Electric Josh

This space is taking a short break.

• Work busy.
• Grandfather passed away. (This space isn't eloquent enough to eulogize sufficiently well, and so won't.)
• News burnout.
• Baby being exceptionally cute, so I play with the computer less.
• Good weather.

Check back often.
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Security expert Bruce Schneier: How long can the country stay scared?

A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.

So H. A. Lorentz wrote his lay explanation of Einstein's then-new relativity in 1920, which means that this excellent book is in the public domain. Here it is.

Any one reading [Einstein's book] will, in my opinion, come to the conclusion that the basic ideas of the theory are really clear and simple; it is only to be regretted that it was impossible to avoid clothing them in pretty involved mathematical terms...

The prose is occasionally not a lot less confusing than heavy duty math, and the absence of pictures kind of hurts, but it's mostly a pretty easy read.
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Learning and Inferring Transportation Routines (found here). Raw GPS data and a hidden Markov model figure out where you're going and when you're going somewhere that you usually don't. Neat! Scary!
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Betamax for the 21st century. What would a seminal court decision be without an excellent pop culture reference?

One striking example provided by the Software Distributors is the popular [sic] band Wilco, whose record company had declined to release one of its albums on the basis that it had no commercial potential. Wilco repurchased the work from the record company and made the album available [I can't find it anywhere] for free downloading, both from its own website and through the software user networks. The result sparked widespread interest and, as a result, Wilco received another recording contract.

(Links added.) See? The good guys don't lose every time.
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Dad was totally remiss in not posting this exact post to his own space when he was in Antarctica this winter (where by winter I mean December, which is summer there, but you had already thought of that, hadn't you?).
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Happy birthday, K!
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The Onion: Where Are You Now, When We Need You Most, Rage Against The Machine? "You've abandoned us in our hour of need. How could you? Everywhere: exploitation. Where's the rock?"
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Clinton was just on The Daily Show, and no matter what anyone says, dammit, the man's an intellectual. I really miss having an intellectual President.
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Proof that we are old.
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The kid's walking.
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That I've been watching enough television to keep track of the Olympics is bad enough, but how sad that I'm just sitting inertly and eating ice cream while I watch the best athletes in the world, each in peak physical condition, swim, run, and vault as I recuperate from a long day of staring at a screen and typing, interrupted only by the occasional cup of coffee or walk to someone else's desk, or by a quick check of the Times, where I learn all the results of the races that the television will be trying to show me that night on tape delay?
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The Empty Seats.
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More cute baby pictures, including some of her small friends. Have fun.
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Earlier we watched what were supposedly the best basketball players in the world humiliated by simple zone defense:

"I'm humiliated, not for the loss – I can always deal with wins and losses – but I'm disappointed because I had a job to do as a coach, to get us to understand how we're supposed to play as a team and act as a team and I don't think we did that," said U.S. head coach Larry Brown.

I'm delighted by this turn of events because it maybe, hopefully, will stimulate the powers that be in the NBA to re-legalize zone defense. The NBA has pretty much been unwatchably boring for at least five years (that I've noticed—maybe it's been longer) and I'm optimistic that a dose of NCAA-style defense might necessitate some good coaching and team play. I'm not, however, fooling myself into thinking that they'll ever call traveling in the NBA.
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Meanwhile, every time the Olympics are on I delight in remembering (bragging about?) days of living within range of the CBC, where events are shown more or less in their entirety and the human interest crap is kept to a minimum, but because my memory is hazy I can never come up with concrete examples of non-horrible coverage. Dad to the rescue.
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Can somebody please point me to something that refutes the infuriating and depressing stuff about National Readiness Month that Bob Harris dug up? (Motto: Be ready to die! All month!) Aren't leaders supposed to inspire confidence rather than depressing readiness to be attacked by fundamentalists?
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So I finally went ahead and added Barlow to the sidebar. My one reservation is that some people will think that I've done this because he's a former Cheney campaign manager who just decided that being an anti-Bush partisan is Important and Good. I promise you that's not it; he just writes well, and is fun to read. Like Hunter S. Thompson but not totally insane.
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John Perry Barlow is interviewed during a break from getting healthy on TV. This part is great:

They asked for a continuation at the last hearing because they said that the Department of Homeland Security had been unable to come up with a set of guidelines regarding the release of the subpoenaed materials for national security reasons. So our national security depends on whether or not they can get me for carrying marijuana on that airplane.

Repays reading.
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This cute baby's mother and I have been married for four years. I am obviously a very, very lucky boy. Happy anniversary, K.
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Remember the Mandelbrot set? Well, hardware is really, really fast now compared with the mid 1980's, when your hero first played around with fractals. In fact, hardware is so fast that this, which is actually really neat, doesn't seem all that remarkable:

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~~~}}}}}}}}}}}}}}|||{{{{{{{{{zzzywotn                     atyz{||}}}}}}}}~~~
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~~~~~~~~}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}|||||||||{{zzzyxvn    Knwyz{{{{||||}}}}}}~~~~~~~~
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Huh.
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So the baby has started sleeping like this. It can't be very comfortable, but it is at least pretty cute. No pictures are available of this, of course, what with flash photography and baby sleep not mixing terribly well and all, so you'll have to live with this illustration.
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To no one's surprise it looks like anonymous car travel is about to be a thing of the past
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I've started thinking again about the traffic simulations I predictably hadn't worked on much until recently. This extra cool looking screenshot inspired me to get moving again.
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Will America watch while its athletes are booed?. Oh. Hadn't even thought of that. What a bummer if it does happen.
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Best subheadline ever.
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Man plays very moderately offensive word at Scrabble championships, people get oversensitive and make idiots of themselves. "The ultimate absurdity is that you can't play the word 'redskins' on ESPN."
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Oh my goodness. The television just showed me a Motel 6 ad wherein dozens of animated computer arrow cursors swim, spermlike, up to the chain's logo, and when one of the arrows makes it inside the logo (and clicks) the other arrows-as-sperms (avoiding the Latin for obvious reasons) drift away, disinterested. Is this really the image that you want people associating with your already marginal chain of inexpensive motels? Are hourly rates next? I, myself, would sooner sleep under the stars in Bumtown or Junkieville than brave the bedding of a joint thus advertised.
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Why no one cares about terror alerts:

"The method chosen to deal with this here seems inappropriate. The warnings don't say what you're supposed to do or where you're supposed to look. It's, 'Be afraid, but go about your business.' If you go about your business, presumably you're not afraid. You condition mice by keeping them in a constant state of terror."

Accompanied by the Alert-O-Mat.
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The Economist: Scientific publishing is having to change rapidly to respond to growing pressure for free access to published research. This is good. My own research used to suffer sometimes because Lehigh didn't have very good access, for example, to The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which journal contained some excellent articles on, for example, protein folding, which was nearly my field of study. Since PNAS is published by what is basically an arm of the U.S. Government, I've already paid for its contents. Why can't I see them? [Returning to work now.]
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Do you know your oil?
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Robert Smigel, the guy behind, among other things, Triumph, Honor of Whitehall, Insult Comic Dog, is interviewed in The Onion. Some great one-liners that are made even better when taken totally out of context, such as,

Not only was he the Dell Guy, but he had the added benefit of being completely wasted. He didn't know where he was, much less what Triumph was saying. That's why I included that on the DVD, again, because this is television Babylon. This is fascinating. Some of it's funny, and some of it, you just can't believe the guy showed up this drunk and this helpless in the face of Triumph.

Coolest model rollercoaster ever. This from a guy who spent a good fraction of his childhood playing with dominoes and what became known in the house as the biggle balls (only the most highbrow of literary references for Daghlian kids), so there's that disclosure, for what it's worth. Be sure to check out the (Quicktime format) video of the coaster.
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Plastic hates America.
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Tried to get some work done late at night in front of the TV, but accidentally had a margarita and, predictably, didn't manage to. Oh well.
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Forgot to say, "Rabbit rabbit," again the other day. Oh well.
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