You know what might be interesting? All of you comic book fans will probably jump on me for this, already knowing five versions of the thing I'm about to say should exist, but here goes:

It might be interesting to learn that Bruce Wayne's father was some kind of vigilante himself. Maybe not in a tights-and-gadgets capacity, but with all the money the Waynes have, he's likely to have funded and overseen some kind of vigilante group. He seems (at least from his short appearance in Batman Begins) to be a forthright kind of guy.

In fact, I'm reminded vaguely of that Batman cartoon that was on for a while, Batman Beyond. That's the one where Bruce Wayne is retired, but some high-schooler takes on the role of the new modern-age Batman, funded by Wayne himself. I think a pre-Batman story might be interesting in this regard.

Note that if you know of such a story and start quoting issues of such-and-such a comic, I will simply start to nod and gaze dreamily off into space. What you've really got to do is drop a graphic novel in my lap.

Sirius satellite radio is going to offer a podcast channel. Once again, I'm not satisfied with the depth of reporting of news. The main questions that I want answered are these:

How does the station choose which podcasts to play? Is there a regular schedule for regular programs? Is there experimentation with random podcasts? Do they broadcast podcasts using CC licenses without informing the author (which is not required by the license)?

How does this all tie to the web site? For instance, if I publish a podcast, does the podcast channel announce my web address before playing the podcast? I would have to assume that this would cut into the listening audience, since after you found a podcast that you liked, you would listen to it directly rather than the radio station.

This whole concept interests me, although I'm not sure how popular it will be. I'm amused to think that Adam Curry, who "started" the whole podcasting thing, could be the celebrity host that would start the fire for the channel. Surely there's someone better. Maybe XM will pick up the idea too, and get a better player (or players).

Berta and I were at the toy store this week, looking at, um, toys. We saw this crazy thing that I have to mention.

It's a small orb-like electronic device. On the front is a screen made of small red lights and four buttons. The buttons are labelled Unknown, No, Yes, and Sometimes.

When you turn it on, it starts asking you questions. Usually around 20. You begin by thinking of a thing - anything - and answering the questions as appropriate. The device has an unnervingly high success rate.

Here is an example question list for the animal "Anteater":

1. Is it an animal? - Yes
2. Is it larger than a microwave oven? - Yes
3. Is it dangerous? - No
4. Does it have claws? - Yes
5. Is it brown? -Yes
6. Can you buy it at a store? - No
7. Does it live in groups? - Unknown
8. Is it an herbivore? - No
9. Can it run fast? - No
10. Is it small? - Yes
11. Is it a predator? - Yes
12. Does it lay eggs? - No
13. Does it have a long tail? - Yes
14. Is it involved in movies? - No
15. Can it growl? - No
16. Is it a carnivore? - Yes
17. Can it climb? - No
18. Does it have short fur? - Yes
19. Does it bring joy to people? - No
20. Is it smooth? - No
21. It's an anteater? - Drat! It guessed it again!

An anteater isn't all that obscure, but it seems to know a lot. Some other things that it got fairly easily were Human, Zinc, Pomegranite, Toaster, and Building.

Incidentally, I had just done anteater one time before I transcribed all of this, and it asked me a completely different set of questions. After checking out the 20Q web site, it's apparent that this trinket uses a neural net to figure out what you're thinking. Neural nets are very cool, much more interesting than the simple decision trees that I had originally thought might be used.

Does using a neural net reduce the number of possible items, though? You figure that a decision tree can result in at most 2 to the 20th items - that's just over a million things. If you factor in unique results for each of the four options (instead of just yes or no, but it would certainly never be like this), then you get just over a trillion items. I'm going to guess that the neural net can probably guess somewhere less than the million items of the b-tree, but that's just intuition and not math knowledge.

Play and contribute to the online version of the game, and see how uncanny the results are.

What would be great is an online magazine that is like POV Magazine. I really liked that magazine. It was all the male edge of Maxim, but with actual writing, actual news, and intelligent and beautiful women. POV had deeper articles (not just for bathroom reading) with actual useful information in them. The interviews were actual interviews - they didn't focus on what the women liked in men they dated and how kinky they are. POV lacked the snarky flavor of Maxim - the stupid photo captions, the girls in nurse outfits in the health section, the testicle jokes every other paragraph, etc.

I have some ideas for what my magazine would include. See what you think.

My online magazine would include a video games section that actually reviews video games from a non-teen point of view. I'm tired of games receiving poor reviews only because they have less than cutting edge graphics. Some of my favorite games have been text-based. I want screenshots and videos for free, and I only want to see games in current or about to be current release. No previews, no Japan-only. And no bias for PS2, XBox, or Gamecube - I have very little doubt that Sony pays (or provides significant incentives to) magazine publishers and stores so that they take up most of the page/shelf space.

An aside: I enourage you to note this phenomenon and report back to me - Have you noticed that at the local video game store PS2 games litter the walls and the XBox section is comparatively small? Now count the PS2 games on the wall that utterly suck and compare that to the number of XBox games on the wall that utterly suck. Note the number of duplicate games appearing on the PlayStation side, too. Finally, get a list of XBox games that were popular last year and try to find them on the wall. Do the same for PS2 and compare. Who's telling the store to keep the crappy PS2 games on the wall, I wonder? And why don't they restock the old popular XBox games? Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems suspiscious to me.

I don't really care if my magazine has girl photos in it, since you can find that anywhere online, in whatever racy or obscure setting your kinks require. If there were photos of people, I would hope that they would be accompanied by interviews of the class of Interview magazine, which are neat because the high-profile interviews are done by associates in their field. For example, Ashton Kutcher was recently interviewed by Brad Pitt.

Everybody loves science and gadgets (or they should). I think my magazine would distill the best of Engadget and Gizmodo and provide reviews and comparisons (Consumer Reports style) of useful equipment. This would not be everything that comes down the pipe, but mostly neat or innovative things that could change the way you live.

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly for only a couple of their segments. I want to know how movies performed the week before. I want preview blurbs about what's going to be on my favorite shows in the coming weeks. I want to know about movies that are scheduled for release on the weekend. I want to know what DVDs are coming out. EW's interviews are mostly crap, their regular columns are mostly crap (although Stephen King's back page is often an interesting read), and their TV reviews are the most worthless and degrading text in any magazine in print. Their music, book, and theater news is pretty useless to me, too. But convert all of the above to good content, and that's what I would include in my magazine.

Has Wired become a liberal/leftist rag? There was a recent issue of Wired with lots of anti-copyright stuff in it (isn't that every issue, though?) that had me wondering just that. I can do without another toothless screed by Cory Doctorow or Lawrence Lessig on the EFF belief system. Don't get me wrong, I like the cause of the EFF, I'm just tired of hearing about failure all the time. Do something, guys. Apart from that, Wired is good for trend-watching, although I suspect that Wired now has more to do with driving the trends than it did in the past. The feature-length articles in Wired are darn solid most of the time, though. Berta understands the power of BitTorrent now from reading Wired better than any way I tried to describe it to her.

We get CMJ at home. It's very irregularly published, and the only thing that's truly worthwhile there is the CD, since the written description of music is often completely useless in determining whether you like the sound of an album. A web magazine could do this right. New artist track samples (in Flash or MP3, depending on the draconian licensing required by the label) would be available for every band, not just the ones that fit on the CD. But the magazine could recommend favorite tracks, just like the CMJ CD is a recommendation list from all of their album reviews.

Does fashion really interest men? I got GQ for a while after POV went down. It was interesting enough, but didn't make me want to run out and buy the latest designer suits. I'm not clamoring for $40 silkscreened T-shirts that are synthetically vintage-aged. Maybe just a yearly fashion issue to see the trends in review? It that even worth it? Who cares.

Business and public interet stories would round out the whole thing. Something like Time Magazine-light, maybe. Stories such as: How to invest today for early retirement. The future of the DVD and other media formats. Why and how to get elected to your local government. Returning from Iraq - The new trials of veterans in the wars after Vietnam. The real story of the fall of Social Security and the government's tenuous plan to fix it. American Schools - The handgun and education landfill. My after-dinner cigarette sent me to jail. Fire in the rainforests - the struggle for ecology. Welfare at the local native american casino. Any good ideas there?

So where's my staff? I've got a domain all set up for this, all I need is an artist and a few writers.

This is a little skit(?) that we wrote for Assorted Hysteria, the college radio show that my roommate (seen in comments as Gregory) and I produced.

Once again, it's a lot of talking, so you folks that don't like audiobooks (ahem) might want to avoid this one. But it's funny as hell. Well, at least I think so. Hell is pretty funny to me.

I don't remember this thing being so long. It's from a tape that we did at the end of my second semester at UPJ that has a good percentage of the bits that we wrote for the show all rolled onto one tape. The logic in that was that we didn't bother to record many of the earlier shows, so we should just record them all at once.

The cafeteria ladies who were forced to listen to our show (which ran from 7-10 AM every other day) really loved us. Lots. We even won an award for the show. Didn't we get a trophy or something? Didn't frat brothers threaten our lives?

Actually, in the original taped recording (not in this compressed version) you can hear Kristy and Berta laughing in the background at certain points. Especially when Greg says "Whoa!" after I seem to admit enjoying walking around wearing only an apron.

Anyhow...

Download The Wok.

Or listen right here:
/AsySound.swf?http://www.asymptomatic.net/audio/The_Wok_final.mp3

For future reference, if you're producing MP3 audio for Flash and it sounds all fast like a chipmunk, here are good RazorLAME settings that I used for this:

1. Bitrate: 32kbps
2. Mode: Mono
3. Optimization: Quality
4. Flags: Copy & Copyright (probably not important)
5. Output sample frequency: 22.05 kHz