It’s somewhat incredible to discover that the “Revenge From Mars” pinball table, which is one of the four machines that I’ve ever played to the point of intimate knowledge and quasi-expertise, now is the subject of a full-length documentary film. I knew the game was noteworthy for its hybrid nature — part traditional pinball, part videogame — but I had no idea it represented a revolutionary (and controversial) attempt to save the doomed pinball industry.
I played on this table over a multi-year period in college at the Gatekeeper, a dive bar in Middletown, Conn., also notable for its steamed cheeseburgers and homemade beef jerky. I was decent at “Mars,” but a woman in the class ahead of me was far superior. I eventually owned the top score on “Theater of Magic,” which was installed at Wesleyan’s campus center and became an obsession over the course of my senior year. The other two pinball tables that have figured prominently in my life are, above all, the “Comet” table by Williams, which my uncle owned and left at my family’s house for a few years when I was 7, and “Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure,” which the local hotdog resturant had in residence for many years when I was in middle school and high school.
I’m sure there are pinball obsessives who know about the personalities and achievements of the legendary pinball designers. This documentary, “Tilt,” looks like it’ll give me a taste of that world.
New feature here at OSP. Over on the right-side hyperlinkalley, you’ll notice a new entry that takes you to my shared items on Google Reader. I guess you’d have to term that feed a blog of all blogs I read, with a notability threshold that keeps out the riff raff. A meta-blog, in other words. In a way, however, its more honest than my prime blog because it shows even better than a “via” link where I do my reading. Although far from transparent, I think the online world would be a better place if eveyone offered an RSS consumption digest like this.
Thank you, Google Reader, for continuing to be the best application ever. (If you use Google Reader yourself, which you really ought to, then by all means add me as shared item-friend and let me know in the comments so I can add your items to my feed.)
Almost through Charles Stross’ “Accelerando,” a fantastic singularity sci-fi novel. I’m really enjoying this book, to the point where I’ll likely start writing a slew of half-baked posts about the singularity. I guess I’ll hold back until I’m done. If you want to read along at home, which is totally in your interest, since the book is so good, find the entire thing here for free. (Open your heart to the free e-books, people.)
On Mr. Stross’s blog this week, he’s got some incredible material on the current thinking into the Fermi Paradox (i.e. we’re intelligent, and that means intelligence is possible, so how come can’t we observe evidence of alien intelligences?). Here’s one of the ideas he brings up:
But the Great Filter argument isn’t the only answer to the Fermi Paradox. More recently, Milan M. Ćirković has written a paper, Against the Empire, in which he criticizes the empire-state model of posthuman civilization that is implicit in many Fermi Paradox treatments. As he points out, for a civilization to be visible at interstellar distances it needs to be expanding and utilizing resources in certain ways. There is a widespread implicit belief among people who look at the topic [] in manifest destiny, expansion to fill all possible evolutionary niches, and the inevitability of any species that develops the technology to explore deep space using that technology to colonize it. As Ćirković points out, this model is based on a naive extrapolation of historical human models which may be utterly inapplicable to posthuman or postbiological societies.
In other words, the answer to Fermi is we don’t see evidence of other intelligences because advanced minds aren’t raw-material consumers like us primitives. When we project an idea of an advanced civilization, we make it look just like us but on space steroids. If getting advanced means using resources differently, which seems likely enough, all these projections based on human evolutionary history up to now may not be quite accurate.
Here’s the trailer for the new Joss Whedon show. Eliza Dushku stars as a programmable hottie-for-hire, but we also get Helo, cranky Zion military commander guy from the shitty Matrix films, and sexy British love-interest lady from Rushmore. I liked most of Buffy and loved Firefly, so I’ll give this show a spin, but I’m not convinced ahead of time that it’s going to be great.
You know what the Internet has now? A very well-executed video mashup of Miss Piggy singing the Peaches hit “Fuck the Pain Away.” Oh, the nostalgia! This song was a college-party staple. Miss Piggy, with her sexually aggressive muppet persona, is perhaps the ideal choice of cover artist. (via)
I was remiss yesterday in not remarking on the ten-year anniversary of Kerry Wood’s 20-strike out game. Sports trivia, to be sure, but also — let us not mince words — one of the greatest individual performances in the history of baseball, a game with an epic and obsessively quantified statistical history. It is, arguably, the single most dominant display of pitching.
For perspective, consider this: He faced 29 batters and defeated 20 of them with strikeouts. No one else has ever done that, despite many thousands of attempts. This happened in the fifth game of his rookie season. Ten years later, Kerry Wood’s career has been marred by physical misfortune and failure, which makes his long-ago achievement all the more poignant.
On a personal level, this event is interesting because I absolutely remember it as if I had watched the game on TV. The memory is as determinate as could be in my mind. The facts, however, make my viewership vanishingly unlikely: May 6, 1998 was a Wednesday, my mom’s birthday, and the game started at 1:20pm. I must have been at high school, right? But I would swear on the memory!
Unlike almost every New Yorker in my age group, I know a good deal about the city’s Access-A-Ride service, having written more than a few “action desk”-style items on the subject. Never once did I get to tackle it from the coveted “burst into deadly flames” angle. In case you’re wondering, the van took virtually no time to go up, and there was nothing like the shrapnel-producing explosion movies teach us to expect in these situations. (Also, no one died inside.)
Here’s me (left) and co-worker Roy watching from twelve floors up:
Also Keith
More action-packed photography of the incident can be seen here and here and particularly here, where the fireman is brandishing that battle ax tool. Always loved those, never seen one in use before. These are from co-worker Kurt’s Flickr stream, which is highly recommended. His non-emergency work is even better.
I couldn’t agree more. My limited experience covering the workings of Albany, as refracted through Queens, made it very clear that the political dysfunction in New York’s fair state capital is well beyond irredeemable. NYC, by contrast, has been a model of effective governance for years now (although it remains to be seen if the city’s good-government sense can survive a real recession led by the financial sector). But even so, I’m partly motivated by sheer spite. The completely daft faux-populism of the anti-congestion political hacks burns me up, and the era of the $4 MTA ride is nigh as a result of Albany’s bullshit antics.
Almost through 
