I'm in Costco right now, and just passed one of the 'foodfolk' who was giving away pomegranate samples, and I felt this chill, like if I ate any I'd have to spend a month in the Costco freezer section for each seed I ate.

This is interesting... Flexplay has developed a DVD that will 'expire' 8 hours after it comes into contact with air. [sorry for the nyt link. registration required]

At first I thought this was stupid, but then at first I thought it related to music CDs. Stupid because you would have all the more reason to mp3 encode it immediately upon purchase. But for DVDs, well, when a product enters the market, the public decides whether it will succeed, and where DivX failed (buy a disc with the rights to watch for 48 hours, then buy more rights to 'license' it permanently on a single DVD player), these 'self-destruct' discs might just work.

You see, I have problems with DVDs. I'll buy ones I like, and then rarely watch them. Sometimes I'll rent DVDs at Blockbuster, but that requires me to drive to Blockbuster, rent it, after giving Blockbuster all kinds of personal data they can use to bill me or track me, watch it within a day or two, and then go back there to return it, or face messy late fees.

Netflix is a little better, but then I'm paying a flat monthly fee, when some months I'll watch 8 movies, and other months I'll watch none.

What this new tech would probably do to the market is that DVDs would just be a commodity like groceries. If these single-use DVDs were comparable in price to a Blockbuster rental, I could pick up a couple copies of Lord of the Rings for later viewing at $2 or $3 each, and then buy the full Special Edition DVD when it comes out.

More importantly, I could go shopping for DVDs at the video store once every few months, and pick up all those films I know I want to see, without having to pay hundreds of dollars for permenant versions, or keep going back every week (and hope that the movie's in stock) to rent the one I want to watch that night.

Also, if I really like a film and I want all my friends to see it, I can buy a handful of copies and give them as gifts. At a sixth the price of a DVD, it's not such a grand gesture, or dent in the wallet.

Since the discs are cheap to make, this could also be a great viral marketing mechanism. When you buy a 'full' DVD, you might also get one or two 'single use' copies in there. This way, when I buy Amelie, because I love it so, I can get a few discs that I can give to friends, making me an instant Amelie evangelist. Those friends, if they love it as I do, might turn around and buy the full DVD, or at least a couple more single-use DVDs of their own, or for friends.

DVD-of-the-month-club also becomes a much more financially reasonable proposition.

Christmas would be much more fun if I didn't have to hope that my friend would like the DVD I chose for her, or pretend to like the one I got. When you can give someone a library of single-viewing experiences, you're more likely to make them happy, and it's easier to trade an inexpensive item with your friends for one you'd rather have.

Basically, you're buying, selling, giving, and trading movie tickets that you can redeem in your own home, the instant you open the airtight seal.

Especially when you consider how many portable devices use DVDs (computers, protable players, card, etc.), the idea of being able to 'rent' a DVD that you never have to return or pay late fees on, and can wait as long as you want before using, looks like exactly what's needed.

Despite the instant reaction to any sort of digital rights management technology, I actually think this is way cool, and could completely change people's spending habits on DVDs.

I'm always collecting things in my head to blog, and once in a while two seem to match up in an odd way, forcing them to the front of the queue. Today's tidbits are about minimal languages, Toki Pona and K, minimal verbal and programming languages, respectively.

My friend, Pigdog's Mr. Bad, recently introduced me to the wonderful language of Toki Pona. Unlike Esperanto (another of Señor Bad's hobbies), Toki Pona is a constructed language that favors simplicity over clarity, and touts itself as "the language of good. The simple way of life."

The Toki Pona language consists of 119 words. By virtue of Toki Pona's extremely small vocabulary, and order-independent syntax, the language is good at talking about feelings and simple relationships, but not about the finer points of politics or silicon-on-insulator microchip fabrication techniques. Tokiponists believe this is exactly as it should be.

It only takes about a day of effort to learn, though the trouble comes when you have nobody to speak with but yourself. Mr. Bad himself admits that he has onl had Toki Pona conversations in email and instant message conversations which, sadly, rips away the simplicity latent on the very phonemes and the way the mouth moves to pronounce them.

Perhaps Toki Pona will become my Chinese as it's used in Firefly, the underlanguage for muttering under my breath. Then again, what place does a happy language have as a muttering language. Well, it could be an interesting experiment anyhow.

...

On the other side of the minimalist coin is a programming language I only found out about this morning called K. There's an excellent K introduction and primer on (appropriately enough) Kuro5hin.org.

I haven't played with K, but it seems to be for lists what perl is for well, big files. And, um I thought Lisp was the language for lists... But this looks pretty cool anyhow. The interesting part is the syntax of K, a language where operators are called verbs, objects are nouns, and linguistic analogistic structures like adverbs take the place of more traditional looping structures.

Sadly, they don't have a version for the Mac yet, just windows, Solaris, and Linux, but a port can't be far behind.

At any rate, if you're a programmer, the primer is a good read, if it serves no other purpose than to be a reminder that just because so many of the coding languages we use have such a similar structure (Is concatenation done with '+', '.', or '&' in [language I'm coding in today]?) that doesn't mean that entirely other syntaxes exist and can prove valuable tools for specific problems.

the part that's amusing to me is that both of the above examples seek to distill existing languages down to core elements, but for entirely different reasons. Toki Pona strives to shape emotion by carving away parts of a language that breed stress, while K tries to distill languages down to core atomic components so that more complex questions can be answered with less chaff.

Either way, an interesting look at how narrowing a vocabulary can change the message conveyed.

Here's someone who did (local mirror) [quicktime, 7.8megs].

This is the best switch parody I've seen yet. Great.

So I know I've mentioned before on here that I live across the street from a cemetery, but those bare words don't do it justice. In the same way that Californians naively refer to 60-year-old buildings as 'old', most of use are used to nice neat cemeteries in nice neat rows; plots marked with plaques or short headstones following a common style guide: anonymity in all but the literal sense.

That's why places like the Black Diamond Mine cemetery, a true 'grave yard' is so nifty; the placement of the plots, and the headstones themselves tell far more about the character of a person, (or the people they left behind), than a bronze plaque could convey.

Come to think of it, I want my URL on my headstone.

Buffy was here.
(no, I didn't do it)

I have a few personal oddities, brought to either life or light by the fast-paced, time-shifting, nearly non-linear world I live in.

One (which I honestly have no idea what is responsible for) is an intermitent lack of my sense of thirst. For days, weeks, or even months at a time, I simply won't get thirsty. Not to say that I don't need water; anything but! But all too often I'll go a few days having almost nothing to drink and only realize it when I get a splitting headache, for which my standard elixer has been two excedrin chased with a soda (Coke, Pepsi, something with caffeine) and sometimes some chocolate. The irony of a diuretic easing the pains of dehydration is oh-so-funny at times like that. Oh yeah, and of course I also chug a liter or two of water, but that takes longer to absorb, so that when the meds wear off at least I'm moistened; the one-two punch of treating the symptom and the cause (yet the disease, to follow the metaphor) remains a mystery, as I have no clue what causes me to not be thirsty. The ultimate in procrastination?

At any rate, I was going to talk about my sense of time, and just mention the thirst thing as another example to back up the first sentence claiming that I had more than one oddity. Like I only have two... Oddities for future elaboration include the thumb trick, the amazing on-cue ear dimples, my internal atomic clock, and others I've already mentioned.

Fortune cookie I got with lunch today:You have made a promise to give something. Keep it.

Great.

So after a nice, warm weekend (66 degrees! woohoo!) there's a huge storm coming in tonight, and now there are news special reports of a tornado watch in western Pennsylvania tonight.

I live in an attic!

Well, if things get crazy and I can't get to the basement in time, I'll be sure to say hi to the Lollipop Guild!

Well, maybe not. But I could.

Combine a close lightning strike every few seconds with an apartment with ungrounded outlets (despite being 3-pronged), and the reasonable thing to do is turn off and unplug the computer, and so I have.

Let me just mention how cool my hiptop (err, 'sidekick') is, that I can, with no modification, browse to my weblog's composition page, and hammer (well, thumb) out a blog post, despite not having a computer turned on anywhere around.

There will be a hiptop review and, after spending a week or two with it, I'll be able to go into so much greater detail than I could have with 15 minutes in a conference room.

I love it, and there are a lot of areas that need improvement, almost all software, thankfully. The biggest testament for the hiptop interface may merely be that it isn't a pain to use it to compose a post of this length!

Getting my proper eight hours, starting just before midnight, is like going to an entirely different dreamspace; one where the journey back is turbulance free. Ahhh....

In other news, I've been trying to decide what to do for Thanksgiving or, to be more honest, I've been waiting for the answer to fall into my lap. I might go home, though my mom will be in Jamaica for a wedding, my aunt and uncle are leaving Friday morning to go to New York, and I'll be heading back to the bay area again two weeks later anyhow.

I've been thinking about taking the time off as a chance to see one of the great cities around here. Washington DC is only 4 hours away by car. Philidelphia is only a little farther, and beyond that is New York and Boston. But without a plan and/or a place to stay the problem gets a little intractable, as things like hotel bills really start to hammer my student budget.

On the other hand, USAir emailed me this morning with super savers to Germany: $235 round-trip nonstop from Pittsburgh to Frankfurt, and the blackout days don't even conflict with Thanksgiving travel. now if it were Italy, France, or England I'd be so there.

In other news, it looks like the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA? GSFBA?) got its first real dose of weather for the season last night.

Road closures, accidents, blackouts, and the opening night of Cirque du Soleil's Varekai was cancelled after 70mph winds ripped the top off the main Chapeau! Such a shame, because it's usually the most ardent die-hard fans who get the opening night tickets. Still, it's a good thing, since the trapese and arialists' equipment is integrated into the top of the tent, and if they kept the 'the show must go on' mentality, there might not be as many performers after the dust settled.

Weather's beautiful here! The forecast for today is 63 degrees! A varitable heat wave after two weeks of highs in the 30s and 40s. I can leave my long underwear and heck, maybe even my jacket at home!

Oh, and PS: Coming down the pike, I've got some gorgeous Fall desktop pics I'll be posting tomorrow for y'all's enjoyment. (y'all's?) Having no classes today, only group meetings, I'm taking the afternoon off and seeing Spirited Away at a 2:45 matinee!