Monthly Archives: August 2009

New Blog, and More Ogg

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Posted by skullbochs on 24 August 2009 – 6:42 pm
Filed under ain't that nifty
Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

As you may or may not know, I have a new blog, Being a Bad Ocelot. So far, I’ve used it to embed Ogg Theora videos.

I’m passionate about Theora. I want it to rule the Internet. The main thing that makes me confident that it will eventually do so is that it’s free. A lot of computer games now use Ogg Vorbis, the audio codec, internally because it gives great quality and doesn’t cost the company a dime to use it. When companies realize that they can stream Theora without paying an MPEG tax, I think they’ll start switching.

But some extra things need to heppen if we really want Theora to go mainstream. First, of course, Theora needs to keep getting better. If you’re good with video compression, you might want to volunteer to help improve it. Another thing is that major streaming video centers need to adopt it. Dailymotion already has, and I hope YouTube will. Browsers need to adopt it, too. For the most part they are: Firefox already has, and the next versions of Chrome and Opera will, as well. Safari can use Theora if you install the XiphQT plugins for QuickTime.

Some myths also need to be dispelled. First, yes, Theora is ready. It’s a good codec; not the best codec, but then, JPEG isn’t the best image format, either. But they get the job done, everybody can use them, and they don’t cost a dime.

Secondly, one thing that I think will make many people and companies hesitate about direct <video> embedding of any kind is that it will be easy to download them. But the fact is that it’s never been hard. Anything sent over the Internet can be captured en route — Safari has an “Activity Window” that logs all files coming in, even from Flash applets — and there are several sites and bookmarklets that let you easily download videos from YT, etc. If you really feel that you need to keep people from watching your videos offline, you really need to use something like Silverlight with its support for Microsoft’s DRM scheme. But considering major companies feel comfortable enough using YouTube (the easiest vid site to download from) to distribute entire shows and movies, some in HD, you may want reconsider whether you really stand to gain anything by making it hard for your users to download to your videos to their computer.

More on Theora, with some tips on using it: Working with Ogg Theora and the video tag.

Persuasio Neopragmatistorum

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Posted by skullbochs on 14 August 2009 – 3:55 pm
Filed under ain't that nifty
Tagged as ,

Credo vitae in poteste potestatis,
in quo vitae mundi noster confingamus.
Non sunt res, neque deis neque mensis, at
ea quod in linguis noster exprimamus.

In deis vel in mensis, alius credat.
Non oppono ego, si is non contradicat.
Nemo sed socios et me ipse praesto,
credo rebus in omnibus quod optimum est.

Wilber vs. Rorty on Anti-Reductionism

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 August 2009 – 7:21 pm
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as ,

One issue on which Ken Wilber and the late Richard Rorty agree is that reductionism, or scientism, is a bad way to look at the world. Both agree that natural science provides a poor guide on ethical, social, and spiritual matters. Both would, I think, agree that reductionistic accounts of what it is to be human are abhorrent and dehumanizing, and that they should be replaced with more robust accounts.

Where they would disagree, I think, is on whether such accounts are missing the obvious, overlooking features that are plain to see and so are not only less useful than some non-reductionistic accounts, but also intellectually irresponsible. Wilber would agree that this is so. Rorty, I think, would refuse to go so far.

Rorty eschewed any purely intellectual attempt to establish what entities exist. So he was dissatisfied by the reductionistic tendency to relegate, for example, tables to a kind of second-class citizenship, having existence only through their derivation from real entities such as electrons and quarks; or to deny the existence of some entities (such as spirits) not because we seem to have no use for them, but because they cannot be reduced to physical particles. For Rorty, there was simply no point to such tactics, and equally little point in the opposite tactics of chiding reductionists for supposedly missing out on the obvious.

For him, the question, “What exists?”, should be replaced by the question, “What is useful for us to talk about?” This is because the first question, taken as a question of absolute reality separate from appearances or practical utility, seems unanswerable. Our only reference for establishing what exists is to ask what seems to exist, which in practice isn’t a significantly different question from asking what is useful to talk about.

So where Wilber and similar anti-reductionists attack reductionism are both morally and intellectually irresponsible, Rorty would just stick to the first charge. I think this is because however much Wilber, etc. hate reductionism, they haven’t freed themselves from the hyperintellectualism that lead to reductionism in the first place.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Posted by skullbochs on 7 August 2009 – 3:37 pm
Filed under rantrantrant, well this sucks
Tagged as ,

I went to see the latest Harry Potter movie last night with my parents. It was Mom’s birthday, and she’s a die-hard HP fan. We had a good time, especially Mom. She and Dad loved the movie. Me? I thought it was majorly disappointing.

First, for a movie named after him, it tells you almost nothing about the Half-Blood Prince. Even knowing who he is now, I’m still not sure why I should care. So he was a great wizard. So he turned out to be _______. Nifty. Yawn.

The plot was completely rushed, almost to the point of not existing. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not complaining about what they left out from the book. I’m complaining that they didn’t put enough of anything into it to make it look like a story rather than a choppy sequence of scenes. This was especially bad towards the end, which didn’t feel climatic at all. Despite a major character dying at the hands of another major character and Harry learning how to finally defeat Voldemort and deciding not to go back to school the next year, I left the movie feeling like nothing really happened. They should have either expanded the movie to 3 hours or cut some of the annoying myspace-drama between Ron-Lavender-Hermione and used the time to fill in the gaps in the plot.

All in all, it felt like (at best) an overly-long prologue to Deathly Hollows, not like a full episode in the series.