liked about Ubuntu are now available upstream as well. This isn’t the distribution I left in 2004; it’s much better, all while being truly community-oriented and software-freedom-respecting. It’s good to be home. Thank you, Debian developers.

So, to recap my dilemma-filled experience thus far:

1. I am sympathetic with the open source/free software cause. I do not like the idea that monolithic corporations and proprietary software vendors can hold my computing experience hostage.
2. Thus, I am considering switching to Linux, especially due to the continuing over-commercialization of the Mac operating system and its integration of more and more hooks into various stores, locked-up user experiences, and other folderol.
3. However, I am also uncomfortable about Ubuntu for many of the same reasons, with its increasing intermingling with non-free software.
4. Likewise, GNOME’s flirting with Microsoft technology gives me the creeps.

What does that leave me with? Debian running Xfce maybe?

Of course, there’s always the option of going straight old-school CLI. ;D

Doing a bit of digging after seeing the Ramona Falls video for “I Say Fever”, I found out that it was directed by Stefan Nadelman.

From 2007, here is the beautiful and sad video for Menomena’s “Evil Bee”, also done by Nadelman. (Ramona Falls is the side project of Brent Knopf from Menomena.)

• More about Stefan Nadelman
• Menomena on MySpace
• Ramona Falls on Facebook
• Ramona Falls on MySpace