I want a thing. It needs to be smallish, and plug into my TV via HDMI or VGA. It needs to automatically find an SMB share on my network, and expose all of the video files (MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and DiVX) in there to the user via a nice menu system. Bonus points if this thing has an 802.11n card in it, so that it can stream content wirelessly. Support for 5.1 and subtitles would be nice too. It needs to work out of the box and be automatic.

I’m not interested in building or supporting a Myth box. It’s a beautiful thing when it works, but I just don’t have the time or patience for that kind of thing anymore. Similarly, I don’t want an Apple TV box, which is beautiful too (for different reasons), but too restrictive.

Any suggestions, gentle reader?

I’m not a big fan of zoos, generally. Animals in captivity as entertainment isn’t something I agree with – especially when they’re not native. If the purpose is education, research and helping to save a species from extinction, then I’d be prepared to have a discussion, but with today’s education turning into “edutainment”, there’s certainly a lot of grey areas and slippery slopes.

Melbourne Zoo is horrible. I’ve been there once, and found it terribly depressing. Bored animals in concrete cages far too small for them. Vapid and generally devoid of any educational or research activity, it’s all about entertainment. It’s on my list of places I will never go again. There are two other zoos under the Zoos Victoria masthead – one in Werribee and the other in Healesville. I’ve never been to the Werribee one, but I was somewhat comfortable with the one in Healesville – it features native flora and fauna only, and (with a few exceptions) isn’t as brash and commercial as Melbourne Zoo. Recent events have changed my mind, however, and I’m no longer going to go to Healesville Sancturay, or recommend anyone else does either.

In the past week, the RSPCA and The Age have been very critical of Zoos Victoria for making some fairly poor decisions: repeatedly stabbing an elephant, allowing animals to escape by placing them in inappropriate enclosures, starving birds to death, and (bizarrely) bringing an echidna to an auto race.

This story takes the cake, however. Zoo chief’s home became menagerie for fund-raising event. What?!

Zoo sources said native animals that were removed from Melbourne Zoo and the Healesville Sanctuary — including a koala, parrots, snakes, lizards and a possum — were paraded around the party, a launch of a fund-raising foundation at Andrew Fairley’s Kooyong Road residence in November.

An orphaned short-beaked echidna is also believed to have been taken to the party. It died a month later after a senior keeper from Healesville Sanctuary took it to the V8 Supercars on Phillip Island.

This is madness, and totally irresponsible. Zoos Victoria ought to be ashamed of themselves.

“We’d like to do a song, ladies and gentlemen, about how love kind of disappears after about 3 days… and you sort of like think ‘I kind of like you but maybe it’s not really working’. You decide that you’ll lock yourself away in a room and fill yourself with as many drugs as you can. And you do this, ladies and gentlemen, and you have such a good time that you forget that you don’t actually love them anymore and it doesn’t matter. You’re walking along one day, and because you’re sort of like this indie rocker, you sort of like hear this Weezer song that says ‘Oooh I look like Buddy Holly and she’s Mary Tyler Moore’ and you think you’re Buddy Holly and she’s Mary Tyler Moore and you kind of like start to think ‘That’s pretty cool.’ Then you kind of look in the window of the shop that you’re going into to buy some bread and you realize that you are actually … Burt Reynolds … and she’s Sally Fields … and you’ve been cast in Smokey and the Bandit 98. You have a toupee… and she’s not The Flying Nun anymore. So that’s kind of bummed you out and you think ‘We really didn’t find love, but we had a lot of fun on the drugs … but if it’s going to make me look like Burt Reynolds and you look like Sally Fields maybe we have to look at doing something else or maybe take another drug that makes us feel, like, kind of better than that.’ But you know in this time, ladies and gentlemen, you know in this time that … Everything Is Fucked.”—Warren Ellis (source))

Thank you Mr Ellis. Oh, and gentle reader, if you want to listen to a fantastic soundtrack, go pick up the work that Ellis did with his friend Nick Cave for the film The Assassination of Jesse James. I’m listening to it right now, and it’s stunning.

The film critic Roger Ebert once said that a measure of a good film is the idea of wanting to have dinner with the characters in the film. If sitting around and having dinner would be an enjoyable thing, it’s more likely to be a good film. As flippant as that may be, there’s some truth to that, and I think it applies to other types of media as well: blogs, books, television.

I like watching Top Gear. Not really because of the car stuff, but because the hosts are so good. Using Ebert’s measurement, I’d love to have them over for dinner. Same thing with Spicks and Specks, Rockwiz and (the subject of this entry) Vasili’s Garden. I’m not really into gardening, but Vasili and his guests are always so entertaining that they end up rating quite well on Ebert’s eat-dinner-with-them scale.

I just read in The Age that Vasili will be moving back to his community-TV roots on Channel 31 from national broadcaster SBS. This means less fame and fortune, probably less money, and less access to high-end production facilities. There was a dispute about the style of the show: SBS wanted polish and glamour, and Vasili wanted to keep doing his successful home-movie style stuff. So the stubborn so-and-so ditched SBS and went back to Channel 31 where he (presumably) has more creative control over his show. I can’t wait to see him back on the air.

The World Question Centre has released the results of their 2008 question, which is:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

There are some exceptional answers to this question, and while I haven’t read them all, here are some highlights I’ve read so far:

It is a simple fact: hardly any of my software even still runs at all!

– Some typical self-important wank from Kai

These [local experts on human behaviour] are the thousands or millions of bright professionals and practitioners in each of thousands of different occupations.  They are the people who went to our high schools and colleges, but who found careers with higher pay and shorter hours than academic science.  Almost all of them know important things about human nature that behavioural scientists have not yet described, much less understood.  Marine drill sergeants know a lot about aggression and dominance.  Master chess players know a lot about if-then reasoning.  Prostitutes know a lot about male sexual psychology.  School teachers know a lot about child development.  Trial lawyers know a lot about social influence.  The dark continent of human nature is already richly populated with autochthonous tribes, but we scientists don’t bother to talk to these experts.

– Geoffrey Miller is smashing down the ivory tower

I realised too that I had to learn to evaluate opinions separately from those who were giving them: the truth might sometimes come out of a mouth I disliked, but that didn’t automatically mean it wasn’t the truth.

– Brian Eno questions himself.

[Doris] Lessing urges us to take pause and to reconsider the capacity of our language and cultural systems to proffer knowledge to those outside of our immediate public.

– Museum curator Hans Ulrich Obrist brings up something I’ve been thinking about myself: What good is all this stuff we have? (Artists, of course, call them “objects”).

Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.

– Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at CalTech realises he’s part of the scientific establishment, and why that’s okay.

Russian America was a social and technological experiment that worked, until political compromises brought the experiment to a halt.

– George Dyson looks at something I’ve often wondered about: What was Alaska like while the Russians were there?

The problem for me was that just as I couldn’t find any evidence that there was a god, I couldn’t find any that there wasn’t a god. I would have to call myself an agnostic. At first, this seemed a little wimpy, but after a while I began to hope it might be an example of Feynman’s heroic willingness to accept, even glory in, uncertainty.

– Alan Alda works on the God question.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers’ market, preferably), this-year’s laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

– WELL co-founder Stewart Brand is trying hard to piss off his disciples.

A sentence of Ludwig Wittgenstein from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6) was like a dogma for me: “Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. — The limits of my language signify the limits of my world ” (my translation). Now I react to this sentence with an emphatic “No!”.

– Neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel doesn’t know why he changed his mind about this, and that’s a good thing.

I thought that it would change people. I thought it would allow us to build a new world through which we could model new behaviors, values, and relationships. In the 90’s, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person’s consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60’s.

– Douglas Rushkoff can’t see the forest for the trees.

In addition to the myth of two nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end, there are other myths that need to be demolished. There is the myth that, if Hitler had acquired nuclear weapons before we did, he could have used them to conquer the world. There is the myth that the invention of the hydrogen bomb changed the nature of nuclear warfare. There is the myth that international agreements to abolish weapons without perfect verification are worthless. All these myths are false. After they are demolished, dramatic moves toward a world without nuclear weapons may become possible.

– Freeman Dyson seeks to rewrite modern myths.

Imagine if your company or organization had one fellow [the CPU] who sat in an isolated office, and refused to talk with anyone except his two most trusted deputies [the Northbridge and Southbridge], through which all the actual work the company does must be funneled.

– In descibing his change of mind, David Dalrymple accidentally comes up with a wonderful way to describe the modern computer.

As for me, I’ve changed my mind about cars. Four doors are good.