Electric Josh

George
Dave points us to the Christian Science Monitor's article about the hoo hah surrounding George Orwell's 100th birthday (he's already dead). Best quote, on people's tendency to overcite the man:

It's part of what Daphne Patai, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, says is a lack of independent thought. Orwell is too often used to bolster arguments without deeper analysis... "Independent thinking is the only thing that will get us out of the ideological messes that we're in."

Traffic
So my 25-minute commute took 90 minutes this morning because of this asshole here insisting on travelling too quickly through a twisty, deep underground tunnel (whose very name is now, absurdly, a matter of some pointless political debate). Argh. But what can you do about traffic?

Well, you can simulate it. (Thank you, twenty years of school!) One of the many clever skunkworks projects that I've toyed with in my mind for a bit and then dropped on the floor due to intrusions from real life has been to get a useful (or at least interesting) traffic simulation running. Driving eleven miles through aggressive, stop-and-go traffic for 90 minutes in a car with a manual transmission and a failing (that means loud) exhaust system counts as real life.

A cursory web search turns up some super expensive software for traffic simulation, and several scientific papers. Cellular automata (the last one) being easy, we'll start there. Stay tuned.
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Kurt
This space's favorite composer of novels composed nearly entirely of one-liners, Kurt Vonnegut, speaking at the Mark Twain house in Hartford:

What has happened to us? We have suffered a technological calamity. Television is now our form of government.