November 28, 2004
This space would just like to take the time to note that the gutters are in dire need of cleaning. If only this didn't involve being on a tall ladder...
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November 27, 2004
Another stab at figuring out what happens to the data from all those inductive loops in the Massachussetts roads has led me to the conclusion that my state government has sold exclusive access to it to a company called SmarTraveller (travellers who are smar? pirates?) who, in turn, won't let me use it. Bummer. Especially given that my taxes already bought this information.
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Ben Folds 5 making fun of mandatory anti-piracy logos: "So this pirate walks into a bar..."
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So this space and its lovely wife seem to have mostly missed Thanksgiving, which was a blur of respiratory problems, back ailments, and Interstate 89. Largest Vermont Thanksgiving we'd ever seen, and it was extremely nice despite being cut a day shorter than planned. It's good to be home, though, where things are less crowded, calmer, and where familiar beds and available antibiotics are making the balance of the weekend significantly easier.
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November 24, 2004
This space has decided that the only good possible outcome of the giant fight at the Pacers-Pistons game in Detroit last week is that the NBA's principals might decide that enough was enough and just close up shop. In other words, for the NBA to cease to exist. There really hasn't been much point in caring about professional basketball in at least ten years, given the absence of offense and rules, not to mention the long-standing illegality of any even remotely interesting defense. The NBA serves nowadays only to take up valuable seconds of SportCenter that could be better spent on curling or bass fishing or something. Alas.
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Emmett has been pronouncing the catastrophic collapse of the dollar to be around the next corner for at least five years or so, and now, for the very same reasons, so is the chief economist at Morgan Stanley (from here). (Funny parenthetical note about the Herald article: of the article's 32 paragraphs, just two contain more than one sentence—and those two each contain two sentences. A third paragraph consists of two one-word sentence fragments. Who the hell reads this thing?)
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November 23, 2004
November 21, 2004
The kid's drawing, albeit breaking no artistic ground not already broken by any of the world's former one-year-olds. Now to convince myself that setting up a scanner is worthwhile.
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November 20, 2004
Fixed the most recent links on the Sophie page. Changed the license information at lower left, because I just know you were dying to derive creative works from this space.
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This space hasn't gone to sleep. Rather, the two super-funny links I've thought worth posting in the last couple of days, including a completely sublime one sent by Adam, aren't really clean enough for a family site. Alas. Lib is having similar troubles, it seems.
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November 15, 2004
Dad finds more Sam. Johnson goodies.
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David Rees totally explains Wittgenstein:
The Good is not a solid, a liquid, or a gas, so we can't use language to talk about it. Same with religion, ethics, metaphysics, and all the profound subjects traditional philosophers usually talk about. From now on those topics will be off-limits to language. You want to discuss the Good? Go play a guitar solo in your jam band about the Good. Just don't mess up the alphabet trying to talk about it.
This space almost minored in Philosophy, and would have had to study this stuff. Two of this space's good friends, geniuses both, claimed all sorts of good and interesting things about Wittgenstein that we were too busy with Maxwell's equations to investigate too deeply. At any rate, in this holiday season in which we are once again thankful that we didn't pursue Physics down a crushing, tenure-track rathole, we thank the good Dr. Rees for the following sentence:
I gave up my drum-solo dreams of tenure and settled in for years of holding a lighter above my head.
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November 13, 2004
Snow is covering a yard full of unraked leaves. Again.
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November 11, 2004
I went outside to look at the aurora borealis, rumored to be working well lately, but then realized that I live in a major metropolitan area and there's a ton of light pollution, so it probably would have been pretty hopeless even without the low spotty clouds. Alas.
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Chris Mooney: Blinded By Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality. A cleverer (and less coarse) way of saying that if something is obviously bullshit then reporters should say so, even if it means doing some hard research, and even if it means choosing a side. It essentially boils down to this, that "...the journalistic norm of balance has no corollary in the world of science." Which sounds a lot like what Richard Feynman said about the (first) space shuttle explosion, that, "...reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." Both true.
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So this space has periodically noodled on traffic related projects, be they silly simulations of cars that can be coerced into traffic jams or plans to telecommute and avoid the headache altogether, but now we see how a real hacker deals with sitting in traffic—by mapping the crap out of it:
First, I’ve got a system working for automatically downloading new GPS data from my truck to my home system every time I pull into my driveway. Seeing that GPS data contains spiffy information like location and speed, it’s pretty simple to know when I’ve arrived at home. Once home, the computer in the truck connects to the computer in the house over the wireless network, does an rsync of the data directory, then shuts itself down. The big machine in the house then parses the data, loads it into the database, and compresses and archives the raw data files for possible future use.
Included is a link to the Washington DOT's excellent road conditions web page, which I wish the MassDOT would copy.
This is what's supposed to happen when nerds sit in slow-moving cars.
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November 09, 2004
John Ashcroft is going away, and obviously trying extremely hard to infuriate this space as he goes:
The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.
Sit and think about that. The official line from the administration is that Iraq is an integral part of the "War on Terror." Our military is, as we sit in the den, here, at this very moment, in the middle of gruelling, post-election urban combat. And they've simultaneously announced that we've already won. Now this sort of thing has happened before: the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the War of 1812 had already been settled by a Christmas Eve treaty—but in the intervening 198 years communications speeds have improved dramatically. Don't you think someone should tell the commanders in Fallujah?
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Larry Lessig wants the exit polling data made public:
The Exit Polls have done enough damage to this election. My bet is that it was incompetence at Edison/Mitofsky. But those firms owe it to this Nation to release their data totally, so that a wide range of competent statisticians can evaluate whether and where the problem was.
That would be a good start, as would more hackproof voting machines, but the more fundamental question I have is this: why in the wide, wide world of sports is there only one set of exit polls? Am I the only one who thinks that putting all of one's eggs in one basket like this is a horrible idea?
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So to start with, if you haven't read Douglas Hofstatder's Godel, Escher, Bach then you should. Go read it now. (It's only about a thousand pages. I'll wait until you're done...) Great. Now that you've read it you have the proper context to appreciate the collection of translations of Lewis Carrol's Jabberwocky that the guys at boingboing have been collecting. I smile.
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November 06, 2004
I don't know who Barry Ritholtz is, but he's today's King of Excellent Maps.
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Doc Searls introduces a family newspaper in Iowa. Homecoming, in particular.
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November 04, 2004
Todd comes up with one more:
This may be the year when we finally come face to
face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million
used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy
guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else
in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
That would be Hunter S. Thompson in
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, published in November of 1972. Thanks, Todd. Now I will try really, really hard to keep politics more or less out of this space (and in the real world instead) for the near future.
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And finally, Dan Kennedy succintly addresses my chief election-related annoyance: land doesn't vote. In other words, big swaths of rural land occupied by tens of thousands of Montanans take up lots more space per capita than do small islands full of millions of New Yorkers, for example. That fact makes colored maps (as opposed to cartograms) bad ways to look at data such as political preference that is at all correlated with population density. Edward Tufte describes this pretty well in his books, too, but paper is harder to link to. Here is a particularly stark example of said maps [more permanent copy here].
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So this space is irritated by the election results, but at least there's this.
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November 02, 2004
So as of 9:00 at night there is essentially no information at all about who's winning the election, and in lieu of useful analysis the television is running puffball interviews with various campaign spokesmen. How is it that with 1% of the precincts reporting from West Virginia that 1,771 votes for Kerry and 1,779 for Bush means that Bush has been declared the winner? Something pretty interesting is happening there. Some kind of crazy statistical model? Can we hear about the model? People on the west coast are still voting, you know... [Note: This style of ranting could go on for quite a bit, so I'm going to stop.] So we're going to play cards until the Daily Show coverage starts, because that will be funny—gallows humor there if nothing else—and by then there might actually be some information to report. I'm guessing that it will also prove fun to see if a comedy show can describe statistics in a more mathematically useful way than real news networks. Random characters spewed to the screen wouldn't do much worse.
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Why Bush Won and Why Kerry Won, both written three days before the election. Compare with your favorite post-election analysis (and with The Onion's article from the day after the 2000 election, which isn't online) and see if you can tell the difference.
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November 01, 2004
John Perry Barlow on How to Overthrow the Government:
Democracy doesn't have to be dreary. Your franchise is a gift not an obligation. Exercise it with with gladness. And company.
Friends don't let friends vote alone. Do not head for your local polling place without a car-load of like-cultured souls, preferably dressed for fun - Burners take note - and possibly high on something. (But not too high, of course.) Tell everyone you know to do this. Dancing while waiting in line is not out of the question.
Following your encounter with the nice blue-haired ladies and the Republican intimidation teams, go to a central place and kick out the jams.
(I've never even thought of this, which, if anything, proves that I need to think a little harder about my civic responsibility to party. Who's in?) The most important part is Part 6, of course.
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Clearing out space on the laptop I came across a large text file with a name consisting of totally random characters which, when opened, proved to be James Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with
Samuel Johnson, LL.D., downloaded two years ago from Project Gutenberg. Now that I've put a copy online in I place I look at a lot maybe I have a shot at actually rereading it. It's been kind of a while. If we're lucky I'll even format it reasonably for reading online.
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I have silly Sesame Street songs running continually through my head. (Yes, I realize that this is only the beginning.) It makes it surprisingly difficult to concentrate.
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