The Original Villain Organ

For some reason villains in movies have a tendency to play the organ. It was only recently that I started asking myself why. Couldn't the villains' guild instrument equally well have been the saxophone or the kazoo? Do villains have to pass a test to prove that they can play the organ before they are allowed to be really evil?

And where does the idea come from? Who was the first villain with an organ? I spent the usual superficial 10 minutes on google and came up with no convincing answer.

One candidate on the screen would be Lon Chaney in the 1925 film The Phantom of the Opera, based on the novel from 1910. However, if we count captain Nemo as a villain, he played the organ already in 1870, in Jules Verne's book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin).

More research is clearly needed in this area.

Captain Nemo playing the organ. 

(Image credits: Alphonse de Neuville, Edouard Riou, Nick Hobgood and Wikipedia. And me who cut and pasted.)

Shopping Dystopia - Automatically

A few years ago, one needed a good camera to take good pictures. Nowadays, I can still take some good pictures with a powerful high end camera that I could never have taken with my smartphone. However, on average, my smartphone takes better photos than I do. Once I have framed a motive, the smartphone uses plenty of smart logic to tweak all the settings to get a decent result. I can tweak the setting on a high end camera, but for trivial photos, my logic is often not as quick as my smart phone.

It seems a computer is outwitting me.

What if this happens with shopping as well?

A big social network has recently started a service called "Nearby Friends". To use that one, the user needs to activate "Location History". For now, that will not be used for marketing or targeted ads, but that is likely to come.

At first I was outraged and considered this yet another invasion of my privacy. But what if they are right? What if they can use all the information they have about me to produce really well targeted ads. I will no longer see any ads for knitwear, and the ads I see everywhere on the internet will all be about things that interest me, like Maroille cheese and Cantonese dictionaries. That would save such a lot of time for me.

Perhaps, they can go one step further. Perhaps they can shop for me using artificial intelligence. I do not even have to read the ads. I just sit back, and some huge computer company will place orders for me. Just before I run out of toilet paper, there will be a knock on the door from someone delivering toilet paper, ordered for me by this company. At my birthday, I will get a surprise present I did not know I wanted, but which the computer company knew I would love to give myself.

The really worrying thing will be when I prepare to go out to my favourite fish restaurant, and someone turns up to deliver antihistamine before I leave.

Geographic Curiosities - Distances between the New and the Old World

Which North American country is closest to Africa? Answer: Canada.

St. Johns - Casablanca: 4051 km

Which American state is closest to Africa? Answer: Maine.

Lubec, Maine - Bu Jaydur: 5095 km

Which American state is closest to Bosaso in Somalia? Answer: Alaska.

Wainwright, Alaska -Bosaso: 10650 km

For almost all of Africa, the closest American state is Maine, but Bosaso is one of the few exceptions. 

Lubec, Maine - Bosaso: 11103 km

Maps and data from WolframAlpha.