This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in March 2006.

Boing Boing Earwax Misinformation

Mark Frauenfelder has run a series of posts recently on Boing Boing about alternative ways to clean your ears. This culminated in a post yesterday evening about cleaning out earwax with a bobby pin. To stop this disturbing trend of vigilante ear cleanliness was our very own Grant S. Hamilton III, MD, from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Dr. Hamilton had a detailed response to the bobby pin post. He has some useful information, such as:

If people are this interested in cleaning their ears, an eyedropper with some saline and peroxide mixed together will dissolve or loosen most chunks of wax. Despite what your family doctor may recommend, never use pressurized water to irrigate your ears. That is a great way to perforate the ear drum.

Dr. Hamilton is in the Department of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. We’re just glad to have such expertise in town and are of course very glad to see that Boing Boing is so widely read that doctors over at the University Hospitals comment on it. We’re hoping too that this is the end of the earwax debate. For other appetizing topics, might I suggest?

Tags: boing boing · ear · earwax · iowa city · otolaryngology · uihc

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WFMU has its cake and eats it too

Over on New York City’s favorite freeform radio station WFMU, they’re calling for cover versions of Todd Colby’s Cake. It’s a short rant / performance art piece about how this guy loves cake and would do anything for some more cake. Apparently the DJ who plays that on his show has been playing the Cake rant every week for ten years. Maybe he’s finally getting bored with it because of the call for different versions of the original Todd Colby piece.

We’re happy to report though that our very own Faust Gertz has weighed in with his own disturbing take of Cake. You can find it over on the Manufactured Podcasts section of this website by clicking on the Podcasts link. Or by going directly to the entry, which includes a transcript of the words. If you want to get directly at the MP3, it’s here.

Tags: cake · faust gertz · podcast · todd colby · wfmu

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No Freeform Faust for March 25, 2006

It is spring break at Luther College and some industrious youngsters are spending their time earning extra money at KWLC by covering people’s shifts. One of those industrious youngsters took my show. So, there will be no Freeform Faust show this week.

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How to spot a baby conservative

A university professor from California named Jack Block did a study beginning in the 1960s of over 100 children in nursery school. He followed the kids into adulthood and found some interesting traits about their personalities. Teachers rated the 3 and 4 year olds at the time, looking at the children’s personalities. He followed up a few decades later with surveys for the then adults that including questions on personality and politics. To quote from a Toronto Star article:

The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity. The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

The article continues:

He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

Interesting. The sample is obviously too small to be totally representative, but the next step is to replicate the results. That is, see if other researchers do similar research and come to the same results.

Tags: conservative · jack block · kids · liberal · research

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SXSW Music does the download mayhem again

Last year, I wrote about how SXSW Music had released a couple of torrents with over 750 MP3s of new music by bands appearing at the SXSW Music conference. SXSW 2006 wrapped up a few days ago, and in case you hadn’t gotten them already, they did the BitTorrent download bonanza again. Check out this page for the torrents. The first release has 713 free and legal MP3s, and the second release contains 229 more. That’s over 925 free songs just for the downloading. Thanks, SXSW! So go now and fill up your iPod. It’s 3.3 GB worth of goodness.

For the technologically challenged, you first need to download the BitTorrent client from BitTorrent.com. Once you’ve installed BitTorrent, you can simply click on one of the torrent links on the SXSW page, and it’ll open up in BitTorrent. BitTorrent works on the sharing principle. So once you start downloading the music collection, it’ll start sharing the parts you’ve downloaded with other people. If you don’t share, your downloads go really, really slowly. It’s a cool idea for sharing bandwidth that works well with large downloads.

Tags: bittorrent · mp3 · sxsw · sxsw music

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Freeform Faust’s playlist for March 18, 2006

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 12:30pm–2:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

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SmartyPants gets a makeover

Movable Type users who care about typography have a new friend in their corner. For years, John Gruber’s SmartyPants plugin has been the solution of choice for crafting typographically correct quotes (that is, “smart” quotes), apostrophes, m-dashes, and more. One point of contention though is that SmartyPants, being something of a generic plugin, didn’t support Movable Type’s dynamic publishing through PHP.

Six Apart had a post yesterday about a variety of new MT plugins. Lots of good new functionality. But the one I really noticed was DynamicSmartyPants. Basically, it allows one to take the original SmartyPants plugin and use it with PHP. Awesome.

I’m glad this functionality has been added, but I must admit to being partial to static archives. Our HTML pages load fast—a lot faster than PHP pages. WordPress pages take something like 7 to 9 database accesses just to create a page. That’s a lot of overhead.

I thought it funny when Jeffrey Zeldman moved to WordPress and highlighted that he was getting typographic controls built-in instead of having to use a plugin, but then he linked to a plugin for WP that allowed caching of pages. I would rather add a plugin to control something like typographically correct quotes rather than be using a system that would require a plugin just to get over the inherent inefficiences of that system. Movable Type is lightning fast. WordPress is…?

Tags: dynamic smartypants · movable type · smartypants · wordpress

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Freeform Faust’s playlist for March 11, 2006

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 12:30pm–2:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

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Zeldman enters a new era

We here at Manufactured Environments are evangelists of web standards. We believe in the rightness of W3C standards. We think the web would be a better place if browsers (I’m talking to you, IE) better supported the standards put forth. A while back we put in the effort and made this entire site validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. That is to say, web standards are important to this website.

So we got the web standards religion a while back, and the high priest of web standards is a Mr. Jeffrey Zeldman, web designer par excellence from NYC. Mr. Zeldman wrote the book on web standards. But he’s long been a contrarian. He has hand-coded his website for the past 11 years. He even rolls his own hand-coded RSS feed. Crazy bastard.

Imagine our surprise when Jeffrey announced yesterday that he has started using WordPress to code his blog. And to our delight he has stopped hand-coding his RSS feed as well, and now we’ll be getting full posts from him in his feed. Most excellent.

Zeldman felt like changing a lot of stuff apparently because he also changed his web host from the service that he had been using since like 1996. That’s a long time.

We heartily welcome Zeldman into the Modern Era, and hope that he likes his WordPress install. We can only hope that with the hand-coding behind him, that we’ll hear more from him.

Tags: media temple · redesign · wordpress · zeldman

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Lazy Sunday, part deux

After the hilarity of the Chronic-what?!-cles of Narnia, which was a video short from Saturday Night Live lampooning hard core rap and the movie the Chronicles of Narnia, SNL goes at it again. This time Natalie Portman, movie star, is the center of attention. Here’s a link to the video over at YouTube.

As anyone who has seen Closer can attest, Ms. Portman seems to be going for a harder image than her initial forays into the film world. Maybe she’s finding her voice. We like the harder, tougher Portman. And thought her rapping debut was pretty hilarious.

Update: The video has been removed from YouTube, but it is available from the official NBC site here.

Tags: natalie portman · snl

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Freeform Faust’s playlist for March 4, 2006

Featured Listener Melissa.

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 12:30pm–2:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Notes

Gender Bias

I noticed that tracks I have played for you so far this year are about 85% male to 15% female artists. It didn’t seem like I had such a male dominated show, but numbers and statistics don’t lie. In the month of March, I hope to make that ratio more equitable. Today’s show featured a ratio of about 55% male to 45% female artists.

Wanted: Featured Listeners

Want to be a featured listener? Send a photo and a few words about yourself to FreeFormFaust at GMail dot com.

Tags: duets · faust · freeform · Gainsbourg · gender bias · kwlc · radio

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Clothing for your favorite Web Geek

Jer’s New Shirt, originally uploaded by kk+.

For the vision impaired, the t-shirt in the photo reads: I know H.T.M.L. (How to Meet Ladies). Nice! [via 0]

Tags: flickr · how to meet ladies · html · t-shirt

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David Lynch explores the Frontiers of Consciousness (in Iowa)

Well, David Lynch has decided to come to Iowa again. You’ll recall his 1999 movie entitled The Straight Story about the man who drove his riding lawn mower from Iowa to visit his sick brother in Wisconsin. He went from that to doing Mulholland Dr., which was more like his usual self.

This time though Mr. Lynch is coming to Explore the Frontiers of Consciousness. It’s the upcoming weekend March 24-26, 2006 an hour south of here in Fairfield at the Maharishi University of Management, which was founded by His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It’s a weekend with David Lynch and quantum physicist John Hagelin. It’s a one-time event, and prior registration is required. Registration is a mere $115 before March 13 for the general public, which includes admission to all events, vegetarian meals, and a special DVD. Wouldn’t you like to get all down with transcendental meditation with the Lynchster?

The Maharishi University of Management offers Consciousness-Based education in an optimal learning environment. Cool, no? Some of the sessions during the weekend include “Consciousness, Filmmaking, and the Creative Process” and “Samadhi - The Fourth Major State of Consciousness.” You might want to check out His Holiness’ podcast over at AnswersFromMaharishi.com.

Anyway, I know you’ve been dying for an excuse to come to Iowa. Now’s your chance! Check out the Lynch Weekend in Fairfield.

Tags: david lynch · explore the frontiers of consciousness · fairfield · iowa · maharishi · maharishi mahesh yogi · mum

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