Apostasy and Topology

Why does Salt Lake City seem to be the epicentre of the blogging world? Is it something to do with the contemplative stimulus of the solitary and desolate distances of the Utahan landscape? Pent-up repression producing a flowering of online creativity? The pod-people-like peer pressure of the sinister-sounding mass movement known as the bloggernacle and its army of bloggernackers, nackers, naccers and bloggerns? Housewives from polygamous households with a lot of free time because the washin’ and sock-darnin’ and grub up-rustlin’ are divided up so efficiently among all the womenfolk? Dooce envy? My relatives? All of the above?

Whatever the case, according to my calculations, aside from my current hometown of Kuala Lumpur, by far the most viewers of this site from a single location have hailed from Salt Lake City, the sedate, decaffeinated heart of “Stormin’” Mormon country.

If I continue on this topic for much longer I’ll just end up poking fun at the LDS, which is certainly not my goal today (although, while I will refrain at this point from sharing my thoughts on the religion per se, I would like to mention in passing that I find their global proselytizing efforts despicable, as I find the similar efforts of most such organizations. Enticing poor and gullible people around the world to abandon their traditions and then give you ten percent of their money is one of the least admirable human activities I can think of). I’ll stop before I get worked up.


AHEM ANYWAY, I was perusing this lovely google analytics map of the locations of my literally half-dozens upon half-dozens of readers (note the [relatively] enormous dot on Salt Lake City) when I realized that it’s a four-color map. You should check out the previous link but basically, the idea of four-color theory is that almost any map you can imagine can be colored in with four colors, no matter how many neighboring countries or whatever you add to the map. A map with thousands of fictional territories on it could be colored in with only four colors, and no two adjacent countries would be the same color. I had real trouble accepting this in high school, and I spent a lot of time trying to draw maps that would disprove the idea.

I was under the impression, probably influenced by the Wikipedia article, that “although the four color theorem was discovered in the process of coloring a real map, it finds no application in practical cartography.” I guess at least one person at Google must have disagreed and thought they’d try it out. I’m assuming the idea was that the colors of the countries shouldn’t interfere with the superimposed dots, so they wanted as subtle a palette as possible.

I got kind of excited about this because, while I’m not really a mathematics person, I do have a sort of armchair amateur layman’s fascination with Moebius strips, Klein bottles (seen below in origami form), prime numbers and so on. I’m the sort of chap who is mildly curious about the Fibonacci sequence and the related sorts of things, things of the sort that poseur authors like the vile Dan Brown usually assume people will think are mysterious and mind-blowing, and incorporate in their idiotic thrillers. Mathematics as magic with Einstein as Gandalf and M.C. Escher as Dumbledore, essentially. I’m not proud of it, but that’s pretty much the level I’m at.

In high school I did a report on the branch of math called topology, and at the time it made a big impact on me, particularly the four-color theorem, the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem and the idea that a coffee mug and a doughnut are essentially the same shape. However, it’s not a subject that really comes up a lot in daily life, so after I presented that report in math class my topological interest lay dormant for 15 years or so. (Speaking of that math report, I realized only upon watching the videotape afterwards that I had been so nervous that I had been bouncing up and down on my tip-toes during the entire speech. And thus was born my second most painful memory of public speaking in school. The first involved me pretending to be abolitionist John Brown in front of a packed auditorium in middle school and the less said about that, the better.)

Now that I’ve looked around a little, it seems that one of the interesting recent applications of topology is mapping the internet, which Ms. Cofino has been investigating recently. I suppose in “cyberspace” (ugh) where distances don’t matter and points of connections do, we’re all bouncing around from one site to another and never quite getting where we were headed, sort of like that pedestrian in Königsberg. Or like stops on the Salt Lake City subway system. Or something.

Haiku time

Through the glass, no snow.
A crow’s shape crosses the square
How much have I missed?


This is basically about me checking webcams in Munich and the Alpine region all month, trying to see some snow. Aside from one day a few weeks ago it seems to not have snowed very much this year, and this was supposed to express the thoughts about passing seasons, global warming, homesickness etc. I always get from the whole checking the webcams thing.

Lost in Other-Siding...

...Starring Birdbeak Murray and Dark-Red, Son of Johan.

I somehow happened upon a goofy news blog with the following article:

Wikipedia is broken in sites of cover 10 of the E.E.U.U. In line popular encyclopedia of Wikipedia of the foundation of Wikimedia cracked superior list ten of most of the Web site popular in the E.E.U.U for the first time in January, according to networks of comScore.

It seems to be a Spanish article machine-translated into English, about Wikipedia cracking (“broken”) the top 10 list (“superior list 10”) of American “in line” sites.

Man that sucks. PLEASE hire professionals to do your translating work for you, or at least pay a native speaker to look the stuff over.

It could be worse, though. I own a couple of Asian movies with English subtitles which were clearly not translated by humans, and it’s almost impossible to watch them. People will be having a karate fight or whatever, and the subtitles will say stuff like “Woman woman snow punch wanderings? Not whelm inner carbuncle!”

Good fer what ails ye

On my first visit to a Malaysian pharmacy, one of the first items that caught my eye was a shelf filled with giant bottles of cod liver oil, fresh from a factory in England. Below that was “gripe water” intended to keep my baby free from “wind”. The boxes and bottles on the nearby shelves were a bizarre mix of Victorian advertisement, Chinese characters, and primitive, clumsy company logos like sailboats, axes and old men. By the time I’d gotten to “Three Rifles Brand Wound Paint”, which featured what looked like a developmentally challenged child’s shaky drawing of a tiny nurse applying something with a paintbrush to a bodiless arm ten times her size, I was hooked.

Now, I personally think Eastern medicine is fascinating from a historical and cultural perspective, like astrology, but, like astrology, I am inclined to think it’s bunk wrapped up in flim-flam and slathered with hokum and hogwash. Let me rephrase that: I do not doubt the apparent efficacy of either alternative medicine or astrology in many situations, but I have what I like to think is a healthily skeptical view of the processes behind that efficacy. I would say the average Eastern medicinal concoction might hover somewhere around 75% placebo effect and 25% effective remedy.

However, I am not writing in order to poke fun at Eastern medicine, but to note that I’m in the Lost World of Western Medicine. A strange and fantastic pharmaceutical otherworld cut off from modern evolutionary developments, where mighty 1800s snake-oil cures still roam proud and free, untouched by the mass extinctions which cruelly cut down their non-Malaysian brethren. There are products here, like the cod liver oil, that no westerners aside from Abe Simpson have used in generations.

Let me put it another way. My grandmother, for example, used to constantly talk about the limitless health benefits of mustard plasters and witch hazel. What the hell are those things? They both sounded bizarre, medieval and excruciatingly painful, and I’m pretty sure that they were. Well, I’m guessing Grandma could easily have walked into a Malaysian pharmacy and found everything she’d need for her home-brewed polio vaccine or Irishman-bite remedy or Coalminer’s Elbow poultice or whatever you need a mustard plaster for.

It’s tough to say who’s behind this time-warp. There are a few European companies that seem to sell olde-fashioned products here, such as the cod liver oil people, but most of the pseudo-Western remedies seem to be made by Malaysian, Singaporean or Chinese factories, possibly ones which were set up BY Europeans, before the Great War, to harness Asia’s teeming millions to produce the latest high-tech products. Now, these factories, presumably cut off from their ties to colonial oppressors, have for generations soldiered on in isolation, like that Japanese soldier alone on that island, turning out for the domestic market strange, vestigial pharmaceutical products which Europe has long ago left behind. It would be like today’s America suddenly switching to a new type of footwear, dooming Chinese kids near the factories to wear Nike and Adidas for the next 200 years.


Anyhoo, I have tracked down and captured one of these specimens in the wild. Long thought extinct, the rugged “Sloan’s Liniment” is a living relic, an evolutionary dead-end which bears witness to an entire world of bizarre interactions of Western and Eastern quack medicine.

The label on the front shows what seems to be a crude Daguerreotype of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with a reproduced signature I interpret as “DrSamlSSloan” underneath in a strangely feminine cursive hand.

On the side of the bottle are:

“FOR EXTERNAL USE for the relief of muscular Rheumatism, Lumbago, Stiff Neck, Neuralgia, Sciatica, Sprains, Bruises, Chilblains and Muscular Cramp.

DIRECTIONS: Apply the liniment liberally with a soft flannel cloth or a piece of cotton wool. Do not rub. Sloan’s Liniment is strong enough without rubbing, which might harm a tender skin. Do not bandage.

ACTIVE CONSTITUENT
Oil of Turpentine 40% w/v
Also Contains:
Oleoresin Capsicum
Camphor
Oil of Pine
Methyl Salicylate
Oil of Sassafrass
Menthol”

So basically, it’s turpentine with a little pepper, pine oil and mint. Yeah, that’s going to help my sprains and bruises. And as for the uses and directions, I don’t really have anything to add to their comedy perfection. It’s like Grandpa Simpson poetry. Lumbago? Chilblains? Oil of Sassafrass? “Do not rub”? I don’t have the time right now, but maybe in a future post I will apply and rub the dickens out of the sh*t, in the name of science.

Dr. Sloane, if you ever really existed, my hat’s off to you, Sir, not only for your fine turpentine liniment but also for your excellent work on Also Sprach Zarathustra.


Update

I thought I was exaggerating too wildly and poking a little too much fun at the remedies in the above post, so I did a little research into Sloan’s Liniment. Well, turns out everything I wrote up there was pretty much right on the money, except that his signature doesn’t say “Sam’l”, it says “Earl”.

According to one very interesting source, Sloan’s Liniment was part of the snake oil fad of the late 1800s. The article says that while they didn’t make the claim that it was made from snakes, Sloan's was part of a long list of products that had the same ingredients (turpentine, a dash of pepper) as the celebrated snake oil. The only active ingredient (and I use the term loosely) seems to be the pepper, which makes the skin feel hot. I guess that explains why rubbing it in is verboten.

I didn’t know there actually was snake oil, I just thought it was a disparaging term for quack tonics. Other competitors, according to the very informative article, included Dr. Thomas’ Eclectric Oil, Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery and the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company’s Swamp Root Kidney and Liver Medicine.

Now, what are the chances that one of those absurdly fraudulent Wild West medicine products would still be being manufactured some 120 years later, on the other side of the world, with the exact same frigging label? The whole thing is too wacky.

Now, Americans and Europeans all have, to some extent, a stereotype that Asians are wise and filled with ancient lore when it comes to healing. So let’s think about this for a moment. People in Asia clearly still use Sloan’s Liniment by the gallon, since it and a dozen similar products are available in every shop. What does that say about the discerning nature of their ancient medicinal wisdom?

If the average Asian pharmacy-goer is clueless enough to shell out for some 1890s mustachioed carnival huckster’s sideshow paint thinner (with a dash of tabasco) and dab it on their chilblains, why on Earth would they be the go-to continent for info on what roots and herbs to mix with ground rhino penis and make into a tea to cure cancer? Why would I let anyone who keeps the Sloan’s flying off the shelves tell me what parts of my feet they should stick needles into to clear up my kidney stones? I’m sorry, Eastern medicine, you’ve been punked. By Dr. Earl S. Sloan, M.D. Oh no, wait, that’s right, he wasn’t a doctor. He was a veterinary school dropout and horse trader.

Heeere’s Crabby!

Well, I was so intrigued by the complex modern origami I described in my previous post that I printed out Robert Lang’s fiddler crab “crease pattern” and started folding away, with utterly no knowledge of the techniques involved.

After about an hour of pre-creasing and tentative folding I started to see how the creases more or less might work, and started bunching the paper up along the folds. It started to look like a sea urchin or something, but I could see no sign of a body or other reference point. I didn’t know what was legs and what was claws.

I then looked around and found some more real-world shots of the finished model, and tried to use them for reference.

But I still had no reference points for where the main body area was supposed to be. I tried for a while then eventually just sort of manhandled it into a vague crab shape. It looks both scary and sort of retarded, like the Garthim from The Dark Crystal. Scroll down to see my masterpiece, if you dare.

I looked around a bit and I now realize that this is like the only asymmetrical origami model in history. The guy designed it using some sort of portal to the 24th dimension, as far as I can understand according to this interview. It’s probably the hardest possible thing to start with. So I don’t feel bad that mine looks like it scuttles on the short bus. I’ll just have to start with something easier, like an origami model of a brick, rock, or fruit roll-up.

Vielfalt

I just read a great article about a modern origami master on the New Yorker website that blew my mind just with the written descriptions - then I actually searched for pictures, and now I’m really impressed.

I urge you to read the article for yourself, but basically the artist is a young, respected American laser physicist who is now living the dream of professional origami folder. Surreal and fascinating. I’m going to need to investigate this subject further. Maybe I can print out some designs and figure out how to make them myself...?

Slightly later: Here is the plan of the fiddler crab above; apparently most designs are made from a single sheet of uncut paper. I think I will have to start smaller. FYI the title is German for “manifold”, well, the noun version of manifold, which would be what? diversity? complexity? Doesn’t have the same ring.

I give up, here’s a list

I’m having a lot of trouble thinking of something to write. I have a lot to say about the two new hobbies I picked up in Vietnam, which are contemplating the history of chess and trying to learn simple Chinese characters, but somehow I don’t think anyone wants to hear more from me on those topics. I know I don’t.

I also acquired a third enthusiasm while in Vietnam a few weeks ago: solving sudoku puzzles. But obviously I’d rather gnaw my own arms off than write anything about the joy of sudoku. For one thing, I know I’m several years late to the fad. And there is an entire groaning set of shelves in every bookstore now devoted to sudoku. Why do we need hundreds and hundreds of books about sudoku? I assume that the average person probably needs one book of sudoku puzzles in their life, ever. Maybe. Need some tips on how to solve them? I’m guessing that info would take up a page or two, max. Why the shelf?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hate fads where people rush out crappy books to try to make a quick buck. There are now probably more books about sudoku in your typical large bookstore than there are about philosophy. What were all these sudoku scribes doing until three years ago when the fad hit? Staring at the wall, imagining square grids and waiting for their big chance? Keeping themselves alive through the winter by burning their unpublished manuscripts on how to play tic-tac-toe or how to win at Tetris? Then the great sudoku boom hit, and dozens of unemployed autistic people suddenly became bestselling authors? I don’t get it. Well, I hope they all saved their earnings, because it might be a while until the next numeral-based grid fad hits.

Or for example, there are two or three entire shelves at the bookstore bulging with books entirely about “Texas Hold ‘Em”. Isn’t that a type of poker? Note that I didn’t say “a type of chemical engineering”. Why hundreds of books? And I’m not talking about Hoyle here, these books don’t cover all types of poker but just one variant that is suddenly popular because there was some cable show about it or something? Ugh. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty sure that I’m the world’s worst poker player and I’m definitely sure I could use all of the advice in those books, I just don’t like the gold-rush fad overkill aspect of things like that.

So, while I do find the puzzles delightful, I refuse to write a word on the topic of sudoku. Aside from those which I just wrote in those last couple dozen sentences. Dammit. I’ll start again.

Since I’m bored and tired and not sure what to write about, I will voluntarily descend deep into the clotted cloacal crevices of the absolute worst common denominator of crap blogging. I refer, of course, to the ancient, unkillable cockroach of blog formats, the list. Whether it’s answers to some stupid “meme” questions, or a list of interesting scents you burped up this week, or a table of Brad Pitt’s weird pointing hand gestures organized by frequency, or whatever, we all know, deep down, that this sort of thing is not really reaching for the brass ring. Not aiming for the stars, aesthetically speaking. Fine by me, I’m out of other ideas. Here are my top ten favorite television shows of all time, which are also by a strange coincidence exactly identical with my favorite shows at this precise moment.

1. The Office (US)
I’ve probably watched every episode of this show up to the middle of the third season around 15 times, and I still find new things to laugh at. The show’s hilarious, everyone in the cast is incredible, and something about the workplace + fake documentary + unrequited office romance formula is just perfect. I don’t think my opinion is too inflated because it’s a recent show, I really do think in hindsight I’ll still say it’s one of the funniest shows of all time.

2. Futurama
My love of this unbelievably good show is only overshadowed by the anger I feel that it only ran for four seasons, while South Park and other vastly inferior shows have gone on longer. Supposedly they’re making new episodes for DVD, but either way I’m still bitter.

3. The Simpsons
I don’t think I need to go into why I like this show.

4. Curb Your Enthusiasm
I think I like this show so much because the mix of comedy and public humiliation are very cathartic for me. I often feel like all my public interactions are on the brink of devolving into the sort of thing that happens on this show, so watching the absolute worst shaming happen to Larry David week after week, and watching him somehow survive nonetheless, is deeply satisfying.

5. Arrested Development
Requires close attention while watching, and is best in small doses, but in terms of jokes per minute and running gags this was basically a live-action equivalent of The Simpsons. GOB, Tobias and Buster are among my favorite comedy characters of all time.

6. Seinfeld

7. The Office (UK)

8. Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Looking back a lot of these episodes don’t seem quite as funny as they did when I was in middle school, but still.

9. Aqua Teen Hunger Force
I actually get really tired of the character Shake, who probably gets the most screen time, but Meatwad, Carl, the aliens, the robot ghost of Christmas past and a lot of the other minor characters make the show.

10. Blackadder
I hadn’t seen a single episode of this series before a couple months ago when I got a box set, and I can’t believe what I’d missed out on. The second and third series are my favorites, the Elizabethan and Georgian ones.

There’s the top ten. Little Britain almost made the cut, hilarious show, but they got bumped because each of their characters basically has one joke they do over and over.

Hooray for Kimbo

Follow That Elephant was voted blog of the day.

The Inevitable Orbital Apocalypse

I apologize for my third post in a row inspired by a news article, but dammit this is nuts:

Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: February 6, 2007

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens.

In the last decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass — or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable — they grew more anxious.

Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.

Now, experts say, China’s test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner. If their predictions are right, the cascade could put billions of dollars’ worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity’s reach for the stars.

Federal and private experts say that early estimates of 800 pieces of detectable debris from the shattering of the satellite will grow to nearly 1,000 as observations continue by tracking radars and space cameras. At either number, it is the worst such episode in space history.

Today, next year or next decade, some piece of whirling debris will start the cascade, experts say.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE F*&%ING KIDDING ME. Um... for decades, we’ve known that there will soon be a catastrophic space debris chain reaction? Why is February 7, 2007 the first time I’ve heard of this? Talk about leaving me out of the loop. Thanks, NASA. Pricks.

This is very troublesome. Earth is going to be surrounded by a thin, eternally-colliding layer of chain-reacting space crap? And may I please just pause to dwell on one of the main foci of the article: China is shooting MISSILES at SATELLITES? And HITTING THEM? When did all this happen? I never imagined, back in middle school when I spent all afternoon, every afternoon, reading science fiction story anthologies in the basement, that I’d be living through such bizarre sh*t. In most of those stories, mankind had to set off for other planets because atomic war or centuries of overpopulation or plague had ruined the environment. Ha. We’ve pretty much done the job already. All it took was a little CO2 and some splintered Chinese satellites. New Orleans and Jakarta are underwater, and soon the skies will be filled with a fine particulate maelstrom of exploded satellite components. Fan-frigging-tastic.

Sign me up for Moon Base Alpha.

Malaysianese Twins

In college I took an entire course on Mark Twain (which seemed pointless at the time but which later came in immensely handy when I wrote some related things for the Hartford Courant), and we read what must be one of Twain’s less popular works, Pudd’nhead Wilson.

It’s a strange, messy and bleakly comic novel. I might be misremembering this but while there is some weird murder mystery business about a pair of unattached Siamese twins, the main plot thread of the book is about a light-skinned slave woman who switches her baby with a rich white baby, so that her son will have a better life. I think the book was originally going to be a comedy about Siamese twins but turned more serious as it went on, becoming more about the switched white and black babies. The “black” baby who is raised as a rich white turns out to be a cad and a murderer, while the other baby grows up to be more or less good.

I never liked that plot, because to my modern eye it seems unnecessarily close to racism, no matter what Twain’s intentions were. Maybe his point was sort of in support of nurture as opposed to nature, that the white upbringing makes the black baby evil, while the black upbringing makes the white baby good. But still, why couldn’t he have written a satire where the technically “black” baby didn’t turn out to be pure psychopathic evil? Disturbing, and a weird mix of allegory, ambiguity and bitterness about the human race in general. Like Melville’s The Confidence-Man. Oh well.

I write all this as preamble to an article I saw this evening, on cnn.com of all places. Now, Malaysian readers will have to bear with me: maybe this has been big local news here for weeks and I am only seeing it now because the AP picked it up. Or maybe this sort of thing happens here all the time. But for me, the story seems like Malaysia’s version of Pudd’nhead Wilson and a perfect glimpse into how this country, like my own, has all sorts of darkly comic racial (and here, religious-cum-racial) issues to deal with.

Swapped Malay baby: I'm not Muslim

POSTED: 4:00 a.m. EST, February 5, 2007

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- An ethnic Chinese Malaysian mistakenly given by doctors to a Malay Muslim couple at birth nearly three decades ago is bracing for a possible legal battle so he can renounce Islam, an action that can be considered a crime in parts of Malaysia.

Zulhaidi Omar, 29, who now goes by the name Eddie to his family and friends, said he discovered his true identity by chance and met his biological parents in 1998 after years of being teased about his Chinese features.

"I want to get my life back in order now," Zulhaidi told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his southern home state of Johor.

Zulhaidi, a sales executive raised in an ethnic Malay Muslim family, said he was revealing his story only now because he wants to take a Chinese name and change his religion to Buddhism. About 20 percent of the Malaysian population is Buddhist.

He declined to comment further, citing sensitivities concerning religion in this predominantly Muslim nation. The constitution does not allow Muslims to renounce their religion, and doing so is considered apostasy and punishable by jail in several states, though not in Johor.

Michael Tay, a politician with the Malaysian Chinese Association who is helping Zulhaidi, said he was negotiating with Johor state authorities to grant Zulhaidi's request.

"The academic question is whether he can return to his Chinese identity," Tay told the AP. "I have told (Zulhaidi) it could be an uphill battle, but he still wants it," Tay said.

It is not clear how long a resolution might take and the case could eventually be handed to the Islamic Shariah court, which presides over religious issues involving Muslims, Tay said.

State religious officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

Malaysian media first reported over the weekend Zulhaidi's claim that he was spotted working in a supermarket eight years ago by his biological sister who noticed he was the spitting image of their father, Teo Ma Leong, 67.

A DNA test later confirmed the relationship and Zulhaidi moved in with his parents three months later, The Star newspaper reported.

The Malay boy that the Teo family brought home because of the mix-up was raised as Tian Fa, and is now married to a Chinese woman, according to The Star. Tian Fa told the newspaper he has no intention of looking for his biological family and is happy to treat Teo and his wife, Lim Sai Hak, as his parents.


Note that, for whatever reasons, the one switched baby is full of questions and doubt and is questing for his true identity, while the other switched baby is perfectly, 100% happy with his life. Comedy gold.

I have no idea how this case will turn out, and I can’t and don’t want to draw any conclusions or make any comments because I am an outsider and guest in this complex nation, but however this turns out, I think Mark Twain would have recognized this situation as one tailor-made for some sort of savage social satire.

Freedom of the Press

I want this thing they talk about in this article. I’m not crazy about the name, since an invention this timelessly cool does not need a gimmicky Starbucks-era moniker, but otherwise I’m enthralled. I think this sounds really cool and possibly revolutionary if you ignore the publishing industry mumbo jumbo they’ve heaped the article with:

The company ... has begun beta testing its Espresso Book Machine, which can print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-color cover, and bind it together in three minutes. "Our goal is to preserve the economic and ergonomic simplicity of the physical book," said Epstein, who laments the disappearance of backlist and ready access to books in other languages. By printing from digital files, ODB hopes to make warehousing—and much of today's distribution model—obsolete. "In theory," said Epstein, "every book printed will be digitized, which means the market will be radically decentralized. A bookstore with this technology, without any expense to themselves [other than the machine] can increase their footprint." Of course, that also means that Kinko's or Wal-Mart can transform themselves into mini-bookstores, especially given the machine's affordability. Neller anticipates that it will retail for less than $100,000.

If I had an extra hundred grand handy I’d totally get one. I am picturing mainly using this thing to print out public domain and out-of-print books of the sort that you can find scanned in or in text files all over the internet, for example one of my favorites, Streitberg’s Gotisches Elementarbuch. I had to search all over Munich for that sort of thing back in the day, and while the physical hunt for obscure academic titles was always fun, I often ended up getting it for muchos dineuros on German E-Bay. I would rather have just printed the sucker out for free or at least cheaply on this machine.

But I suppose I could also see printing out a commercial book from time to time and paying the publisher something for it, sort of like iTunes. A bound book in three minutes! That’s like those food replicator machines from Star Trek, only cooler because it’s not so obviously impossible. And it doesn’t bring up the disturbing subject of the sick things that leering slob Commander Riker would have synthesized.

Anyway, I myself have a long history of spending hours and hours trying to format and print my own public domain books while I’m supposed to be working; my triumph was a handsome bound version of Beowulf with Old English and facing translation, made by printing out the pages in a very odd way with the help of diagrams like this, and bound with dental floss. This machine just seems to be the logical next step.