Electric Josh

Professional wrestling
I'm loath to admit that my dear wife, so perfect in almost every way, is now worked up (quite!) about an Olympic ice skating-type judging/voting conflict in a TV show that couldn't possibly be more ridiculous. The show is about music (loosely defined). I will not utter the show's name.

I refer you all to my essay from last year on real music. (Dig the retro page layout.)
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New
There's a new ZZZ up, including:

1. wicked cool radio controlled helicopters that beam video to heads-up displays on the ground, and
2. a good Tom the Dancing Bug at the end for some reason.

Prose
Someday I'll be this good with the language: William Safire on Newt Gingrich.

"It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," said America's second-ranking diplomat. All of us observing "the Shootout at the Neocon Cabal" agree that was a good one. The rhythm of Armitage's memorable phrase - reminiscent of Adlai Stevenson's "out of sorts and out of office" - suggests that an unbalanced Gingrich is in need of, and running from, psychiatric care. The deputy secretary's riposte offends only psychiatrists, and there are no Republican psychiatrists.

Wimmen
The Chronicle of Higher Education (via boingboing, I think) reports on a professor of psychology at the University of Washington (whose kind of measly academic web page is here, but who seems to have his very own institute---wehehell...!) who can determine with some mathematical accuracy whether couples will remain couples.

What the students were modeling in that lounge was not "marriage" per se, but the dynamics of marital conversations. Before looking at data from any real-world couples, they began with some very simple hypotheses: the idea, for example, that spouses will react emotionally to the most recent comment made by their partners. At this early stage they sketched crude "influence functions" -- calculus equations that described a dynamic system in which a snarky comment by one spouse would result in negative emotions in the partner, sometimes resulting in a downward spiral. When they tested those first equations against the Love Lab's data, however, they did not match at all.

The scholars soon realized that they needed to add a constant that represented each partner's "uninfluenced steady state" -- that is, the person's general level of cheerfulness or gloom, independent of the spouse's behavior on a particular day. "In retrospect, we should have thought of that at the very beginning," says Mr. Murray. "But once we added that constant, everything fell in just beautifully."

The researchers now had equations that fit Mr. Gottman's data quite closely. They used these to develop bilinear influence functions, which describe a person's ability to affect his or her spouse's mood. Some couples, which Mr. Gottman calls "volatile," routinely unleash anger at one another -- but offset that anger with even larger doses of warm feelings. Those couples tend to be stable and successful, Mr. Gottman says, because they are able to influence one another with both anger and affection. (The influence functions of "conflict avoiding" couples look very different.)

I took a course at UVM that was taught out of the Mathematical Biology book the article describes, and it's the kind of book that makes it just totally obvious that every kid in America should be forced to understand calculus and basic differential equations in order to graduate from high school. Once I dig the text out of the basement I'll post the example question that got the good doctors' collaboration started. Fascinating stuff, here.
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Radio
Running Windows programs on a Linux box is cooool. Of course, all I can get running is notepad, but it's better than nothing. (No MS software anywhere.)
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Stealing links again
This from Boing Boing, in the sidebar: Cool nerd dad makes robot playhouse for lucky progeny.

It was now time to get the Mech out of the garage so that the wife's car could once again be parked inside. So a good friend was invited over and asked bring his truck (kind of knew what he was getting into) and the towing began? the first question, would it fit through the garage door? It looks taller than the door opening, but measurements confirmed that there was one inch to spare.

PA
We're breaking the Pennsylvania Moratorium this weekend by heading down to visit some friends from law school. Neither of us liked the place all that much, and when the time finally came to move back to Boston after K graduated, we recalled our plan, conceived in a fit of idle frustration at the weather or a long drive back from home or a lack of something to do on a Saturday night, of pulling over and dancing as we crossed into New York and out of Pennsylvania for the last time. We did. Cherry Poppin Daddies, I believe. Or maybe Harry Connick, Jr.

None of which is really fair, but the drive will serve as yet another reminder of how nice it is to live in the same area code as one's wife, less than an eight hour drive away. It's also fun to visit old friends.
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Weather
For no reason at all, Spring seems to have arrived with some degree of suddenness after the longest winter in my increasingly not-so-short memory. One doesn't really need a coat outdoors anymore, I get to drive to and from work with the windows open, and I don't have to shovel record amounts of snow up over a retaining wall every week or so. In the wee hours of the morning, Melissa and Aaron had their baby (Alison), so we went over and visited the three of them in the hospital. All are well. We went up to the 21st floor of the hospital and pondered the city and the Charles from above---there were duck boats on the river and light holiday traffic on the new cable stay bridge; the Citgo sign is back on for the season---and got pizza, chatted back in the room about cute little peanut babies. Really quite a nice day.
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NY
Then there's this, also from the Sunday Times: The Day the Traffic Disappeared. I really should have been a city planner.
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A small vow
Inspired by this, from the Sunday Times:

For the balding, middle-aged urologist out to impress the baby sitter, there has always been the sports car. But over the last 20 years, the family car, at least the models aimed at the mainstream buyer, has become profoundly dull, a mobile cup holder for the focus group soccer mom of the suburban minivan collective, an aerodynamic lozenge tricked up with a DVD slot for SpongeBob SquarePants, a built-in diaper bag and an onboard atomic formula warmer.

Tim
Transcript of Tim Robbins' speech to the National Press Club about the cool new "retro 50's" trend in politics. Now back to our usual apolitical mode.
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We are in control
I assume that every site and news outlet that exists has pointed here already, but who can deny the appeal of a politician whose venom is as colorful as that of Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf.

• "We have placed them in a quagmire from which they can never emerge except dead."
• "They are nowhere near the airport ..they are lost in the desert...they can not read a compass...they are retarded."
• "Our initial assessment is that they will all die"

So
This space's accidental hiatus is due more to long, festive, holiday meals than to any particular dearth of things to expound upon, nor worse. It's also tough to get much done at night when you've awoken at 4 AM four times in the last week. Just up and ready to go for the day. Sergey (at work) said, "Ah! I know what's happening to you. You're one of those people who will, for the rest of your life, wake up at four in the morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, every day. Eventually you don't need to go to bed until about ten or eleven at night. It happened to me years ago. It's wonderful!"

So I'm not dying or anything, but it's pretty damn strange to be awake three hours before I have any reason to be. Must use this extra time for something...
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Easter humor
Moderately funny. Go.
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There's a...
...new Get Your War On.
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Another idle skunkworks project
So after spending at least a week complaining about what appeared to be horrible gaffes by the folks who simulated traffic flow through the Big Dig before it got built, they shifted southbound I-93 into the former northbound tunnel, and suddenly it only took 20 minutes to get home today including walking to the car, right at the height of rush hour. I've been threatening to whip up (or dig up) some traffic simulation code for at least a year---because I'm a nerd, I guess---and now that I am officially one of those people that drives to and from work every day I can purport to be motivated to learn about my surroundings, or something.

My prediction is that the traffic has mostly to do with people trying to cross all N lanes of traffic at once. (See four days ago.) I dream of getting a snowplow and T-boning these people and pushing them off into the shoulder, just past their exit. (In this dream, the collision teaches them the error of their ways, making them into considerate, infrequent drivers of small, fuel efficient cars.) Simulating them is probably more productive, tho. If I get around to doing so, I'll post reports to this space. Update: This is the sort of thing I have in mind.
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Once again
Happy birthday, Mom!
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Phone
Go to Google and search for your phone number (in xxx-xxx-xxxx form). Go ahead. Then click on the map and aerial photo of your house. Ponder.
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Broken (Update: fixed)
My hosting provider has hosed the innards of this site. Standby. Fixed.
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Four
I'm awake, ready to go for the day, at 4 AM. This is completely unreasonable.
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Tunnel again
Apparently the new tunnel doesn't help in the afternoon. People moving left to right across three or four lanes of traffic again. Lucky me, taking it in the morning.
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Good!
This is pretty cool. Lucky them.
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Bad!
Bad bad bad bad bad bad! Slashdot observes the Times reporting: it's being proposed that the completely insane and Orwellian USA PATRIOT act be made permanent. Anyone voting for this loses the right---does anyone really have one?---to call anyone else un-American. This is really, really bad! Argh!!

Back to this space's previous apolitical stint.
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Hair
In one of those moments of apathy and submissiveness that we all experience from time to time, I was sitting in the chair last night getting my hair cut when Jen (the hair cutter) said, "So why don't we frost your tips or something?" to which I replied, strangely, "Oh, what the hell." Strange pieces of hair coloring equipment and hair separating apparatus were produced, and unfamiliar hair pulling instruments were applied to my head. Paste was slathered on, then a plastic bag, and then I was told to sit underneath the old lady hair driers and read Boston magazine.

Upon arriving home (half an hour late; boy haircuts are supposed to be fast) K kind of gasped while saying, "Oh my god!" at the same time, which always scares me because she simultaneously inhales (to gasp) and exhales (to exclaim) in a way that human lungs aren't really meant to do. Neither of us is sure what to think of my new Vanilla Ice style head.

I mention this to all dozen of you so that you aren't unpleasantly surprised when next we meet. Word to your mother.
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zzz
My dad's been telling me for many, many months about ZZZ, but its completely pathological URL is one I'd never been able to remember for the entire length of the drive from Vermont back to Boston. This has nothing to do with the piles and piles of wonderful junk food that the house in Montpelier is stocked with, nor with the fact that I tend to revert whenever I'm up there to my teenaged behavior of neither shaving nor trying very hard to think about anything, and sitting in front of whatever cool new Apple product my dad has sitting around the house. I tend to lose the ability to reliably form complete spoken sentences (really). Mostly I just can't remember web sites' addresses very well. This time I managed at least to remember the existence of the site, and had him email me the link.

It's got some pretty cool stuff, all of which is fun to read, some of which isn't true. It's being placed in the sidebar.

And despite the icy New Hampshire interstates and the bizarre mental downshifting that often accompany the trip, it's awfully nice to visit home.
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Fixed
Computer works again. You may all exhale now. Time to go to work.
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Computers are horrible
So I've managed to unconfigure my laptop to the point that it crashes every time it tries to display fonts. This obviously limits the utility of a computer. More radio silence until I spend some unholy amount of energy on getting things back up and running.

(Begin rant. I'm a professional programmer of average intelligence or so; computers are the tools of the trade, which means I'm about as familiar with them as people can reasonably be expected to be. That they refuse to behave for people whose job it is to use them is obviously completely ridiculous. They frustrate me even though I like screwing around with these things; I pity everyone who just wants to get something done without worrying too much about the tool. End rant.)

I wanna PowerBook for my birthday.
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English
Well, what do you know? Al Jazeera seems to have recovered from its DoS attack. Now we can put Al Jazeera and Fox News in a jar and make em fight.
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One more
Jack Beatty: A Country of Fear. Executive branch promulgation of fear being my main pet peeve. Last politics-related link for at least a week. Promise.
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Names
This is kind of unbelievable. There's actually a running debate about what to call the new tunnels. Wasn't there pretty widespread agreement on this already? The usual suspects in the sidebar are on the case. One hopes that the likelihood of the following passage is ebbing:

In my next novel, set in the 2020s, the Big Dig is still going, a kind of permanent revolution in earthworks, a neverending state of traffic emergency.

Doc
Doc Searls, who is obviously a wizard at this whole internet thing, has reposted an email (chain letter?) about fascism that he got. Links to original sources are actually included.

And now I'm on a one-week hiatus from anything Iraq or Federal Government related. See if this works...
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Tunnel
Just a quick note that the new I-93 North tunnel, despite almost certainly helping everyone else, isn't actually helping my commute all that much. The I-90 East tunnel over to Logan helps a lot, because now everyone goes that way instead of clogging the I-93 North tunnel with their cars in some kind of attempt to simultaneously block my way and get themselves to the Callahan tunnel. In fact, right after that tunnel opened, the traffic on the old I-93 North viaduct suddenly cleared right up.

It's all because those clever traffic engineers have choked off the traffic about a mile or so before the tunnel entrance. The HOV lane dumps awkwardly back into traffic on the left side, giving a whole lane worth of traffic all of about one mile to change four lanes to the right before exits 15 and 16. (You can imagine how smoothly this goes.) Exit 18 drops traffic down to three lanes again, after which the four lane tunnel will flow smoothly, duh, for decades to come.

But the new I-93 North is officially wicked cool.
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They got him!
It sounds like Saddam Hussein might truly, actually be dead!

LANGLEY, VA-The CIA announced Monday that it suspects Saddam Hussein's latest televised address was pre-recorded, pointing to its suspiciously dated reference to Nelly's "Hot In Herre," a rap hit from the summer of 2002.

"For the enemy invaders of Iraq, it soon will get truly hot in here," Hussein said in the speech, which was televised worldwide Monday. "No amount of clothing removal will be sufficient to withstand the fiery inferno that awaits them on the battlefield."

The Emperor
At the end of Return of the Jedi, the Emperor makes exactly the same face and does exactly the same hand gesture as Donald Rumsfeld, here, and says, "Now, young Skywalker...you will die!" (I'm so clever.) Now off to read the paper...
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Spring
It's snowing. Again.
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J. Robb
I've been reading John Robb's site very intermittently for a couple of years, and, like most sites full of musings by a software guy, it's a decent read if you, too, happen to be a software guy (or chick), but not so thrilling otherwise. But now it turns out that the guy was a special ops guy in the Air Force in his previous life, and he's got a great perspective on the military and diplomatic execution of the war. Mostly politically neutral, and totally neutral on whether the war is, itself, a good idea; instead we get pragmatic analysis of how best to win the military campaign (informed strategy analysis!) and the broader "make America safe" campaign.

Here is the question everyone should be asking themselves.  For this is the nut of why we entered this war. Which path reduces the chances of a terrorist exploding a nuke in NYC over the next 10 years : a) a withdrawal from Iraq, or b) a bloody Pyrrhic victory?