youwot?

ProxySwitchy not reading .pac files on Ubuntu

2011-11-08T10:10:00.001-08:00

Finally found a workaround for ProxySwitchy not reading .pac files on Ubuntu after the latest Chrome update:

http://insready.com/en/blog/how-make-proxy-switchy-work-again-after-latest-chrome-update-linux

tom mccarthy

2011-01-19T21:09:00.000-08:00

listened

blown my mind: tom mccarthy, who i'd never heard of until i heard him talking to my favorite quail [eleanor wachtel on writers & company]. the man is nuts, visceral, a schizophrenically articulate beat-academic who was apparently short-listed for the booker last year (though i had a start at reading his new novel, the letter C, and it didn't grab me maniacally in the manner i require. never mind -- i shall persist). his interview is fantastic, ecstatic, multidimensionally creative, weird.

he's written Tintin and the Secret of Literature, "a reading of Hergé's Tintin books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory", and since 1999 has operated as 'General Secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' called the International Necronautical Society (INS) "devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex".

yes he's been accused of being pointlessly pretentious. i admit i'm a total sucker for it all anyway [e.g. martin amis].

excerpts of him chatting don't do him justice, but here are some vaguely representative bits & bobs:

on some of his previous writing, hidden meaning, freud's The Wolf Man:

"...what Freud is really talking about is not a pyramid; it’s a crypt. cryptos means hidden, anything buried. And it’s a site—it’s a linguistic site of encryption. I mean, psychoanalysis is “the listening cure.” The psychoanalyst tunes in to the patient almost like a kind of radio ham tuning into some mysterious frequency, and what they find when they tune in, via Freud, to his patient, is this kind of double eavesdropping in this multilinguistic zone, because the wolf man was first Russian, then spoke English and French, and is talking to Freud in German. They find this kind of polyglottal crackling zone of words, which contain images and memories and associations, kind of encrypting one another to produce this weird neurosis, almost like a linguistic tumor. And I found that very, very compelling..."

on the modern fascination with secret messages and codes:

"it's a populist manifestation of Calvinist culture, basically. For the Calvinists, we were living in a world of signs. As Francis Bacon said, “Nature is God’s second book.” It’s a text—it needs to be interpreted. I mean, you get it in the Greeks, in Virgil—every flight path of a sparrow or movement of an ant over a tuft of ground is a message. It is a sign—it needs interpretation. In more modern literature you get this sensibility very much in the work of Thomas Pynchon or William Burroughs, the sense that we are living in a world of signs, that there’s an order behind the visible that needs to be drawn out through interpretation.

"And I guess this manifests itself in many ways, in more subcultural formats. Even in the paranoia of the Christian parents of America who want to listen to Iron Maiden records backward and find the Satanist messages in them. Of course, maybe one in every hundred chance “message” that emerges could be construed as Satanist—the others turn out to be things like 'Give me a peppermint,” or 'It smells of fish.'"

he has a nice point about how popular literature (well, novels) after the promise of modernism made a bit of a safe turn back towards the stultifying safety of 19th c romanticism...

don't make many like him these days.

tom stoppard on terry gilliam on the film brazil

2011-01-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

came across this in krasny's memoir off mike (collection of vignettes from his interviews over the years), which i picked up over christmas in point reyes. i intensely hated the experience of watching brazil, and yet it's surprised me what an impression it must have made: it has firmly stuck with me over the last couple of years. i suppose that's much of the purpose of dystopian literature and film? anyway, laughed on reading this, as i'd felt brazil to be so resonantly orwellian:

Stoppard tells an amusing story of his work with Terry Gilliam on the film script for Brazil. He kept telling Gilliam that everything sounded too much like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gilliam told him not to worry. Two years after Brazil was released, Stoppard saw Gilliam, and Gilliam admitted he had never read Nineteen Eight-Four before they worked on the film. He had read it for the first time just that week. He told Stoppard the parallels and similarities between the two works shocked him.

from

Off mike: a memoir of talk radio and literary life, by

Michael Krasny

i'm kind of obsessed with water right now...

2010-11-11T22:46:00.000-08:00

...and behold! If you microwave a given quantity of water and an equivalent mass of ice:

Although it only takes an increase of a few °C to melt the ice, and the water has to heat up by about 80°C to boil, the water will normally boil before the ice melts!

What is going on?

There are two effects happening here, one of them is that to melt ice takes a huge amount of energy, the equivalent of heating water by about 80°C. This is because in ice water molecules are locked together by quite strong hydrogen bonds, and to melt it has to break a lot of these bonds, which takes a lot of energy.

The second effect is that ice just doesn't absorb microwaves nearly as well as water - this means it actually heats up less.

Why does water absorb microwaves better than ice?

A microwave oven cooks by creating microwaves, a form of light or electromagnetic radiation. These are produced on the right hand side of the oven and are sent into the main oven. They reflect back and forth creating a standing wave.


The microwave oven gives out microwaves (a form of electromagnetic radiation) which then reflect back and forth across the metal box.	As they do this they create an electric field which will point up and then down about 2.5 billion times a second.

In the microwave the electric field will point upwards and then downwards about 2.5 billion times every second. This means that anything charged will be pulled upwards and downwards by the field produced by the microwaves.

Although water molecules don't have an overall charge, their oxygen atom is slightly negative and their hydrogen atoms are slightly positive (they have a positive and negative pole so are called polar). This means that in an electric field they will rotate to align with the field.


Each water molecule is made up of one oxygen atom which is slightly negative and two hydrogen atoms which are slightly positive.	If the electric field points upwards then the positive hydrogen atoms are pulled upwards and the negative oxygen atoms are pulled downwards, so the molecules rotate.

If the field keeps changing at 2.5 billion times a second they will keep rotating which will give them energy so the water heats up.


If the field now points downwards then the oxygen atoms will try an reverse their direction. All of this rotation transfers energy to the water and heats it up.	Although the ice molecules also feel a rotational force they are locked into a crystal and rotating would involve breaking bonds between molecules. So they hardly move and they absorb very little energy.

In ice the water molecules are all locked together in a crystal structure by hydrogen bonds. These bonds will stop the water molecules rotating, which means they can't absorb much energy from the microwaves. This, in turn, means that the ice doesn't heat up.

Aaaaa! So cool!

From http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/-324719c1f8/

befoozlement of Kultur and the consequent hell

2010-10-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

I actually can't believe I'm reading this. Ezra Pound, writing in 1917:

....The hell of contemporary Europe is caused by the lack of representative government in Germany, and by the non-existence of decent prose in the German language. Clear thought and sanity depend on clear prose. They cannot live apart. The former produces the latter. The latter conserves and transmits the former.

The mush of the German sentence, the straddling of the verb out to the end, are just as much a part of the befoozlement of Kultur and the consequent hell, as was the rhetoric of later Rome the seed and the symptom of the Roman Empire's decadence and extinction. A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think.

-- "At Last the Novel Appears," from The Egoist, February 1917.

The irony (tragedy?) is that his madness drew him straight into the arms of the fascist and antisemitic ideologies of the 1930s, leading to a treason arrest, poetry written in adulation of Mussolini, and ultimately the postshumus publication of a certain Canto "CXX", asking (too late?)
"Let those I love forgive / what I have made".

See also
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/fascism.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

graham greene, luis bunuel, j.m. coatzee

2010-10-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

read
graham greene, short story cheap in august. deeply affecting.

watched
luis bunuel, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, 1972 [french] film by the notorious [spanish, modern, surrealist art film] director; in US won academy award for best foreign film. not unpleasant, but a bit baffling: where is the line dividing the random and the absurd? tried quite hard to find meaning in the bits that seemed beyond satire (so much shooting, priest wanting to be gardner), but didn't come up with much, and was suspicious that so many websites laud the film without an analysis. one thing i managed to take away: i read that bunuel was at the end of his life and nearly deaf when he made the film, and on reflection i realized that it did feel a bit like a silent dream-world, how one might experience scenes of life with no sound: intently focusing on one scene or another, then moving one's attention because one can't hear what's happening beyond what one can see.

listened
interview with j.m. coatzee, who is on my list of excruciatingly good writers...a funny fellow, in person much more reluctant/measured/guarded/defensive/serious than i would have expected (he apparently refused to discuss his life or his writing in the interview, and upon being asked which books he felt were important, after a big wind up of this-is-a-very-loaded-question-you-know, he finally admitted that he supposed he could include the iliad as having lasting impact(!) also mentioned plato, so i've picked up the republic...) my favorite bit was a lovely theory about why beckett switched to writing in french (without explanation): included in my random jumble of notes below that will remain a jumble of notes.

Writing in general is becoing underrated...I speak from the bosom of an educational institution that is in the process of turning itself from an instituition that studies writing to an inst that studies all kinds of other 'cultural artifacts', some exceedingly transitory in nature.

(contrast that with what susan sontag said on the Big Ideas lecture)

one can't fully belong, inherit the judeo-christian-greco-tradition without understanding the philosophy of aristotle, plato.

horace - classic is one that somehow keeps being read (said that 2000 years ago!)

written about beckett, ford maddox ford, kafka -- could all be considered outsiders...

FDF: became outsider bc of social scandals
kafka: constitutional outsider, woudl have been an outsider wherever he was. his outsiderdom was only compounded by the fact of having been born a jew in troubled times, ieven in autrohungary of the end of the 19th century
beckettt - outsdier by temperament, election.
dostoyevsky - outsider bc of external circumstances, being caught up without full premeditations in student secret movement, being packed orf to siberia for a long period. returned with mark against his naem which was dificult to obliterate.

beckett's writing gives him "a sensuous delight".
also joyce, in different ways: knew the english language with a completeness.

joyce in ulysses, beckett, at least while still writing in english, there exists a conoisseurship, a delight in the perfection of the writing itself.

that sensuous side of his own writing was perhaps what beckett reacted to when he, in effect, gave up writing in english. needed a greater rigor of e.g. a strictly romance language, fewer seductive possibilities in lexical choices -- playing off the romance against the germanic, which is not possible in any other language. beckett never explained fully why he made the switch, so it's for us to guess why he made it. he felt the [irrelevant?] seductions of english post-1945 just felt to be something he'd done, he'd played with language enough, it was time to move on.

american authors he admires (but has never written about):
melleville, whitman, faulkner, emily dickinson,

read dostoevsky, tolstoy "on their own terms" (meaning wrt their fear, devotion to god).

the fall

2010-10-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

watched
the fall, labor of cinematographic love, simply gorgeous. jess recommended it to me a year ago and i never seemed to be in the mood... turns out one doesn't need to be in the mood (and it makes me now want to crawl back in time and see all the films she's ever recommended, e.g. delicatessen, though i fear i've left many too late...)

film made possibly twice as enjoyable by following this blog post as we went along which ids most of the scene locations. nearly fell over that a spot that had reminded me of a park in buenos aires was in fact that very spot (somewhere there's a photo of jess and me standing exactly where darwin stands).

bits and pieces:

"indian" (as in cowboys) imagined by alexandria to be indian from india
darwin's monkey and much of their conversation a reference to alfred russel wallace, a contemporary of darwin's who independently proposed evolutionary theory but whom darwin (sort of) beat to the punch
favorite scene shift: of priest's hat to this desert scene; beautifully done
doves out of mouth as symbol of ascendant spirit of god (ref):
"[A] white dove is regarded, both in historical narration and in works of art, as the impersonation of the Spirit of God—a divine breath, a brilliant and unsullied symbol of the Trinity. We are told in history that the Spirit of God descended, in the bodily shape of a dove, upon the head of the Saviour immediately after his baptism by St. John.* The Holy Ghost is almost invariably figured in works of art, under the semblance of a dove, as has already been shown in several examples given above,t and as will be seen in many to be hereafter given."
the ending sequence of silent films can't be roy because he's now paralyzed?

nice writeup for afters:
http://thefilmist.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/best-of-the-2000s-4-tarsems-the-fall

2010-10-01T00:34:00.000-07:00

listened
Interview with Peter Carey, author of Parrot and Olivier in America

Funny, slightly bitter fellow; surprising how a two-timer Booker prize winner only "discovered reading" in his twenties -- and then it was the fiction of Kafka (wild, disturbed, disillusioned) that got him. It reminds me of the guys I went to school with only "discovering classical music" in their late teens, and then it was always Mahler Mahler Mahler that they fell in love with. Ugh.)

Talked about Carey's latest book, an alternate-universe fiction of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th century journey to the US (Tocqueville came to the US after the reign of terror ostensibly to study the penal system, and ended up writing his famous Democracy in America).

Random bits I noticed:

Tocqueville genuinely feared the tyrrany of the majority (Carey does today, too, in the "era of Palin")
the contradictory, quaint (perverse?) 18th-century US practice of putting family crests on e.g. business cards, when the revolution was all about breaking with the monarchy
Tocqueville questioned whether art in the 1830s American mercantile consumer-obsessed culture could genuinely be cultivated/valued

sylvia beach, spinoza the proto-computer

2010-09-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

listened
Interview with biographer of Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, funky bohemian lesbian running around Paris in the 1920s, champion of modernist literature, proprietress of "Shakespeare & Company", an English-language bookstore catering to expats in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Friendship with Hemingway, Gide, Eliot, Joyce. Excerpts of Beach's own voice on the radio, of Hemingway (!) reading.

read
Spinoza, excerpt from Ethics.
Heard him mentioned on the Rebecca Goldstein interview (oops, another post). Fascinating guy: 17th-century Dutch philosopher, hints that the universe is deterministic and computable (ordered, yet infinite), seems to refute any anthromorphism of God (alludes to him more like a robot that happened to have output a description of the universe, with no moral intent or purpose.) Cries foul on those who claim that God does have a plan with ethical intent, but included in that plan is the goal that we not know his plan -- he attacks this as sloppy logic (that "not knowing what the hell is going on" does not imply "God must know, and he also must not want us to know"). Sounds a lot like a refutation of "I think therefore I am" (Descartes' mind/body problem, which actually I read somewhere else he also violently disagreed with). Concludes that it's thus silly for us all to run around hand-wringing about God being angry. Unsurprisingly, he got himself kicked out of the Jewish church because of his radical views. The book that included the excerpt (Main Currents of Western Thought, Franklin Le Van Baumer, fabulous but woefully Spinoza-skimpy) skips his supposedly "geometric" discussion/proof for the determinism of the universe (which I would love to read -- reminder to self to pick up his full work). Suggestive how (in my translation -- haven't looked up if this exists in the original) God and Nature were given different pronouns (Him, Her) (almost suggesting nature is another player in the game, diminishing the role of God?). Spinoza talks about God's decrees but Nature's laws. Take that, God.

david mitchell, susan sontag, annie cohen-solal

2010-09-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

listened
Thoughtful interview with David Mitchell on the history behind The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a childhood of stammering, Black Swan Green. He reads a lovely passage of The Thousand Autumns in there.

read
David Denby on SS's passion & lament for the slow decline for modernist cinema:

In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review, Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of high modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais but not Buñuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls.

watched
Fractured interview with Annie Cohen-Solal (French academic, historian, and new biographer of Leo Castelli, pioneering New York gallerist (if such a term exists) of much of the late 20th century. CR in typicaly annoying, interjecting form... :/

iTunes store in a browser!

2010-05-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

just found http://app-store.appspot.com, which allows you to browse the iTunes store without iTunes. woo!

wunderground road-trip feature

2010-05-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Spiff road trip feature on wunderground: enter your time/location for each of (start, end), and get back a nice little annotated map of the weather forecast along the way.

Can't wait for Big Sur this weekend! :)

Update: ha! Did you know you can buy a weather station? You! Sitting at your little computer, right now! You buy some hardware (they're nice enough to guide you in placing your 14-foot rain collector funnel), get your own personal weather station ID (KDAYZY!), and then you can upload the data stream to wunderground. Love it. I'm going to get one and tether it to the free-range chickens on the fire escape.

Ambient Weather WS-1080 Wireless Home Weather Station w/ Data Logging

The Ambient WS-1080 is a compact, easy to install complete weather station with impressive reliability at a very low cost.

This weather station measures wind speed, wind direction, temperature and humidity (both inside and outside), rainfall and barometric pressure.

The weather station’s touch screen console displays a wide range of parameters in an easy-to-read format on a large LCD. The attractively thin console can be placed on a desktop or mounted to a wall.

Includes a USB port and EasyWeather software, a simple to use windows application that allows real time monitoring of the WS-1080 Home Weather Station. It can be used to progam weather station parameters and alarms. You can also log data as well as view collected data in various graphical formats.

Importing a Google calendar into Korganizer / Lucid / KDE 4.4

2010-05-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

How I got my Google calendar(s) to show up in Korganizer:

1. sudo apt-get install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata
2. In Korganizer, click on the ‘+’ sign and add an akonadi resource

3. Sign into Google calendar; click on “Settings” in the “My Calendars” section to the left; choose the calendar you want to import; select the appropriate green ICAL icons depending on whether your calendar is public/private; right-click and select "copy URL"; paste this as the akonadi resource.

4. Make sure only the new Google calendar is selected as an akonadi resource! Somehow all of my existing calendars were already selected (and thus duplicated, and then I had to go delete them later)

In case you have problems, you can kill Korganizer and manually edit ~/.kde/share/config/kresources/calendar/stdrc (I set "active = false" to my duplicate calendars because Korganizer basically froze up trying to display so many calendars. I was then able to remove them after they weren't displayed.)

(Note to future self: see also http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage11.html ?)

2010-04-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

was reading this guy's great hiking blog, and on the page of the hike i'm doing today he makes a passing comment about the role of camouflage in the evolution of skin pigment (extrapolated from banana slugs, white people, and inuit indians, woot). the basic question is: ok, we can all think of two rough reasons for skin color: (1) to block bad UV light, and (2) for camouflage. but how do you explain the fact that inuit indians' skin color seems like a statistical outlier in a plot of of skin color vs. these environmental factors? (yes, this is rough. camouflage is obviously a function of predation risk and, more subtly, the evolutionary rate and cost of developing or undeveloping an already-existing trait. totally ignoring all that here.)

there's a nice little ask a scientist page that cites a bunch of research in the last 10 years on this:

[...snipped section on how UV light's role in synthesizing vitamin D in humans...]

In environments where UV light is weak, natural selection would tend to favor lighter skin, to increase the body’s ability to capture UV light and make more vitamin D. An exception that proves the rule is the case of the Inuit, who live in the North American arctic (with low UV light levels, especially in the winter) and yet possess relatively dark skin. This seems to be due to the abundance of fish in the Inuit environment and, therefore, in their diet: fish are rich in vitamin D, so the Inuit are saved from having to synthesize this nutrient using UV light.

that immediately led me to think well, but what selective pressure would cause inuit skin tone to be darker, then, since there isn't lots of UV light in sun-starved alaska that trigger the growth of UV blocking proteins in the body. fortuitously, his next sentence is:

In summary, the known physiological effects of UV light would suggest that natural selection would tend to favor a skin color (or level of skin melanization) that blocks excess UV light to protect DNA from damage and folate from destruction while allowing enough UV light through to supply the body with vitamin D (Jablonski and Chaplin 2000).

ok, but then what selective pressures would cause white skin to evolve, which would seem to be kinda sucky as suggested by the presence of a multi-million-dollar sunscreen industry? author (Dennis C. Chang) claims:

Genetic analysis of the MC1R gene substantiates and enhances this story. Even though black African peoples are extremely genetically diverse, most (and perhaps all) make exactly the same MC1R protein (Harding et al. 2000). Meanwhile, white Europeans have an abundance of MC1R gene variants, each making a slightly different MC1R protein. As mentioned before, many of these European alleles are actually defective. It appears as though (after hominids lost thick body hair) natural selection has forced people living in Africa to keep a certain MC1R allele, one that is naturally active and therefore causes high eumelanin production. In the high-UV environment of most of Africa, any mutation making MC1R less active would have a negative effect, leaving its possessor susceptible to UV-induced DNA damage and folate depletion. People who migrated into more temperate latitudes experienced a relaxation of this constraint and an opposing selective pressure: mutations decreasing MC1R’s activity (and in the extreme case rendering MC1R nonfunctional) would have a favorable effect, allowing its possessor to make more vitamin D.

papers cited at the end.

word.

London Society: A Monthly Magazine of of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, Volume 67

2010-02-13T12:10:00.000-08:00

Word of the day: "marcescent".

Marcescent leaves dry out in autumn, stay on a tree through winter and fall in the spring when new buds break. From classical Latin "marcidus" (withered), whither (oooo) the now archaic English word "marcid" (withered or rotten).

Also used metaphorically in such literary gems as the 1895 "London Society: A Monthly Magazine of of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, Volume 67" by James Hogg and Florence Marryat:

But why talk of gaunt marcid penury on Boxing night? Surely every man woman and child gets enough and to spare of roast beef and plum pudding at Christmas tide in this boasted land of Christian charity.

on lenses

2010-01-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

The lens inside your eye contributes only about 25-35% of the focusing power of your eye. The rest comes from...

...can you guess? :)

The answer is: your cornea. According to the NIH, "The cornea acts as the eye's outermost lens. It functions like a window that controls and focuses the entry of light into the eye. The cornea contributes between 65-75 percent of the eye's total focusing power." Which makes sense: it focuses incoming light down to a small area on the surface of the lens, which, via ability to change curvature, can be squished or stretched such that it in turn focuses the light precisely on the surface of the retina. Nice little bootstrapped two-tiered design there. (And note that the larger corneal refractive power means that its radius of curvature is necessarily smaller than that of the lens -- it's more curved than the lens. Which, if you'd asked me to draw a picture of the cornea ten minutes ago, I completely would not have gotten right)

Ok, now the second quiz question: in addition to helping keep dust and grit out, the cornea also serves what important function?

Give up?

...

(I know, the suspense is killing you...)

A: It screens out some of the most damaging ultraviolet wavelengths in sunlight. While too much UV exposure can mess up all parts of your eye nicely (and here I'm thinking of the guys with the Fresnel lens at the Maker Faire), I guess the cornea does have the capacity to absorb a fraction of that light without damage. Cool, man.

Now go play!

End-of-year giving

2009-12-31T11:32:00.001-08:00

Updated list (this after visa's fraudometer went off and they called to make sure my credit card hadn't been stolen :)) --

American Civil Liberies Union - making sure we don't get pwned by wackos
ACLU Foundation (for corporate matching)
Electronic Frontier Foundation - digital rights advocacy
International Rescue Committee - humanitarian aid for refugees
Natural Resources Defense Council - fantastic environmental protecection advocacy group
United Way - education and health services for less forunate Americans
Project Prevention - help all children be born to loving parents that want them (kinda sketchy grassroots organization, but I like their innovation)
PopOffsets - offsetting our carbon by letting less-fortuntate women control their reproductive freedom (their mission, like that of Project Prevention, strikes many people as eugenics-y, but again, their approach is innovative and their goal is reproductive freedom, not population totalitarianism)
Friends of the Urban Forest - because a green San Francisco makes me wonderfully happy
KQED - all my friends in the little box in the kitchen when I work from home!

trees!

2009-12-29T17:10:00.000-08:00

San Jose, 1975 and 2006: witness the striking effect of trees!

Consider helping put more trees where you live:

Self-guided tree walks in Mountain View
San Francisco Friends of the Urban Forest
Portland Friends of Trees

current conditions: sunny, wing antennas on, volcanoes snowy

2009-11-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

doing this for hein, who i know would be doing this if he were here with me on this flight:

i'm on my first wifi-enabled virgin america flight from sf to seattle. as we read last night, the gogo internet link is not via satellite, as you might expect, but comes from 100 EVDO towers on the ground that broadcast upwards to antennas on the plane's body. (and yep, that airspace had to be licensed). it turns out i'm sitting at the window, right next to the RHS wing, and there are a stretch of twelve antennas pointing back. i've no idea, though, if these are actually for the plane's collective twittering or if they're for unimportant stuff like air traffic control: "mysteriously", not many images of plane wing antenna diagrams are available on the net.

google latitude still shows me sitting at the airport, though. somehow i don't think it has much historical SSID data to go off of. :)

corny

2009-11-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

quick quick: etymology of corny?

From etymonline:

Amer.Eng. slang "old-fashioned, sentimental," is from 1932 (first attested in "Melody Maker"), perhaps originally "something appealing to country folk."

grammarphobia expounds:

The adjective "corny" has a shorter history. It's been a term of derision only since the 1930s, when something that was "corny" or "cornfed" or "on the cob" was rustic, countrified, old-fashioned, or behind the times – and hence trite or hackneyed.

It first was used by jazz musicians, who called a style of playing "corny" if it was outmoded or worn out. Here's the OED's first citation, from 1932: "The ‘bounce’ of the brass section ... has degenerated into a definitely ‘corny’ and staccato style of playing." (Imagine a rube fresh from the cornfields trying to make a splash in the big city and you'll get the idea.)

2009-11-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

I had a revelation the other day that I can have so much more patience reading philosophy if I simply consider it as poetry.

The irony: this makes philosophy more palatable to me because it removes the presumption that a tangle of ideas and semantic murkiness actually contains a larger, concrete truth (something I always roll my eyes at, as so many pages of philosophical inquiry rely on logical fallacies that are borne of the simple fact that language is completely context-sensitive: "if A [in one context] is B, and B [in a different context] is C, then A must be C. But we can clearly see [in a different context D] that A is not C, and therefore what is the real A?", etc etc...as one of the music conductors of my childhood would say, "subdivide! subdivide!")

... and yet isn't that play of murkiness and truth supposed to be the beauty of poetry? (And indeed what I love about poetry?)

And to anyone who is actually educated in this subject: yes I realize I'm a a total presumptuous twit.

go canada!

2009-07-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

I was curious as to how Pepto Bismol "actually actually" works (Google helped me determine that the medical term i want here is "mechanism"), and one of the drug database pages I found reveals a total geek goldmine. (And if you're curious, we also don't totally know how Pepto works -- our hunch is that it stops the creation of some compounds that inflame your intestines. And don't worry, I just have a tummy ache. Nothing vicious. :)).

So the Pepto page is cool, but the page on the headache medicine Naproxen Sodium (aka Aleve) blows it out of the water. It lists the molecular weight, cell locations, gene bank gene id link, and gene sequences (!) of each protein that the drug its thought to target. Oh but that's not all. Nuh-uh. It also lists ("Prostaglandin and leukotriene metabolism") and links to Genome Project map of the chemical pathways that the drug takes, and lists the actual chemical reactions that occur ("arachidonate + AH2 + 2 O2 = prostaglandin H2 + A + H2O").
It finishes each page with a bunch of links to the major PubMed studies for reference.

BAD ASS. Go check it out.

(Yeah and what the hell is the site? It's apparently part of Genome Alberta and Genome Canada, which yes, wikipedia reveals, does indeed work along with the Craig Venter Institute/Human Genome Project.)

sci foo camp agenda

2009-07-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Sci Foo is on this weekend so it's on my mind (big outdoor tarp went up at the plex yesterday, etc). It's hard to find any concrete reports or data that comes out of it, but I finally found a pic of the un-agenda from 2007:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/1267053565/sizes/o/

Sessions apparently included:

- (Chris Anderson) micro-UAVs: supercheap drones for mapping and scientific sensing
- (George Dyson) Godel and the Draft Board

:)

2009-07-08T19:02:00.000-07:00

Actually, that “new line” is one of the oldest in the human book, but almost a decade later, Amis’s novel The Green Man would demonstrate with unsettling insight the failure of sex to ward off intimations of mortality and post-mortality. Indeed, one might say that the diminishing returns of the avid sexual life are a leitmotif in the entire oeuvre.

I love the Atlantic.

(http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/kingsley-amis)

propinquity!

2009-07-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

propinquity in spanish is propinciudad! makes so much sense, love it.