Rush Limbaugh Boasts Being Bamboozled By Bee Blurb

Last week Rush Limbaugh joined the bee brigade when he mentioned the bogus Einstein bee quote. To his credit, today he admitted to being fooled.

“There’s a line in the story about this mysterious bee disappearance that is attributed to Einstein, says if the bees went away, that humanity would expire in four to five years, that we couldn’t survive without them. And Einstein never said it. It’s one of the these popular myths that circulating. It might be true, but Einstein didn’t say it.”

“But I was totally taken in by it,” Limbaugh said. “Even I, the great El Rushbo was taken in. I apologize for that, too.”

Wow … Rush Limbaugh is capable of occasionally telling the truth!

(By the way, friends, this is the first and last Rush Limbaugh link you’ll ever see on MT.Net.)

Shutterbug

Inevitably whenever I’m out in public shooting pictures, a total stranger will walk up to me and try to hire me to shoot pictures at his or her event. Last night’s fundraiser at Ess Lounge was no exception. A woman asked if photography is “what I do,” and when I nodded she invited me to shoot at tomorrow night’s Derby Party. I had to tell her I was already booked, having plans to visit our friends the Naylors, but I did appreciate the offer. There will be lots of classily-dressed people at that party so shooting pictures is bound to be fun.

The hook of local mags Social and zSpotlight is publishing party pictures. I could easily do that, perhaps for my own website. That was the idea behind my Eventwire domain before I sold it to its current owner. Certainly I could make some money doing photography on the side.

It also would’ve been a great occasion to have my calling cards with me (no, not the ones that say BMF, the ones that say “photographer”). I keep a pack of them in my car but we took Kelly’s car to the event and I neglected to bring them along. Parties like that are really the reason I got them. Who knows how many photography gigs I might have lined up just from last night?

I caved in today and purchased an external flash for my Nikon D50: the new Nikon SB-400. Its compact, uses only TWO (!) AA batteries, and can handle bounce flash, too. Ken Rockwell loves his, and that was good enough for me.

It was also helpful to learn why my old Vivitar flash doesn’t work with the Nikon: CCDs are too shiny for the camera to judge proper lighting. The Internets are good for all kinds of information.

Cheap Thoughts: Flash Drive Receipts

Once again we’re faced with a pile of paper receipts from our purchases, and once again we’re facing tedious and error-prone data entry as we reconcile our checkbook.

It’s 2007. Why are we still dealing in paper receipts? Mechanical cash registers are so 1870s. Computerized ones have taken their place. Why not take advantage of these computers?

A digital receipt could be provided on a customer’s USB flash drive. Or it could go on their smartchip-enabled “customer appreciation card.” The customer would take home a full, digital inventory of their purchases which could be direcly imported into their favorite checkbook application. No more poring over receipts at the end of the month, trying to figure out what’s what.

The receipts also be fed into a shopping list application, providing an easy way of keeping track of your fridge’s contents and when you’re likely to need more.

Coupons could be copied to the drive as well and redeemed the same way.

You’d never again have to wait in line while the cashier fumbled with a new roll of paper for the printer. You’d never wait for the impossibly-long paper receipt to print something you’re likely to throw away anyway.

What’s better, the digital receipt could be cryptographically signed by the store, verifying that the purchases were legitimate. In this way, these receipts would be even more secure than the paper ones, which are more susceptible to forgery.

It wouldn’t take much to make this happen. Any system would have to be backwards-compatible with existing systems (at least, to begin with). This means a terminal would have a serial or parallel port in addition to a USB port (or smartcard reader). If some modern registers use USB printers, that makes things even easier. The terminal app would take the output from the register, sign it, and copy it to the USB drive, perhaps in a CSV, XML, or some other open format. The register would never know it didn’t print to paper.

Who knows? Someday USB drives or smartcards may one day take the place of credit cards entirely. Anything would be more secure than a flimsy piece of plastic with no inherent security features.

I think I’ll take a closer look at registers in the next few days and figure out how this might work.

Children’s House Of Raleigh Fundraiser At Ess Lounge

We just got back from the annual fundraiser for my daughter’s preschool, Children’s House of Raleigh. It was held downtown at the Ess Lounge this year and it was rocking.

Thanks to Kelly for all the hard work she put into it, and thanks to all the other parent volunteers. Thanks also to the many, many businesses who donated products and services to make this fundraiser a success!

Pictures from the event can be found in my gallery. As with my recent RTP 2.0 pics, these are Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-alike licensed. Spread ’em round, and tell folks you got ’em at MarkTurner.Net.

AP Carries Einstein Bee Smackdown Story

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein laid the smackdown on the Einstein bee quote with his Cellphones, rapture or Einstein? Ideas, myths swirl around bees’ disappearance article today:

Also on the Internet is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein on how humans would die off in four years if not for honeybees. It’s wrong on two counts.

First, Einstein probably never said it, according to Alice Calaprice, author of “The Quotable Einstein” and five other books on the physicist.

“I’ve never come across it in anything Einstein has written,” Calaprice said. “it could be that someone had made it up and put Einstein’s name on it.”

Second, it’s incorrect scientifically, [U.S. Department of Agriculture bee researcher Jeff] Pettis said. There would be food left for humans because some food is wind-pollinated.

I stopped checking Einstein experts at Walter Isaacson since his word was good enough for me. Alice Calaprice, as author of “The Quotable Einstein” is probably in a better position to know an Einstein quote when she saw it.

Kudos to Seth Borenstein for helping shoo this myth away!

pr0n on I-540?

I took I-540 on the way home yesterday evening. On the pedestrian bridge between the Falls of the Neuse and Capital Boulevard exits, some 733+ h4XORz had spelled out: “PRON?” in what looked like paper cups stuffed into the chain-link fence.

I’m not sure why one would want to display pr0n over a busy interstate, as its very difficult to see the naughty bits when speeding by at 70 MPH. Why one would want to display the word pr0n is even more of a mystery.

I’m kicking myself now for not stopping to snap a picture.

Cheap Thoughts: Checkbox News – Customized News

Doc tipped me off about checkbox news, Dave Winer’s dream of being able to fine-tune the news that gets delivered to him. Checkbox news lets you tailor the stories you are presented according to your likes, and perhaps more importantly, your dislikes.

I find it interesting that this isn’t already being done. Its the future of broadcasting, or to be more precise – its proof there is no future for broadcasting. The idea that everyone will be watching the same thing was mortally wounded with the invention of the Tivo and this idea may finish it off.

I see “checkbox news” taking shape as a Tivo-like set-top box collecting snippets of news. The typical network news show consists of multiple stories lasting around 60 to 90 seconds, with plenty of commercial padding. You’ll soon be able to pick which stories you want to follow, perhaps even mixing in another network’s coverage of a particular story if you like their angle better.

Overnight, the media is freed from the iron grip of so few companies. Networks no longer matter. Anchors no longer matter. News is broken up into the essential element:the story. A news session can be assembled any way the viewer wishes, with stories selected in the same way newspaper editors select wire stories to mix with their locally-produced news. The idea of a television “consumer,” one who takes only what is given, goes the way of black and white TV. Individual stories compete for viewers in an online marketplace: the free market at its best.

News would be judged on the basis of the stories alone. In the same manner that the World Wide Web acts as a great equalizer for anyone with something to say, checkbox news could provide the platform for anyone willing to provide a report. Offer more compelling reporting, and you as an independent journalist could speak to millions. Anyone with a story could have an equal shot of getting heard.

Sites like YouTube specialize in short video clips. Tools like bittorrent can distribute news clips. Konspire is like BitTorrent with a remote control – designed for customized IPTV channels that anyone can create. Its dormant now but still offers as much promise as when I wrote about it earlier. Maybe even more.

All one needs is to create the story marketplace – the economic engine for this whole scheme – and news will never be the same. Ah, to have access to a few million bucks right now…