Weekend Items

Several things:

• The ♥G♥ and I also watched the film The Prestige this morning, and I was fascinated by it. (I kept pausing the DVD every few minutes to share my theories on the story with her.) Mild spoiler warning: If you've ever read Spock Must Die, there are some similar concepts. I want to see about reading the novel by Christopher Priest. They gist of the story was about magicians being psychotically obsessive about hiding their secrets. I was reminded of the contrasting approach that Penn & Teller have used to much success, in which they tell the audience they are flim-flamming them, and then explain how they did it.
• Does the Internet need an overhaul? Some people at Stanford University (and elsewhere) think so. Excerpt: We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and 'backward-compatible' style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?", and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?" We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.
• Happy belated birthday to the institution of the blog.
• Lots of stuff on the late great Kurt Vonnegut. Where do you begin on his writings? I haven't read all of it, but I've read a lot of it. Maybe start with Slaughterhouse Five, if you have not yet initiated yourself into the Cult of Vonnegut. Or is that my bias because that was my first book of his? Maybe God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater for a more optimistic characterization?
• I came across some copies of Juxtapoz Magazine this weekend. (I swear, it was before I saw this Boing Boing link -- Some friends of ours have some copies in a basket next to the bidet in their bathroom.) Check 'em out. I like the magazine's overall vibe, and I will be looking at more of their articles in the next few weeks.