Status-Q

Excellent...

I've written before about some of the great talks available online from the TED conference. Here are a couple I've just watched, and would definitely recommend:

• Dan Gilbert talks about what really makes us happy, and the research that shows how bad we are at predicting what really makes us happy.
• Oxford Statistician Peter Donnelly explores the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics, and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.

Today's fun YouTube movie...

Lasse Gjertsen claims that he can play neither drums nor piano. But, boy, can he edit a video!

Treadmills can be so dull if you just run or walk on them. This should give you some ideas for the next time you're in the gym...

Larry Lessig, as always, gave a great keynote speech this morning at LinuxWorld, which touched on many topics, but a key focus was the following idea: that kids will always be creative in whatever medium is available to them. Nowadays, the medium is digital media, and playing with it and remixing it is what they will do, making use of previous creations in much the same way that jazz musicians have always played variations on older themes. It's foolish, and counter-productive, to try and stop them.

As Hollywood, the RIAA, governments, and others try to stamp out unlicensed use of copyrighted materials, and copyright everything under the sun, in the vain hope of preventing piracy, they are also doing something more serious; they are turning the natural creativity of youth into a criminal act. What does this do, in the long term, to young peoples' perception of the rule of law?

Anyway, as one of his examples of remixing, he played the rather nice 'love duet' between Bush & Blair created by ATMO as part of their 'Read my lips' series. It's only a short clip - I recommend the 4M Quicktime Movie. Very clever.

Ah, lots of fun stuff this weekend. Here's a great video clip showing what the kitten of today likes in the way of toys.

I was going to post a picture or two from a boat trip yesterday in Cape Town, but I emailed some snaps to John and he beat me to it.

I've taken to carrying a little IXUS 750 with me almost everywhere I go, and one of the things I'm appreciating more and more is its ability to record video clips. I've never been one of those people who likes to spend much of their holiday looking through a camcorder viewfinder. I have a very nice camcorder, but I normally only use it for making corporate demo videos; I don't carry it around with me.

Occasionally, however, there are scenes which require something more than a still image, and it's great to have something on my belt which can record them. Here are a couple of little Quicktime clips from yesterday:

• The Cape Town Waterfront (10MB)
• A life on the Ocean Wave (9MB)

I borrowed a digital-8 camcorder from a friend - thanks, William! - because I wanted to salvage some footage from a few old Hi-8 tapes, which will soon be completely obsolete and unreadable.

The main thing I wanted to save was a little 2-minute clip about BrightBoard, the project which formed the bulk of my PhD work. This 'video figure' was done at the end of 1995 to accompany a paper I presented at the CHI96 conference. Click the picture to see a much younger and thinner Quentin... [12MB Quicktime H.264]

...this time we'll put our digital camera in 'Quicktime movie' mode before pointing it at the falls...

(Click to play)