Noniecles

As someone who believes that life shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and that humor is the key to happiness, I love my stand-up and sitcom comedies. I know it’s solid gold when I’m still stuck on a show about nothing from the days when high-waist jeans were in, or when I’m obsessed with inviting over strangers just because they haven’t witnessed the infinite wisdom of BBC’s Coupling.

However, finding quality comedy is not always an easy task. There are some comedians who just aim at the lowest common denominator and somehow get away with it (Adam Sandler, anyone?). Then there are those who might be funny, but are just a little too generic to make you want to go and seek out their other material. So while there is a lot of crap out there that might satisfy the masses (I’ve even heard of people who actually enjoyed Zoolander!), it takes more than that to keep me happy. Personally, I prefer humor that is smart, politically-incorrect, and makes you work for the punch line.

The other day, I was introduced to the following clip:

I am not usually patient with friends who try to force me to watch those “really funny / interesting / cool / amazing video clip I found online!”. But this one actually had me intrigued – it’s just what I like, so I started looking this girl up:

Her name is Sarah Silverman. She’s a Jewish American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live for writing sketches that were too screwball and unusable. Her comedy deals with topical humor, satire and social taboos (both mild and serious) such as racism, sex, and religion. A couple of weeks ago, she hosted the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, and she now has her own sitcom on Comedy Central, The Sarah Silverman Program.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? So I watched a couple of episodes from her show…

…and it wasn’t great.

The show was at times stupid, childish, predictable and badly made. The ideas behind the jokes are actually quite good and could have worked better with different arrangements – the punch lines were a little too explicit, and Sarah’s juvenile attitude kills altogether. I haven’t had the chance to watch any of her live acts just yet, but I hope that when I do, it will stand up to expectations – because let me tell you, this kid’s got potential.

However, according to Dylan Moran, potential is a dangerous thing:

“You should stay away from your potential. I mean, that is something you should leave absolutely alone! You’ll mess it up! It’s potential, leave it! And anyway, it’s like your bank balance, you know - you always have much less than you think.”

I first saw Moran in the BBC comedy Black Books. I’d never heard of this show until a while back, when a friend started going around quoting from The Little Book of Calm. Two days later, I’d caught up on all three seasons of the lives of an eccentric bookshop owner and his hapless best friends – it was that good.

At the time, I didn’t actually know that Moran, who plays the foul-mouthed, misanthropic drunkard protagonist, was also a stand-up comedian. It was later, in March, when I learned that he would be performing at the Enmore Theater, here in Sydney. Not knowing what to expect, I went to see the act. The verdict? I don’t think I have ever laughed harder in my life than in that hour and a half – his drunkenly acerbic delivery was flawless.

To get your started down the road to Dylan Moran, here is a clip from his live tour, Monster (now available on DVD). Enjoy.

But… what else are you supposed to give hookers in a hotel room?

Nonie.

A couple of months before starting my uni degree back in early 2002, I bought my first laptop computer. It was a 15″, HP Pentium III with a huge 30GB drive and a built-in CD-RW/DVD-Rom combo unit. Back in the days, it was a state-of-the-art piece of equipment, even if it was a bit too heavy for my liking (just over 3kg).

Taking it out for a walk was always a bit of a hassle. I had to disconnect all the different peripherals before packing it up in my bag. It became a little ritual actually; the network cable went first, followed by the external hard-drive (lets face it, 30GB doesn’t hold that much porn), then the mouse, the printer, the webcam, the audio cable and finally, the power cord. Putting it all back together wasn’t great fun either. Who’s the guy that came up with the concept of making the Firewire connector so small and then sticking it right at the back of the laptop?

Thats why I was happy when I bought my new Sony Vaio last year - I was able to get rid of all the cables! The Internet now flies through the WiFi, the mouse is wireless, the webcam is built-in and the printer, hard-drive and audio are all connected to the old laptop which acts as a server to the new one through the wireless router. But there’s one naughty wire that seems destined to stick around regardless - the power cord. It’s a shame that nobody’s ever came up with wireless electricity technology…

…Or have they?

Researchers from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Temple Mount equivalent for geeks) recently demonstrated an efficient wireless power transfer by lighting up a 60W bulb from a power source located more than two meters away. The formal theory behind the experiment was published in a paper featured in the Science Express magazine. The paper itself includes many nasty equations involving double integrals, vector manipulations, dot-products, gradients and some Greek letters you didn’t even know existed - but here’s the gist of how WiTricity (as in wireless electricity) works:

Several methods of transferring power wirelessly have been known for centuries. Technically, the radio wave radiation that we use for most of the wireless appliances you can think of is actually a transmission of power. The only problem with this method is that radiation spreads in all directions and a vast majority of power would end up being wasted into free space. Of course, you can use directed electromagnetic radiation, but this isn’t very practical and can even be dangerous; it requires an uninterrupted line of sight between the source and the device, as well as a sophisticated tracking mechanism when the device is mobile.

Another possible method is the one often used in electric toothbrushes. Have you ever noticed how there are no metal contacts on either the toothbrush or the charger, and yet it still charges? This is known as magnetic induction - it’s like putting one half of a transformer (the electric kind, not the Autobot) inside the brush and the other half in the charger. When brought together, a varying magnetic field in one coil induces a current in the other coil, thereby allowing the battery to charge. However, this is also a very insufficient method - did you realize it takes 16 hours to recharge the damned brush?

In contrast, WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with objects that have a different resonant frequency. In physics, resonance is the tendency of an object to oscillate at maximum amplitude at a certain frequency. If the object is excited with a different frequency, its oscillation will die down. Think of a swing for example - a kid needs to pump his legs with the right rhythm in order to gain more momentum from it.

Another example: we’ve all heard the myth about the opera singer breaking the wine glass with a high note, but has anyone ever seen it happening in real life? It’s not actually a myth, though - if the singer sings a sufficiently loud single note of the same frequency as the natural frequency of the glass, the latter will accumulate energy until it finally explodes.

While there are few different kinds of resonant systems, the MIT team focused on one particular type: magnetically coupled resonators. The team explored a system of two electromagnetic resonators, each consist of a helical copper coil placed about two meters apart, coupled mostly through their magnetic fields. Using the mathematical theory, they calculated the optimal sizes of the coils in order to match their frequencies and maximize the energy transfer efficiency. This is what it looks like in action:

Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. This makes it a safe design for people and other living creatures, and in order to prove it, the team released couple of photos with themselves standing between the coils while the system was operating. Here you can see that the system still works even when there’s an obstruction in the middle:

The crucial advantage of using the non-radiative field lies in the fact that most of the power not picked up by the receiving coil remains bound to the vicinity of the sending unit, instead of being radiated into the environment and lost. Although the two coils are currently of identical dimensions, it is possible to make the device coil small enough to fit into portable devices without decreasing the efficiency.

However, as the distance between the source and the device coils increases, the efficiency of transfer decreases. Still, for laptop-sized coils, power levels more than sufficient to run a laptop can be transferred across a room; as long as the laptop is in a room equipped with a source of such wireless power, it would charge automatically, without having to be plugged in.

Now I’m just wondering whether I should use my super engineering skills to try to produce my own WiTricity system in order to get rid of that one last power cord or should I wait for them to figure out all the technical difficulties first. Mind you, the last time I attempted playing around with high-voltages, I blew up my radiator. Maybe I should stick to microelectronics for now…

Nonie.

Last week, Britain’s University and College Union, representing more than 120,000 college-level educators, has voted to go forward with a proposal to boycott Israeli academic institutions in response to “Israel’s 40-year occupation”.

Obviously, I have my strong opinions about the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict but it’ll take me a number of hours and quite a few pages to express them all around here. Lets just say that when it comes to the maths of Israeli politics, I am standing somewhere on the left-hand side of the equation.

So its not like I’m against the Palestinians as a whole, and I do acknowledge their right for independent life, free from occupation and all that jazz - but it does irritate me when I read such headlines as the ones about the British boycott.

I remember that they actually tried playing that same trick a while back, but I’m not quite sure if it had any impact. It probably didn’t. Besides, isn’t it a bit hypocritical on their part to take these extreme measures in protest against something that they have never experienced with their own flesh and blood? I mean, seriously - if one of the cities in Great Britain was under a missile attack, even for just one week, I’m sure even the poshest of their professors would put his croquet mallet away and collect his wooden balls in support for Her Majesty’s armed forces.

I wouldn’t have thought of it any further, if it wasn’t for Bradley Burston’s excellent article in Ha’aretz. With just the right dash of sarcasm, he rolls out how pathetic the whole boycott attempt really is. I couldn’t have said it better myself:

Boycotting Israel as moral masturbation
By Bradley Burston

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that you’re a British academic. You believe strongly that the occupation must end, that the Palestinians should have an independent state, that Israel’s military and diplomatic policies are wrongheaded to the point of immorality.

What to do? Simple. Find the one group within Israeli society which has consistently, vigorously and courageously campaigned against the occupation since its inception.

Then attack them.

Single them out for professional ruin. Do your best to get as many of their colleagues around the world to shun them. Yes, just as if you were in seventh grade and had decided to alleviate your own feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, panic and lack of requisite cool by cutting another victim from the middle school herd and lobbying your equally insecure colleagues to abuse the chosen victim.

Choose your victim with care. Select the one group in Israel which has taken substantive physical, professional, legal and personal risks, which has defied the spirit of Israeli nationalism and the letter of Israeli law, in order to seek out Palestinians to search for equitable solutions.

Select the one group which has, from the very beginning, spoken out eloquently for the rights of the Palestinians to self-determination, to freedom from Israeli domination, to freedom from disproportionate and often indiscriminate use of force, to freedom from social injustice.

Then denounce them.

Decide that your moral vision fully empowers you to declare Israeli professors and other university and college faculty to be unworthy of practicing their calling. All of them.

That is, perhaps, the real beauty of the British campaign to declare a quarantine over Israeli academics.

You really must envy the U.K. far-left for its blindness. Its consummate inability to see more than one side, which is to say, its demonstrated refusal to see Jews as fellow human beings, is only exceeded by its exquisite sense of timing.

No matter that in the whole of the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein managed to hit all of Israel with a total of 39 missiles, and that two weeks ago, Hamas sent 40 rockets into the Sderot area in the space of a single day.

No matter that Sapir College, Israel’s largest public college, has for years been a primary target of Qassam crews.

No matter that in boycotting all Israeli academics on the basis of their being Israelis, the measure is patently racist, a grotesque reprise of the history of curbing academic freedom.

No matter that Israeli Arab academics who are staunchly opposed to the occupation are vehement opponents of the boycott as well.

No matter, even, that opposition to the boycott runs strong within the British University and College Union itself. In fact, all the more reason to press on.

For the genuine elitist, the unpopularity of an opinion is the best assurance of its real value.

Perhaps this is why the whole boycott campaign smacks of a uniquely far-left British brand of moral masturbation, a desperate, delusional, sterile, supremely self-contained form of non-activism that risks nothing even as it changes nothing.

There must be some reason why no one in this world does condescension better than the British far-left. There must be some reason why the British far-left manages to satisfy itself with a uniquely public, uniquely self-congratulatory form of ideological self-abuse.

Leftists abroad would do well to respect their Israeli counterparts for defying societal norms to work for the rights of people with whom their nation is at war. Perhaps the Israeli left deserves respect, as well, for having to do this while enduring the racist abuse of leftists abroad.

Nonie.

I didn’t actually have the time yet to start considering this whole writing-to-the-world site just yet, but just so we don’t end up with WordPress’s default post, here is something for you to enjoy in the meanwhile.