"Hylozoic," the physical book: saying good-bye.
(Credit: Scott Stein/CNET)It's been widely debated since Amazon's Kindle began redefining the e-book space: when will e-books become more compelling than the physical books they were meant to replace?
For me, it happened. Today, at 2 p.m. Eastern, I went to Borders and returned a book I bought just a week ago. The reason was this: I found the book had popped up on the Amazon Kindle store for less. So I pulled the trigger.
The funny thing is I don't even have a Kindle. I have an iPhone 3G running the Kindle app. Yet, for me, in a crowded New York ecosystem where I barely have time or room to pull a book out of my backpack while crammed onto a subway, quick-fix iPhone reading does the trick better than anything else.
The book in question was "Hylozoic" by Rudy Rucker, an excellent and weird science fiction writer whose works I've become addicted to. I had tracked the release of his latest, a sequel to his equally odd "Postsingular," for months. I should have ordered on Amazon in the first place, where it was far cheaper than Borders' full retail, but I wanted instant satisfaction and got trigger-happy. Hylozoic wasn't available on the Kindle store when the book first hit the streets.
I submitted a "this should be a Kindle book" request to Amazon and went back to my life, when yesterday I discovered that "Hylozoic" had in fact been added...for $14.95.
... Read moreWatch what you say. Scientists in England have developed a computer that can not only read lips, but can tell the difference between languages.
Mouth movements can differ according to the language spoken.
(Credit: University of East Anglia)Researchers at the University of East Anglia's School of Computing Sciences developed the technology by statistically modeling the lip motions of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers. The resulting system is able to identify the language spoken by an individual with "very high accuracy," according to the university. Identifiable languages included English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish, and Russian.
What gives you away? The movement of your articulators--when you wag your tongue, jaw, and lips, you are generating the measurable characteristics of visual speech, the recognition of which is known as lip reading. Computer vision has already been used in lip reading, or "feature extraction," but this is the first time computers have been "taught" to recognize different languages, according to UEA (PDF).
"This is an exciting advance in automatic lip-reading technology and the first scientific confirmation of something we already intuitively suspected--that when people speak different languages, they use different mouth shapes in different sequences," said Professor Stephen Cox, who led the research along with Jake Newman. "For example, we found frequent 'lip rounding' among French speakers, and more prominent tongue movements among Arabic speakers."
The discovery could have practical uses for the deaf, law enforcement, and military units serving overseas, the researchers predict. With a little fine tuning it may also help you figure out what language your teenager speaks.
The 404 studio starts its transition from toxic-waste dump site into a full-on video production system with the help of Buzz Out Loud star Jason Howell. Seriously, there are about six cameras in here pointed at things I don't even want to mention.
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Print Screen/CNET/Tricaster)
Lots on today's show. First, the Interwebs have tracked down the location of the suspected Domino's Pizza where a few employees rolled dough down their backs and stuck cheese up their nose. Speaking of douche bags, there's a new book coming out highlighting the antics of "that guy." You know, the one that strikes up a conversation at the urinal or, like Justin, who sends you pictures that leave you having nightmares. Rounding out the first half of the show, a 6-year-old boy can't return a brand-new PSP to Wal-Mart after he discovers pr0n on it.
On the second half, we've got some great voice mails, including a call from a special someone in Hawaii who wants to have Justin's babies. Stephen Colbert gets a treadmill named after him aboard the International Space Station. If you're addicted to the Internet, there's an application on the Mac that will help. And finally, AT&T allows parents and jealous boyfriends and girlfriends to track the location of their loved ones. Call it a social network and it's not big brother; it's awesometown.
Again, please RSVP for tomorrow night's BOL and 404 meetup at the Delancey in New York City at 7:30 p.m. Right now, only age 21 and up can come. We're working on trying to get 18+ to get in, but no guarantees. It is a bar, after all. If you can't make it though, please call in at 1-866-404-CNET (2638) to leave a callback or message about something asinine one of us said.
EPISODE 321
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When Amazon.com hosts its anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.
The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.
The Journal says a Kindle-like device is a factor in the story. The work by King might later be published in physical book form by Scribner, King's current publisher. (Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, whose CBS Interactive unit is the publisher of CNET News.)
This wouldn't be King's first tech-related effort. During the dot-com boom, the best-selling author posted chapters of a serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet in a bid to see if readers would pay voluntarily for what they were reading. He suspended the work in late 2000 after the sixth installment.
An earlier Internet-publishing foray by King, Riding the Bullet, was a case study in Internet piracy.
Stephen Colbert's new Christmas album is at the top of our list.
We have a diverse batch of goodies for you this year. New additions include a duet with Elvis Presley and Martina McBride; a New Kids on the Block reissue; Stephen Colbert's debut Christmas album; and a Hanukkah jam from Erran Baron Cohen. And the great thing about holiday tunes is that you can recycle them every year! So, get acquainted with the new stuff, and then dig into our archive to resurrect the classic favorites.
The Corpus Clock at the University of Cambridge conveys a sobering message about the ephemeral nature of time.
(Credit: Corpus Christi College)A $1.8 million mechanical clock featuring a massive time-eating grasshopper made its debut at the University of Cambridge Friday, and famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking was on site to introduce the strange and provocative timepiece.
The Corpus Clock has no hands or digital numerals, but instead features slits cut into its gold-plated face. As the escape wheel moves, darting blue LED lights behind the openings pause at the correct hour, minute, and second.
Atop the clock, the blinking, tail-wagging grasshopper (or "chronophage," meaning "time eater") perpetually advances the perimeter of the 4-foot-wide round dial, devouring minutes in its snapping jaws to remind viewers that time is fleeting.
But even those with excessive amounts of cash and an affinity for giant insects won't be able to buy a Corpus Clock for their living room anytime soon. It was designed specially for the exterior of Corpus Christi College's new library as both a radical new way of telling time and a hard-to-miss piece of public art with an existential message.
On the hour, the college explains, the clock "reminds us of our mortality with the sound of a chain dropping into a wooden coffin. More playfully, the clock plays tricks on the observer, seeming occasionally to pause, run unevenly, and even go backwards."
The Corpus Clock runs on an electric motor, which reportedly will last for the next quarter century.
Seven years in the making--with part of it engineered underwater at a secret Dutch military research institute--the clock was created by inventor and horologist John Taylor, a student at Corpus Christi College in the '50s. He designed the timepiece as a tribute to celebrated 18th century English clockmaker John Harrison, inventor of the "grasshopper escapement" mechanism, an internal gear device. Watch a video of Taylor and his creation here.
Stephen Colbert
Should anything happen to Earth, the human race will now be insured.
Comedy Central announced Monday that the host of The Colbert Report will have his DNA digitized and sent to the International Space Station (ISS). According to the Associated Press, Stephen Colbert's gene package will be carried there by famed video game designer Richard Garriott, who will travel to the station in October.
Garriott will deposit the "Immortality Drive," a time capsule that will include human DNA and records of humanity's greatest accomplishments, along with personal messages collected specifically for the project.
This will be the second time Colbert goes intergalactic. In May, he was the first late-night host to interview an astronaut, Garrett Reisman, while he was in space.
In a statement, Stephen Colbert said he was thrilled to have his DNA shot into space, as this would bring him "...one step closer to my lifelong dream of being the baby at the end of 2001," referring to the 1968 sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In a statement, Garriott said: "In the unlikely event that Earth and humanity are destroyed, mankind can be resurrected with Stephen Colbert's DNA. Is there a better person for us to turn to for this high-level responsibility?"
Stephen Colbert's answer to that rhetorical question would probably be "no."
The man who openly tore down the U.S. President during the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years back, Stephen Colbert, doesn't mess around with a BlackBerry, or any sort of Nokia phones. To put it in Stephen's own words, "I use an iPhone...and I got it for free, motherf***er!"
The guys from CNET's The 404 podcast stopped by The Colbert Report yesterday for a few laughs. During an audience preshow Q&A, they did what any enterprising blogger would do: asked about his cell preference.
Other than the iPhone, Colbert also mentioned that he was working with Apple to get 30 MacBook Air notebooks shipped around the world in manila envelopes, just to see how they fared without any sort of packing. The stunt was moving swimmingly until Apple realized Colbert wasn't joking. Pity Apple doesn't have the sense of humor (or the $60,000 in computers to spare) to see the experiment through.
(Credit:
Comedy Central)
Shortly after the nascent Stephen Colbert '08 presidential campaign filed to run on the Democratic ballot in South Carolina's primary, the state party voted on Thursday to kick the colorful comedian out of the race. According to the Associated Press, party officials met for approximately 40 minutes and then voted 13-3 to remove Colbert from the ballot.
Meanwhile, many members of the "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert" group on Facebook, which currently hovers around 1,300,000 in membership, refuse to give up.
"I think it's stupid that they are trying to put a stop to his campaign because they believe it is just a ploy to further his comedy routine," one infuriated member of the Colbert Nation wrote on the message board for the "1,000,000 Strong" group. "From what I have seen he is probably the most realistic person running right now."
"You know what?" another asked. "If Arnold Schwarzenegger can be governor of California, then Stephen Colbert can certainly be president. What's wrong with these people?"
Others started posting telephone numbers for the state Democratic Party's office and began linking to offshoot groups to promote a Colbert write-in campaign.
Colbert, who hosts the Comedy Central program The Colbert Report, announced last month that he planned to run for president--but only in South Carolina as a "favorite son."
On a related note, Thursday was a sad day for purveyors of the green screen challenge everywhere: in addition to Colbert's rejection from the Democratic primary, indie-rock band and onetime Colbert foe The Decemberists canceled the remainder of their North American tour.
Stephen Colbert
(Credit: Comedy Central)On October 16, Stephen Colbert announced that he is seeking the presidential nomination from both the Republican and Democratic parties in his home state of South Carolina. Though Colbert has never asserted he is serious (he recently told students at Columbia University, "I don't actually want to win, I just want to f**k with people."), his candidacy continues to be covered by just about every media outlet you can think of. Some people fully support his run for president whereas others are less than excited about turning the U.S. into a Colbert Nation.
While it's interesting that Colbert continues to garner coverage for his bid on the White House, what fascinates me is the level of support his campaign has generated. It's clear that many Americans are frustrated with the state of politics and their voting options; this is the reason that less than one third of voters stated they would definitely vote against Stephen Colbert for President in a Rasmussen poll, and six percent said they'd definitely vote for him despite the fact that he's a Democrat with no political experience who plays a caricature of Bill O'Reilly on television.
Of course, this is actually the same story that made its way through the theater last year in the Robin Williams vehicle, Man of the Year. In the film Williams is more Stewart than he is Colbert, but the premise is the same, a late-night political satirist decides to run for president and manages to gather far more support than anyone expected. He actually winds up getting elected in the movie due to a technical glitch, but surrenders his victory after learning his success was only made possible through computer error.
It's unlikely that Diebold will deliver Colbert the win, or that he will even make it onto the national ballot, but the success he's already achieved in his campaign is indicative of the same hunger for a real alternative that Man of the Year tapped into. As the New York Times reports on their blog The Caucus, the Facebook group 1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert has already eclipsed their stated goal and left Barrack Obama in the dust. Obama has the second most popular Facebook group amongst the presidential contenders but hasn't even accrued 400,000 supporters in the 8 months the group has been active.
Jon Friedman at MarketWatch has suggested that Colbert's campaign is nothing more than an attempt to bolster sales of his new book. Friedman argues that, "The clever host of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" is holding the usually clear-eyed media in the palm of his hand and bringing out the worst in some star-struck journalists who should know better," but Allison Kilkenny at The Huffington Post sees things differently:
This is the root of all that is wrong with American politics. It's the "you can't win, so sit down" attitude. Supporters of this philosophy forget that runners don't necessarily have to win to shape public opinion. Victories are won with ideas, and true leaders possess the vision and wisdom to know that sometimes revolutions happen gradually.Sometimes, revolutions begin with one person standing up and saying: "I know you don't take me seriously. I know I'm the clown in the room, but damnit, I'm trying anyway."
I tend to agree with Kilkenny. It often feels as if a politician's influence can be bought and sold like a commodity on the stock market (Colbert himself alluded to this when he announced that his campaign would be sponsored by Dorritos), and this tends to be true at both the national and local level. Colbert and other also ran candidates are doing what they can to shed light on this sordid system we call politics. Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford professor and the author of Free Culture has been working to eradicate political corruption not as candidates, but as an expert on culture and a beacon in the academic community, and he's not the only one working to build alternatives to the current system.
There's obviously a long way to go before we can develop something that is truly representative of the will of the people, of all people, but it's encouraging to know that people are working on it. The classic saying is true: democracy is not a spectator sport; with the advent of the internet and Web 2.0, I'm hopeful that we can begin moving toward direct democracy and a system that isn't governed by the economic influence of special interests and the political elite.
In the words of John Lennon, "You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."
Here's to Stephen Colbert, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and every other person, who has ever run for office knowing their odds of being elected are a long shot, at best, but are committed to making a change in whatever capacity they are able: good luck and never, never, give up!
