So I’ve gotten my girlfriend hooked on Doctor Who, specifically the new series, aka strangely enough “The First Season”, which is currently rerunning on SciFi.

I don’t know why they named it Season 1 (and the currently-airing David Tennant season as Season 2), when in true chronology it would be something like the 27th.

This new series has a very awkward and uncomfortable connection to the old. The first episode has the Doctor facing an old enemy, although not a very common one. Here and there we see little snippets of the former series creep in — like a Cyberman head on display in a museum, copious (almost pre-Davison overkill) use of the sonic screwdriver, etc. The Doctor even faces his most popular foe, a Dalek, in an episode of the same name.

On the other hand, however, this new series has seemingly gone to great, almost Stephen King-like lengths to kill off as many of those vestiges as possible. For example, that Dalek the Doctor faces in Dalek is the last of its kind, and it dies (it basically commits suicide over a frankly rather disturbing eugenic principle).

While we’re on the topic of last of their kind, we learn in episode 2 (The End of the World) that Gallifrey — and apparently all the other Time Lords — was completely destroyed in a Time War that happened sometime after the Paul McGann movie and the start of this series. Lots of intergalactic races were involved in this war, including the Daleks, though apparently not Earthlings.

Of course, the Doctor insists he was the only survivor of the Time War, and yet he encounters a Dalek which fell through time into the early 21st century. Perhaps there were other survivors. For some reason, this oddly goofy yet troubled Doctor has convinced himself that he is all alone.

Anyway, the other thing I’m not fond of is Christopher Eccleston’s refusal to serve as the Doctor for more than one season. After having singlehandedly reintroduced the series to a new audience, and bringing a new level of sophisticated humor and aloof free-spiritedness to the character, he promptly buggers off. Apparently they say he is being well received. On the other hand, the Independent doesn’t think so.

I’m sure I won’t be able to exhaust the list, and I understand that movies cannot include every detail of books, so that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m talking about things in the movie that clearly were not reflected in the book. (Also, keep in mind I actually only listened to the audiobook, not the dead tree version.)

This is also a Very Big Spoiler Alert, because most of the changes affect the very surprises of the story.

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I was going to post a pump for eMusic, but I found a good start from Atrios at Eschaton:

Unlike most (all?) legal download services, emusic has no DRM whatsover. You download the .mp3 and it’s yours to do with what you want. It runs on a monthly subscription service - starting at $9.99 for 40 songs/month…. They don’t have most of the latest and greatest from the major labels, but they have some interesting back catalogs and a lot of great indie stuff.

Link

Another thing that I find great about eMusic is that they will help you find related music to whatever you’re looking at, with help coming from user playlists and download trends.

It is a little annoying not finding most popular (i.e. you’ve heard of it) artists, or the most popular of their albums, but that may not be important to you if, like me, you miss services like the old mp3.com that introduced you to new, good, music from bands you wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. And $0.25 a song certainly beats iTunes’ $0.99.

Since the eMusic files are straight MP3 (and this may have something to do with their limited catalog), they work on any MP3 player, not just an iPod, and furthermore, they can also be downloaded with any Web browser on any platform. (There is a snazzy and fairly useful download tool for Windows, but it’s entirely optional.)

eMusic

If you think that the consolidation of banks or telephone companies is disturbing, you’ve probably been totally unaware of the scope of supermarket consolidation:

Supervalu, 1500 stores, including all:

• Bigg’s
• Cub Foods
• Farm Fresh
• Hornbacher’s
• Save-A-Lot
• Scott’s (Indiana)
• Shop ‘n Save
• Shoppers (D.C.)
• Sunflower Market (Indianapolis)
• Soon to own Albertsons, 2500 grocery and 700 drug stores, including all:
• Acme
• Albertsons
• Bristol Farms
• Grocery Warehouse
• Jewel
• Lazy Acres
• Max Foods
• Save-A-Lot
• Shaw’s
• Star Market
• Super Saver Foods
• Acme Express
• Albertsons Express
• County Line Liquor
• Jewel Express
• Osco Drug
• Sav-on Drug

Kroger, 2500 grocery stores, including all:

• Bakers
• Barney’s Discount
• Bell Markets
  
• Cala Foods
• City Market
• Dillons
• Food 4 Less
• Foods Co
• Fred Meyer
• Fry’s Food and Drug
• Gerbes
• Hilander
• JayC Food Markets
• King Soopers
• Kroger
• Owens Market
• Pay Less Food Markets
• QFC
• Ralphs
• Smith’s Food and Drug

Safeway, 1800 stores, including all:

• Carrs (Alaska)
• Casa Ley, (Mexico)
• Genuardi’s
• Pavilions
• Tom Thumb (Texas)
• Dominick’s (Illinois)
• Pak ‘n’ Save
• Randalls (Texas)
• Vons (California/Nevada)

Ahold, lots of locations in the US and Europe, including all (in the US):

• Stop & Shop
• Martin’s Food Markets
• Tops
• U.S. Foodservice
• Peapod
• Giant Food (Maryland)

Kmart, which also owns Sears, for god sakes — though I guess they’re not quite grocery, but are worth a mention here considering how much traditional department retail is moving into hypermarketry;

Wal-Mart, 3300 stores (most if not all sell at least limited groceries), which also owns Sam’s Club, 550 stores, as well as 375 grocery stores in Central America and 300 ADSA stores in the UK;

Target, 1800 stores (some if not most sell at least limited groceries);

followed by a handful of major locals like Publix (880 stores), A&P (600 stores [Can/US]), Winn-Dixie (600 stores), Piggly Wiggly (600 stores), H-E-B (300 stores), Giant Eagle (200 stores), and Meijer (170 stores). In Canada, there are also the Loblaws, Metro, and Sobeys conglomerates.

In lieu of serious content, here’s something that just looks cool.

These fascinating organic sculptures are created by Professor Walter R. Tschinkel at FSU. Prof. Tschinkel created a series of blank earth enclosures, into which he let loose a few hundred harvester ants to build a home. After a few days, Tschinkel recaptured the ants, and then poured dental plaster (or molten metal) into the top, which seeped through the entire nest structure. The dried and cleaned results expose systems of ant-made space-age caverns connected with winding, helical shafts.

Link

In 2009, all American TV stations will be required to shut down their analog broadcasts and transmit their signals in digital only. If you don’t have a way to receive digital transmission by then, you’ll be picking up static.

Now, if you haven’t felt the need in the past few years to upgrade your TV to a digital model, like the “droves” referred to by FCC chairman Jonathan Adelstein, you may end up one of them. The FCC is confident that digital will take off, because people are already scooping up HDTVs. The actual number of sales is not mentioned. (How many of you have digital-ready TVs? If so, is your whole home converted?)

I grew up near some pretty poor neighborhoods in the early 90s, and I knew of at least one household whose only TV was a 13′’ black-and-white. People like that aren’t going to be upgrading to digital. Sure, they probably don’t still have B&W, but they probably don’t have digital, either.

If we believe television is a important medium, not just for entertainment but for culture, news, and public information, then it is important that television be accessible to as much of the public as possible. DTV won’t do that, not even by 2008.

To their credit, a few legislators (including the populist tease McCain) have put forward the notion of a digital converter subsidy to aid the transition specifically for low-income viewers. Meanwhile, though, he’s pushing for acceleration of the cutover to digital.

Why not let broadcasters keep analog next to their digital signal? Well, Congress wants the spectrum back, in order to give it to wireless. This is not entirely a bad idea, given the increased demand (and reticent implementation) of wireless high speed data and voice, though we have a hard time imagining that the TV band is the only place to get the spectrum from (already high-channel UHF is being reallocated).

Oddly, there is no such push for terrestrial digital radio, forcing radio broadcasters to trade in their analog signal right for a digital one. Satellite radio and HD are progressing, but not due to regulation, and not without extra carrots (e.g. being commercial-free), and even still, not really doing as well as they would like.

Developments in the DTV debate have introduced an exception for the requirement of trading in the analog signal. If the stations can get the FCC to rule that dropping analog in the market will cause a “consumer disruption“. Which will likely happen in larger markets — which are, pretty likely, exactly the same markets that have most demand for more wireless spectrum.

Incidentally, this is where it could spell the end for terrestrial TV. In Asia, where 3G is the rule, not the exception, (in some cases, literally) wireless-based entertainment, including what is awkwardly called “cell phone TV” is the killer app for wireless (as opposed to video telephony, which try as it might, hasn’t been able to sell anyone for over 40 years). As of right now, most major cell carriers have some form of 3G available in major markets (T-Mobile is planning it for 2007). In Asia, cellphone TV is a broadcast market on par with cable and satellite in terms of demand and attractiveness. Were this to catch on in the US, it may give DTV a run for its money. (As it currently stands, Cingular’s high-speed service specifically outlaws all of the high-bandwidth services that 3G is basically meant for.)

Meanwhile, municipal WiFi is becoming a hot item, especially for many struggling exurbs and bedroom communities looking to (re)vitalize their downtown areas and office space markets. If ever implemented effectively, this could introduce the feasibility of mobile IPTV. Add in the current number of homes with PCs or Internet applicances, and Internet-based IPTV could also jump into the fray against a recently and reluctantly converted terrestrial broadcast industry.

So, there is probably no need to kill your television. It may very well simply self-destruct.

Regarding all the buzz lately about NSA collecting wireless phone-call records en masse from telephone companies: I happen to work with some telecom people, and heard a couple of fairly disturbing things from one of them recently:

“Actually, the government’s had these agreements with the landline companies for a long time. When telephony went wireless, the agreements went with them.”

and:

“That information has never been secret. We’ve thought it was, but it never was.”

The most disturbing part is how that last line was delivered. It wasn’t in a tone of “we’ve really be duped by our government (and should do something about it)”, but of “well, we were wrong all along… oops, our mistake.”

The blogworld is abuzz today with the story that Karl Rove believes he will be indicted very soon. If so, he will resign. This would be the latest in a string of mid-term losses by the Bush White House, after Libby, Card, and Goss.

The question is, can the neocon machine really handle the loss of Bush’s main puppet master? I have a hard time believing that it can’t. After all, anyone who can rationally look at the policies and acts of this administration would have to agree that America wasn’t going to really swallow it. If anything, the machine is probably a bit astonished that it has taken this long for the chinks to appear in the Bush armor and his bishops and ministers to be deposed one by one. Which would mean that they’re prepared for such a contingency. Maybe they weren’t prepared for the loss of Rove, but I bet they are prepared for a lot.

Of course, this is all stemming from the belief that the neocons really realize the negative effects their agenda will have, and aren’t just massively, ridiculously, mind-numbingly convinced they are serving a great utilitarian good. If the latter is true, then maybe they are not ready for this, and will crumble like a deck of cards. I find that really hard to believe.

I for one expect that the Bush administration or the engine behind it is prepared to withstand the loss of every single person currently there, all the way to the top. How could you run forward with a record like theirs and not be prepared to handle a severe backlash?

It’s just far too optimistic to think that a single independent counsel investigation — the same thing that brought down Clinton — would be able to bring this house down so easily.

The big number in the news today was 29. Not only because the NASDAQ dropped by that many points (which frankly isn’t news, it’s chump change), but because it’s GWB’s current approval rating, his first under 30 and apparently the worst since his father’s in 1992. In fact, his numbers are lower than they were back in mid-2001, pre-9/11, when he was widely seen as a pretender to the office.

Of course, the Democrats are pretty encouraged by this. And the numbers just seem to keep going down, despite the fact that Fox News’ ratings are still as strong as ever. There’s a disconnect here — Fox News certainly hasn’t changed tack on its postive coverage of the GOP or the president, so how is it that more people are watching it yet less people are aligned with its politics?

An important thing to remember about polls is that they are only as good as the corpus of their polling sample. And a big part of what determines that sample is the set of people who agree — or more to the point, don’t agree — to answer the poll.

Not to invoke the VRWC, but after the heyday of Freeping, is it insane to think that, perhaps, Bush supporters are taking it upon themselves to deliberately not answer political polls? Worse, could they be stuffing them with anti-GOP answers? Polls mean nothing in and of themselves; their only possible effect is how political engines choose to direct their campaigns (and whether people go and vote). And if the GOP can lure the Democrats into a false sense of overconfidence, lowering the Dems’ defenses, they could pull off yet another upset. And chaos would rule the center-left as they finally conclude that everything they know is wrong.

Bush’s poll numbers were lower than his opponent in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, Granted, they weren’t this lopsided, but the point is, they consistently undermeasured the pro-GOP population.

Maybe it’s paranoia. Maybe it’s easy to be paranoid after 6 years. But maybe the polls have been wrong long enough to make me think twice about how much to trust them, even when they’re good.

This little device costs under $30 and plays MP3s from an SD or MMC card. While $300 iPods corner the MP3 player market, lock your music inside, keep you in an upgrade path, and encourage you to use proprietary formats, a little device like this keeps your cost down and lets you be as flexible as you want with the quality and size of your storage. I picked this up for $28 at Fry’s, though it tends to go on sale for $15; it was tucked away in a lonely, neglected, sparse forgotten far corner of the store. In the same trip I picked up a 1GB SD for $45 (only the second cheapest).

With handheld game software coming on SmartMedia-sized cartridges, and a device like this, it shouldn’t be at all difficult to imagine a future where albums are delivered on 128MB SD cards for use in a player like this.