Some time ago I posted about the ongoing debate between David Hockney and our Cheif Scientist, David Stork, about whether the great painters of the 15th century “cheated” by secretly using optical devices like the camera obscura. Hockney thinks the realism one suddenly sees in paintings around 1430 proves that such devices were used, even though no record of them can be found (they were secret, remember?). Stork thinks it’s hogwash, and has both proposed numerous ways the realism could have been acheived using technology known to exist at the time and pointed out reasons the optical techniques Hockney proposes wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Now the New Scientist is reporting that evidence of one alternative technology Stork suggested has been found:

Separate findings will be published in March by Thomas Ketelsen, a curator at the Museum of Prints, Drawings and Manuscripts in Dresden, Germany. Hockney has argued that the similarity between Jan van Eyck’s drawing Portrait of Niccolò Albergati and a larger oil painting of the same name could only have been achieved using optical projections. But using a microscope, Ketelsen has found evidence of previously unseen pinpricks in the drawing – suggesting the copying method was mechanical, not optical. He suggests that a type of reducing compass called a “reductionzirkel” might have been used.

Falco points out that the pinpricks could have been made 50 years after van Eyck’s death by someone wishing to copy it, or even 500 years after. “Holes can’t be carbon dated,” he says. But Stork thinks the mounting evidence can’t be ignored. “The evidence doesn’t support Hockney,” he says.

“The debate is fascinating,” Hockney says. “But it cannot end just because someone found pinpricks.”

Hockney’s argument was never strong to begin with, but it’s starting to sound like he’s join the ranks of creationists, alien abduction followers and conspiracy nuts. If so, he may as well have ended his last sentence after the fourth word…

To quote a coworker of mine, “Apple’s going to make unspeakable amounts of money on these.” I’m especially glad to see the Mac mini, since it’s exactly what I’ve been searching around for as the media hub of a new entertainment center I’m putting together now that I’m no longer in a one-bedroom apartment. Cheap ($499 starting, a little over $600 for the bluetooth & 80G version I want), small (6.5″ x 6.5″ x 2″), and quiet — it’ll be my combination CD jukebox, DVD player and MIDI munger for my keyboard.

As for the iPod Shuffle, I could really see this becoming the satellite-radio killer. If the iPod is your music collection in your pocket and the iPod mini is your jogging music / music wherever you want, the iPod Shuffle is going to be the daily download. Mix it with iMix, Wiretap Pro and/or a Radio Shark and you’ve got a personalized commercial-free radio with a “next song” feature. You miss out on realtime info like traffic reports (which really should go to your GPS/nav system anyway) and breaking news, but how much news breaks between the time I leave for my commute and arrive at my destination? I’d also miss out on Howard Stern if I don’t go with satellite radio, but for me that’s a feature, not a bug.

As is traditional, Apple’s stock is down almost %6 as of this writing. Me? I just put in a buy order…

BusinessWeek and Reuters mention that the New York Times is “considering” moving to a pay-for-content model for their web-based news, though they’ve no immediate plans to do so. Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly comments :

For all the big talk in the blogosphere, if this happened it would pretty much spell the end of political blogging. Without a copious supply of online newspapers and magazines providing the raw material, there are very few bloggers who would have anything left to say.

I doubt that, though honestly I’m not sure it would be a bad thing if it happened. Riffing off my basic belief that the trend towards decentralized communication are too powerful for one company (or even one cartel) to reverse, I see one of two things happening should the NYT make such a move:

1. Bloggers keep going just as before without the NYT, linking to other news sources that are still free or to AP or local paper stories that talk about the NYT articles rather than linking to the NYT directly. In the end this could damage the Times’ status as the paper of record for US online news-junkies, but they’d probably keep their reputation among the pros.
2. Other news sources follow suit, and people start caching the pages directly and putting them online as “context for this quote.” Then people get fed up with how it takes 10 seconds to cut-and-paste a copy, and all new blogging software settles on extensions and interface paradigms that automatically make a local cache of anything you link to (ala the Cache plug-in for MovableType). Newspapers realize that people are still reading their content but now they’ve lost control of the frame, presentation and banner ads. They briefly consider pulling an RIAA and going all lawsuit crazy, but then realize that (a) unlike the recording industry their value is so time-critical that there are plenty of other ways to monetize their content, and (b) it’s generally bad to follow in the footsteps of a someone currently sinking in quicksand anyway.

Personally, my money’s on #2 happening regardless of what the Times does.

Found at the bottom of a PDF online form on the IRS website:

Amazon.com has set up a one-click donation site for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief fund. All proceeds will go to the fund, and they’ve already collected over $2M. (Get your donation in before the 31st for tax savings this year…)

Before the Net, I would have thought about giving a donation but not gotten around to it — as it is, I just sent $100. I love seeing things like one-click and PayPal making it easy to do good…

Ted Nelson and Andrew Pam have come out with The Little TransQuoter, a simple (and currently fairly rudimentary) system for doing transclusion of text blocks on top of HTML (see sample).

The concept of transclusion — the quotation of documents by linking directly to embedded text instead of making a copy — has a lot of interesting possibilities, but in the end it feels to me like it’s going in the exact wrong direction for the digital age. Nelson’s whole design seems to be based around the idea of ownership: I own the bits I’ve written, I control the content and modifications, and when you quote from me you owe me a micropayment. That was the shape of publication in the last century, but it’s not how 21st-century publication is shaping up. In so far as ownership means control, information in the 21st century has no owner. Information can have hosts, pedigrees, histories, and even generally-accepted custodians, but in the future that’s being built “my bits” means not what I’ve written but what I’m carrying in my hard drive. Like a new joke or a bad cold that travels around the office, mutating as it goes, each copy of information is controlled by the host that holds it in his possession. I can’t see any technology that tries to buck that trend winning out in the long run, especially not as we ride the technology trends towards the day when I can store the entire Web in my pocket.

Yahoo unveiled their video search engine a couple days ago — CNET News has the story and talk of similar projects by Google, Microsoft and AOL.

I’m pleased to say I was able to find my old favorite Powers of Ten pretty easilly…

The latest for that James-Bond or Peeping-Tom wannabee:

• The Nokia Spyphone, which looks like a normal cellphone but will silently turn on and act as a wireless bug whenever called from a particular phone number. In another mode it can seem to be turned off but silently take calls and listen in (say, when you take a break during a business meeting).
• The Nokia Observation Camera, which will send pictures to any MMS-capable mobile phone or email address at a certain time, when triggered by a motion sensor or when the temperature goes out of a set range.
• The Nokia Remote Camera, which includes capabilities of the Observation Camera plus the ability to capture video clips with sound, ability to call and listen in on the microphone, remote control with compatible mobile phone and night-picture mode using its own infrared light source. (No word on whether the night-picture mode has the side-effect of giving you a see-through-clothing mode like with the Sony Nightshot…)

(Thanks to Thad Starner and Ellis Weinberger on the Wearables list for the links…)

(By way of SlashDot) The Wikipedia entry on Sollog is an interesting example of how a community can protect a shared collaborative space. Sollog is a self-proclaimed seer/prophet, who a little over a week ago was the subject of a new anonymously-written Wikipedia entry touting his books and otherwise proclaiming his powers. Since then the entry has been edited, vandalized & blanked back and forth 194 times (several of the vandalizations from the same IP address that wrote the original article), put to a vote on deletion by community members (who decided to keep the article, though in edited form) and finally protected from further edits to keep it from being vandalized.

The part that impresses me most is the amount of work and calm rational discussion that’s gotten done over at the discussion thread on the topic (and even pre-refactored version). I wish I had a metric for how much the success of an online community owes to the communication tools at its disposal (protection, easy version-handling, IP-blocking, etc.), a clear mission statement / rules of engagement and smart dedicated people, but I’m betting the breakdown is something like 20% / 30% / 50%…