Electric Josh

Holidays
This space is probably going to take a little holiday break. Turn off the computer and go hang out with your friends and family.
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BW
The Death of Horatio Alger: "The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago. The name of the leftist rag? Business Week..."
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Video games
I don't play video games because it would infuriate both my employer and my family, and nothing good could come of doing either. Why get myself hooked on something I don't have time for? (How sad.) However, this Times Magazine article about the sort-of rebirth of Atari contains the following snippet:

But the fact is that parents who are unsettled by video games -- who have let this phenomenon into their homes without necessarily understanding what it is -- are onto something.

John Hurlbut of Atari tells the story of his teenage daughter playing RollerCoaster Tycoon, one of the least violent games imaginable. In the course of the game it's possible to zoom in on any one amusement-park patron. ''There was this one guy,'' he says, ''who just had this scowl on his face. It really bothered her. She built new rides, she opened up concession stands, she lowered all her prices and she kept checking in with this one guy, but he just kept frowning. So finally, she clicked on him, picked him up, dragged him over to the river and dropped him in. 'Daddy, I tried everything,' she said. 'But I just couldn't make him happy.' ''

I'm completely delighted with this anecdote. Unsettling? This is fantastic! Kids need humor. Half the fun of The Sims is waiting until one or more characters are in a particular room, pausing the game, replacing the doors with walls, and then waiting for the characters to die; or triggering earthquakes or releasing monsters in SimCity; and so on.

Must, get, Playstation...
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Map
Super cool electoral-demographic type map of the U.S. pointed to by Dan Kennedy of the Phoenix, which you should really be reading.
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Crappy
whatacrappypresent.com. This is pure genius.

Kids today are so good at downloading music from the internet that most of them already have all the music they like on their computer, or if they don't have it yet they can get it in 10 minutes. And remember: if your family turns off "sharing" downloading songs is 100% safe..

I know I've said this about stuff other than the site we're presently discussing, but this is what the internet was invented for. Hey, if I can't be pointlessly hyperbolic on my own website then where can I be? [Note to people who may be Santa Claus or my wife: I still want There is Nothing Wrong With Love by Built to Spill and Still Feel Gone by Uncle Tupelo. I don't think either of these (nor both!) would be crappy at all; quite the opposite, in fact!] From boingboing, which you should be reading regularly anyway.
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Tunnel
I can't stand driving anymore---it makes me tense and because so many more people are driving now it's not that much faster than the T anymore---but they're about to open the new Southbound I-93 tunnel. (Thanks, Mike.) Can't they improve public transportation, too?
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Evil
Proof that Saddam is eeeeevil.
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Rotary
Todd points us to the news that the Sagamore rotary is going away:

The Sagamore Rotary, long the most grueling hurdle for thousands of travelers who flock to Cape Cod on summer weekends, will be dismantled beginning as early as this spring and replaced by a road that sends Route 3 traffic straight onto the Sagamore Bridge.

I can't wait to sit in traffic on Route 6 instead.
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AJ
Pictures of A. J.; Sophie is only briefly involved.
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Copps
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps: "Anyone could access the Internet, with any kind of computer, for any type of application, and read or say pretty much what they wanted. This Internet may be dying." Via Dave.
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Byrd
Robert Byrd (D-WV): "The older I get, the more I become convinced that wisdom is enhanced by age, and I think the same can be said of The Nation magazine. It is more than a good read. It has become, over the years, an essential publication and a voice for the loyal opposition that is needed today as perhaps never before."
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Dennis
Dennis Kucinich: "I don't think ABC should be the first primary. The first primary should not be on a television network."
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Saddam
I'd be totally remiss if I didn't weigh in on the Saddam capture: Nice! Now we can all have fun making fun of the people who change their opinions of the invasion of Iraq because of the way it turned out. Better still, we can prepare to defend ourselves against the claim that our previous opposition to the invasion is now somehow not only un-American, but newly demonstrably un-American. (Of course I'm glad he's been nabbed! Did you think that I wanted American soldiers dead or something? Geez. I've already had to tell the car radio at least once that I never once wished that American soldiers would die. What sort of sicko would think such a thing?)

Anyways, maybe now we can get back to the WarOnTerror(tm).
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Krugman
Paul Krugman: "In short, this week's diplomatic debacle probably reflects an internal power struggle, with hawks using the contracts issue as a way to prevent Republican grown-ups from regaining control of U.S. foreign policy." (Try here if the other article vanishes behind the paywall.) Ignore the nasty comments about Bechtel. :)
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McMurdo again
Dad is back from the field.
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Baby
I sometimes have no idea what the folks at The Onion are talking about:

Baby Boring
TAMARAC, FL-Michelle, the three-week-old daughter of area residents Sue and Allen McKay, is "unbelievably boring," sources close to the couple said Monday. "Sue's always raving about how amazing Michelle is," friend Elena Jacobs said. "But then you meet her, and she barely moves. Who knows? Maybe Michelle is an incredibly charming and engaging little mastermind during the 20 minutes each day that she's awake and not crying." Jacobs added that Michelle must have been born with her mother's eyes and her father's total lack of personality.

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Plane
Pinhead runs out of fuel, gets stuck at McMurdo. My dad could very well be chatting with (and making fun of) this guy even as we speak. Update: word directly from the seventh continent:

I have not met the guy, but did see his *tiny* plane sitting on the ice runway as we got off the C-130 earlier today. He is apparently sleeping in the fuel shed (why not steal 100 gallons?)and is generally being given a cool reception.

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Baby
More baby pictures. Now, isn't checking this space frequently handsomely repaid?
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The computer is playing me a song called Michigan, a nice little love song, that's on the order of seven minutes long, by a band called Red House Painters. Who the hell are they? That followed by something by Superchunk, whom I've only ever heard once before. Both excellent. Death Cab For Cutie came earlier.

I would never have ever heard either of these songs if not for the internet. It's like being in school when a large minority of my friends were at least somewhat involved in campus radio, where all the music is good and totally unheard of. I get to pretend to be cool again. The internet is good.
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PPT
This is not a joke. Now why didn't they have this for Bill Clinton?
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Southern man
So dad's radio silence is due to the absence of internet connections at Beardmore base, and not because he was among the eight Korean researchers in Antarctica who were lost, for a time, at sea, and one of whom is presumed dead. Those folks were working from a new Korean station on the Antarctic Peninsula, about 90 degrees east of where dad et al. are, at Beardmore on the other side of the Ross Ice Shelf where they're awaiting (in good weather) helicopters that were delayed getting out of McMurdo by bad weather. Not to worry.
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Offshore
A super interesting conversation among economist types, on the rapidly increasing number of jobs being outsourced overseas. The following demonstrates a massive disconnect between these folks and the complexity of the type of job they're talking about:

Out in the Bay Area there are plenty of folks who would love to create a little bit of protectionism around their I.T. jobs, but we are far better off letting a lot of those jobs go. Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.

Umm, no programmer does only the low-skill part of coding; instead, each programmer works constantly to understand (and to help to develop) the project's requirements as sketched by the project management layer. That's not to say that there aren't too many programmers in San Francisco, but let's be clear: if something in programming is low-skill, then you can (gasp!) write a little program to do it automatically, and then spend your time worrying about the high-skill part, which is communicating with the project manager or client. Geez.
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Soph
More baby pictures in the next day or so. If it wasn't for everyone's overly reflective eyeballs and my annoying tendency to try to take verticals as often as possible it these things sure would be easier to post. Ah, well.
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Reagan
Apparently there is a movement out there to replace FDR's likeness on the dime with that of Reagan. Apparently, despite appearances, this isn't a hoax.
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Jokes
Physics jokes:

1. "Hey, what's new?"
   "E/h"
2. Dr. Heisenberg was pulled over for speeding. The cop asked him, "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know exactly where I am."
3. Q: What do you get when you cross a pig with a rat? A: Pig rat sine theta.

Read up on what claims (ironically, thankfully) to be The Best Physics Humor Ever. Slashdot's comments section, where I stole the link from, is obviously full of even nerdier (and funnier) jokes, although they quickly drift offtopic:

Q: How many ADD kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Wanna go for a bike ride?

An excellent way to spend a snowstorm...
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No news
A winter storm is moving our drive to Vermont up by about twelve hours. This makes four of the last six trips to Vermont that will have occurred in a winter storm. The other two were in June and September. Update: laying low here; no point trying to drive through a blizzard both ways, you know. (Thank goodness for these critical "updates.")
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Phoenix
This space notes with delight that the excellent Boston Phoenix has finally removed its amazingly inappropriate link to the Daniel Pearl decapitation video---which this space, like the rest of you, neither needed to watch nor bothered to---and has thus been readded to the sidebar. Local media and all...
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"Traffic"
From K comes word that this cute baby's first real word (other than maa and daaaa) was traffic, uttered in response to her grandmother's traffic-related lament. (We are aware that this is a fluke. Let us have our fun.)
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Snow
Back when we lived in Oklahoma nobody knew how to drive in the snow. Despite being miserably hot all summer, it would inevitably get cold enough to snow once or twice most winters. Maybe it's obvious, but snow and driving mix badly, and the mix is worse the further south one goes. A quarter inch of snow would shut Norman down pretty much until it melted. We kids didn't see any benefit other than the day off from school. There were no snowball fights or snowmen because there wasn't enough snow to do anything but slip and fall down on.

Folks in Pennsylvania dealt better with the snow, although the occasional 18-inch storm did manage to shut things down for a few days rather than just one day; there were some snowplows, but not enough to cope with something on that scale. Everyone drove slowly enough not to be killed immediately upon crashing, but still fast enough that there were lots of nonfatal crashes. Carlisle was rural enough that my 20-minute commute only doubled in length, which wasn't too bad.

But New England is supposed to be above any such delays. It snows several feet every year. People occasionally emigrate at least seasonally to Florida, but for the most part we taunt the television when it starts shrieking about 12 inches of snow coming this week. Buy three weeks worth of groceries and get a gun, kids, we're all gonna die from this snowstorm! live from in front of a drift behind someone's house.

Yet today we were treated to a dusting of snow that ground traffic to a halt everywhere near Boston. People at work were talking about three and four hour commutes, one way. Bizarre. I worked from home, which has been kind of nice.
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India
Read all about why MIT grads and your gentle narrator and other nerdy sorts may have to move to India or become middle management types. According to Businessweek, anyway. Meanwhile, people who actually are technologists point out that not everything can be magically outsourced overseas. My personal experience as a technologist suggests that the technologists at Ars will not be noticed before a ton of businesses waaaaaay overcommit to shipping work to distant and not necessarily optimal locations. Hmmmm... time to go back to school?
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First
Rabbit, rabbit.
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