Month: February 2003

All Your Bonsai Kittens Are Belong To Us

One of the things that fascinates me — largely because I don’t understand the process at all — is how some hoaxes and memes spread like wildfire throughout the Internet, while others just crash and burn.

I cannot understand, for example, why BonsaiKitten.Com still attracts such outrage among people almost three years after it first appeared on the web.

The first time I saw it I thought it was somewhat clever, but assumed that it is so obviously a hoax that the furor over it would soon die down. Apparently I vastly overestimated the general level of knowledge about mammalian physiology.

So as maintainer of a site about the animal rights movement I receive about 6 or 7 emails a week asking me to spread the word about this horrible site. Several times a week, people forward me one of a number of petitions against the site. For the most part I ignore these e-mails because of the odd responses I would get from people after I told them the site was a hoax — many of my correspondents simply refused to believe the site was a hoax. Look, you can see the pictures there for yourself, they would write back.

I’ve come to have a grudging admiration for whomever is actually behind the BonsaiKitten.Com site for their ability to really strike a nerve. Connie Bloom, a writer for Ohio’s The Beacon Journal, recently devoted a long column to what she calls this “disgusting work of a former student at [MIT].”

And like a lot of people, Bloom on the one hand understands why the site exists, but on the other hand, can’t help but herself in giving the author of the site what he or she was looking for. Early in her column, Bloom notes that back in 2000 BonsaiKitten.Com had to jump from provider to provider after getting kicked off various ISPs, but “the student was encouraged by all the negative attention and has continued to promote it on a series of Web hosts, one after another, citing his right to free speech.”

But she ends her column with a flourish noting that even the Humane Society of the United States recognizes that BonsaiKitten.Com is protected speech but, Bloom adds, “That doesn’t make it any less offensive or infuriating.”

Infuriating and offensive enough to devote 900 words to it in a newspaper column three years after it was obvious the site was a hoax? Again, I’ve got some grudging admiration whose rather tame satire is so successful at getting underneath people’s skin.

Source:

‘Bonsai Kittens’ in jars cause stir with pet lovers. Connie Bloom, Beacon Journal (Ohio), Feb. 15, 2003.

HP ScanJet 5500c

One of the many projects I’ve been working on is converting all of the pieces of paper I have hanging around into digital versions (and then safely hiding the paper versions away). A couple years ago I tried using a cheap film scanner to take care of the thousands of pictures I’ve accumulated, but ran into a number of problems (the operative word turning out to be cheap film scanner).

I’m having a bit more luck with HP’s ScanJet 5500c. The ScanJet 5500c has a photo document feeder — essentially a document feeder that is designed to accommodate stacks of photographs up to 4×6″.

Over the last two months I’ve scanned in about 2,000 photographs and so far have few complaints. I have run into some problems with jams, but for the most part those involved either a) photographs that were somewhat warped or b) photographs that were not cleanly cut during developing.

I generally scan the photos at 600 DPI and the highest color setting, which usually results in TIFF files of 17mb to 20mb. I use those files to generate smaller JPEGS for my web site and then archive the TIFF files on CD-R (still waiting to buy a larger hard drive to store all of the photos in one place).

ClubPhoto.Com

Back in December, Seth Dillingham posted about his experiences with SnapFish.Com on his web site. I’d never really looked seriously at businesses such as this which develop film, produce prints, and post scans on the web, but Seth’s post piqued my interest.

I finally settled on giving ClubPhoto.Com a try for a number of reasons — the major one being that I wasn’t really interested in prints of my film, and ClubPhoto.Com seemed to have the cheapest rates for simply processing and posting high quality scans (they then snail mail me back the negatives).

Overall, I am satisfied with the service I’ve received from ClubPhoto.Com. As Seth noted, these sorts of shops are obviously using automated processes and the developing quality you’ll find here is comparable to what you’d get if you drop your film off at the local drugstore or supermarket.

On the positive side, the turnaround for film processing is very quick even via snail mail. When I mail the photos from my office in Kalamazoo it usually takes only about 4 business days before ClubPhoto.Com (which is headquartered in Texas) has scans of the photos posted.

The only negative is that ClubPhoto.Com’s idea of a high quality scan usually ends up being a 400kb JPEG. My idea of a high quality scan is a 17mb TIFF file. But then, I guess they wouldn’t be able to offer their service that cheaply if they had to absorb the bandwidth charges that would accompany files that large.

But the service is otherwise almost perfect for people like me who don’t want to deal with (and pay for) prints, but aren’t quite ready to ditch their film camera for a digital model either.

Conspiracy Theories About Google

Dave Winer is apparently impressed by Daniel Brandt’s anti-Google rantings. But as this Salon.Com article documents, Brandt is a nutty conspiracy theorist (just go a few links deep at his NameBase.Org who is pissed off because *his* page about Donald Rumsfeld, and a whole host of other people, doesn’t show up very high in Google searches.

I particularly love the brief explanation Brandt offers of why Google’s PageRank sucks,

It’s democratic in the same way that capitalism is democratic. You could have the cure for cancer on the Web and not find it in Google because ‘important’ sites don’t link to it.

But, of course, if there were a cure for cancer posted on the web, then it is likely that lots of people would link to it, much like many scientists would end up citing a paper that outlined a successful cure for cancer.

What Brandt wants is for Google to be democratic in the same way that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is Democratic.

In fact, as Salon notes, Brandt believes that if you search on “Donald Rumsfeld” his page about Rumsfeld should be shown before Rumsfeld’s DoD biography page, even though it is largely useless and almost impossible to navigate (the main problem with NameBase is that it is an index of citations largely of the conspiracy literature which Brandt has personally read).

Update: A good example of one of Brandt’s nutty conspiracy theories his his speculation about China’s blocking of Google in which Brandt argues that “China may be well-advised to block the use of U.S. engines to protect their own national security” because Google may be sharing data about Chinese users with the National Security Agency which would, in Brandt’s mind, “put the NSA at a tremendous advantage in determining where pro-U.S. sentiment may exist in China.”

Alterman, Limbaugh and Apologies

While doing a little research on Eric Alterman’s wish in Esquire that Rush Limbaugh had gone deaf, I came across this post on a blog that makes an erroneous statement about one of Limbaugh’s more reprehensible statements.

During his television show’s run, Limbaugh told a story about a mythical White House dog and at the end of his bit a picture of Chelsea Clinton was displayed (Clinton was 12 or 13 at the time). According to the weblog linked to above. Alterman mentions this incident in his apology about his Limbaugh comment, and the blogger linked to above has this to say,

But since Limbaugh has apologized for the quip directed at Chelsea Clinton (which Alterman quotes), and Alterman clearly still holds it against him regardless, it’s fair to have the same standard for Alterman’s own apology.

But Limbaugh has never unequivocally apologized for his comments about Chelsea. As far as I can tell, the closest he’s come to apologizing was December 2002 when both he and Hillary Clinton were at the same wedding and the New York Observer reported that Limbaugh had privately apologized to Hillary Clinton about his comments about Chelsea.

Instead, at the time Limbaugh tried to pass off his insulting comments as a mistake by a staffer who supposedly showed the wrong picture — which is why his alleged apology to Hillary Clinton, if it actually happened, would have been news.

Animal Liberation Front Damages Trucks at Seafood Company

Animal Liberation Front activists damaged 48 delivery trucks at Supreme Lobster and Seafood Co. in Villa Park, Illinois.

Activists cut the brake lines and destroyed the refrigeration units in the trucks. Total damage was estimated at between $50,000 and $75,000. The attack took place sometime on Feb. 1 or Feb. 2, but wasn’t discovered until Feb. 3 when a driver realized his truck had no breaks. Further investigation revealed an “ALF — No Brakes” slogan written in marker or spray paint on the door of a garage.

An e-mail communique from the group said that,

[Supreme Lobster is] responsible for the deaths of more than one billion sea creatures over the past 25 years.

The company was able to rent trucks to finish its scheduled deliveries.

Sources:

FBI investigates vandalism to local business. Larry Rogowin, The Lombardian (Illinois), February 5, 2003.

FBI investigating animal rights group attack on Supreme Seafoods. Ken Coons, Seafood.Com, February 4, 2003.

Supreme Lobster estimates damage of $50,000 to $70,000 from vandalism. Daily Herald (Illinois), February 5, 2003.