Electric Josh

So the iPod is already crashed good and hard, with what looks (and sounds?) like a bad hard disk. Upon seaching the web for solutions I stumbled across this ode to eating an iPod Shuffle. Nice.
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So Rolling Stone (which became so obviously a music industry PR vessel that I stopped reading it sometime during college—I swear I only know about this because of slashdot) has noticed that a bill championed by the elephant-mascotted people who run things now would make saying bad words way more costly than doing bad things.

If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying "fucking brilliant" on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. And for the price of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors.

The usual place alerts this space an uncommonly excellent headline: America's dumbest laws to be violated all summer long. "Two British students have researched America's stupidest laws and are spending this summer travelling from state to state, violating them." Apparently in the nearby town of Marlboro, MA, it's illegal to detonate a nuclear device within city limits, so hopefully that's not one of the laws they'll be trying to break.
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The satellite radio is playing me some amazingly obscure Frank Zappa.
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Massive, The New Zealand company that did all the many-agent animations for Lord of the Rings looks like it might possibly be the coolest such company in the world.
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So for the last several evenings the telephone has been ringing at bedtime-ish hours and presenting some kind of easy listening jazz kind of music instead of a person's voice. This is baffling and infuriating. If you're planning on calling this space's land line, leave a message because we may very well be screening calls. The cell phones seem unaffected thus far.
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More copyfight goodness that Todd and Kelly, who have no wedding photos because of this sort of copyright-related stupidity, will find particularly interesting.
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With any luck I'll get to worry about this in a few years.
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Roland talks about an idea that I vaguely remember hearing something about while still in school, getting terribly excited about, and then forgetting in the heat of something or other. Might have been qualifiers. At any rate, the idea is that some really basic scaling laws—lifespan is proportional to the 4th root of heartrate, etc.—govern most species in an alarmingly beautiful way. Now this space's favorite recent invention, the free (libre and gratis) scientific journal, has a review article on the subject. It's long and good. Have fun kids.
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Ach. I failed to wish Lib a good trip.
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We took the kid for a sled ride through the snowy woods this weekend. (Alas, no pictures were taken.) It was almost absurdly pleasant.
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Astonishingly, only just now has Hunter S. Thompson died. (Word from here.)
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Rats! I missed these excellent Chinese New Year resolutions.
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They painted lines on part of the road, but now they've scraped away even the holes in the road that once served as ersatz lines. This is the stuff I deal with while not getting home to play with the kid.
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Wow. The satellite radio is playing me Robyn Hitchcock covering Bob Dylan. (It's even weirder than you think.) Thanks, mom!
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Yes! The Times Magazine spends several feet of text noticing what this space started to discover in college when Michael Jordan's reign was winding down, which is that pro basketball has been sucking for years (local copy here), doing nothing for anyone except taking up a couple of seconds per day on NPR and making SportCenter even slower than usual:

The N.B.A. doesn't have a thug problem; it has a basketball problem. Its players are the best athletes in all of pro sports—oversize, swift and agile—but weirdly they are also the first to have devolved to a point where they can no longer play their own game.

And:

Presented with players bent on executing highlight-reel dunks—but who otherwise do not pass well, shoot well or move effectively to open spots on the floor—many N.B.A. coaches have slowed the pace to a plodding, unwatchable crawl. And the more important the game, the more slowly it is played.

I find it sad, because the whole playoffs from the year Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan faced off in the finals were great. I can't even be bothered to notice whether the Celtics even exist these days, except to plan my commute so as not to get stuck in traffic (I guess there are still a few fans) going past the Fleet Center before games. So notify me in five or ten years when it becomes more like the NCAA tournament, the first few rounds of which are, aside from the usual seizure-inducing camera work, the best sports tournament out there save for the occasional Yankees-Red Sox ALCS. Or, if the NBA never becomes good again, maybe just silently kill the whole league and then, if someone can resuscitate the NHL's postseason (but not the always-pointless regular season), please replace it with the CBC's hockey broadcasts.
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Man with spine installed as top Democrat. Yay!
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The latest web zen (see sidebar) entry points us to Cooking For Engineers, where recipes are presented in an utterly fantastic (pure HTML) grid, perfect for those with overly technical outlooks. Of course, the okra stew will be rigorously avoided.
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Today's bizarre baby note: She went and pulled The Crucible and Incident at Vichy off the shelf and left them in the middle of the living room. Weird.
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So the Public Library of Science is a superb idea. The fact that there will be a journal called PLos Computational Science starting in June of this year is even better. Here's hoping it's good.
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The appropriate level of contempt for engineering.
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Good news, baby fans: Christmas through January. See scraped noses timed perfectly for the holidays! Random walking around the house! Snowfall! Dozens of minutes of entertainment.
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Lib learns about washing cars. Excellent job, Lib.
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It's probably not necessary to have grown up on late-1980's heavy metal to fully appreciate Everything I Need To Know I've Learned from Iron Maiden: An Open Letter to Principal Stevens, but it helps. " I performed an a capella air guitar version of the entire song while standing atop my desk as my final project in World History 101, and Mr. Bradley was forced to admit that it was—despite being 'inappropriate and disruptive'—100% historically accurate."
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Dad strikes a thick vein of traffic simulation goodness. There's even a Ph. D. Master's thesis in the bunch that talks about simulations of my commute. Excellent!
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So the kid (pictures of whom really, really are coming—sorry, grandparents) has now seen two Patriots and one Red Sox championship, and she's not even two. Growing up a New England sports fan will not be the same for her as it has been for decades. Of course, she may, like her mother, not care that much. She did enjoy the chips and the chili, though.
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Climate prediction at home. An excellent description of how long-range climate forecasting works, and SETI-at-home-style clients to turn your PC into a climate forecasting processor. Nice! Update: On the other hand, check out this unbelievably annoying clickthru agreement they bind you to, demanding that you actually use the software once you download it. Huh?
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Now that everyone spent a day stuck in abnormally bad traffic (although still no mention of the absence of lines on the road), people are asking trivial questions about how the traffic is supposed to flow:

"We always knew that this thing would create a very brief improvement and things would recongest if we did not improve public transportation," says Salvucci. Computer-generated predictions of improved traffic flow assumed "that transit improvements on the books would in fact get built in the timeframe talked about," he says.

For the record, my commute is already way better.
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Three years of this space. Holy crap!
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So on a particular stretch of highway (shown here before its recent renovation) that constitutes part of my commute home there are no lines on the roads. Four lanes of Interstate highway with two lanes merging in from the left and one from the right, all just before another exit on the right, which is, in turn, just before another on ramp on the right, which is several hundred yards before yet another exit on the right—and then all that traffic switches lanes anyway so the semis can get out of the left lane and the commuters can get into the HOV lane on the left—this is the stretch with no lines on the road. Had I not spent an extra 30 minutes sitting in traffic today I might even write a long funny piece about it. Kind of a catch-22, you see. One assumes that the paint situation is temporary.
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Go, Howard, go!
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