Electric Josh

First snow of the year, here. Just a flurry at the moment.
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So while most of you read the indictment of the Vice President's Chief of Staff and see a guy being referred to by his last name, I see my little sister being dragged through the mud, in bold and in all caps, by someone I had thought she'd never met.

9. On or about June 12, 2003, LIBBY was advised by the Vice President of the United States that Wilson's wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the Counterproliferation Division. LIBBY understood that the Vice President had learned this information from the CIA.

Damnit, Libby, why were you talking to Dick Cheney about the CIA? Didn't you have exams then? Is this why you only got a B in French?

14. On or about June 23, 2003, LIBBY met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

Libby, my understanding is that you were here in Boston celebrating my thirtieth birthday on or about this date. What gives?

Hours of fun to be had in this vein, by the way.

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DARPA, the folks who brought you the internet and the neutron bomb, commissioned a race of unpiloted vehicles across an obstacle course. Unpiloted doesn't mean remotely controlled, it means autonomous; no human intervention once it starts. This has been fun to follow for a couple of years, in a Battlebots on Comedy Central kind of way: last year no one got further than 10 miles into the course, but this year Stanford and a couple of other teams finished. But now they've got actual white papers describing the construction of each of this year's entries. If you have nothing better to do this weekend than read about real life Knight Rider cars—you that don't know who you are—your weekend plans are hereby made. The DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 Link Purge. Have fun.
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Daylight Saving Time (singular!) is about to stretch out even longer. Excellent! Of course, the new federal law to which this change was attached is somewhat less than excellent.
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For some reason, probably wine or coffee related, we ended up with a bunch of fruit flies in the kitchen. They're nasty. Fortunately, my excellent colleague is married to a cell biologist, who is just the sort of person who has to years of experience with unbelievable numbers of escaped fruit flies. I had thought, years ago, of putting a mason jar of stinky fruit out in the open and then, after twenty-four hours, screwing on the lid and throwing the whole thing away, the idea being that all the fruit flies would lay their eggs in the jar and that they'd hatch inside a mason jar in a distant landfill where they wouldn't bother me. It works sort of well, but this new solution from the former drosophila biologist is more effective, and certainly much more elegant:

1. Pour several ounces of apple cider vinegar into a glass. (Having only regular vinegar, I instead used white wine with a slice of way-past-ripe banana from the fridge. Long story.)
2. Apply several drops of dish soap. Stir.
3. Wait for flies to magically disappear from the room.

Normally, when a small beast like a fruit fly lands in a glass of water, the water's surface tension supports they fly's weight and the fly can conceivably squirm over to the side of the glass, walk out, and continue to fly around looking for fruit to foul. But a soapy liquid wets the fly, and gravity, with no bug-water interface to overcome (now there's a soap-bug and a soap-water interface instead), pulls the fly under. Terminal velocity for a submerged fruit fly looks to be something like half an inch per second. Of course, now there's a dense layer of dead fruit flies in the bottom of the glass. It's a bit gross, but much less so than having them flying about the kitchen. If you try this, do remember to toss your eau de d. melanogaster down the drain at some point. Tadaa!
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So this weekend I finally got around to driving down to the record store to get that Decemberists album referred to a week or two ago. This was at Newbury Comics, which is actually a decent local(-ish) record store. It nevertheless took me about ten minutes to locate the album. (One would think that finding the D section in an alphabetically sorted shelf would be easy, but one would be confounded if he didn't know ahead of time that there were several different such alphabetic sequences spread across the store, none necessarily contiguous.) It was seventeen friggin dollars, so out I went without a new CD. The one extra catchy song has started fading from my head well enough that I can get work done and actually carry on conversations with people, so I figured I could get home without melting down, and wasn't unpleasantly surprised in that regard. I headed over to the iTunes music store (didn't even have to leave the house), which of course has thirty-second snippets of all of their songs, and just as soon as I manage to test some iTunes DRM-removal software I might even buy it from Apple. Someone remind me why the music industry is in trouble.
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Do I need a panflute?
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We've rented Hotel Rwanda, and it's a ruthlessly sad movie. Little kids covered in blood, suburban-looking houses with families freshly shot dead strewn about the lawn, Don Cheadle pretty much muddling through, wife and kids not murdered before him (and us viewers) only because he came up with a pile of cash for the militias, and then the small girl upstairs started fussing pathetically into the monitor that she'd really like to use the potty—this means that she wants to get up and play—so I went up and dealt with an impossibly happy (and tired) little kid for a couple of minutes and then of course couldn't bring myself to resume watching modernity's most avoidable genocide, which is too bad since the whole thing is (was, until I stopped watching) so expertly acted and shot. No stomach for this sort of thing anymore, I guess.
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Menger sponges are what you get when you recursively chop out the middle of a cube. They're not-quite-three dimensional, and they're pretty neat. (Last Winter, you'll recall, we went and looked at a dorm that MIT, apparently intentionally, built in this shape.) Then a couple of months ago, my office mate showed me how to waste business cards making (surprisingly strong) Menger sponges. So this space is delighted to point you all at the ne plus ultra of time wasting goodness: the 66,048-card, level 3 Menger sponge:

In February, 1995 the company I worked for changed its name. My colleagues gave me their business cards. In August, 1995, my employers moved. My colleagues gave me their business cards. After we arrived at our new location, the printers sent us business cards with the new address—and the old zip-code. I got to keep them. This accounts for the 48,000 cards needed for the base, and some to spare. The 18,048 colored cards needed for the exterior paneling were provided by Jay Meddaugh of American Wholesale Thermographers of Woburn, Massachusetts, who saved bad print runs of colored business cards for me for several months.

It's not a waste of paper: it's recycling!
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This space's old friend, who works fifty yards away from where I work yet whom I never see for some reason, asked me the other day if I'd like to go to Game 3 between the Red Sox and White Sox. Well, yeah. So I spent a whole day at work cancelling afternoon meetings and gearing up to head over to Thursday's game. That the game was in fact scheduled to take place Friday was lost on me until well after I had rearranged my afternoon and convinced several colleagues along the way that they were going to miss the game because of extracurricular work activities they were planning for Thursday. My confusion was resolved before I hiked all the way over to Fenway, thankfully. Ribbing (not the literal variety) was endured.

The game itself, though, second one this year and my first ever playoff game, was ridiculous. Promising start, fell behind, never caught up. Swept. "Welcome back to being a Red Sox fan," said Jake. "This is what it's usually like." The four of us stood around in the bleachers for twenty or thirty minutes trying to figure out what to do next. The season ticket holders all greeted each other with, "Have a good winter," and shuffled out, or lingered in the stands and soaked in the field for one last time this year, and the lights stayed on long enough for everyone to head out. Got Mexican food and went home. Probably won't bother watching any more night games this year, so we'll get some sleep in October for the first time since 2002. Goodnight.
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Oh my goodness. A Google Maps hack that links to live traffic cams across greater New York. Looks very useful. Seems unbelievably creepy.
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So Fox is now trying to show us two baseball games at the same time using some kind of horrible picture-in-picture display, which means that we not only have to listen to Fox announcers but we must also watch the game we tuned in to see in Teeny-Tiny-o-Vision and with announcers talking about the other game! This is unbelievably annoying. That Tim Wakefield is getting beat up doesn't help.
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