MemeMachineGo!

OK, so I don’t go anywhere without my Palm, which has more calculator than I’ll ever need . Still I find myself yearning to teach myself all the speed arithmetic techniques of the Trachtenberg Method, also described briefly here .

Addition

The method advocated here involves the following principle: “Never count higher than eleven.” If any running column total exceeds 11, subtract 11 and put a tick mark in that column. When you reach the bottom, write down the running total, and under it write the number of tick marks. Now add these two rows using the strange rule of adding the two numbers in any column and the neighbor tick number. Write down the last digit and carry the other digit, if any, working right-to-left.

Example

      3  6  8  9

         7' 5' 8'

      9' 6  6  7'  column

      1  0  6' 4   of

      6  4' 9' 8'  figures

      ----------

      8  1  1  3   running totals

      1  2  3  3   ticks

      ----------

   2 '1  6  7  6   sum

This technique works on arbitrarily long columns of figures, and the columns can be dealt with in any order desired, except at the very last step.

Powell’s is having a contest to win the whole 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary . I’m seriously tempted to stuff the box. It says one entry per email address. Can I help it if it’s easy to generate an arbitrarily large number of email addresses?

‘cause we’ll run out of oil long before it’s an issue

Oil and gas will run out too fast for doomsday global warming scenarios to materialise, according to a controversial analysis presented this week at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. The authors warn that all the fuel will be burnt before there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to realise predictions of melting ice caps and searing temperatures.

Umm… what about the record-setting melting and temperatures we’re already seeing?

Learning better through listening faster :

The new software programs, DVD players and phone services rising to this challenge all take advantage of the human ability to comprehend speech much more quickly than the typical spoken rate of 140 to 180 words a minute. How many times as fast? “I’ve heard of instances where people go to 4X, and they still want it to go faster,” said Blake Erickson of Telex Communications, which makes “talking book” audio players for the educational market.

[…]”People who are listening at accelerated speeds learn just as much, and there’s some evidence they may learn even a bit more,” said Kevin Harrigan, an associate professor at the Center for Learning and Teaching Through Technology of the University of Waterloo in Canada. The consensus is that the extra brainpower needed to follow speedy speech enhances comprehension. “If you’re listening at accelerated speeds,” said Joel Galbraith, a researcher in Penn State’s instructional systems program, “it forces you to not do anything else, so you’re more focused on it.”

My improv troupe, Platypus Jones will be performing this Saturday night, October 18, at 8 PM at LaVal’s Subterranean Theatre, 1834 Euclid Ave. in Berkeley, just north of campus. Bring your friends and relations. I’ll be doing No You Didn’t , we’ll have another round of Bucket , the high-risk improv game in which one player must at all times have his or her head submerged in a bucket of water, and much, much more.

Hope to see you there.

I’ve been a neglectful blogger. As penance, I promise new content daily for the next month.

Yesterday, I turned 36. After dinner at Millennium , Pocahontas and I didn’t have much of an agenda, so we wandered to the Sony Metreon to see if maybe there were any interesting IMAX films playing.

There weren’t, but I’d heard tell there was a Dance Dance Revolution game there, so we sought out the arcade.

As a lad, I enjoyed playing video games, but gave up in the late eighties when every new game was copying Street Fighter, save maybe the ones that were coping Gauntlet. Whatever happened to each new game inventing its own genre?

So I’ve pretty much been away from arcades for some 15 years… I’d played DDR only twice before, once when my friend Johnzo took me to a dirt-cheap arcade in Portland, and another time on a friend’s Playstation.

The machines don’t even take quarters anymore — there are magnetic key cards. When I heard $5 was the minimum purchase and that’d get me only 2 games, or $10 for unlimited play of anything for the next 90 minutes, I turned around and was walking out. Pocahontas encouraged me to stay and play, and, heck, it was my birthday, so she was paying.

And we had a really great time.

I played DDR. And some fanciful taxi-driving game in which jumping ramps and hitting glowing things bestowed special powers like giant tires that let you roll over other cars, flight, a jet engine… that was a theme also in a street luge and a snowmobile game we played.

In Hyperbowling, one operates a giant bowling ball-sized trackball to roll your bowling ball across various city landscapes. I only played in ancient Rome — San Francisco looked much harder — you have to roll it uphill, dodging cable
cars.

One game was something like Extreme Skateboarding, in which the controller was a skateboard mounted an something like a giant joystick/paddle in which it could tilt in any direction as well as turn.

Then there was a Retro Room, in which half the games were after my time. I played a couple of games of Joust.

In a Slashdot thread on a new release of Nethack I was distressed to read one commenter say

I first tried playing Nethack a few years ago, and I couldn’t stand it. I’m a huge fan of RPGs and MUDs, but I just couldn’t get the whole nethack thing. For those of you who don’t like it either, try Falcon’s Eye (or another Nethack GUI—there’s many!)

Nethack’s an extraordinarily complicated game using ASCII graphics, in which the player is represented by an @ and beats up on monsters represented by all the letters of the alphabet. I spent a lot of time in college playing it. So that comment left me with a profound “Kids these days” sentiment. What, they don’t have a long enough attention span to play a game without graphics? Why when I was a kid, we used to hunt the wumpus in text and we were lucky!

But the calls to update the graphics were retroactively made somewhat worth it by this :

If they do, I can’t wait to see the fully raytraced, mip-mapped hi rez @ sign brutally attacking the letter Z.

But, anyway, after playing what kids these days are growing up with, I can see how the appeal of, say, Joust (or Tempest, or Centipede, or Time Pilot, or Frogger…) could be lost on them.

We had to ask the attendant how to do simultaneous two-person play a couple of times. I had the sudden horrifying realization that any 11-year-old would know how to do that and would be rolling his or her eyes about someone not getting it.

And I’m not used to that.

Robert James posted some corrections to a MMG! entry on For Us the Living . I appended them to the entry.

Thanks, Robert.

It was 1983. I’d been saving paper route money for years, and my parents generously contributed the last $500 to buy the then new Apple IIe .

• a 6502 running at over 1 MHz! (2% over, to be exact)
• 128K of RAM! (sort of — the 6502’s an 8-bit processor and could only address 64K, so it “bank-switched” between one 64K and another)
• A 5 1/4” floppy drive capable of storing 140K!
• A green monochrome monitor that could display text at 24 x 80!

And I loved it. Killer apps for me included the built-in BASIC interpreter, everything by the Beagle Brothers , Serpentine , Dino Eggs , Ultima III (or was it IV? or both?), and, once I got to college, the shareware terminal emulator a classmate had written — the first shareware I ever registered.

By contrast, my 4 oz. Palm m515 has a better processor running at 33 MHz and 16M of memory — as much as the Apple IIe + 116 disks. Let’s not even talk about the 64M SD card I’ve got in the Palm.

Eight years ago, when I faced moving to California, the Apple and its monitor had done nothing but sit in boxes in the closet for years. I knew that was all it was likely to continue to do. I sold it for $25 before I moved.

Sometimes I still have qualms about that. But I’ve got enough things sitting in my closet (figuratively — given my state of unpacking, sitting in the closet would be an improvement.)

And if I were ever really inspired, I could download an emulator . And I haven’t done that, either.

The Geekiest Hobbies of All Time , conveniently organized according to public humiliation, damage to sex life, and distinguishing characteristics.

3. Star Trek

Public Humiliation: 86.2%
These geeks used to be called Trekkies, but now insist on the less derogatory term Trekkers, which is the image control equivalent of adding a koala bear to the Nazi flag. They tend to be unobtrusive, but for every hundred Trekkers polite enough to obsess in their own homes, there’s some bastard singing at the karaoke bar in Klingon and a computer repairman demanding that his coworkers address him by his Starfleet rank. Before you laugh, though, there’s almost assuredly a third one building something that can vaporize your non-Star Trek ass from orbit.

Damage to Sex Life: 93.4%
While it’s true that ladies crave fat men with pointy ears and a strong armpit odor, those green aliens that Kirk used to bone created a standard of beauty for Trekkies that no Earth woman can live up to.

Distinguishing Characteristics: If someone approaching you is more machine than man and threatening to assimilate you, it’s either a Star Trek enthusiast or an android lost in time. Either way, it’s your duty as a human to smash it.

Of my current interests, only one made the list, comic books, and that just barely, at tenth.

Blogging wasn’t mentioned at all.

I feel like I dodged a bullet on that one.

6 years later, in 1989, I got a 386 box running DOS. I don’t remember much about its specs, but its hard drive was measured in megabytes, and its RAM wasn’t. It had an amber monochrome monitor.

The killer apps were Turbo C, so I could do my Numerical Computing homework on my very own computer — the first time I did a college programming assignment off of a college machine, Tetris (ultimately uninstalled — too much of a time sink), and, as ever, a terminal emulator.

I tried a couple of times to install Linux, but that was harder in those days. I could never configure my modem, which left me unable to look up HOWTO’s on the net to find out what I was doing wrong.

This was my primary computer for about 7 years (that’s right — I was running DOS on a 386 box through 1995… at least I wholly missed out on Windows 3.1.) I never bonded with it like I did with my Apple (yet the 386 was the one I took with me to California.)

When I replaced it, I gave it to a friend. I don’t miss it and I don’t think about it — in fact, it came as a surprise to me as I wrote this that, yeah, I had it for seven years.

Eliot writes of bipolar disorder :

The corollary of accepting that you have bipolar disease is never being able to trust your emotions at face value. While normal people have moodswings in the natural course of day-to-day living, once someone has become known to have a bipolar process all mood variability becomes suspect as a harbinger of a fullblown episode. It becomes difficult for the patient and those around her/him to avoid pathologizing all emotional swings. This often sullies the person’s ability to have ‘normal happiness’, in effect, without thinking that instead of something good it is a warning sign of an illness. In essence, bipolar disease is potentially a betrayal of one’s relationship with one’s own emotions. One learns, in a sense, that to trust being happy — which the bipolar patient desperately wants to be able to do — one has to ignore or deny that s/he is bipolar.

When I saw that headline in Slashdot , I was all excited that there’d been some breakthrough in stimulating the body to generate and release the drugs you need.

Imagine my disappointment that it’s just a new slow-release technique .

The chip’s surface is covered in little grooves, where drugs can be loaded. It is then covered with different types of polymer which slowly biodegrade releasing each dose at a different time.

Guess we’ll have to keep waiting to get high at will.

The one problem with the whole stalking the library thing is the lack of control over timing. Last week, I was excited to receive notice that the new Jonathan Lethem novel, Fortress of Solitude was in.

When I went to the library to pick it up, I found out that in the meantime, Quicksilver, the new Neal Stephenson, had arrived.

Fortress of Solitude isn’t a short book. Quicksilver is a very long one.

Now, the rules on holding books still hearken back to the days when they snailmailed notification. One has ten days from when it hits the hold shelf, so as to give one time after the notice arrives. I could have left it there for a week and a half.

But there’s a stack of holds on it, and I’d’ve felt bad about that. So now I’ve got under three weeks left to read some 1400 pages.

As problems go, it’s a pretty good one.

I graduated in grad school in ‘91, and was making real money. So why did I go five more years with a 386 DOS box?

Well, what would I have gotten? And why?

A Windows 3.1 box? Yuck. Amigas were pretty nice machines, but the platform was pretty clearly not going anywhere. A Linux box could have been fun, but I was somewhat soured on it by prior installation attempts.

By now, I’m sure there’s someone on the edge of his or her seat, waving a hand and shouting “I know! I know!” All right. Yes? Yes, you.

“The correct answer is a Macintosh!”

I have a strong verbal bias. I like command lines. I feel hamstrung by a system that forces use of a GUI to do everything.

And I don’t like being protected from myself.

Like the man says :

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners. The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner’s drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner’s drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other. If you lose it, you just go to the local plumbing supply store and buy another chunk of pipe.

During the Eighties I did some construction work. One day, another worker leaned a ladder against the outside of the building that we were putting up, climbed up to the second-story level, and used the Hole Hawg to drill a hole through the exterior wall. At some point, the drill bit caught in the wall. The Hole Hawg, following its one and only imperative, kept going. It spun the worker’s body around like a rag doll, causing him to knock his own ladder down. Fortunately he kept his grip on the Hole Hawg, which remained lodged in the wall, and he simply dangled from it and shouted for help until someone came along and reinstated the ladder.

I myself used a Hole Hawg to drill many holes through studs, which it did as a blender chops cabbage. I also used it to cut a few six-inch-diameter holes through an old lath-and-plaster ceiling. I chucked in a new hole saw, went up to the second story, reached down between the newly installed floor joists, and began to cut through the first-floor ceiling below. Where my homeowner’s drill had labored and whined to spin the huge bit around, and had stalled at the slightest obstruction, the Hole Hawg rotated with the stupid consistency of a spinning planet. When the hole saw seized up, the Hole Hawg spun itself and me around, and crushed one of my hands between the steel pipe handle and a joist, producing a few lacerations, each surrounded by a wide corona of deeply bruised flesh. It also bent the hole saw itself, though not so badly that I couldn’t use it. After a few such run-ins, when I got ready to use the Hole Hawg my heart actually began to pound with atavistic terror.

But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner’s product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user’s failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.

A smaller tool is dangerous too, but for a completely different reason: it tries to do what you tell it to, and fails in some way that is unpredictable and almost always undesirable. But the Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his master’s instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disastrous, unforeseen consequences.

Pre-Hole Hawg, I used to examine the drill selection in hardware stores with what I thought was a judicious eye, scorning the smaller low-end models and hefting the big expensive ones appreciatively, wishing I could afford one of them babies. Now I view them all with such contempt that I do not even consider them to be real drills—merely scaled-up toys designed to exploit the self-delusional tendencies of soft-handed homeowners who want to believe that they have purchased an actual tool. Their plastic casings, carefully designed and focus-group-tested to convey a feeling of solidity and power, seem disgustingly flimsy and cheap to me, and I am ashamed that I was ever bamboozled into buying such knicknacks.

It is not hard to imagine what the world would look like to someone who had been raised by contractors and who had never used any drill other than a Hole Hawg. Such a person, presented with the best and most expensive hardware-store drill, would not even recognize it as such. He might instead misidentify it as a child’s toy, or some kind of motorized screwdriver. If a salesperson or a deluded homeowner referred to it as a drill, he would laugh and tell them that they were mistaken—they simply had their terminology wrong. His interlocutor would go away irritated, and probably feeling rather defensive about his basement full of cheap, dangerous, flashy, colorful tools.

Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor’s sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously.

And just about every experience I had with old MacOSes made Windows 95 or 98 look like paragons of stability. Particularly fun was the Mac I had on my desk for a while at work, that would routinely freeze up during system shutdown. Now, since the Mac designers were so thoughtful as to not include something so un-user-friendly as an off-switch, my choices were to either do a hardware reset, and reboot the system so that I could shut it down, or to pull the power plug.

Mac devotees have insisted that I only dealt with badly configured Macs or especially bad programs such that they crashed the OS. And unless Apple truly perfected brainwashing, or these people were all in deep denial due to their need to justify using a Mac, maybe this was the case. But my experience was consistent, and it was mine.

The current OS X machines, on the other hand, look very nice, and if I had money to burn, I’d probably have a G4 Powerbook .

As of today, MemeMachineGo! is 13th on Technorati ‘s list of Top 50 Interesting Newcomers .

In the Making Recursion Work for You Dept., it looks like I was #41 yesterday, but this blog reprints the top 50 list in its sidebar, so when Technorati spidered it, it bumped my new links from blogs count from 2 to 3.

And the other new links are from people reprinting in their entirety Boing Boing entries I’d suggested, complete with the accreditation link, rather than people specifically linking to MemeMachineGo! or one of its entries, per se.

But what the hell — I’ll take it.

Holy crap! Amazon now supports searching the text of books.

I tried “Edison’s last breath” and Tim Powers’ Expiration Date was choice #2. “ten-point steel” and Slan was #3. “The winter of our discontent” and “The Tragedy of Richard III” was #103 (okay, okay, the deck’s pretty loaded on that one.).

And I tried a lot of less specific phrases and got a lot of junk. Right now you can’t distinguish a text search from a search on title, author, subject, and it looks like when it’s grasping at straws, it weights the results heavily toward books that are popular (not an unreasonable choice.)

I was corresponding with my friend Johnzo today, and asked him if he’d tried it. Forgetting that he moved to Seattle a while ago. And was working for Amazon. And not knowing he’d been working on this very project. Doh!

Boing Boing linked to this Wired article on the subject (from which I cribbed the entry title above.)

O’Reilly’s been doing something similar for some time, the Safari Bookshelf which allows you to search not only their collection of computer reference books, but a large number of books from other publishers. Then for as little as $10/month, you can keep a number of titles on your virtual bookshelf, and browse them to see the context of your search result to solve a given problem, or read them cover-to-cover. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while — $10 a month for all the O’Reilly you can eat is a good deal.

Why this Interweb thing might actually end up downright useful by and by.

Maybe he could teach

Aides say Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger has been too busy setting up his administration to consider whether to take the same sexual harassment prevention training that thousands of state workers and the 120 members of the Legislature are required to take.

=v= I've got no phone line, no cable. Anything involving wires in New York City takes forever to work out. (Perhaps I should mention at this juncture that I've relocated again. New and improved MemeMachineGo, now with added bicoastal flavor!)

A friend of mine has no modem. During the blackout, her laptop did okay, but her modem was fried. Perhaps there was a surge in the phone line? Nobody knows, nobody wants to honor any warranties to fix it.

We are Modemless Brooklyn.

Modemless Brooklyn has a few options. We could head over to an overpriced Internet café, not far from where Gerald Minna muttered the words "motherless Brooklyn," and try to blog while the loudmothed proprietor and his buddies call each other "bitch" while playing violent videogames in the next room; or I could take my laptop over to her house, when our infamously-busy New York schedules permit. Mostly, though, we sneak time at work, hoping nobody's looking over our shoulders.

In Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy to be (the last volume hasn’t been finished yet), he’s up to various postmodern games, and it’s a book within the book as well as a book within a book within the book in an entirely different way. The protagonist says at one point something much like “I’m writing a book too complicated to be understood in a single reading, and too long to ever be reread.”

In Quicksilver, too, I think I can detect the author speaking:

“He is very likely named after Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz.”

“A friend of yours and Sir Isaac’s?”

“Of mine, yes. Of Sir Isaac’s, no — and therein lies a tale too long to tell now.”

“Would it fill a book?”

“In truth, ‘twould fill several — and it is not even finished yet.”

“When shall it be finished?”

“At times, I fear never.”

He has some more fun later:

“…Then I nipped up to Oxford, meaning only to pay a call on John Wilkins and pick up some copies of _Cryptonomicon_.”

“What is that?” Ben wants to know.

“A very queer old book, dreadfully thick, and full of nonsense,” says Godfrey. “Papa uses it to keep the door from blowing shut.”

I’m enjoying it immensely.

It was one year ago today that Pocahontas and I first met face to face (having previously exchanched a couple of email messages after I replied to her profile on match.com .)

We’ve decided that our anniversary is a movable feast — the last Saturday in October, the Saturday before Daylight Savings ends. So yesterday we celebrated by going to Cafe Strada, where we first met.

Like last time, she was late (which is uncharacteristic: normally she’s very punctual.) Last time I was reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (borrowed from Jym) while I waited, this time it was Quicksilver, borrowed from the Berkeley Public Library.

The conversation had been fun and fairly easy from the start, but was still laced with not knowing each other and wanting to make a good impression. And apparently we did, ‘cause the next night we made another date for later that week, and now here we are sharing a mortgage.

And the conversation’s much more fun (and easier) than ever.

Happy anniversary, honey. I love you.

On the consequences of suggesting that grizzlies and humans could co-exist :

The internationally famous research by two Canadian naturalists showing that grizzly bears in the snow-swept Russian wilderness can live peacefully with humans has ended in a brutal tragedy. […]

The dozens of massive Siberian grizzly bears whose lives were catalogued for the groundbreaking eight-year study have been slaughtered in their nature sanctuary as a message to the Canadian researchers, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, to abandon the project. […] The people who killed the bears nailed the gall bladder of a baby grizzly to the research station’s kitchen wall as a gruesome taunt.

After searching fruitlessly for two months for the bears’ remains, Mr. Russell arrived back in Canada last Friday and broke his silence only after a week’s soul-searching. “The bears were killed so we would go home,” he said in an exclusive interview with The Globe from his ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills of Alberta, adding later, “It is a brutal ending to our research.”

(Via Meat Facts )

I commented previously as to how yesterday’s videogames might seem dull to a kid raised on today’s . Well, Electronic Gaming Monthly did the experiment . Some modern pre-teens on Space Invaders:

EGM: This game was so popular in Japan that—

John: They made it into a TV show?

EGM: Well, no. It was so popular that they ran out—

John: Oh, did they make collectible trading cards for it?

EGM: Um, no. It was so popular that there was a shortage of the coins used to play it.

John: But you can get this game on a cell phone. Why would you want to pay for it in an arcade?

Andrew: I’ve seen a game like this in the arcade, but it’s tons faster.

Sheldon: …and it’s in color.

Andrew: …and your spaceship looks more like a spaceship.

Nico: …and not like a little box.

Gordon: It looks like food.

Andrew: Where’s my rapid fire?

Nico: The aliens look like spiders…

Becky: …and squids and crabs.

John: Maybe this is what seafood will do in a thousand years.

EGM: How long could you play this game before you got bored?

Sheldon: About 15 minutes.

Andrew: If you take it on the road and play it on your cell phone, then you might play it pretty long.

Nico: There’s nothing else to do.

Andrew: Except look at nature.

EGM: Would you rather play this or play outside?

Andrew: Outside. [editorial note: that’s a low blow.]

Nico: This game needs a super bomb or something.

Tim: This is nothing compared to Grand Theft Auto III, because you can’t steal a taxi cab, pick up somebody, then drive into the ocean with him.

Kirk: And you can’t pick up an AK-47 and go kill—hey, those aliens on the top row, you use them in EGM for stuff.

EGM: Yeah, we use them to end our articles. They do kinda look like they’re from Space Invaders, don’t they?

Tim: They’re going to sue you.

Kirk: I’m sure everyone who made this game is dead by now.

(Via Boing Boing )

12-year-old schoolboy researches a term paper on a local bridge on-line and his school gets a visit from the FBI .

This fall, Dorsey Boyle, a middle-school teacher at Boys’ Latin, the venerable Lake Avenue private school, assigned his classes a series of research papers. The first, on some famous individual. Seventh-grader John McLean picked Abner Doubleday, the baseball legend. The second, on some famous structure. McLean picked the [Chesapeake] Bay Bridge.

“He went to the Internet to research as much as he could,” Bruce McLean, John’s dad, was saying last week. He laughed a little ruefully. “He wanted to know how it was built and financed, how much concrete and steel went into it. But he was having trouble getting information. So Mr. Boyle told him a couple of Web sites where he could ask questions.”

One was a Bay Bridge Web site. The other, the Maryland Transportation Authority’s.

[…] When the Boys’ Latin middle school headmaster, Rick Brocato, went to school the previous morning, he had an unexpected visitor: Jim Drotar of the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force.

“We need verification,” Drotar said. “About someone who claims he’s a student here. It’s about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.”

(Via Post-Atomic )