Lots of NYC cab drivers live and/or garage in Brooklyn. I felt like a
native when I called out to an off-duty cab at a stop-light, "Brooklyn?"
"Where?"
"Park Slope."
"Get in."
My pleasure dimmed when he made two comments that probably indicate
he's got a race problem, and I thought about the many advantages that
accrue from living in desireable, central neighborhoods.
rach 3
Originally uploaded by _buttercup
Fun. I liked the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet. There was an encore piano duo with Michael Tilson Thomas and Yefim Bronfman that was entertaining. While I was listening to the "Rach 3" piece, I was thinking, "do I not like piano concertos?" because I was not thrilled. I liked the lighter parts, but I thought some of the moodier parts would be better distributed across the instruments that were, after all, right there. Happily my company for the concert, much more experienced in these things than I am, basically agreed, and I didn't feel like such a country mouse.
merrell side
Originally uploaded by _buttercup
These boots turned out to be a terrific purchase. I was planning a trip to New England in late December four years ago when I decided I needed some really warm boots. I bought these (used, I know, that can freak one out) for $75 with shipping, which is still a whole lot of money. I've gotten more use than I expected from them. I take them with me anytime I go anywhere cold. Since they pack down to nothing but sole, I end up taking them more places than I expected. And if they're with me, I always wear them. I also wear them on remotely chilly nights in SoCal. They're too lose to be comfortable for long walks, but they're so easy to slip in and out of that I find myself wearing them a lot. Unsurprisingly, they are truly warm. I think Uggs are aesthetically hideous, and these follow that trend. Still, the high comfort and convenience mean I'm willing to uglify and old-trendify my look on their behalf.
I went to a movie theater yesterday for over five hours to watch the Metropolitan Opera simulcast of their production of Tristan und Isolde. I thought I'd sleep during it, given how long it was and how little sleep I got this week. I didn't sleep much though, and I really enjoyed it. The set, as you can see above, was lovely. The backstage interviews were also fantastic.
One thing I hate is how I easily forget who was involved in productions. I made picture flash cards for this one.
Alan Mittelstaedt at the LA City Beat (in the context of criticizing a lawyer):
You should be a lawyer more like Dan Stormer, who for free represented JPL scientists who fought back the invasive forces of the federal government that wanted to do background checks on their credit history and sex lives in the name of national security.
Today's version had the same red pepper, spinach, apples and gorgonzola dressing, but I added canned mandarin oranges and left out the sausages I tried last time. Good, but definitely required the side dish of hummus and pita to make a full meal. I'd like to try to a wilted (i.e. briefly cooked) spinach salad with cheese and walnuts, but the inside of my mouth is too tender for walnuts right now. It was nearly too tender for today's salad.
Why? Why does an elected figure have to have a prayer breakfast? Can't they envision a broader moral leadership? If Mr. Random Mayor (I don't know of women mayors having prayer breakfasts, although they certainly may) wants very badly to have a prayer breakfast, I say that's your privilege. But use your name, not your title, and don't use city money to publicize the damned thing. Here's my local annoyance, and here's a link to the prayer breakfast network, which asserts that their strategy is to allow breakfasters to "experience a fresh reminder of our country's Spiritual Heritage." They seem a little fringe though, so maybe they're not as much a part of prayer breakfasts as they'd like.
One of the first things I saw this morning was a discordant image in the periphery. Turns out even the corner of my sleepy eye is startled by the combination of jammies I was wearing.
spinach salad
Originally uploaded by _buttercup
For some unknown reason I was motivated to make some food today. This salad has spinach, red peppers, apples, chicken-mango sausage, and some kind of gorgonzola dressing from trader joe's. Ultimately I couldn't soak enough of the grease out of the sausage, and the salad is too greasy. Guess I'll have to stick to eating the sausage with pasta and tomato sauce. Maybe I'll use bacon for the salad if I'm planning on making it my whole meal.
I am on a perpetual quest for a better lab timer. Unfortunately the features I want don't seem to live in a single timer. I've thought about buying parts and programming/soldering something with the features I want, but it's not worth the time it would take. Here's my list of needed features:
1) Enter countdown time using number buttons, none of that up/down crap. In other words, it should have a keyboard like this:
1a) The interface for setting the countdown time shouldn't be stupid. For example, I shouldn't have to hold down a "set" button. If I'm pressing a number button, what else might I want to be doing? Obviously, I want to be setting the time.
2) When the elapsed time is finished, if I don't silence the alarm within a minute, it should stop beeping and start counting up so when I come back I know how long it's been.
3) It should show three different countdowns at once, like this:
4) It should have a "lock" slider button that prevents the buttons from responding when I put it in my pocket.
5) It should have a clip so I can attach it the outside of my pocket when I need to take it with me and use it frequently.
6) It should have a magnet on the back so I can attach it to the eye-level metal rail at my bench.
7) It should not be ginormous.
It's this kind of thing that I find to be a ridiculous need given the technology we have today. I can program. I can get a circuit board printed. I can print to a 3D printer. Why can't I make the timer of my dreams easily?
(Image and inspiration from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sdm/examples.htm)
A group of researchers found a way to retrieve memory in RAM from a computer: lower the temperature of the RAM chips. One method they used was compressed air. This isn't a real security threat to the merely mortal among us - I'm interested in it because it sounds like an incredibly fun project. Still they are handicapped by researcher-talk: "data written even momentarily to RAM persists for a non-trivial period of time." Here's all the dirt.
I'm a sucker for large-scale projects. Bridges! How are they possible? It's hard for me to really believe that all those little steps can make things so big and strong. Lately I've come across a few things that get me excited in the same way.
I found this picture on the Eye Level Pasadena blog. It's a half an apartment building being moved.
There is also a very fun time lapse movie of construction on campus here. Why are time lapse movies so pleasing?
And finally, there is the great tree moving of the past few days. Click on the image to see a quick animation. It's annoying to watch after the first few times.
Someone (who shall remain nameless, lest you end up wanting to curse her too) introduced me to these golf shoes. Aren't they lovely? I can't stop thinking about them.
There is so much gated parking here in Heck that this graphic has seared its way into my consciousness. The drama of the figure is quite arresting, but i'm confused about how the victim's arm is apparently behind the thing s/he's being squished into. (Perhaps this is meant to portray a man; in Sign-Land, only men wear pants. Does this mean women don't have anything to fear from moving gates? Or maybe all the victims have been men so far?)
After a sleepless night followed a supposedly decaf afternoon coffee drink, I'm anxiously awaiting the development of these caffeine test strips. I envision them to be like the pH test strips above.
(cite: Ladenson RC, Crimmins DL, Landt Y, Ladenson JH. Isolation and characterization of a thermally stable recombinant anti-caffeine heavy-chain antibody fragment. Analytical Chemistry June 1, 2006.)
Being besotted with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, I'm newly respectful of historical fiction. Here's a book that sounds like fun:
Here's part of the blurb:
Jerome Charyn now delights with this picaresque tour de force. He reanimates a war-torn Manhattan overrun by Redcoats and deserted by all but the Loyalists—and Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, the tempestuous, redheaded queen of Manhattan’s most spectacular bordello. When the novel opens, young double agent John Stocking is being interrogated by Washington, a rebel commander far removed from the dour, silent man of most history books.
I just heard about this book, and it sounds terrific:
Broken Justice is a true story about Dr. Ken Edelin, a young, black doctor who arrived in Boston in 1971 to do his residency training in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Boston City Hospital. In April 1974 he was three months away from completing his residency when he was indicted on a charge of manslaughter by a secret Grand Jury. The indictment concerned an abortion he had performed on a 17-year old girl, and the alleged victim washer aborted fetus. The indictment was sought by an over zealous, anti-abortion prosecutor and because of the racial, political and religious climate which existed in Boston the indictment received national and international attention. In January of 1975 his sensational six week trial began before a jury which was all white, predominantly male and overwhelmingly Catholic.
The future of Scrabulous on Facebook remains uncertain. It turns out that Hasbro sold digital rights to Scrabble to EA, who have certainly shown they make an excellent computer game, although I'm not wild about their online games. And they certainly don't have the user-interaction aspects of Facebook. Still, I think EA is more in touch with the current online markets than Hasbro is, so hopefully they can work out the Scrabble-on-Facebook thing in a way that benefits everyone, as I suggested before.
As always, I love Miss Manners. Here is her advice to an engaged gay man who doesn't want to deal with people's questions about the legality of his upcoming nuptials:
Just follow Miss Manners' rule of answering the question you want to deal with rather than the one that was asked. It got her through school.
To: hasbrogamespr@hasbro.com, corporate.communications@mattel.com
Subject: Removing scrabulous from Facebook
Hello -
I am concerned about your request that Facebook remove the Scrabble-like application Scrabulous from its site. I think you're entirely within your rights to make this request, but I think it's a terrible idea. You have already benefited from the situation: Scrabble has gained in popularity because of Scrabulous. With licensing and partnership, you could do much better by capitalizing on the current situation than trying to shut it down.
If you are considering hosting your own online Scrabble site, do not expect the same level of use as Scrabulous gets. People like Scrabble, but it's a notoriously long and slow game. Putting it in the context of Facebook is what makes it accessible. People don't need to convince friends to sign up for a new site. They can play asynchronously without forgetting about the game, because they're coming to the site for other reasons as well.
Remember too that Facebook is a social networking site: it's entire purpose is shared information. There are 10,000 people in various "Save Scrabulous" groups. You must act quickly to correct this mistake. I suggest you consider the existing benefits, devise new ways to capitalize on the situation, and change your position. By requesting the removal of Scrabulous from Facebook, you've positioned yourselves as the out-of-touch creaky old-guard. You now must pick between two roles: the old-fashioned but ultimately rational uncle or the demented lost cause.
Good luck,
From an editorial in the LA Times today:
As custodians of a great human adventure, the men and women of JPL deserve better from their own country than to be victimized by a shabby crowd of apprentice Torquemadas.* By resisting this bargain-basement inquisition, JPL plaintiffs have rendered us all yet another service. Who would have guessed that the folks with the pocket protectors would turn out to be the ones with the right stuff?* Torquemada was a prominent leader of the Spanish Inquisition.
"The more expensive a wine is perceived to be, the more likely a person is to enjoy it, according to a new study out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Caltech."
I was a participant in the survey portion of this study ("Come, drink wine for free."). Of course, I don't know what my results were, but the overall conclusion of the study is pretty depressing about human nature.
This problem was giving me an enormous headache. I had a bunch of images of my results in a spreadsheet next to the quantification of each image. I wanted to reuse all the formulas and layout etc, but remove the images from my old results. I had too many images to happily Shift-Click them. I wanted a single command to select all of them. I knew they were in the drawing layer, but I couldn't get any further. Google gave me nothing. Finally, just fiddling around, I discovered that if you select one of the images, then you can select all of the rest with the Cmd-A shortcut (that's Ctrl-A for those of you on Windows). A caveat: I'm using Excel 2004 for Mac; Leopard on Macbook Pro. There were relatively few pictures that I wanted to keep, so it was easy to use the mouse to de-select those before I deleted the rest. I'm posting this in hopes that it won't take as much time for the next poor sucker who uses some obscure Excel functionality to solve this problem.
The New York Times reports that "The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in California, issued an opinion allowing the scientists to continue working until the question of their privacy challenge can be addressed at a full trial."
Here's a brilliant soundbite: “This is truly a vindication for these scientists and engineers,” said Dan Stormer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “They’ve been loyal and hard-working and committed to science and this country — and they’ve been threatened with the loss of their jobs simply because they stood up for their constitutional rights.”
The court called the background checks "an inquisition." Unfortunately, the 9th circuit is the most overturned court of appeals. Hopefully this ruling will stick.
The AP reports about Caltech involvement:
The decision appeared to reverse a ruling by Wright late Thursday dismissing Caltech as a defendant in the lawsuit. The 9th Circuit said any injunction must also apply to Caltech.
It said the case "raises serious questions as to whether the university has in fact now become a willful and joint participant in NASA's investigation program, even though it was not so initially."
There was dry time at the dog park. Jeff Quebral was shooting at the dog park and kindly sent me these pictures.
The Union of Concerned Scientists wikipedia entry has a "criticism" section. Each entry in the section features a crack-pot and essentially adds to the organization's credibility. This might be the result of some clever editing, but it's representative of the critics found on the web. Here's an example from the wikipedia "criticism" section:
Televangelist Jerry Falwell endorsed Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Dennis Byrne's description of UCS as the "inexhaustibly liberal and self-appointed guardians of scientific purity [who] try to corrupt science for [their] own ends",[31] and accused UCS of leading evangelicals to "[fall] for all of this global warming hocus-pocus" and "[run] down meaningless rabbit trails that get our focus off of our heavenly purpose."[32]
One of the pleasures of completing my big meeting is that I get to have some leisure time. Today I indulged myself by watching some football. I didn't see this bit live, but the clip cracked me up. During the Packers-Bears game (in which the Packers were possessed by the three stooges), one of the refs dragged a player out of a scuffle (above photo from Brian Kersey). One of the commentators, I think it was Madden, likened it to the Martinez-Zimmer scuffle in 2003. The size and age disparity is certainly significant in both, but in this case, the big young guy (linebacker Barnett) doesn't seem pissed at the smaller old guy (ref Quirk). The interaction was more like a small mom dragging her hulking son away from something fun by his ear. Video here.
Update: Apparently Barnett was pissed afterward. Quirk was fined $8150 by the NFL, which Barnett's agent reported was satisfactory.
Say you were a dog and someone gave you a plush duck. Would your first instinct be to pull the long fuzz off the top of its head? Besides riding in cars backward, I think my dog has other problems.
I can't wait to use this:
“Hello, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.”
“Bill Jovanovich please.”
“Mr. Jovanovich isn’t in.”
(Temple throb increases.) “Where is he?”
“He’s in Europe, I’m afraid”
“Don’t be afraid. Where in Europe?”
Earlier this year, JPL employees working with non-classified material were informed they would need to give permission for extraordinarily invasive background checks to keep their jobs. JPL employees filed suit to stop the background checks. In September, a panel of judges granted a temporary injunction against this requirement. This week, another panel heard arguments about extending the injunction. According to an article in the Whittier Daily News, the tone of the hearing was promising for the JPL employees. The judges gave positive feedback to the employee's lawyer:
The panel asked few questions of Keeny, however, and had words of praise.
"You've done a good job. I don't want to interfere, keep it up," Judge David Thompson told her part way through her argument.
And were critical of the government's arguments:
Most contentious were Stern's arguments, during which sparks flew in the normally calm courtroom.
"It's really much better if you don't distort the record," Judge Kim Wardlaw chided at one point after Stern described a questionnaire as having only multiple-choice questions.
"I have a copy of the form. It asks if there is anything else, and there are blanks," she said.
I'm also happy to learn that Caltech objects to the requirements:
Caltech lawyer Mark Holscher argued that the college should not be included in the injunction because it objected to the requirements and is not involved in the collection of employee information.
I heard a terrific slip of the tongue on the radio yesterday. A local official was being interviewed about the Southern California Association of Governments' report on "how the Southland is doing on everything, including the economy, crime, traffic, housing and education." The report is described here. The unfortunate official was reading from a statement, somewhat haltingly, and discussed the type of changes the report indicates they need to make so that the region is "a place we want to leave," halting pause, "to our children."
