Electric Josh

FTP access finally restored. Look for pictures here soon. Sorry about the six-week gap.
[permalink ]

This state of the union remix is hilarious. "Our intelligence sources tell us that [Hussein] has attempted to purchase seven million hydrogen powered doctors and the western wall of the Pentagon." It goes on forever.
[permalink ]

Oh, man. I thought Republicans were supposed to be the fiscal conservatives. Uh oh.
[permalink ]

Roland describes an amazingly comprehensive study of the coupling (and copulating) dynamics within a largely white, midwestern high school. Excellent network diagrams and analysis abound.

In describing the events of the past year, many students report that there is absolutely nothing to do in Jefferson. For fun, students like to drive to the outskirts of town and get drunk. For uor purposes, the relative isolation of th ecommunity is an important factor, significant for the patterns of romantic partnership and sexual partnership choices we observe. The context provides a good setting in which to look for the networks suggested by preferred-mixing models, for if redundand structures...exist, they are most likely to appear in island populations not permeated by the currents of larger, more cosmopolitan settings.

It could be anywhere.
[permalink ]

Dro sends us the following slightly old financial advice:

The nickel deposits made a thousand dollars worth of beer the best investment here. Plus you would have had beer for each of the year's several hundred days. Nice.
[permalink ]

From young radical Adam (via Mom, surprisingly):

Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

Nice.
[permalink ]

Emmett's dollar collapse is coming. Buy your euros and Canadian dollars now.
[permalink ]

In what is almost certainly bad news for this space, the right to administer (and collect fees for) the .net top level domain is up for sale.
[permalink ]

It's snowing quite a lot, and it's very windy. If my silly hosting provider would only allow me to upload files, or, indeed, do anything other than edit this space, then we'd be in business with impressive pictures. In lieu of documentation, this space is about to start three hours or so of shoveling. Alas.
[permalink ]

Maybe there's something to this whole gay SpongeBob thing.
[permalink ]

Check out Bionic Abu Ghraib Man. All of David Rees' comics rolled into one.
[permalink ]

Adam's a catch.
[permalink ]

Dad's image gallery contains many images that serve as excellent desktop pictures for your computer. If you ask nicely he'll even translate from the Latin for you.
[permalink ]

Added Copyfight to the sidebar so you can enjoy a ringside seat at the battle to own what you buy. Today features a link to an excellent exposition of the main ideas involved, in the form of a book review:

Who owns the words you're reading right now? if you're holding a copy of Bookforum in your hands, the law permits you to lend or sell it to whomever you like. If you're reading this article on the Internet, you are allowed to link to it, but are prohibited from duplicating it on your web site or chat room without permission. You are free to make copies of it for teaching purposes, but aren't allowed to sell those copies to your students without permission. A critic who misrepresents my ideas or uses some of my words to attack me in an article of his own is well within his rights to do so. But were I to fashion these pages into a work of collage art and sell it, my customer would be breaking the law if he altered it. Furthermore, were I to set these words to music, I'd receive royalties when it was played on the radio; the band performing it, however, would get nothing. In the end, the copyright to these words belongs to me, and I've given Bookforum the right to publish them. But even my ownership is limited. Unlike a house, which I may pass on to my heirs (and they to theirs), my copyright will expire seventy years after my death, and these words will enter the public domain, where anyone is free to use them. But those doodles you're drawing in the margins of this page? Have no fear: They belong entirely to you.

Nice.
[permalink ]

The right wing, led by radical cleric James Dobson, has decided that SpongeBob makes kids gay. Is it parody? Amazingly, no. But I bet something super evil is going to quietly happen while we're paying attention to these clowns. More comprehensive description here:

The video uses the voices and images of more than 100 characters from popular children's television programs including Arthur, Barney, Blue's Clues, Bob the Builder, The Book of Pooh, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dora the Explorer, Jimmy Neutron, Kim Possible, Lilo & Stitch, Little Mermaid, Madeline, The Magic School Bus, The Muppet Show, Rugrats, Sesame Street and SpongeBob SquarePants.

That Ariel is so totally queer. No wonder she didn't fit in under the sea.

Oh yeah, that and we're exactly halfway through Bush fils.
[permalink ]

Yet more magnetic ribbons! Make your own! A pointer regarding actual ribbons: they hang downward when pinned, which means that your magnetic ribbon should point downward, which means that the text is supposed to be on a diagonal.
[permalink ]

How a guy learned French in one year.
[permalink ]

Holy crap! Bill Gates had a spread in Tiger Beat in 1983! Even funnier than it sounds.
[permalink ]

I swear I already thought of this: the Rock-To-Sleep-O-Tron (not its actual name) is a motorized device for gently shaking infants, also known as "rocking" them, until they sleep. (For obvious reasons, do not confuse this with the other kind of rocking.) If this kid slept at all anymore then we might have some use for this.
[permalink | tb ]

Preying mantis eating another bug. (Perhaps a reader trained in entomology can help here.)
[permalink | tb ]

An entire software company (that's making money) whose offices consist of a coffee shop with free wireless ethernet. "We go down there every day with our laptops and work. It's an incredible place. They have two or three of the top baristas in the country (the awards are on the wall). We pay our rent by buying coffee.... They love us. We're some of their best customers."
[permalink | tb ]

Spacecraft on Titan. Excellent! Update: Titan's sky is orange.
[permalink | tb ]

So my great uncle Paul died. I had only met him once, at a family reunion about ten years ago, and, being a physicist and being happy that I was becoming one, too, he gave me a green plastic slab that was rounded on one side such that it could be placed on a flat surface and spun, but only in one direction. Spinning the thing the wrong way would cause it to become unstable, rock around sort of awkwardly, and then settle down spinning the other way, never having flipped over. I suppose he was impressed enough with my half-correct explanation of how it worked, some kind of hand-waving cobbling together of moments of inertia and unstable equilibria. He was involved in the development of some early TV camera tubes and later worked on CCD's. Here he is talking about his work in 1975 (when I was two):

Well, I think that the solid-state devices are here to stay as exciting new devices. There still have not quite met our objective of building a really low-cost device. And you see that has been one of the objectives all along. One of the objectives was that a solid-state sensor, because it is made by the processes that one used in making integrated circuits, could be extremely low cost. It could be used in consumer-type applications where TV has never been used before.
...
Now, you see, if one could build this kind of device and build it cheaply, one has the possibility of going on to new types of consumer applications. The one type of consumer application that everybody thinks of, and Al Rose in particular around here has mentioned time and time again, if we have these kinds of cheap cameras and if we have a cheap method of storing the videos, then you see we are running with Eastman Kodak. We would then have a product which would really outsell any of the present kind of cameras, where you have to develop the film and send it off to be developed. It would even have advantages over the Polaroid-type thing where you use chemical photography. You get only a few pictures and they are relatively expensive, whereas you do all this electronically and you have it on tape or a tiny disk.

So that only took another 25 years. I now have a consumer-grade CCD camera, of course, and the green plastic slab is still somewhere in the house.
[permalink | tb ]

A screensaver that depicts several hundred balls bouncing (in 2-D) around the screen under the influence of gravity (described here) randomly showed up on my new work machine. It makes a guy want to go back to physics. They bounce in what looks like real time, and there are enough of them that one can see behaviors like splashing and sloshing whenever the gravity direction changes, which it does every thirty seconds or so. What fun.
[permalink | tb ]

Here's a list of the 100 oldest currently-registered .com domain names. All the names that I recognize are the sort of place you'd expect to have been on the Internet in the mid 1980's, but what's amazing is that the 100th name was registered a whole two and a half years after the first one.
[permalink | tb ]

Howard Dean is running for chairman of the Democratic Party. Dude sent me an email. Go Howard!
[permalink | tb ]

Man, PressThink is getting more interesting, if that was possible. It's in the sidebar; go nuts, friends.
[permalink | tb ]

The Times, via Dave Winer, celebrates Jon Stewart's Crossfire smackdown last Fall and the recent (resultant?) canning of Tucker Carlson, who was on the receiving end, with Paul Begala. (Who are those two, anyway? Why did they ever need to be on the television to begin with?) The editorial begins:

As it turns out, an important moment in the annals of modern culture may have occurred when Jon Stewart of Comedy Central went on CNN's "Crossfire" last October and decided to be serious. He told Paul Begala, on the left, and Tucker Carlson, on the right, that their show, which specializes in encouraging midlevel political types to yell slogans at each other, was "partisan hackery" that was lowering the level of political discourse. ... Maybe this could be the start of something big.

Please, please let this be the start of something big. And perhaps someone at the Times might cleanse that paper's own editorial page for regurgitation of canned talking points, repetition of party-issued phrases, and other partisan hackery. Hey, even if they started pointing out such problems with other papers' editorial pages that would be fine with me.
[permalink | tb ]

The kid now plays more or less autonomously with the computer. Excellent!
[permalink | tb ]

This space is delighted to report that the National Weather Service (a.k.a weather.gov) seems to be providing extremely detailed weather forecast maps on the web. Of course, these maps suffer from the usual conceit that not only is there no weather in Canada or offshore, but that Americans near these non-US places might want to know what the weather is nearby. Regardless, there is no longer any need at all to go to The Weather Channel's horrible site. This is excellent news.
[permalink | tb ]

The kid is saying, "Oh, man!" in a whiny voice that we swear isn't at all similar to the way this space says it. Honest. (It's very cute.)
[permalink | tb ]

The Onion defines queueer as, "The line to get gay married." Actual humor that doesn't involve The Ironic Newspaper Voice.
[permalink | tb ]

Wouldn't it be great if this was your life?
[permalink | tb ]

What the hell is wrong with me that I'm not even watching OU play for the national championship in the Orange Bowl? Geez. Update: who can possibly forget how horrible the halftime show always is? Ashlee Simpson lipsyncing in front of an old anarchy logo with cheerleaders dressed up as wide receivers for the Kiss football team. It's even better now that I'm listening to a strange Wilco live show on XM radio instead of whatever horrible noises the TV would be making if only it weren't muted. Ha! Take that, television! Update: Oh man, the Sooners are gettin crushed. Alas.
[permalink | tb ]

This iPod is impossibly cool, as evidenced by the fact that it just played me Sweet Potato by Cracker. Just try to find that song on any radio station anywhere. It played it at random, which, with this much music to draw from, is the best feature imaginable in a music player.
[permalink | tb ]

Just part of the reason Java is so stinkin lousy to work with: "Now, I don't claim to be an expert coder by any means, but I sure know bad code when I see it."
[permalink | tb ]

The chairwoman of the 55th Presidential Inaugural Committee supports the troops:

As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now -- not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the -- well, it's called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

I'm not sure that they do benefit from them.

Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

Honoring service is what our theme is about.

I just reads em, folks. (Here, as usual.)
[permalink | tb ]

Software guy in Sri Lanka spending his time now doing IT work to coordinate 12,000 (!) NGO's working there. Small chunk of a long, fascinating post:

At 5pm we met with the logistics person at the UN DAC (not sure what that stands for) organization which is handling all incoming planeloads of stuff at the airport. Aramex has given (or donated; not sure) their logistics system along with a trained person and that's now running .. that system keeps excellent coordination of consignments until it gets handed over to someone.

The problem is what happens after it gets handed over. Well, no one knows right now .. no one knows whether it was actually delivered to the needy locations or is sitting in a warehouse somewhere else or whatever.

They want us to aggregate the needs that we get from various places and to publish reports that they can put into the central UN Web site for relief needs. After that they'd like to tie up with the system at the airport to track what happens to stuff after it leaves the airport via the trading system at the NGO level.

What's incredible is that there doesn't appear to be software for this stuff and all these agencies which deal with disasters regularly don't have all this shit automated. Incredible. Well, we're going to build our stuff (openly/freely) and we'll be happy to share it with the other affected countries or anyone else.

Links added to the iPodder entry from the other day, after actual humans asked about it.
[permalink | tb ]

Oh, thank God one of the big name bloggers has decided that the word "blog" is too horrible even to utter. Man, do I hate that word.
[permalink | tb ]

Rabbit, rabbit.
[permalink | tb ]