Electric Josh

Filter
Perfect spam filtering, if you run Windows and use Outlook for email. I use it at work, and it's unbelievably accurate. Here's how it works.
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Soph
There are new baby pictures for those who must (and you know who you are). She's lately been kind of sitting up, but the pictures don't reflect that. First real food. Have fun.
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Bunny
Bonnie from work provides the following, which was the highlight of the week:


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Barlow
Ahem...

• John Perry Barlow on Howard: The Counter-Revolution Has Been Televised.
• Doc Searls on much more of the same.
• I, myself, noticed ABC News speaking contritely about the whole scream thing last night, and they even played the post-Iowa speech as recorded by a camcorder in the audience; Dean was totally inaudible above the din.

Just a reminder to think for yourself on this one. Okay, okay, nothing more here about the campaign.
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Maiden
Iron Maiden straddled the line between coolness and unintentional self parody well enough that some of my high school classmates used their (ridiculous) lyrics as senior yearbook quotes. What can I say? It was the late 1980's. So, then, what could be better than having a busy day at work interrupted the most wonderfully appropriate of all possible news about an aborted Iron Maiden show:

Iron Maiden offered its sympathy to fans whose concert experience was ruined by a beer over the weekend. Iron Maiden manager Ron Smallwood said on the band's Web site "some idiot" on the mezzanine of their show in New York "thought it was a good idea to chuck his beer into the air rather than down his throat."

The beer landed below on the mixing board. It blew out several channels and kept the band from playing any encores. Smallwood said the band felt "gutted" about the incident and he thanked fans for being understanding. He added, "And to the idiot who caused this, I do hope you learned a lesson."

That's the article in its entirety, although if you insist that I've made this up I encourage you to look at a corroborating source. Thanks, Todd.
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Sleep
I took a nap, and now I feel excellent. Of course, right on cue, this cute baby has decided that she doesn't want to go to sleep, so I'm doing the good fatherly thing and typing away on this silly site while the women do baby things. (Later I'll be eating red meat! Yeeaaargh!) But my point (you just knew there was one) is that after borrowing my first Neil Stephenson book from Todd I now have over 1,500 pages of recreational reading lined up, not counting the New Yorker, which basically means that I need to stop sleeping more than six hours a night. See how these things work out so nicely?
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Format
In a ridiculous fit of insomnia I watched the sunrise from my couch while tweaking this space's layout. (I bet they never made E. B. White play with the typesetter.) Complain, but do not be alarmed, if everything is ugly now.
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So Get Your War On updated like two whole days ago and I missed it. Distracted by St. Augustine Bear, I guess.
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Howard
Anatomy of a Goreing. Not surprising, but still really disappointing.
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(c)
The Tyranny of Copyright. "Once a dry and seemingly mechanical area of the American legal system, intellectual property law can now be found at the center of major disputes in the arts, sciences and -- as in the Diebold case -- politics. Recent cases have involved everything from attempts to force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties for singing songs around campfires to the infringement suit brought by the estate of Margaret Mitchell against the publishers of Alice Randall's book ''The Wind Done Gone'' (which tells the story of Mitchell's ''Gone With the Wind'' from a slave's perspective) to corporations like Celera Genomics filing for patents for human genes. The most publicized development came in September, when the Recording Industry Association of America began suing music downloaders for copyright infringement, reaching out-of-court settlements for thousands of dollars with defendants as young as 12. And in November, a group of independent film producers went to court to fight a ban, imposed this year by the Motion Picture Association of America, on sending DVD's to those who vote for annual film awards." The irony here is, of course, that the Times will stop letting you read this article in a week.
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Stomata
So any of you who are current or former professors of botany and who work at universities that subscribe to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are strongly encouraged to save me a copy of this article:

Peak, D. A., West, J. D., Messinger, S. M & Mott, K. A. "Evidence for complex, collective dynamics and emergent, distributed computation in plants." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 101, 918 - 922, (2004)

about large-scale, self-organizing patterns of opening and closing of stomata. The article is described in this Nature blurb, which I found here via Slashdot. Couple of annoying things here. First, the article uses the word emergence, which almost always means that some interesting phenomenon is about to be explained and then gratuitously followed by a bunch of handwaving bullshit. Maybe this has changed in the four years since I quit science, but I'm not optimistic. Second, PNAS is unbelievably expensive despite that fact that I've already paid for it, given that the National Academy of Sciences is something that's, you know, funded by my taxes. Ah well.
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Montpelier
A New Yorker's (positive) take on central Vermont, where I grew up. I only wish he wouldn't publish this sort of thing; people will want to move there. (Like the joke says, there are already plenty of New Yorkers.)
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St. Augustine Bear
David Rees, who totally fixed late 2001 for me, has started a new series called St. Augustine Bear that's going to require an enormous amount of creativity to keep going: it's just way too damn weird. While you're at it, though, try to imagine being a programmer and reading My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable starting from the Horse Races series.
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Saddam
Kelly keeps us posted on what the former Iraqi dictator's been up to.
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Tone
This is why this space has given up active politics for the time being. (So, she claims, has this space's mom, among others.)
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Ararat
What guy named Daghlian has any business not pointing out the movie Ararat? Not that I could probably stand sitting through a realistic movie about genocide nor, indeed, that telling Turks that they're jerks for something their great-grandparents did is a terribly healthy thing to do. But if my dear aunt Alice wanted to send me some photocopies of certain family histories they might make for some pretty fascinating reading on a certain website. I'm just saying...
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Starbucks
I can't decide whether to be horrified or amused.
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Color
How the photos from the Mars rover are colorized. (Hint: it's not a consumer-grade Sony digital camera they have on board.)
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Afar
Local anchor feels our pain from afar. "'Would you believe it's 5 below zero right now?' he told listeners yesterday at 6 a.m. 'The only thing worse than the actual temperature right now is having the wind chill factored in.' What he didn't mention was that he was actually in northern Florida, where it was a balmy 50 degrees."
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Venus
I was wondering whether the ridiculously bright thing in the evening sky just above the setting sun was Venus. Dad points us to excellent, free skymaps. This one answers the question: it is.
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Mars
First signs of life on Mars. From the guys at work.
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War
The bad news is that I've been totally unable to sleep. The good news is that Get Your War On is updating again. Have fun.
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Sun
I am staring out my front window from the couch, before everyone else has gotten out of bed, looking at a particularly impressive sunrise. See? I don't just look at computer screens all day.
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Approved
I'm Josh Daghlian and I approved this message. Guess it's McCain-Feingold. K and I had been wondering about that.
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Ads
At least three people I spoke to today had never seen the super cool Honda ad in which a Rube Goldberg machine constructed entirely out of Honda parts elegantly does its thing for two minutes. You have two minutes for this. Apparently no computer effects were used: it's all live action. It's number nine of this series of ten ads America won't see.
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Deconstruct
Back in the day, when I was choosing majors at UVM, I was torn between English, of which my grandfather was a professor, and physics, of which my great-grandfather was a professor. I ended up picking physics partly because I figured that I had a fighting chance of becoming Literate on my own, and that I hadn't a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out thermodynamics or electricity and magnetism, to say nothing of calculus and chaos theory and whatnot, unless I got myself some formal training. So imagine my delight when I discovered on Slashdot the following first-person account of a lowly computer engineer like myself tackling the postmodern literary criticism: How To Deconstruct Almost Anything---My Postmodern Adventure. This sounded quite a bit like the joke a couple of physicists played on a postmodernist (gawd, is that even a word?) literary journal a couple of years ago, and I discovered to my further delight that the very first comment in the Slashdot thread above linked right to it. That I enjoy this may compensate for my being the first Daghlian male since the late 19th century not to get his Ph. D. and become a university professor. Ah well.
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iChat
So the baby and I were in the basement looking at a web browser and the iTunes Visualizer, respectively---it's a great setup, with each of us totally enthralled by half of the computer screen, equally nonverbal---when it occurred to me that we could instead be chatting with Dad or Lib, fellow iChat users three hours away. Never having used the audio chat feature before, I fumbled for the green telephone icon next to their screennames and just like that we were talking via free, long-distance speakerphone. Of course, Lib's computer didn't have a functional microphone so it was a one-way conversation for a minute or two. Then there's the fact that several thousand dollars worth of computers, all connected with non-cheap cable modem service, were required. But it's still pretty damn cool. Free phone calls, kids!

This cute baby loved the talking computer even better than the singing computer.
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Well
Yes. It's cold. Walking between work and the T is very much like the way I remember walking to and from school. I didn't like being bitterly cold then, either. Too cold to ski.
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Hermes
Go look at pictures from the surface of Mars.
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kill -9
One of the great (if pyrrhic) pleasures of my job is that when the Weblogic server my software runs on craps out or otherwise needs to be restarted, the solution starts with the command:

killall java

A little mini-catharsis thirty times a day.
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Train
I've started taking the train again because I can't stand getting tense sitting in traffic anymore. Then after this excellent decision was made comes word that the totally impassible intersection at the confluence of Storrow Drive, the McGrath Highway, the new Leverett connector, and all traffic out of the Fleet Center is going to remain completely hosed for at least another year, if not forever. Forgive my astonishment that this major intersection passes just three friggin' cars per cycle of the traffic lights! Didn't anybody bother to simulate traffic flow before digging? Note also this space's eagerness to get its hands on some of whatever the story's author was using to hallucinate so heavily as to think that it has been possible to go faster than 1.5 miles per hour (that's walking speed) through the new tunnel during rush hour.

Of course, the train took over an hour this morning because of some ominous-sounding "medical emergency" at South Station, which apparently resolved itself just late enough that I had to walk through the rain from Kendall Square to work. And now I'm working from home anyway. Alas.
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Photos
More baby pictures here, and a bonus lo-res movie of the new bouncy seat.
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Back
Happy new year. I get super annoyed whenever I read the papers now, so I've committed to almost completely stopping posting anything political after this: the Howard Dean link will remain in the sidebar until it's irrelevant. Everyone should vote for him. Hopefully twice.

The baby had an excellent Christmas, and was photographed a lot. A post along those lines is coming. Note that I've also decided to post way fewer baby pictures, and to post them more frequently, although it remains to be seen how correct that last bit will turn out...

Work is about to be evil for about a week and a half. This space may remain quiet for just a bit longer. Fair warning. Then I'll resume.
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