By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!

MacRumors has information about a new operating system interface (both Mac and Windows) that uses an armband that senses muscle movement to determine actions to take on the computer.  As they say, it's not like the Microsoft Kinect, which is using a camera to track body movements, so it only works with one arm/hand and you have to wear it.  We slowly are moving to better human/machine interaction, from Siri for voice commands to break us free from the keyboard to this that will possibly break us free from the mouse.

But, best of all, I love this advertising picture.  You know that the ad manager had to be a fan of Dr. Strange to pick this particular hand gesture.

Ah, to think that I should ever live to the day where comic geekdom took over the world!

Art for Art's Sake

David Bryne (yes, that David Byrne) has a great review up regarding the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).  His description of it and its conception of both reverence and irreverence, as well as the incorporation of technology to provide meta information about the artwork, sounds delightful.  I've always wanted to go to Tasmania, and now I have yet another reason to do so!

(title h/t to Mr Brown)

You wonder why you drive me crazy

A common question from people when they learn we've relocated to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is if we are worried about terrorism.  "No," we reply, "we're much more worried about being in a traffic accident."  Saudi Arabia is the world's leader in traffic fatalities per capita, with roughly 19 per day.  Part of the reason for this is the lack of, as we've seen it termed in the local newspaper, "lane discipline."  There are also wonderful manuevers like the one illustrated below, for which there are now cameras in place to try and catch (click to enlarge).

Arab News PSA

I tell people about this little manuever all the time.  We see this at least once a week on our drive into work, typically at the intersection of King Fahd Road and Oroba Street.  However, I do believe I noticed a new camera installed there today, so perhaps we'll be spared in the future.

Now, if they could only do something about people turning left from the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th lane over....

(Title from the first line of "Reckless Driver" by Timbuk 3, one of my fav Austin bands.)

Holiday Greetings for the Year 2012

As is our custom each year, we finish it off with a letter that we send to family and friends about what happened during the last 12 months and what we're looking forward to in the near future. And because we can never do the same thing twice, each year that letter takes on a new theme or form. This year's letter is in the shape of a PowerPoint slide, because that's what most defined the year for us.  Here it is:

2012 Holiday Letter

Past letters are archived in the About page here on immediacy.

An Open Letter to Rosetta Stone

Dear Rosetta Stone Ltd.,

On 1 August 2012 I purchased your product, TOTALe Online Arabic - 12 Month Plan, from your website.  As the confirmation email you sent to me, this is what I expected to get with my purchase:

What do you get with the TOTALe Online Access Only product?

• Rosetta Course™ teaches you Arabic by intuitively associating sounds and images with new language meaning, without translations, grammar drills or memorization.
• Rosetta Studio™ allows you to interact in live sessions with a Coach who is a native speaker to reinforce your learning as you complete each unit.
• Rosetta World™ provides a fun online community where you can practice your new skills in interactive games and activities with other learners.
• Rosetta Stone TOTALe Mobile Companion™ for your iPhone® or iPod Touch® serves as an additional way to practice on the go.
  Download the app from iTunes today.
• Rosetta COURSe® for your iPad® provides you with a new way to engage in language discovery.
  Download the app from iTunes today.

And this is what I did receive initially, and I was quite happy with my purchase.  However, less than a week from my purchase, you updated the Rosetta COURSe for the iPad, and upon applying the update, I discovered that you had removed support for Arabic from this iPad product.  I immediately wrote to your customer service department asking for a date at which Arabic would be available again for the iPad, to which I received the following very non-committal reply that indicated it would be available sometime in the future:

Yes, Arabic and Farsi were previously available in TOTALe Course HD on iPad (v1.4.8).  With the release of Rosetta Course on iPad (v1.5.4), Arabic and Farsi are no longer available. We are striving to bring Arabic and Farsi to Rosetta Course on iPad in a future release.

We do not have any expected time for this yet. We actually waited to bring the application back quickly(We received many other learners contacting us as well on this.Hence we wanted to respond to all these email`s at a time once we have the update). However, it seems to take more time.

We would keep you posted once the application is back.

We apologize for the delay in replying to your email and apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Three months later, on November 17, Arabic was still not available on Rosetta COURSe on the iPad.  I wrote to you again, and not only did you not connect my follow-up to my original, your response indicated that you were not even working on re-adding this functionality.  The response:

The iPad app does not support Arabic. I will provide a language request on your behalf. 

This is unacceptable behavior, and has totally -- or, to use your own branding, TOTALe -- soured me on your product.  While it is true that I still have access to the other aspects of the product, the ability to use my iPad to access these language lessons while I am away from my home computer was one of the reasons I choose your product.  The advertisement of this feature, and then the removal of it, along with your customer service response, I consider unfair and deceptive.

As should be clear by now, I will not be recommending your product or service in the future.

Sincerely,

Glen Engel-Cox

Missing the Picture(s)

Todd Klein reviews The Annotated Sandman, Vol. 2, and notes that the annotator misses at least half of the point of comics, as all the annotations are just about Neil Gaiman's script.  This is a perfect example of what I used to try to cover with my students in my "text + vision" writing class -- if your analysis of the comic simply focused on the plot of the comic, you've missed the picture, quite literally.  Comics work (or don't work) because of the interplay between the pictures and the text, the latter of which is, in the parlance of creative writing, often the "telling" part of the story, while the picture is the "showing."  Good comic writers, of which Gaiman is one, know how to show with their text as well, but also work collaboratively with the artist to make sure that the pictures carry the story forward.  I've been reading a lot of comics from the early 40s, where many writers and artists were still learning their craft.  If you compare Gardner Fox's Flash stories to Will Eisner's Spirit stories, you notice just how much text is on the Flash page--that's because Fox came from a literary tradition and focused on the words.  Eisner, as both writer and artist, was able to use words sparingly, because he knew that the pictures would also progress his story.

A True Olympian: Congratulations to Dr. Raymond Hoff!

Words do not convey how proud I am to have been associated with Ray Hoff, who today received the highest recognition possible from NASA for a non-goverrnmental employee, the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, for "for distinguished service and leadership in Earth observations and their application for societal benefit." Ray was Jill's PhD advisor, my boss at UMBC at GEST and JCET, and one of our best friends in the DC region. His award is around the 28:00 mark in this video.

As NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver alludes to, the people here are the true Olympians, those who have made sacrifices to benefit the rest of us rather than themselves, and they are the ones who kids should consider heroes rather than some swimmer or gymnast.

A History of Recent Saudi Arabia

Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
by Robert Lacey
ISBN: 978-1-101-14073-4

My wife and I are about to begin an assignment in Saudi Arabia that will have us living there for months or possibly years, thus my need to quickly increase my knowledge about the Kingdom and its culture. This book by Robert Lacey is actually a follow-up to a much larger volume titled simply, The Kingdom, that Lacey first published in 1981.  This, basicaly, is a sequel, but one written with the purpose of understanding the events that occurred after 1981 related to Saudi Arabia, specifically the war in Afghanistan, the rise of Al-Qaeda, 9/11, the embassy attacks within Saudi Arabia, and Guantanamo Bay. The title, therefore, is both accurate and inaccurate: if anything, Lacey's premise is that the last 30 years has forced Saudi Arabia to come to the realization that the Kingdom affects and can be affected by events outside its borders, for better or worse, and can no longer be denied by the King.

It's a fascinating book, and Lacey an engaging and smooth writer.  Things I was able to learn from the narrative include finally understanding some of Saudi Arabia's attitude towards its neighbors (as well as sections of its own population) by Lacey's clear explanation of the Sunni and Shia differences.  The book also illustrates the strange shift in Saudi attitudes towards hardline Muslim extremists and business-focused Westerners by focusing on several of the important power brokers in addition to the Al-Saud family.

The book was published in 2009, but based on what I've already learned from my first trip to the country, is in need of a couple of additional chapters, as Saudi Arabia continues to both embrace and fight a rapid pace of change.  Just in the last year, a university dedicated to women's education has been completed near the Riyadh airport and several economic cities dedicated to trade, banking, and manufacturing are due to be completed in the next year.  Women continue to press for more rights (not just the right to drive, but with regards to family and property rights) and the religious police have recently been pulled back from some more egrigious behavior.  All of these are on a pendulum, one that Inside the Kingdom reveals can just as easily swing back in a more conservative direction. 

It's going to be an interesting time here.

Visual BASIC: The Proposal

Option Explicit

Dim time As Long
Dim life As Short
Dim you As Single
Dim I As Single
Dim us As Double

While time > life
   If us = you And I Then
      Set life = New beginning
   Else
      Call Me
      For time = Now() To life < time
         While you Or I
            Wait
            life = life + time
         Loop
      Next time
      time = time + time
   End If
   If time > life Then
      Execute us
   End If
Loop

NOTES

I wrote this poem back in 1999. It likely requires a nerd to understand it, but there's more and more of us out there every year.

Public Service: Identifying a Craigslist Scam

I received a message today from robot@craigslist.org that tripped my scam alert. If you look at the message, and the fact that it's coming from what looks to be a authentic email address, it would be easy to be fooled by this one, because Craigslist does in fact use a robot to confirm listings.  However, that robot usually sends a message right after you post your listing, not a week afterwards.  And this looks similar to that message, but something seemed to be off.  What reallly got me to doubt it wasn't the multiple exclamation marks, but the use of the word "ADD" for advertisement.

So I looked at the email message header, and found the scam in the reply-to line:

Reply-To: "craigslist - automated message, reply for verification" robot@crajgsljsts.org

How does the scam work?  I did my due diligence and came up with the following scenario from someone who feel for this:

You respond to the message with your post information. This allows the scammer to replace your post with their for sale post, which now looks like it is coming from you instead of them, thus giving it a legitimacy they wouldn't have had, and possibly also making it look like the advert is local.

The original message is reposted below so others who do a search may find this based on the text in the scam and not fall for it.

DEAR email_address

IMPORTANT - FURTHER ACTION IS REQUIRED TO PUBLISH YOUR (cars & trucks - by owner) ADD ONLINE - HUMAN VERIFICATION!!!
YOUR POSTING IS CURRENTLY HELD FOR VERIFICATION!!!
REPLY US YOUR CITY/STATE AND THE POST/EDIT/DELETE LINK FROM THE MESSAGE YOU RECEIVED EARLIER WITH SUBJECT LINE POST/EDIT/DELETE

Here are the steps you need to follow:

Find the message with the POST/EDIT/DELETE subject line

Copy the POST/EDIT/DELETE link.

Reply to this message by putting your POST/EDIT/DELETE link and your location: City/State in which you posted the ADD in the subject line.

Deliver us the message for human verification by pressing the SEND button in order to reactivate your posting.

You will find your POST/EDIT/DELETE link in an earlier message sent by us with this subject line: POST/EDIT/DELETE. You need to copy your entire link, paste it in the subject line of this message and reply to us.

*** HUMAN VERIFICATION IS A MECHANISM TO PREVENT SPAMMING ON CRAIGSLIST!!!

This is an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person.This message was sent to prevent automated software from performing actions which degrade the quality of our services, also this action is required to minimize automated posting on craigslist (cars & trucks - by owner). Human Verification Posting is sometimes required for posting on craigslist. Your posting is currently held for verification. Follow the instructions, and your posting will be verified and approved to go online on craigslist.
Your posting will expire off the site 45 days after it was created.

WARNING!! *** WARNING!! *** WARNING!! *** WARNING!!

Please be wary of distant 'buyers' responding to your ad! Many sellers receive replies from scammers hoping to defraud them through schemes involving counterfeit cashier's checks and/or wire transfers. These checks will clear the bank, but the person cashing the check will be held responsible when the fraud is discovered.

More info on scams can be found at this web address: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams

Thanks for using craigslist!