Electric Josh

Aha! Something to complain about: we awoke this morning to zero water pressure. I eventually took a walk down to where we'd heard all sorts of crazy mechanical noises and discovered a backhoe and several very large trucks all manned by City of Quincy workers, one of whom was busily digging with what I presume was an unseen shovel in a seven-foot-deep pit in the middle of Bryant Avenue, which was, of course, closed to traffic. I chatted for a bit with a few of the other gawkers, who included several neighbors I'd never met, and ended up talking to one of the city guys, who reported that it was about a 10- or 12-inch main that had broken, "because of old age or something." Apparently only about fifty houses are still without water—going on 10 hours, now. I guess we got lucky.
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Like every other sufficiently nerdly person, this space has spent a decent fraction of the last several days going over Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence. Astonishingly, I've seen a decent fraction of this material before, including Peter Norvig's PowerPoint Gettysburg Address (check out his accounting of its creation) and the two or three chapters that he pre-published in public on his web site). Sitting here with a pile of jelly beans and chocolates and cookies it's hard to find much to complain about.
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