7: The average lifespan, in pitches, of a baseball in a major league game.

Speaking of RIM … on Tuesday they are going to venture forth with another touch-screen Blackberry. The development and impeding launch of the new handset has seen a bare fraction of the hype and hullabaloo that preceded the Storm, and I think this might be a good thing. After the disappointment of the Storm – a fabulous piece of hardware that was fatally crippled by RIM’s aging and user-hostile generic OS – coming in with zero expectations and no preconceptions is a good thing. If the 9800 is just another Storm, well, no harm no foul. But if the whispers are right, and the mandarins up in Waterloo have finally opened their eyes and grokked onto the idea that the user experience is actually important, then we may just have a sleeper hit.

So – fingers crossed, and here’s hoping that sleeper hit is indeed where this is going. RIM is full of smart people with smart ideas who somehow end up turning out the same product over and over because the people at the very top of the company either can’t or won’t open their eyes and see what increasingly-sophisticated customers want in a mobile computer. The smart people need to start winning out over the top people, and soon, or the Blackberry platform is going to go from being “dated” to “irrelevant” in a very short time. And that – for everyone – would be a shame.

If you point your browser to “blackpad.com” you get … nada. Blank page. But if you look up the whois record, you will find that the domain is being held by CSC on behalf of some outfit called “Research in Motion” in Waterloo. Which gives some serious credence to a story that just moved on the Bloomberg wire, RIM will release their first pad computer in November, and not surprisingly it will be called the “Blackpad”. I don’t have a link to this yet, since Bloomberg has a short embargo time between items hitting the wire and those items showing up on their web archive. When I do get a link, I will slap it in here.

I can’t decide if they name is “yea” or “nay” yet. Still mulling on that one. But it sure beats the hell out of “Slate”.

UPDATE: Link to the updated Bloomberg story.

Okay. Three times today I heard people talking about the weather, and all three times they had completely different – and completely wrong – explanations of this particular phrase actually means:

Percentage probability of precipitation.

Alright, enough. It’s a really simple concept. If the weather report comes on and the bingo caller says that there is a 60% chance of rain, it means that the last 100 times the weather was like this it rained the next day 60 times. It’s a historical reference, nothing more. The numbers, of course, are higher – it would be more like the last 2000 times it was like this, it rained the next day 1200 times – but the percentage would be the same.

Which, if you were wondering, does indeed mean if the weather droids say there is a 100% chance of rain tomorrow and it doesn’t rain … well, technically they weren’t wrong. It just means that it never happened before. It’s a pretty low bar as far as accuracy goes, but there you are.

And now you know. Feel free to correct morons around you who can’t figure this out.

I love Apple’s “Magic Mouse”. I use a MacBook all day, and I get hardwired into using the assorted multi-touch gestures on the trackpad. Then I go home and have to go back to an old-fashioned mouse is it is like being crippled. No tapping? No pinching? No squooging? It’s like being sent back in time to the era of cassette tapes and Quark Xpress. Just wretched. The Magic Mouse was a wonderful way to bridge the gap – you get your desktop mouse, but with all the gestures you have been used to using all day.

The best of both worlds, right?

Er, no. Manually hauling the mouse around to do the basic cursor movements was still a drag. It just wasn’t as seamless and as fluid as doing everything with touches and flicks and squooges. It was an annoyingly incomplete experience … better than the retro-mouse alternative, but still not entirely sublime. Which means, as we stumble towards the point of this less-than-lucid post, that I am over the fucking moon at the release of the Magic Track Pad. Mouse be gone, this is what I have been waiting for. It probably helps that I am a trackball guy from way back – if you don’t have that same background then your mileage is definitely going to vary – but you should be giving this a try.

Tactile heaven.

20: The number of minutes that all of the human urine produced in the world in a single day would take to flow over Niagara Falls.

Today’s amusing diversion for anyone who spends at least some portion of their life creating verbiage: I Write Like. You take a sample of your prose, slam it in, their engine masticates it for a while, and out pops the name of some probably-more-well-known-than-you author that you write like. Personally, I would enjoy this a lot more if there was some sort of explanation of what specific parts of your writing matched up to the famous person you are reminiscent of, or how the algorithm works, or something beyond “You write like so-and-so” but it is an amusing diversion nonetheless.

For what it’s worth, I got two hits on H.P. Lovecraft and two on Cory Doctorow for random submissions from this blog and the other (less profane) one. So I guess I can’t complain. It certainly beats ringing up some talentless hack like Dan Brown.

Curious? Give it a shot.

Stupid name, yes. But, if you are a publisher looking for direction on how to provide content in the new age of mobile media, this would be a great place to start. Or you could, you know, just stick your head in the ground and block certain browsers. Let me know how that works out for you.

If the final product here is anywhere as interesting as this demo it’s going to be a winner. No word yet on pricing or frequency, but if this sort of thing strikes your fancy you can sign up for email updates here. You’re welcome.

16: The average number of minutes between dreams for an adult feline.

In past rantings on these pages I have mentioned the fact that the vast majority of “financial analysts” desperately want Apple to fail. They don’t understand the business model – the idea of selling a few premium products for a nice profit instead of boatloads of low-end crap is completely foreign to them – and because of that they hate and fear the company. When you hear an analyst talk about Apple and say that they “expect” lower revenues or poor sales or a downturn, you can safely substitute the word “hope” instead.

They hope – desperately hope – that the wheels will fall off. Spending time and money on innovation and a refined user experience is like some sort of financial small pox to these people.

The point of all of this is that we are getting close to the third quarter earnings report. Between now and then you will hear a lot of stuff from “the street” about revenue slowdown, stagnating sales, new competition from Microsoft, etc and so on. Remember the names of the people who say these things – they are to be mocked and reviled. To anyone capable of independent thought, it’s obvious that this quarter’s revenues will be scary huge – from the retail throughput, I would guess the biggest revenues ever for a non-Christmas quarter.

Don’t forget where you read that. And yes, the title of this thing is a Spaceballs reference. May the Schwartz be with you.

65: The average number of minutes between dreams for an adult canine.

Why have major-league baseball managers taken to wearing these dumpy-looking windshirts?

90: The average number of minutes between dreams for an adult human.

So today I sat through a meeting were it was determined that we should maybe block any web visitors to our site if they are using Safari 5. Why? Because the new “reader” function in Safari takes completely unreadable pages on the web and makes them easy to read. Contrary to the ravings of the panicked publishing biz, it doesn’t block ads, or replace ads, or “declare war on newspapers”. What it does is take the actual content from a web page and lift it up into a single item that you can actually read. The function only works on pages that are cluttered with crap and/or use that reprehensible technique of splitting the thing you want to read across three or four pages – something content providers do to try and inflate their total number of ad impressions without any care for the fact that it makes readers crazy.

In a nutshell: Reading content via a web browsers sucks giant logs these days. Online content providers treat their readers like garbage to try and pad their revenue streams. So the solution is not to fix the content, no, it is to block a browser that lets readers fix this problem themselves and actually read your goddamn page, in the bizarre assumption that they will quit that browser, fire up another, and come back. Instead of, oh, fucking off to another site and never ever bothering with you again.

And the newspaper biz wonders why they are dying a painful digital death. Idiots.

The most reasonable take on the whole thing is here. But a far more entertaining way to grok this is to download Safari 5 and then follow Ms. Fletcher’s link to this bizarro rant. Try to read the lunatic ravings, but good luck to you, since there is so much crap on the page that it is generally impossible. Then hit the handy “reader” button in your Safari address bar. Voila – now the thing is easy to read, and even easier to laugh at since everything he whines about is his own fucking fault.

Apple hasn’t “declared war on newspapers” (and yes, I heard that three times in the stupid meeting I was in). Apple has given readers a tool to decide whether or not online publishers are treating them like shit and if they are, to do something about it.

If your readers are pushing a button that tells you that you suck, maybe you should have a meeting or two about that.

He’s just walking. Well, walking and pushing his cart. And taking pictures.

Why? No idea, really. I just thought these were cool, but don’t have the mental oomph to actually write anything about them. You’re on your own.

Eight odd jobs from the past that probably sucked a lot more than yours does now.

Top 10 new species of 2010. Don’t tell Palin that things are still evolving!

Speaking of evolving …

Need a font?

And is it strange that Google doesn’t want to part with the Wi-Fi data it “accidentally” gathered and stored and parsed and sorted? Accidentally?

38: The most common waist size for men’s pants sold in North America in 2008

The fine folks at BP (Busted Pipe?) have been less than forthcoming about the nuts and bolts of what – if anything – they are actually trying to do about the giant gushing oil well of doom in the Gulf of Mexico. Things may be changing, though … they have actually admitted that this “top kill” thing might or might not work, and if it doesn’t work things will actually be a lot worse than they are now. Cold comfort, I know. But they are also providing a live video feed of the wellhead as they try this possibly cockamamie scheme over the next two days, which gives them at least a bit of cred here. It’s Java and HTML, so no flash needed, hooray. UPDATE: This handy diagram will help you figure out what the video is actually showing when the ROV drives around looking at something other than the gushing pollution.

Better late than never, I guess. Just don’t tell that to all the dead birds. And big ups to Ginger Snaps for the link.

UPDATE: If you want an “in depth” look at what the oil is doing below the surface, this feature from ABC is quite good. Now with H.262 encoding!

Animated GIFs have long been the bane of the interwebs. But I have to bow down to this one … it is a complete visual time-suck is the easily greatest animated GIF of all time. I can take no credit for it at all, it was a totally random find. Someone, somewhere has an awful lot of patience.

I don’t want to sound like I am saying “I told you so”, but … no, fuck it. I told you so.

And if you believe the response from Facebook and actually think that Shmuckerberg and his minions are going to give up this insanely lucrative stream of revenue, then I have a Brooklyn Bridge in Florida to sell you. This is the “enhanced value for advertisers” that they are always crowing on about, the holy source of their money torrent. Give it up? Not a chance.

UPDATE: If you are wondering how it actually works, wonder no more.

Talking about the last flight of the space shuttle brought up the age-old topic of “going to the bathroom in space”. The basic question of just how these things work has been answered by greater minds than mine (plastic bags and adhesive? ew!) but the old adage that a picture – or a movie – is worth a thousand words really comes into play here. Text – no matter how descriptive – just does not convey how incredibly fucking complicated it is to go the bathroom in space.

32: The most common waist size for men’s pants sold in North America in 1985

I have committed more than a few pixels to extolling the many, many virtues of Soma FM on These Very Pages over the past handful of years. This week (and next, barring some sort of unforeseen but sadly-not-unprecidented disaster) they are offering something new and wickedly original. Mission Control is a new (and necessarily short-lived) channel that mixes the brain tentacles of electronic ambient music with the live feed of mission audio to and from STS-132, the last hurrah of the United States space shuttle program. It runs until shuttle touchdown, scheduled for May 26, 2010.

It’s funky and cool and hey – you just might learn something. They offer the usual spread of iTunes playlist feeds in AAC and MP3, a firewall-friendly MP3 feed, and the Soma pop-up player – which would be a cool idea if it wasn’t Flash, but it is Flash so it pretty much sucks. And, as always, it’s presented sans commercials and 100% free-as-in-beer free.

I have mentioned this more than once, but sometimes it just bears repeating:

I will never, ever understand Japanese television.

11.4: The weight, in pounds, of Clint Eastwood at birth.

There was surprise – pleasant surprise – far and wide across the interwebs when AT&T announced (gasp!) fair and reasonable pricing for their iPad 3G service plans. Sadly, there was no surprise at all when Rogers announced the pricing for their Canadian equivalent – screwjob pricing that once again shows the complete and utter disregard they have for their monopolized customer base.

And it’s not just the pricing. They way they announced it – and their ongoing refusal to acknowledge the howls of outrage from the the chattels that line their pockets each month – makes it absolutely clear that they look upon their users as idiots and simpletons. They shovel forth pap and obvious misinformation, crap that only a complete idiot would fall for, with the bland expectation that (like all good Canadians) we will just stand there and say “thank you”.

Consider: On their official blogs, Rogers mouthpieces claim that their data rates “stack up pretty favourably with carriers around the world”, and point hopefully at the fact that both they and AT&T offer 250MB over a 30 day period for just fifteen bucks. Great – except that the 250MB plan is a fool’s errand, and is a pittance when it comes to actual consumption. The real comparison is the “might actually be useful in the real world” higher-level pricing: AT&T gives you unlimited data for 30 dollars, and Rogers gives you 5MB for 35 dollars. Since many 3G users that are already on AT&T are reporting usages of up to 200MB per hour an adjusted comparison would be:

AT&T: 30 dollars = all you can use for 30 days, or a buck a day
Rogers: 35 dollars = all you can use for 5 days (4 if you don’t sleep much), or seven bucks a day

Seven to one. How does that “stack up”? It doesn’t … unless the thing you are stacking is pure horseshit.

If that wasn’t insulting enough, any time one of the Rogers drones is willing to address this discrepancy they try to explain it away by saying that AT&T’s network is crap, Well, sure – everyone knows that the Death Star’s service is generally terrible. But everyone also knows that Rogers’ service and coverage is also crap. Well, okay, worse than crap. Trying to deflect criticism by throwing black pots in glass houses just highlights the torrent of insult and condescension they are spewing forth.

And, as the final dollop of disregard to the downtrodden masses, they are actually callous enough to have drafted in some astroturfers on their blogs – obvious Rogers drones and shills posting comments about how awesome this whole thing is and how anyone that disagrees must be some sort of commie fag junkie (with a tip of the hat to George Carlin).

It’s just pathetic. Not unexpected, but definitely 100% pathetic.

One day these clowns are going to get theirs.

One day.

If you drive all the way up Highway 11 in Ontario – past Huntsville, past North Bay, even past Rib Lake – you come to the scenic town of Cobalt. Okay, so it’s not all that scenic. There isn’t really anything to see at all … except for the Highway Book Shop, a gigantic and cavernous barn packed with a staggering selection of books. And I do mean staggering. The sign out front tells you that they have a larger selection of titles than any other bookstore in the world. If you stop in and browse you will find that the reason for this is simple – they have all of the books that you will find at any other bookstore, plus thousands upon thousands of offerings from every Tom, Dick, and Hemmingway who ever put a pen to paper or a finger to key. They don’t just sell the books, they make ‘em!

If you have written something – hell, anything – then the fine folks at the Highway Book Shop will publish it for you. Six copies (one for you), somewhat shoddy binding, laser printed pages, and a generic cover. The laser printing, it should be pointed out, is a somewhat new development – last time I was there I saw a lot of older titles that had been printed with dot matrix.

Note to younger readers. Go look up “dot matrix”. It will do you good.

Now – just because the books are there, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good. Or even readable. Between the crackpots (my first exposure to the oft-linked Peacock was via his tome at the Highway Book Shop), the half-wits and semi-literate boobs with delusions of literary adequacy, the place is packed with dreck. Stacks and stacks and stacks of dreck. And some stuff which, if we are going to be frank about it, would outright tarnish the good name of dreck. Which – four paragraphs and a gratuitous Peacock link later – brings us to the whole point:

Universal access to being a published author is not necessarily a good thing.

A simple way for the masses at large to become a published author and get a spot in a global digital bookstore has the potential to be really, really scary. And that is what the fine folks at Lulu are promising. They are taking their “all play” print publishing program and extending it by way of a deal with Apple and the iBookstore. The premise is great – hell, hacking away at this blog shows that I believe in citizen access to both sides of digital media. But the execution is rife with pitfalls. Will this pollute the store with so much random crap that it becomes impossible to shop? Will these titles all get buried in the bottom layers so that no one ever finds the one or two real gems? Does the ultimate extension of this endanger of my long-standing assertion that editors are nothing more than unwanted filters between creator and audience?

There are a lot of questions. And not many answers. I want to like this idea, I really do. But … but … but …

24: The minimum number of functioning GPS satellites needed to make the system work.

A couple of days ago I linked to an excellent timeline that showed the ongoing erosion of user rights on Facebook. It was a succinct and frank look into how selling your private information for profit is the raison d’être for Zuckerberg’s little creation*.

A couple of interesting follow-ups are out there this morning. One is a super awesome look at the actual “process” of trying to manage your privacy on Facebook (nutshell: 150 poorly documented options spread out amount 70 different buttons that you have to hunt down). The other is a venom-filled and wickedly entertaining look at Zuckerberg and his evil, evil domain. Easily the best article ever written about Facebook. Period.

*NOTE: I felt I had to qualify the description of Facebook as Zuckerberg’s “creation” because there are large and towering schools of thought regarding his having stolen the thing from his early partners who actually did create it.

17: The number of GPS satellites still functioning that are beyond their maximum life expectancy.