Does anybody know how to have partial subtitles in an .mp4 file? So far I have all, or none. I don’t need subtitles for a predominantly English film, but then I do need them in the one or two scenes that are in other languages…

This is automatic on a normal DVD stream, so I imagine it must be possible?

</alex>

I recently posted a short comment on Google+ in relation to an article in the The Daily Mail online; an article about the release of Apple’s iPhone 4s in which a man had camped outside an Apple shop in Covent Garden for ten days in order to be the first in line. There were similar idiotic motions made by countless others across the globe presented in the article. I just want to break that down…

A phone is produced. A good smartphone, sure, but alas just a phone. It has some features that make for a good choice if one is in the market: buying their first phone in a while, or if one needs to buy a new phone for one reason or another. However, here we have a man who has essentially pretended to be homeless for almost two weeks not because he needed to, nor because it was some absurd condition of being able to purchase said phone; but because for some unbelievable reason he decided he had to be the first to buy it. I realise that with countless other sheeple, not queuing might mean that you wouldn’t manage to buy one on the day of release… but when it’s just a phone I fail to see what the problem is in waiting another two weeks.

I also wonder who it is in society that can afford a £500 consumerist gadget, and yet also afford to spend ten days sat on a pavement. Was this his vacation, in which case I’d argue a serious mental health problem? Or is he one of the countless unemployed on benefits who somehow still have large quantities of free cash to spend on needless nice-to-haves? Either way, I see a problem.

This man is undoubtedly an Apple ‘fanboi’, and the extent to which Apple ‘fandom’ exists is something I can literally not fathom – I am totally and utterly incapable of understanding it. The Onion, famed for piss-take satire, writes stories that have been becoming more and more realistic for a while now, and worryingly it’s the world that getting more ridiculous than The Onion less so. Indeed, following the death of Steve Jobs they hit the nail absolutely perfectly on the head.

What bugs me most about this delusional worship is something shared by many others’ posts that I’ve read: that Steve Jobs did not cure cancer, nor work to reduce poverty or deliver peace. He was an almost textbook-definition capitalist who manufactured need-less western middle-class gadgets that do very little in the support of humanity. To my knowledge, he himself was not a noted philanthropist, and neither is the company he ran (though that’s not to say neither were charitable). The products he manufactured, though shiny and clearly excellently marketed, were not innovative; and they were manufactured in Asia under immense pressure and with very little regard for human rights – all purely because Apple’s desire for wealth is apparently more important than such small matters as the string of worker suicides.

What gets me though more than all that greed, is that it’s based on the manufacture and sale of devices that people do not actually need! The man camping on the pavement no doubt already had an iPhone 4: his ‘need’ – and I mean need as in ‘need to eat’ – for the new model is literally non-existent. In the words of The Onion, these people “reportedly needs to get [their] fucking priorities straight”.

</alex>

Claire’s been reading. And I for one don’t envy her. Of a 119-page document (one of many), a single figure she quoted jumped out as rather surprising for me; and, given a single sentence can provoke so much subsequent analysis, I fear for what the remaining 118.9 pages may contain.

The particular statistic mentioned was that when a habitat’s size is increased by a factor of ten, the number of species only doubles. I’m not sure of the wider context in which this was stated – and in particular whether it was presented as a problem – but it immediately implies a number of things as far as I can tell:

1. Species density is non-linear. That is to say that the number of species found per unit of land area is not linearly correlated. The following chart based on the quoted statistic shows this more clearly (assuming a starting point of 100 species in 100 units of land area):

2. As land area decreases, the number of species decreases (tending towards zero) but at a much slower rate. This implies that you’ll run out of land leaving some species with no habitat (but still present).

3. As land area increases, the number of species increases (tending towards infinity) but at a much slower rate. This implies (given a finite maximum land area on our planet) that there is a finite maximum number of species the earth can accomodate.

4. The non-linear relationship implies some kind of ‘compression’. That is to say, as land area is reduced by 90%, the species density (note not population density) is reduced by only 50%. This equates to an increase in the number of species per land-area-unit of 500%.

5. This increase of 500% implies an inherent change to inter-species relationships; specifically the food chain (to me at any rate). After all, as you crush competing species together with ever-increased resource shortages – living space, food resources, etc. – it makes sense that competition will increase correspondingly. Dramatic changes to environmental or inter-species relationships are – under Punctuated Equilibrium Darwinism – believed to be a key driver for an increase in the rate of evolution.

6. An increase in the rate of evolution should be measurable, primarily by intra-species variations.

This last one is particularly interesting to me. If punctuated equilibrium were true, and we would see an increased rate of evolution in habitats under threat (and assuming the rate of evolution were fast enough to cope with the rate of habitat destruction), then is habitat destruction implicitly bad? Is it true to say that evolution is inherently positive, given its definition being ‘survival of the fittest’?

And, what of the inverse? The above supposition would suggest that given an abundance of available habitat and resources, the rate of evolution would slow down. Is that inherently bad?

I don’t know the answers, or even whether inferences drawn from theories like PED are necessarily valid. But like I say, I don’t envy Claire the work she has ahead – just the subject matter

</alex>

OK. Those who know me well know that I’ll give people (or companies) a hard time when they need a good kick up the arse. Those who know me really well know I’ll also go out of my way to recognize the exceptional.

In Cyprus I dropped my Kindle. It was in its case, and was dropped from only a couple of feet, but I dropped it through clumsiness and the screen cracked. I didn’t buy the nice scotch at the airport on the basis that it cost the same as the replacement Kindle I expected to have to buy.

Cue Amazing Amazon. Yesterday morning at around 8am I clicked the ‘Contact Us’ button on their website and within 10 seconds had a call from them. Having explained my clumsiness and that my Kindle is 11 month’s old and well used/loved/battered, the very helpful guy on the other end explained that they believe a Kindle should survive a 5 foot fall and he’d therefore send me a replacement. That replacement turned up now.

Let’s recap: I have a device that’s barely within its warranty. I’m clumsy. I drop my device. I break my device. There’s no manufacturer fault at all.

And yet Amazon manage not only to take it on the chin on my behalf but get me a replacement device within 26 hours. Oh, and they’ll pick up the other one from anywhere, whenever, at my convenience.

THAT my friends is how to run a business and keep your customers fiercely loyal! Amazon, I’m yours.

</alex>