Electric Josh

Science!
It looks like scientists are immortal compared with everyone else. Well, that's not the exact finding, but see if you can find any overlap at all between this story's body and its headline.
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RIAA detector
Check out the RIAA Radar site that will tell you which albums are safe to buy if you're into that whole boycotting evil guilds thing. Happily, the one or two Built To Spill albums I want to buy (but don't already have) are marked Safe!, so the baby might just have to buy me There Is Nothing Wrong With Love for K's and my anniversary. Or something. Link stolen from boingboing, again.
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Tech
Excellent tech docs diagram site. Nothing's better than baffling technical documentation, except comical illustrations of said documentation. Have fun.
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Dean again
So the Times has a long piece on Howard. Notable is the sloppy claim that as Governor he "antagonized environmentalists." It's fairer to say that he antagonized Earth First types while actually managing to set aside decent chunks of reservation land and water. Nitpicking; watch him go!

Also notable is that that Wilgoren and Rosenbaum talked to somebody other than Republican lackey Garrison Nelson, UVM History professor and longtime Dean hater. First time I've ever seen that outside Vermont.
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Why work?
This space has stumbled across a nice-sized lode of amateur philosophizing on why not to work. Lots of stuff along these lines:

We actively promote alternatives to the wage slavery mindset and what we call "The Cult of the Job" which automatically equates having a job with making a living.

It turns out that the only problem with most of these schemes is the need for money: mortgages, food, and health care aren't free. It's kind of fun to imagine just how catastrophically society would crumble if they suddenly were, and everyone stopped going to work. I, for example, would write many, many small bits of software that wouldn't help you (nor probably my current employer) in the slightest; or I'd figure out some way of getting my house off the electric grid. Or I'd spend a lot of time raising my kid. Either way would be good.
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Radio silence
Why the radio silence? Stuff to do.
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Tufte
I just threw together a document that summarized [boring work information] on a single page. The exciting part is that I was thinking more like an illustrator than a programmer. What fun.

Let's all take a minute and thank Edward R. Tufte for making this sort of thing desirable again. (Cosmic irony: I found PowerPoint to be the least annoying available product with which to design the page in question...)

Back to work!
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Potato
So the BBC has a cool article on this gravity map of the Earth. You might expect that since the Earth isn't a completely homogeneous lump of a single material, but instead consists of massive plates floating around on convecting blob of molten rock and iron and such, that gravity wouldn't be exactly the same everywhere you stood, rock and iron and water all having different densities and all.

My dad's friend Jim (How is it possible that Jim has no web presence, having kept me interested in physics and computers since I was wee...?) says he used to worry about this kind of thing when he was flying satellites for NASA; the orbits would get slightly screwed up when they flew over one of the parts with stronger or weaker gravity than normal, and they'd need to preemptively nudge the satellite up or down to compensate. Apparently the gravity map was less precise back in the day. Bitchin picture, huh?
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Back
Lib is back from Central America.
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Cord
Obviously an idiot.
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Baby Gross
We awoke to this rather fantastic news from Lee and Adam:

Wanted to let you know that my water broke in the middle of the night last night so Baby Gross is on the way. We are at home now (we spent a few quality hours at the hospital before being sent home)and expect to go back to the hospital early this afternoon.

Meanwhile, across town...
The fine folks at The Atlantic nicely describe the RAND Corporation's list of ten fairly major pieces of current world news that we've heard nothing about (at least that I've heard nothing about), the most fascinating being the developing Iran-India alliance. This space really needs to start reading The Economist again.
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Safer
Oct. Report Said Defeated Hussein Would Be Threat. Huh!?
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Islands
The harbor islands are pretty cool, but we took the boat from Hingham only to discover, once arrived, that it's impossible to visit islands other than George's island if one's car is parked in Hingham, due to last minute boat schedule changes that had, of course, not been mentioned anywhere except on the island itself, a bit too late to do anything about it. At any rate, sure enough, there's a pre-Civil War era fort, Savannah style, right out there in Boston Harbor, a twenty minute ferry ride from downtown, or, I hope, a slightly longer kayak. They had the usual assortment of Civil War reenactment people hanging out, dressed up in heavy wool uniforms and firing muskets and cannon. It being a national park (state park?), there were also about ten million junior high kids tooling around, being irritating, shrieking for no reason, annoying even one another.

A "vintage baseball" game with Civil War era rules (hit the ball too far and it's a foul, not a home run, etc.) was to be played later in the day, but we had checked out the whole island already and were ready to get back to the suburbs and do something more productive with our afternoon than check out the fort again, so we ate lunch under a tree while watching a (possibly equally entertaining) wiffle ball game played by some of the rapidly increasing throng of high schoolers. As soon as I figure out why I'm getting "file too large" errors I'll throw a picture or two up. (Yes, I know, it's because the file is too large.)
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Bingo
Hipster bingo. Nice. (Reload the page for a different random bingo card.)
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Spam
Well, the spammers have finally found my email address in the last couple of days, here, which is kind of a drag, but it occasionally provides comedic relief such as this tidbit that I received this morning:

We can supply you with high-quality, artistic, and customized paper-cuts. Our paper-cuts are developed for all kinds of use in both daily life and business. ... Exoticism: All of our paper cuts are handmade by folk experts in China, where paper-cutting has been a traditional folk art dated back to 105 A.D.

Mix-a-lot
For those of you who are more or less exactly my age, check out The Onion AV Club's interview with Sir Mix-a-Lot. More interesting than you'd expect, but that's the great thing about low expectations...
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Excellent news
The coolest, most totally awesome scientists in the whole wide world have reported the best news ever: self gratification reduces the risk of cancer. Yaaaaay!!
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New way home
This is the dumbest line (or is it the most ingenious) of any song that's been stuck, completely cemented, in my head, blocking out all other thought:

I'm not scared
I felt like this on my way home
I'm not scared
I pass boats and the Kingdome.

Tired
An excellent piece of news for a guy who's already pretty well beat at 10:15 AM: The BBC informs us that a nap may be as good as a full night's sleep. Doubtful, but it would be nice.
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Update
Random notes:

• Still pondering the Metallica show. A review is still coming. Watch this space closely, as though your child's life hangs in the balance. (It doesn't, but watch closely anyway.)
• Gearing up for a trip to the harbor islands this weekend. Should be cool.
• No luck yet with the accursed DVD player.

Dog
Okay, so if you're a kid and your dog runs away, you should hope that you live in Connecticut. Apparently, there, police will immediately chase your runaway dog through town, for miles if necessary, until he is in police custody, caught by a bystander, or stops to poop.

The incident started when Connecticut's ''first dog'' jumped out of a window in Rowland's car as the governor was touring a new building at the University of Connecticut's Waterbury campus. Coalby bolted down East Main Street, up a hill and over a green, with two city police officers on bicycles in dogged pursuit. The three-mile chase ended when the officers shouted at a Wolcott man, Ed Humel, who grabbed the canine in his arms.

Clyde
Barb kicks a bunch of ass. Fish and electricity living in harmony. Aawww! Nice, Barb.
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Past
Hey, remember this?
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Lib
Lib is in Costa Rica, but apparently can't update her site. Bummer.
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Quack
The crack boingboing staff have done it again: New England's beaches to be invaded by tens of thousands of rubber duckies! They had apparently been dumped from a shipping container in the North Pacific.
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Great White North
The Globe on the emergence of what Pat Buchanan has started calling Soviet Canuckistan. Wacky Canadians and their stupid free health care. My prediction: the name "Canuckistan" is going to be a permanent label, and Canadians will fling it (ironically) in the faces of (indifferent) Americans for years.
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Apex and TERK
I have an Apex AD-1110W DVD player. It is a piece of crap, but it was cheap. I just bought a TERK "mini" modulator to connect the DVD player to the TV, which lacks RCA jacks. The modulator is also a piece of crap, and doesn't work: the circuitry backing its RCA jacks doesn't have enough gain to feed a television. This despite the fact that feeding video signals to a television is its sole function, it being too fragile to serve even as a doorstop. Argh!!
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Brits on Dean
From across the pond, an extreme outsider's view of Dean. The article's highlight is the following:

But that is the nature of politics in New Hampshire, a peaceful prosperous state with the jarringly inappropriate motto "Live free or die". Through historical accident, the place has become a crucial early hoop the candidates have to jump through and survive if they are to get a shot at the presidency. Consequently, contenders for the most powerful job in the history of the world have to spend weeks courting the state house by house, schmoozing voters in their own back gardens. It is an odd arrangement - a bit like giving Northumbrians an early say in who becomes prime minister.

Speaking of piracy
Speaking of piracy, here's a keyboard for pirates.
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Beatty on Blumenthal
Christopher Hitchens rambles wonderfully. At some point I'll bother to parse out the rest of what he's actually saying, but he's fun to read, even if not for the content of his rant against Sidney Blumenthal. I hope the ideas themselves, of course, fade rapidly to irrelevance next fall.
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Never mind
US Changes Reason For Invading Iraq. It would have been way funnier if Rumsfeld had dropped this information in a Gilda Radner voice, smiling: "Oh. Never mind."
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DVD
Finally hooked up a DVD player, only to discover that the goddamned thing employs some kind of copy protection that prevents me from using it unless I

1. buy a more expensive TV, or
2. buy some overpriced dongles at Radio Shack.

Voting machine
How to rig an election with Microsoft Access if your local elections board happens to be using electronic ballot boxes. As this less analytical screed suggests, no fraternal/gubernatorial connections are required. Link from slashdot.
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Bush lied
I've now talked to two people today who are usually on top of this sort of thing, and neither had any idea what I was talking about. (Must have been the holiday.) A deviation from this space's relatively apolitical voice is therefore in order.

Over the last couple of days the Bush administration has actually been caught lying about war, and, most astonishingly, has been getting called on it by the press (rather than just these silly weblogs). Cursor, the one in the sidebar, provides a decent overview (scroll to "July 8"). Roughly, the Times published an op-ed by Joseph C. Wilson, 4th (could such a name belong to anyone but a diplomat?), the very guy whom the government sent to Niger to check out the claims that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium ore. The piece was called What I Didn't Find In Africa, and begins:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

... It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

If you blinked--or were busy buying hot-dogs and beer for a Fourth of July cookout--you might have missed the latest evidence that George W. Bush misrepresented the threat from Iraq as he guided the country into invasion and occupation in the Middle East.

The day before Independence Day, Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading a review of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons, held a series of interviews with journalists and revealed that his unfinished inquiry had so far found that the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been somewhat ambiguous, that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence services had received pressure from the Bush administration, and that the CIA had not found any proof of operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime.

The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.

The acknowledgment came after a day of questions - and sometimes contradictory answers from White House officials - about an article published on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Sunday by Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger, in West Africa, last year to investigate reports of the attempted purchase. He reported back that the intelligence was likely fraudulent, a warning that White House officials say never reached them.

Multitasking
It turns out that refusing to concentrate on one task at a time is incredibly bad for your ability to get anything done at all, and may be addictive to boot. Oh no! I do this (we jerks call it multitasking to sound smart and avoid thinking) all the time, although not nearly as much as the people described in the article, who, due to their unwillingness to turn their electronics off, are (unintentionally?) made to sound like assholes.

So for those of you who, like me, constantly feel like you're getting very little done (at work nor in general), consider:

The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives, other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture of the Always On - and a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to turn off.

Some people who are persistently wired say it is not uncommon for them to be sitting in a meeting and using a hand-held device to exchange instant messages surreptitiously - with someone in the same meeting. Others may be sitting at a desk and engaging in conversation on two phones, one at each ear. At social events, or in the grandstand at their children's soccer games, they read news feeds on mobile devices instead of chatting with actual human beings.

Bummer. Link from boingboing.
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Review pending
Since every single one of this space's dedicated readers are diehard heavy metal fans, a review of the Metallica show is forthcoming. Metallica was decent, but in order to accurately describe the Limp Bizkit part of the show immediately preceding I need to find a word that means "self-parody" only much, much stronger. (Any German speakers out there?) Stay tuned, if you care to.
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GIA
Best MIT hack in a long time: Government Information Awareness. (Why isn't this on the MIT Hacks page?) Story in the Globe:

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

"It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency," said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.

Beach
Headed to the Cape for the weekend, so this space is going to get real quiet. I'll return via the Metallica show in Foxboro. We enjoyed a pump up (but not this ultimate pump up) over at Adam's Wednesday night, wherein we watched the live DVD that accompanies the new CD---it's just a rehearsal, but since it's way less produced than the CD it sounds a ton better---and I discovered that the new album is, surprisingly, excellent, except that there are no solos at all on the whole album! We eventually switched to Cliff 'Em All. At any rate, happy fourth. Remember to think, like the flag says.
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fear
So an honest to god Congressman (McDermott: D-WA) has picked up on the fear itself theme I've been bothered by forever.
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anything to oil
From the world of things that, if even remotely true, really ought to be getting zillions of federal research dollars comes news of an omnirefinery that cheaply generates #2 fuel oil (among other commodities) from refuse. Neat stuff!

A special prize, however, should be awarded to me for spotting the astounding, disingenuous hole in the following argument, posed by the company's guy and accepted uncritically by the reporter:

But if there were a global shift to thermal depolymerization technologies, belowground carbon would remain there. The accoutrements of the civilized world-domestic animals and plants, buildings, artificial objects of all kinds-would then be regarded as temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in thermal depolymerization machines into short-chain fuels, fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface; it could no longer dangerously accumulate in the atmosphere. "Suddenly, the whole built world just becomes a temporary carbon sink," says Paul Baskis, inventor of the thermal depolymerization process. "We would be honoring the balance of nature."

add chris lydon
Stumbled across Chris Lydon's site, whose NPR show I can't stand, but whose site is excellent. I've added it to the sidebar. It replaces the Times, which we all know how to find without a link to click on.
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titles
Finally got rid of those completely useless titles. In whose universe did it ever make sense that individual paragraphs must each bear a title?
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Registry
National "Do Not Vote" Registry Huge Success.
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Irony
Dave Eggers first pointed out to me that the word irony is pretty much universally misused. Leave it to the Brits to belabor the point. From the American, buried in an appendix to the second printing of his first book (which I recommend), comes a blurb, printed in extremely small type, called Irony and its Malcontents that begins:

This section should be skipped over by most, for it is annoying and pedantic, and directed to a very few. ... I have that i-word here only to make clear what was clear to, by my estimations, about 99.9% of original hardcover readers of this book: that there is almost no irony, whatsoever, within its covers. But to hear a few people tell it, this entire book, or most of it, was/is ironic. Well. Well. Ahem. Well. Let's define irony as the dictionary does: the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning. (There are lesser definitions, but they all serve this main one.) Now, where, keeping that definition in mind, do we find that herein? We do find some things that might have confused the reader prone to presuming this irony, so let's address them one at a time: 1. When someone kids around, it does not necessarily mean he or she is being ironic. That is, when one tells a joke, in an context, in can mean, simply, that a joke is being told. Jokes, thus, do not have to be ironic to be jokes. Further, satire is not inherently ironic. Nor is parody. Or any kind of comedy. Irony is a very specific and not all that interesting thing, and to use the word/concept to blanket half of all contemporary cultural production---which some aged arbiters seem to be doing (particularly with regard to work made by those under a certain age)---is akin to the too-common citing of "the Midwest" as the regional impediment to all national social progress (when we all know the "Midwest" is ten miles outside of any city). In other words, irony should be considered a very particular and recognizable thing, as defined above, and thus, to refer to everything odd, coincidental, eerie, absurd or strangely funny as ironic is, frankly, an abomination upon the Lord. [Re that last clause: not irony, but a simple, wholesome, American-born exaggeration]. To illustrate the many more things that are not ironic but are often referred to as such, let's look at some sample sentences, starring a wee wayward pup known as Benji, and see if we can illuminate some distinctions.

Sample: Benji was run over by a bus. Isn't that ironic?

No: That is not ironic. That is unfortunate, but it is not ironic.

Sample: It was a bright and sunny day when Benji was run over by a bus. Ironic, no?

Again, no: That is not irony. It is an instance of dissonance between weather and tragedy.

Sample: It is ironic that Benji was on his way to the vet when he was run over by a bus.

Still: That is not irony. That is a coincidence that might be called eerie.

Sample: It is ironic hta Benji was run over on the same day he misused the word ironic.

But see: This is, again, a coincidence. It is wonderfully appropriate that he was run over on this day, deserving as he was of punishment, but it is not ironic.

Sample: Is it not ironic that on the side of the bus that ran over Benji was an advertisement for "The Late Show with David Letterman," a show which many consider often ironic?

Oh, oh: No, no.

From the Brit:

Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can't do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can't do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it's a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that "post-ironic" is an acceptable term - it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.