Listening to music on a headset while you're out walking sometimes leads to surprising dialogs between the music in your ears and the sounds and sights from the world around you.

I had exactly that experience this morning, listening to Boards of Canada's track Skyliner from the album Trans Canada Highway. I was in the Montreal Metro's orange line and the train heading in the opposite direction was just pulling out from the station. The metro gives off a little three-note quint arpeggio as it pulls out - root, quint, octave - a power chord if you're a guitarist, and it just so happened that this chord matched a part of Skyliner so perfectly it was eerie.

This arpeggio sound is the power being switched on sequentially to give a smooth start, and is actually explained on the Transport Society's web site along with the fact that the wooden brakes of the metro is lubricated with peanut oil to give off a pleasant smell when used. I've got some smelling to do next time I take the metro!

Fascinating and thought-provoking illustration by Dan Phiffer that shows just how thin the atmosphere and usable volume of the earth actually is. Reminds me of what Carl Sagan said in Pale Blue Dot: if the earth was the size of a snooker ball, you would hardly be able to feel the ridges (mountains) on it at all.

UPDATE: Another look at this reveals the amazing relative dimensions of the atmosphere. The thickness of the Troposphere and the Stratosphere is about 53km. The diameter of the earth is 12756.32 Km at the equator. So the atmosphere is 1/240 of the diameter of the earth.

A basketball has a diameter of roughly 24 cm - so the atmosphere, if I have my maths right, of a basketball-sized earth would be only 1 mm thick. Divide that by 5 and you have another rough estimate of the height of Mount Everest, a mere 0.2mm!

Via Daring Fireball, a fun viral site called The Big Word Project. The idea is you buy a word, USD 1 per letter, to link that word to the site of your choice. It's sort of been done before but I like the twist - it's interesting to click around and get associations before proceeding to the site behind the word.

I bought one!

Today I updated a ticket I registered with the usually very agreeable MooTools js framework.

It is seemingly an issue with callback resources not existing when the callback is made, and the demo page is very simple; Click the link to open the popup, Trigger the ajax request in the popup, and close the window before the three seconds that the server script runs for is up.

This gives the error of $defined is not defined in MooTools 1.2 b2, an error that can be viewed with Firebug. I discovered the bug while working on a simple chat system in a popup, and my best shot at an explanation so far is that MooTools in the popup is being unloaded before the callback is fired - but then why is the callback fired at all? Slightly odd stuff.

UPDATE: The demo page for MooTools 1.11 is still up, and a slightly different error: $pick is not defined.

I'm happy I work in a field where, heated text editor fights aside, most discussions are based on facts rather than unfounded beliefs. It does not get you far to simply believe that programs can do something they can not that would fit your view of how the world should work. You can, of course, write your own program to do what you want but by doing that you remove the belief part and put proof behind your view.

Listening to

not just in the USA. http://www.truth.no/

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula

I'm following the (avalanche of) discussion around the proposed META version freeze of IE8. If you haven't been paying attention, Jeffrey Zeldman and Jeremy Keith presents two different views of the issue and as such pretty good introductions. The short version is that in the future, all versions of IE will default to behave like IE7 unless you specifically tell it to act like a new version.

A couple of days ago WaSP posted a transcription of an interesting roundtable discussion on the issue, and although I don't feel entirely convinced on it I still maintain my original feeling - the concept of a meta switch and its proposed implementation honors those who have built already broken websites for IE only while placing burdens on websites sticking to standards.

I've heard analogies to Word being able to import and export old .docs; you wouldn't try to have word read a 2003 .doc using a parser designed for a 2007 .docx. Such comparisons fall short though, this is the web, we've agreed on standards. Microsoft have gotten themselves in this pickle by not conforming to the standards and I don't think this switch where one has to specifically target versions of IE is going to help further exciting web development.

I'm with Opera's Håkon Wium Lie on this one: Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers.

Steal This Film II director Jamie King puts forth a good critique of the current approach of government and ISPs to filesharing.

King has a quote eminently capturing the essence of The Pirate Bay's philosophy from admin Peter Sunde:

> They are not legitimate users on our system, and we do not accept their harvesting of IPs, since it's not productive. Breaking into our system when you're not invited is a violation of our terms of use. This means these ISPs have to pay a basic fee of five thousand Euros, plus bandwidth and other costs that may arise due to the violation.

"They" in the quote is Tiscali UK who is monitoring P2P usage among their clients - and The Pirate Bay are here taking issue with them for the way they are investigating torrent downloaders. Peter Sunde reminds me what Tim Bray said about weekend Ruby-meetups.

> Look, dammit, Ruby isn't an insurgency or a conspiracy or a party, it's a profession and a vocation and we're getting getting paid for doing it. So why the flaming hell are we meeting on weekends like Trekkies or scrapbookers?

It's with exactly the same philosophy, a sense of "you are what you act like", that The Pirate Bay has taken torrents and p2p from fringe to mainstream - with incredible balls at times (remember their bid to purchase Sealand?).

Not to get hung up on the balls of the Pirate Bay admins, but if said balls seem less incredible nowadays it's only because they themselves brought the issues out from the shadows and in to the mainstream of un-ignorable politics.

Via Gizmodo, the one-trick wonder that is the Steak Toaster. Mmmmm, grease-drippingly good!

Other entries in the do-only-one-very-specific-thing kitchen appliance niche include the Hot Diggity Dogger and its cousin the Toast-R-Grill. And lest we forget the classics, a Hot Dog Roller from Nostalgia Electrics.

Unsurprisingly, it is possible to use the integrated Google Talk client in GMail even if you're in Safari on Windows: Enable the debug menu and change your user agent to a supported browser, such as "Firefox 2 -- Windows". The only problem I've had is that the contact list extends a bit past its container and partly obscures a few mail checkboxes. Not a big deal, and worth it for your daily fix of silky smooth OS X fonts.

<img alt="Dracula" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2053/2090080979_bfb9e51932_m.jpg" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" />The latest episode of the NPR: Movies podcast has a fantastic, if too short, interview with 97 year old Mexican actress Lupita Tovar. I must confess my ignorance: I had never heard of her before the interview, but the stories she has to tell inspire.

One stands out in particular, about how the Spanish language version of the classic Drácula was filmed on the same set, at the same time as the more famous English version starring Bela Lugosi. The mainly Mexican cast would come in at night after the English crew had left, and Ms. Tovar revealed she never even met Bela Lugosi! According to the [wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_(Spanish_Version), the Spanish version is by some considered to be better because the night crew had the advantage of being able to review the dailies from the day's filming and improve on lightning and camera angles. I have to see it!

Thanks to TCM Hitchhiker for the image.