Electric Josh

Sky
So I went out to look at the solar aurora like Lib mentioned, and...nothing. Light pollution. Should have driven several hours to somewhere dark. I miss living in the middle of nowhere. Alas.
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MFAS
The Masters of Fine Arts in Software.

There is no other program like this in the world today. This is because the traditions of Computer Science and Software Engineering have tried to turn all aspects of software creation into a pure engineering discipline when they clearly are not. The MFA in Software would begin to repair this error.

Pix
While you're all waiting with 'bated breath for new pictures of the kid, feast on the NASA Earth Observatory's new images gallery.
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Sun
If your house is about to burn down you might as well have fun staring directly at the sun, looking at sun spots so big that you can see them with your naked eye. Watching fire through fire.
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Halloween
Costumes are always a problem around here. I went as a pumpkin something like eight years in a row (orange sweater with cardboard eyes and mouth taped on, green hat with construction paper stem). To no one's surprise a gallery of such perfect, cheap, low-effort costumes exists. There is an entire section called Costumes made from boxes. Have fun.
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Electric Chuck
So I guess the best thing about being a studly paleobotanist (come on, use your Latin...you know what a paleobotanist does) is that occasionally old science buddies call you up out of the blue and ask you to help them on an Antarctic expedition for fossil seed ferns and such. All those years of grinding one's teeth at his kids' refusal to be significantly interested in flora (in all their Latin binomial detail) on mountain hikes or episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard, all the diplomatic energy spent dealing with his poor wife's disapproval of turning over a good chunk of the yard to milkweed in an attempt to host migrating Monarch butterflies, (the 0-for-5 raising a scientist, dammit!), are all finally paying off handsomely for dear old dad. Read about his adventures on the ice here. He leaves in two weeks. Pretty neat, Dad.
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Baseball
Okay, last one, I promise. Todd asks, How can you root for the Yankees? You might as well root for TicketMaster!
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Games
We'd like to spend thirty seconds pointing out what has been, to this point, the highlight of this space's day: ten-year-old kids playing twenty-year-old video games. This commentary on Tetris, the most recent of the games reviewed:

Tim: Which button do I press to make the blocks explode?

EGM: Sorry, they don't explode.

Becky: This is boring. Maybe if it had characters and stuff and different levels, it would be OK. If things blew up or something or-

Sheldon: If there were bombs.

Becky: Yeah, or special bricks. Like, if a yellow brick touched a red brick it would blow up and you'd have to start over.

John: Why haven't I won yet? I've paired up so many of the same color.

EGM: Don't worry about colors.

John: I just lined up six of the same color. Why didn't they blow up?

EGM: Nothing blows up.

Last one
Red Sox fans always turn out to be philosophers.

Dave gave me my cue as he recoiled in shock and surprise. "What are You doing here? I thought we wouldn't see you until next week. Aren't you going to watch the game?"

I recited my lines from memory, with feeling, ""Well, Dave, I would much prefer to pass this evening with you guys than watching the game of the century, because YOU, Dave, have not let me down EVERY FALL for the past 32 years. Because you, my friend, would never RIP my HEART from my chest and stomp it into the dirt behind home plate!"

6-5
Dan Shaughnessy in the Globe.

And so a new generation of New Englanders has learned the risk of rooting for the Red Sox.

They will tease you for months. They will tell you they are different from their forebears. They will claim that what happened before has nothing to do with them. They will make you believe this really is the year.

But in the end, they will fall and sometimes they will do it in excruciating fashion. The weight of the Boston uniform is always too heavy.

Meet the new Red Sox. Same as the old Red Sox. In perhaps the most painful game in franchise history -- no small statement given the Sox' penchant for macabre moments -- the Sox last night lost the American League pennant to their century-old nemisis, the New York Yankees.

7
Game 7 starts now on Fox. Go Sox!

• Grady Little left Pedro in the game waaaaaaaaay too long. Tied at the top of the ninth, now...
• Tied middle of nine. Dammit.
• Todd Walker is my hero.
• ...
• ugh.

Atrium
I'm working (except for this post) on a bench outdoors, connected to the office's wireless network, enjoying a beautiful, brisk day. Yay, technology!
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Game 6
So to our astonishment, the Red Sox managed to force a Game 7 tonight by coming from behind to beat the Yankees. This cute baby got to see all sorts of grunting and cheering including a parental high five, the first of hopefully only a few of these often annoying gestures to which she'll ever be subjected.

And while this space is kind of bummed that the Cubs were cruelly booted, we're at least happy that a Red Sox victory tonight, should it happen, wouldn't now necessarily portend the immediate end of the world.
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War
Get Your War On is starting this reverse-chronological posting thing. Go read.
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No
Holy crap, that's a lot of vetoes!
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MacArthur
The Onion is particularly good this week. For example:

MacArthur Genius Grant Goes Right Up Recipient's Nose
ALBANY, NY-According to friends, the $500,000, five-year, no-strings-attached MacArthur Fellowship awarded to Jim Yong Kim earlier this month went right up the 43-year-old scientist's nose. "Kim's efforts to eradicate drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis in Russian prisons and Peruvian ghettos amazed everyone-as did his appetite for top-grade cocaine," Marisa Amir said Monday. "As soon as that first check arrived, Kim was on the phone with his dealer, and two hours later, he was in a hot tub full of strippers." His first installment of money gone, the scientist then returned to the task of developing a whole-cell cholera toxin recombinant B subunit vaccine.

2-2
In honor of the good guys winning a well-played game against the Yankees and evening things up at two games apiece, this space points to David Brooks in the Times:

It's interesting, for example, to turn and watch Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watch a game. As the game goes on, they almost never display pleasure, contentment or joy. Instead, during the game they experience long periods of contempt interrupted by short bursts of vindication.

If one of their players has just grounded out, they regard him with a gaze that suggests he has just betrayed his country. If he has hit a home run, they treat it as evidence that the pathetic bum on the field has finally lived up to the standard set by their superlative fandom. Then comes the taunting.

Now back to our regular boycott of publications that disappear behind paywalls.
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PLoS
Something called the Public Library of Science has opened its doors. Free (capital F) science journals---apparently only biology for now, though. How can they do this? Well, computers and the internet have reduced the cost of running a real live peer-reviewed scientific journal basically to zero plus the cost of getting other scientists to do the peer reviews, which is, and has long been, zero. (Yes, the cost of the reviewer's time is zero.)

This is a Very Good Thing. The whole point of science is to contribute knowledge to the public domain for the public good, so why the hell should I, the researcher, pay someone to publish my work? Why should I be unable to promote myself and my research by republishing the papers I've written for publication in Nature or Physical Review or whatever?

Most importantly, why should students in poor countries, freelance researchers, or anyone else without access to a university's super-expensive subscription to such a journal be denied access to newly common knowledge? This is precisely one of the primary reasons the internet was developed. Yay, internet!
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Sites
Firsthand, semi-independent, web-only reporting from Iraq by the reporter Kevin Sites. Cool. This is what newspapers would feel like if they didn't insist on the stilted voice that makes The Onion so funny.
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Governator
Here's hoping this is true. After consulting its secret council of California Republicans this evening over wine and much cooing over the baby, this space is optimistic.
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Grid
Industrial Physicist's explanation of the problems with the power grid. It's way more readable, even for the nontechnical, than anything you've seen in the Times or USA Today.
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SUV
The preferred vehicle of rapists and lawyers. (I love gratuitously inflammatory stuff that isn't about particular people.)
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O'Reilly's an M
On the way home the car radio was playing me Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly managed to turn a fairly engaging interview into a yelling match by turning astonishingly defensive in response to the slightest barb, instead of just answering amiably. NPR ain't exactly the BBC, and she would have mostly let him slide. Guess he's a type M.
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C and M
An introduction to Type C and Type M arguments. A must-read despite using Paul Krugman, whom this space enjoys, as a punching bag.
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Fred
Fred Tuttle has died. After becoming famous across Vermont as the star of A Man With A Plan, a movie about a woodchuck dairy farmer named Fred Tuttle who runs for Senate. (I can't imagine anyone but a longtime Vermonters ever finding the movie entertaining. It was basically a big inside joke.)

The joke got even funnier when a guy from somewhere in western Massachusetts decided to run as a Republican for Pat Leahy's Senate seat. Fred decided to run against the guy in the Republican primary, complete with joke platform straight out of the movie. The F is for Fred, the R is for renewable, the E is for extra-terrestrial, and the D is for dinky. Vermonters have kind of an anti-carpetbagger streak (of the sort that a majority of New Yorkers, for example, seem to lack), and handed the real life Republican nomination to Fred. Leahy obviously won.

Walking out of the booth on election day, someone asked from among the phalanx of TV cameras, "Hey Fred, who did you vote for?"

"Well, me and my wife voted for Leahy, same as always."

One is pleased to be from Vermont.
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Sox
Not quite sure how I managed to get to sleep after last night's game. Not only do the Red Sox find ways to lose games that shouldn't have even been close to begin with, and even in victory they're incredibly painful to watch. Bases loaded, two out in the bottom of the ninth, clinging to a one-run lead. Shudder.

We had all been out to dinner (happy birthday, Amy!) in Kenmore Square, checking in periodically on the game, and then listened to the bottom of the ninth on the way home. We managed to get to the house just as the last batter was coming up, so I ran inside and found Dick tensed and annoyed in front of the television. [Agonizing series of pitches resulting in a full count.] Upon the last strike call Dick and I started yelling and jumping around for about half a second until we realized that this cute little baby, who has never in her whole life known anything but the Red Sox making the playoffs, was still sleeping in the same small room.

At any rate the key to being a Boston sports fan (a fate I suppose I might as well resign myself to) is to expect that you'll lose, trying very hard to avoid reminding yourself what a pleasant surprise winning is.
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Moore
Michael Moore needs to calm down. His (valid!) questions (that should be answered) are lost amid the amateurish rhetoric and sly cheap shots.
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VT
[Passive voice alert!] It is being proposed that if Dean wins the nomination the Republican strategy will be to trash Vermont. I'm eager to see this because it won't work.

And how nice that my one-time college roommate's insane, Dartmouth Review-editing high school buddy Jonah Goldberg (is it really the same guy?) is finding so much wrong with a state that remains, thanks in part to Dean's recent economic and environmental stewardship, nicer even than lovely Hanover, NH, where Goldberg's parents wrote a (large) check for him to go to school and practice his cloying, disingenuous, William F. Buckley invective. (I won't bother getting into why former Dartmouth Review staffers merit less than no respect from this space.)
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Navel gazing
[Navel gazing alert!] Why bother with this site? Phil G. answers the question nicely:

Personal Web sites are interesting because they support 20- or 30-page essays beautifully, with search engines directing interested readers to those essays right at the moment that they're curious about that topic.

Blogs are interesting because they support the 2-paragraph idea.  It is sort of ridiculous to create a separate .html file for every little aphorism or fleeting thought and it would be a shame to clog search engines with pages that have such a high machinery-to-content ratio.  ... Everyone can write like Nietzsche or a Marcus Aurelius, even if few people ever come up with enough clever small ideas to fill a 200-page book.

Iceland
A year's worth of views from a Reykjavik balcony. Sadly, the pictures are small. But wow.
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ACME
Some kind soul has enumerated what I assume to be all of the ACME products ever shown in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Have fun harkening back to the salad days of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show, two hours every Saturday morning on CBS. (Holy crap, I was four and I remember that it was CBS.) This site has 'em all,

• the ACME Adding Machine,
• the ACME Airdrop,  
• the ACME All-Purpose Farm Implement,  
• the ACME Animal Delivery Service,  
• the ACME Anti-Nightmare Machine,  
• the ACME Anvils,  
• the ACME Artificial Rock,
• ...

Bush and Kennedy
I had to read this twice. It's not a typo, and constitutes my moment of Zen for the afternoon:

U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy will receive the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. ... Former President Bush has sole discretion on who receives the award, said Penrod Thornton of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

''Knowing President Bush, it was more about ... contributions of the individuals and it didn't have anything to do with politics,'' Thornton told the Bryan-College Station Eagle for its Saturday editions.

Trust
So just in case you erroneously thought you'd always own computers you bought, and could choose what software to run on the computer you'd bought, check out the future: trusted computing. Yes, this will probably end up being bad for folks like us.
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Time
No time to post this week. Alas. Baby stuff. Not sleeping. I'm sure you understand. This space has purchased an iMac, so once that beast is configured (it's hiding in the basement lair) we should be back to full posting speed by the end of the weekend. Yaaaar!
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Onion
Breakup Secretly Hilarious to Friends.
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First
Rabbit rabbit.
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