Can’t sleep, robot woman’ll eat me. Can’t sleep, robot woman’ll eat me. Can’t sleep, robot woman’ll eat me…

An anecdote about Wii sales versus PS3 sales. Best Buy put up 75 60GB PS3s on their website around 4:30pm today. As of 7pm, there were 49 left. Future Shop put up 100 PS3s of their own around the same time, and were down to 40 by 7pm.

Future Shop also put up 100 Wiis on their website at 6:02pm. They were all gone by 6:06pm.

For anyone keeping track, that’s about 1 PS3 every two minutes, versus 25 Wiis every minute.

Autoblog posts its blacklist of things that should disappear in 2007. The Camry Solara gets singled out for extremely dubious praise, a car that stands out by being blander than most everything else on the road today. But particularly interesting—and heartening—is this blackballed item:

Cheap gas.
This borders on heresy for an automotive blog, but gas is too cheap. Who among us wouldn’t love to give up sitting in gridlock? You could drive for pleasure. Of course, this would have to go hand in hand with massive improvements to public transportation. Adding additional taxes on to fuel to fund light-rail improvements, offer incentives for developing biofuels and sustainable sources of energy would be wonderful and worth it. Pay now or pay later – and if we’re going to have to pay anyway, we may as well attempt to be less beholden to energy sources from unstable regions of the world.

Yes, that’s right—an automotive blog is saying there should be better public transit and more expensive gas. This is, I think, the first time someone else has articulated the way I feel about cars: in a perfect world, we’d only ever use them as track day speedsters and back-road cruisers. Leave the commuting to public transit systems, which are far more efficient at the task of carrying people around in the city. Though I love cars and would love one day to drive them on a track or in a rallycross, I have never understood the strident defence of a driver’s right to sit in their car, idling on a congested freeway, for an hour or more to get to work.

As for the relatively enlightened stance on alternative fuels, that’s not so much a surprise—with vehicles like the Tesla Roadster promising a more green-friendly way to feed your speed addiction, people are finally realizing that powersliding and fuel economy don’t necessarily have to be at odds with one another.

Two detailed, well-researched articles about subjects you probably know nothing about.

First, a devastating critique of a premium chocolatier’s product and practices from Dallasfood.org. In addition to being a highly entertaining smackdown on what sounds like a couple of fly-by-night operators, it’s also a great read about some of the inner workings of the premium chocolate business.

Second, Ars Technica takes a look at telecommunications regulations coming back to bite AT&T in the ass. In examining the legal battle between AT&T and a couple of Chicago-area suburban towns over the rollout of IPTV and a new fiber/copper data network, Nate Anderson touches on the blurring of the lines between digital cable providers and digital voice/data providers. The article is also a good look at the ongoing conflict between fair-dealing regulations and big business.

Skyrates is a free flash-based MMORPG that’s just entered beta testing. The concept: you’re the captain of a prop plane, delivering trade goods and fighting pirates while hopping from sky island to sky island. It’s designed to be played in sporadic bits and pieces—flights between islands occurs in real time (an hour or several, depending on length); you queue up actions like trades and refuels, and then come back a couple of hours later to reap the rewards. The game can even send a message to your AIM account when the action queue has finished.

In many ways the game bears a distinct resemblance to the old BBS game Trade Wars, but with a much nicer graphical interface, more RPG-like features like skill points, and a real-time combat module that allows you to take on the task of shooting down pirates yourself instead of letting the AI handle the fight for you. The neat part about the game, aside from the actual mechanics, is that it’s actually the brainchild of several game design students at Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks to some meticulous class documentation, you can read for yourself the game design document and other assorted design documents for a fun peek behind the curtain for anyone with a casual interest in how game concepts are developed and refined.

CALLER: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between one dollar and one cent?
VERIZON CSR: Definitely.
CALLER: Do you recognize that there’s a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?
VERIZON CSR: Definitely.
CALLER: Then, do you therefore recognize that there’s a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents?
VERIZON CSR: No.

Officially the greatest customer service cock-up ever. Here’s an MP3 of the whole call.

Shots Ring Out decries the rise of YouTube as a music video medium:

The subtle emotion that an artist exudes, the very thing that defines their personality and thus defines their charm and money-making ability, may be lost. The polish and shine you paid all that money for gets thrown right out the window when I see it in a compressed 320 x 240 box.

This distribution method is making your artists look bad.

They are completely right, of course. YouTube videos look like shit. But they’re also completely wrong about YouTube’s effectiveness. Bitching about video quality is completely missing the point. The reason why YouTube has become the number one medium for music videos on the internet is because virulence trumps quality every time, and flash-based video like YouTube is far easier to transmit and spread via the internet than any other video format currently in use.

Think about it. In order to watch a high-quality 30MB Xvid-encoded AVI file, I have to first download the file (we’re still not quite at the stage where anyone can reliably stream a 30MB three-minute movie reliably). Then I have to open it using a media player—probably Windows Media Player or Quicktime (does it open AVIs?) or VLC or MPlayer. As this sort of thing is usually OS-specific (who would run WMP on OS X, anyways?) let’s assume you can just double-click on the file and the correct player will open it. Do you have the Xvid codec? It doesn’t come standard with any of the major media players, certainly not the ones that come preinstalled with the OS. So unless you’re smart enough to know where to grab Xvid (and “smart enough” usually means downloading one of those bloated, adware-filled codec packs) or a proper media player (how many people know what VLC is, or that it can play just about anything?), you’re going to have yet more trouble. And even assuming you’ve got all the proper software, you still have to download every video you want to watch.

In order to watch a YouTube video, you click on the play button and you’re watching it. Sure, it looks like crap. But look at all the trouble I didn’t have to go through in order to do it: I didn’t have to download anything because nearly everyone who’s going to watch a YouTube video already has Flash installed, and installing Flash is a fairly simple procedure these days. It’s a streaming video, so the wait before I get to watch the video is much shorter. But the real trump card is not how easy it is to watch, but how easy it is to show to other people.

If you want to show people that awesome music video you found somewhere, you have two choices: link to the video or try to embed it in your blog. But embedding a Quicktime movie or an AVI is a pain in the ass. Have you ever examined the HTML code necessary to embed a movie, whether it be Quicktime or YouTube? It’s a pain in the ass having to write all that code. YouTube provides this code for you in a neat little package—copy the right textbox and paste into your blog post. With downloaded videos, you have to write this code yourself, which is non-trivial. Furthermore, you have to find a place to host it, or else hotlink the video from the original server. No one likes a hotlinker. Obviously, with a YouTube video, the content is stored on YouTube servers, and so you don’t have to worry about where to store the video yourself.

Yes, I would love it if YouTube’s video quality improved. But I’ve watched entire documentaries and TV shows on YouTube and Google Video, and I enjoyed them immensely despite the relatively poor video quality. Complaining about how poor video quality is ruining music videos is like complaining about how MP3s ruin music because they cut off high frequencies and introduce compression artifacts. That’s great, but I don’t like carting around 400 CDs whenever I go out, I don’t want to have to reach for my CD collection whenever I want to listen to a different album, and I sure as hell don’t want to mess around with a record player just to eliminate the cold, digital sound of CDs. I want to listen to music.

I will continue to download high quality music videos whenever they’re provided, but I won’t lose any sleep about the dominance of YouTube. Not for video quality reasons, anyways.

P.S. About the headline of this post: Shots Ring Out starts its post with commentary on an artist who produced his latest music video with a cellphone, and how you couldn’t tell because the poor YouTube compression makes everything look like it was produced on a cellphone. Where they see bad practice, I see good; shooting video on a cellphone because you don’t need anything more powerful is called good budgeting and making use of what you’ve got. Special effects and HD cameras aren’t everything, as the entire independent film industry can attest.

The United States puts out as much greenhouse gas emissions as the UK, Brazil and China combined. That’s a pretty damning statistic in itself, and it’s something people should think about. But there’s also something Science magazine and the World Research Institute should think about: bad infographics.

Unfortunately, the Science article that contains this map is behind a pay wall, and the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool requires registration and possibly affiliation with an organization. In any case, very few people are going to take the extra steps to register and sift through the raw data to figure out what the map means. That’s the whole point of infographics like these—to distill mountains of data and highlight the main findings. The map is supposed to give you an idea of how the United States stacks up against other countries when it comes to emissions.

So tell me this: what fraction of the United States’ emissions does Brazil represent?

Not so easy to figure out, is it? Here’s some questions that pop into my mind when I see this. First, the map is split into states, and each nation’s footprint fits neatly inside state lines. Does that mean that Brazil’s emissions footprint is equal to exactly the emissions from the specific midwestern states it covers? Or is it equal to the fraction of the United States represented by the area those states cover? After all, the World Research Institute claims California is one of the top 30 emitters in the world, and it’s included in the UK’s footprint. Comparatively, the midwestern states probably produce fewer emissions (based solely on my assumption that population density is lower and thus emissions are lower—I may very well be wrong, but that’s somewhat besides the point). So, even though Brazil’s footprint appears larger on the map, is its emissions footprint perhaps smaller than that of the UK, whose footprint includes California? Who knows? The map gives you no way to tell.

That one issue makes the whole map harder to understand. When China is shown to take up more than half of the United States, does that actually mean China produces half the emissions of the United States? But China’s footprint includes all of the high-emission states except California, so does China actually produce substantially more? What about Canada, stuck in the dense northwestern states. How does its emissions footprint compare to, say, South Korea? Are they, in fact, roughly equal? Are they each only about a fifth of Brazil’s footprint? The map implies relationships that may or may not be there; it’s ambiguous, a very bad thing when you’re trying to clarify a complicated issue.

It’s nice to be able to slap together some fancy graphics in order to make a point, but this is one of those cases where a simple bar chart would’ve told you so much more about where each country stands compared to the States. All I get out of this graphic is the message that the States produces a lot of emissions—an important message, but blindingly obvious. Once you get past that revelation, the map gives you little idea of just how bad things are. Since that’s sort of the whole point of the map, it can be classified a failure.

I can finally say that someone has, indeed, been stabbed just a few blocks away from where I used to live. The weird thing is, I thought I remembered there being a police presence at Haro and Bute. An hour of Google searching later, and I can’t find any evidence of a community policing centre or anything else there, which has me seriously spooked (didn’t I walk past it all the time? wasn’t it just across from the Bread Garden?).

In any case, the stabbing actually isn’t a very big deal; what’s one isolated stabbing incident compared to the ominous-sounding “crystal corner,” named for the apparently rampant use of crystal meth? I lived a lot closer to Davie and Bute than Robson anyways. Oh, and what’s that about Nelson Park again?