MemeMachineGo!

On graduation, Canadian engineers receive a stainless steel ring to be worn on the pinky of the working hand.

The word “pedigree” is derived from the French “pied de grue” (no relation): foot of the crane.

What on earth does a crane’s foot have to do with genealogy? Well, descendants in a pedigree are indicated with something like this /|\, branching out from the names of their parents. That mark does somewhat resemble the foot of a crane.

Bakku-shan is apparently Japanese for “a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front.” The Japanese Google image search for it yields mostly pictures of pets, though, leading me to suspect it’s applied to anything facing away from you that’s considered cute.

Hairy sweatshops:

A factory will send a representative out to a village, or even to places like monasteries, and there he or she will contract with the residents to grow hair for a specified period of time, depending on the length of hair the factory is looking for. Human hair grows at an average rate of 1/2 inch a month, so that a 5 year contract will yield approximately 30 inches of hair.

There are very specific guidelines the growers must follow if they wish to enter into the contract. They must use natural herbal preparations to wash and condition their hair, they must never use blowdryers, curling irons, or commercial styling products, they must not color or perm it, and they must keep the hair covered to protect it from pollution and sun damage.

At the end of the contracted time period, the factories go in and “harvest” the hair, and then pay the growers for their “crop”.

Cue up “Big Time” by Peter Gabriel:

HI THERE!

Zed’s none too big on making splashy announcements of major events, so on the occasion of my assumption of full authoring status here at MMG, it’s up to me to toot my own horn. No problem, got years of practice at that.

First of all, thanks to Zed and Jym for allowing me aboard. A couple of years ago, when I first discovered this blog, I offhandedly mentioned that I might like to run one of my own, and Zed offered to set me up. I turned him down, but finally the temptation got the better of me. The fame, fortune, and glamour of the blogosphere have proved too strong to resist. Plus, of course, there’s the opportunity to share my babble with the world at large.

I also want to thank Jen at Circadian Shift and Adam at Mookie, whose blogs I’ve followed for the past couple of years and who’ve occasionally posted things at my suggestion. (Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately, Adam.)

So if you’re wondering what Jimcat is all about, a good first source is the “About Jimcat” link on the upper left. Yeah, it’s got dead links and nonexistent pages and large parts of it haven’t been updated in nearly a decade, but it’s still me.

As for my posting habits, here’s a summary that I sent Zed when I asked for the keys to the kingdom: “I figure I’d post regularly but not daily, anywhere from a few posts per week to a few per month. Most frequent topics would be transportation, generational and pop-cultural cycles, computer strategy games, science fiction conventions, and observations on human stupidity.”

Now it’s just a matter of churning out the posts. Stay tuned, I’ve got lots to say, oh yes indeed.

Won’t somebody think of the clouds?

At the Cloud Appreciation Society we believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wheresoever we find it.

I’ve engaged in my first bit of activism as an Irish citizen. (My first bit of anything besides getting a passport, actually.)

I sent an e-postcard to preserve tax exemptions for artists in Ireland.

I saw an RPI Players production of Inherit the Wind in 1989. Oh, ho, ho, thought I. Look at how backwards we were as recently as 1925 for the Scopes Monkey Trial to have been a hard-fought battle.

Back in May, there was some fuss over Intelligent Design proponents trying to get the Kansas Board of Education to change its definition of science

Advocates of “intelligent design” are pushing the board to reject a definition limiting science to natural explanations for what’s observed in the world. Instead, they want to define it as “a systematic method of continuing investigation,” without specifying what kind of answer is being sought. The definition would appear in the introduction to the state’s science standards.

I actually had to admire the chutzpah of it.

But not the intent. And they’ve won.

The Nature of Science, 2001 (large PDF):

Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us. Science does so through the use of observation, experimentation, and logical argument while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

The Nature of Science, revised (another one):

Science is a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observations, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena. Science does so while maintaining strict empirical standards and healthy skepticism. Scientific explanations are built on observations, hypotheses, and theories. A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world that can be used to build more complex inferences and explanations. A theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate observations, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

Well, hey, that doesn’t sound so bad, right? We’ve even still got (elsewhere) “Science studies natural phenomena by formulating explanations that can be tested against the natural world.” And “Scientific explanations are consistent with experimental and/or observational data and testable by scientists through additional experimentation and/or observation.”

But they’ll be next. The Right is once again fighting to control the language. ‘cause when you’ve got that, you’ve already won — the rest is just cleanup.

We’re losing.

This has been out for a while, and commented on in a few other places such as Making Light and Slate. But I thought it was still worth posting here.

It's been said that "military intelligence" is an oxymoron. But every now and then, a truly intelligent, clear-thinking, and dedicated person will speak up and provide some reasssurance that the defense of this country and what it stands for are in good hands. Or at least could be, if such people weren't stifled and ignored by people with too much political power and too little brainpower.

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff at the Department of State, is a very smart man who's not afraid to tell the truth. And the truth isn't very welcome if you're a George W. Bush loyalist.

This guy is not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. He was a director of the Marine Corps War College, and the president he most admires is the elder Bush. He spoke at the New America Foundation, a think tank that advocates a strong American presence on the world scene. I've seen this speech excerpted in a few different articles, but I find it so powerful and compelling that I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Here's what he has to say about the current government:

And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.... Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you’re talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don’t get our act together.

[T]he case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.

And on the subject of our consumption-based society, he comes out and says what everyone must realize, just as a fact of daily living, but no one is willing to discuss the broader implications:

The other thing that no one ever likes to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption ... we consume 60 percent of the world’s resources. Well, we have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation – and I don’t see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this administration, in my mind – or we better be ready to take those assets. We had a discussion in policy planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields in the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N. trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly. That’s how serious we thought about it.

A full transcript of the speech can be found at: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/Wilkerson%20Speech%20--%20WEB.htm

Take a dozen young Japanese women, strap meat to their foreheads, and sic a giant lizard on them. What do you get? Pure TV gold.

Blogging about work: if you’re posting negative things about your specific employer, it can be dangerous.

But if you’re posting fictionalized stories about a crazy workplace that just might bear some resemblance to someplace you’ve worked before, it can be great entertainment.

If you’ve ever gotten a corporate memo that reads something like this:

Attention all employees:

Congratulations on the “storm” of goodwill you showed in the first annual company wide hurricane relief campaign, “Winkyshock, Inc. Cares.” Unfortunately because of some weaknesses in the coordination schema, some of your workspaces look like it was them that got hit by a hurricane. Because neatness is a Winkyshock “Core Value,” all employees are reminded to report to their departmental relief coordinator with their donated items by the COB tomorrow. Remember, “we can’t help others, if our working area is cluttered.”

Now, get back to work.

… then you’ve probably worked at someplace like Winkyshock, Inc.

I’ve been known to do something along those lines myself. A few years back, I wrote a story that was partly inspired by the Bastard Operator From Hell and partly by my own work at a computing center.

On the other hand, former employers are more safe, especially if your period of employment was long enough ago that the statute of limitations has expired. And if you worked for a company that’s since gone out of busienss, well, I consider anything to be fair game.

All of this is by way of introduction to some posts that I will make in the coming days. I dug up some old files with my reminiscences of working in retail hell, for a now-defunct department store chain. I’ll be posting a short piece or two each day, starting tomorrow.

Twenty years ago at this time, I was working as an “associate” at Bradlees department store in Manchester, CT.

Five years ago at around this time, Bradlees announced that it was going down for the last time, and would close its doors forever in early 2001.

I have many stories from my Bradlees days, some better than others. I’ll share some of my favorites here.

Bradlees, as part of the Stop and Shop Companies, was a union shop. In my youthful idealism, having recently studied the Progressive Age and the Depression in my history class and caught part of F.I.S.T. on television, I was caught up in the fervor of a moment that had long since passed. I felt a swell of pride at becoming a card-carrying member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, and became familiar with all of the union’s propaganda on the benefits it brought to the working people.

This is not to say that I have become anti-union since then; I still recognize that unions can do a lot of good in today’s working environment. But as time went on and I grew up, I noticed a lot more of the corruption and abuse that takes place in the upper ranks of these organizations.

And not all of their policies are fair to the workers. I received an object lesson in this soon after I left Bradlee’s. The union sent me a letter saying that if I wanted to remain a member, I had to keep paying dues even though I was no longer employed with one of their companies. If I didn’t keep up my membership, I would have to pay all my back dues if I ever wanted to work in a UFCW shop again. At that point I said, “The United Food and Commercial Workers Union can kiss my ass.”

When I first got to college, they had all incoming freshmen take an essay test to determine basic proficiency in writing. The topic I chose was, “Identify a problem at a place you have worked, and propose a solution.” This remains in my mind to this day, because the problem was one I encountered constantly at Bradlees, and it still exists in just about every large department store.

The issue is that, whenever the store has a sale, inevitably some of the items advertised for the sale are not going to be in stock. Bradlees, like most stores, had a reasonable policy where they would give a raincheck entitling the customer to the sale price on the out-of-stock item when it came in. The problem was in communicating to the customers which items were, or were not, actually on sale.

Let me give an example. Sunday was the start of all sales at Bradlees. Every Sunday, the store would run a flyer in the major local paper, advertising all the items on sale that week. So let’s say the Proctor-Silex model 50 toaster was on sale, and our store just happened not to get any of those toasters for that week (or didn’t get enough, and sold out on the first day). The official store policy was to put up a small sign, about eight by ten inches, in the appropriate department saying “This item is not in stock, please pick up a rain check at the customer service desk.” Naturally, since customers would be looking for the Proctor-Silex 50 toaster, the employees would put the sign near the other Proctor-Silex toasters.

Now, enter the customer. The customer doesn’t want to see that the item they came to buy isn’t available. They want their toaster, and they want it now. They go to the toaster shelves, and they see the Proctor-Silex 30 toaster, and the Proctor-Silex 70 toaster, and if they see the sign at all, they probably ignore it. They came to get a Proctor-Silex toaster that was on sale, and here it is. So they take their booty up to the register, and the cashier rings up the price, which naturally isn’t the sale price. Argument ensues, which always plays out to the same predictable result. Customer says that the price is wrong. Cashier calls the department for a price check. Employee from the department comes up to the register with a copy of the flyer, points out the item that was on sale, points out that the one the customer has isn’t the one that’s on sale. Employees recommend that the customer get a rain check at the customer service desk. Customer grumbles, complains, occasionally curses. Employees shrug. Cycle repeats endlessly with new customers and new sales.

The solution I came up with for the purposes of the essay was to have a prominent sign at the front of the store listing the sale items that were not in stock, and directing people immediately to the customer service desk. I got a good grade on the essay and got to skip the “English for Non-Literate Geeks” course, but realistically, I don’t think my solution would have made it any better. The real solution, of course, is to make smarter customers.

While browsing news sites this morning, I saw a headline that read “Radish in intensive care after murder attempt.”

I thought: someone named Radish was the victim of an attack, but the headline makes it look like the victim was a vegetable.

Nope. It really was an attempted murder of a radish. As in a Japanese daikon radish.

From the article:

The “daikon” radish, shaped like a giant carrot, first made the news months ago when it was noticed poking up through asphalt along a roadside in the town of Aioi, population 33,289.

This week local residents, who had nicknamed the vegetable “Gutsy Radish,” were shocked — and in some cases moved to tears — when they found it had been decapitated.

Like any large organization, my Bradlees store had a wide variety of people working for it. Some were more pleasant to deal with than others. My manager, Janice, was a rather brash and stubborn woman in her early twenties, who seemed to get an ego boost from being able to boss around a few high school kids. I worked for her in the Men’s (clothing) department, and when nothing special was going on, I was tasked with keeping the “basics” (socks and underwear) area clean and well-stocked. Not too challenging for any advanced primate.

As I’ve mentioned before, Sunday was the start of the weekly sales at Bradlees, and that meant that Saturday nights were often busy as we got all of the sale items out to the floor, and prepared the signs for the next morning. I soon noticed that the Girls’ department, right next to mine, had some unreliable employees who were prone to calling in sick on Saturdays, leaving the manager there to try to handle all the sale preparation by herself. Sue, the Girls’ manager, was much easier to get along with than Janice, and several times I helped her out when she was swamped with work on Saturday nights. For some reason Janice didn’t like this, and thought I should be counting socks instead of working in another department. After a couple of arguments about this, we took it to the next higher manager, and I was told that since I worked for Janice, I should do what she told me to do and not worry about what was happening in the other departments.

Shortly thereafter, this became a moot point, as I was transferred to the “front end”, i.e., the cash registers. It was very strongly implied that this was because the managers wanted me to be where they could keep an eye on me in case I got any dangerous ideas about doing work that needed to be done instead of just doing what I was told.

According to Bradlees policy, a cashier had three primary responsibilities: to ring up the prices accurately, collect the proper amount of money, and keep the line moving. I had no problem with this; it appealed to my sense of orderliness. However, I discovered some room for creativity and fun even within this rigid framework.

One of the biggest sources of delays in department store checkout lines is the price check. One of the biggest reasons for price checks is items without a price tag. I decided that, in the interest of keeping the line moving, I would dispense with price checks whenever possible.

If you’ve ever worked in a department store, you’ve no doubt encountered this pricing scheme or something very similar. At Bradlees, everything we sold was categorized by department codes and SKU’s (Stock Keeping Units – not that Bradlees ever told us what it meant). If you entered the department code and SKU into the register, most of the time the price would come up automatically. Department codes were two digits, and there were about fifty of them in the whole store, so they were easy enough to memorize (and we had a list of them under the register just in case). The SKU was six digits, and most of the time they matched the six digits on the UPC bar code. So if someone came up with a boxed item, it was pretty easy to find the department code, enter the digits from the UPC on the box, and voila, there was your price. Sometimes this wasn’t enough. Not every item’s tag or package had a UPC code, and sometimes even with the code, the price wouldn’t come up automatically. At this point, I thought it proper to reintroduce the ancient custom of haggling.

Most of the time this was quite easy to do. I’d simply say to the customer, “I think this shirt is $14.99.” The vast majority of them agreed with whatever I suggested. After four or five months of working in the store, I had a good idea of what things cost, and I was always fair in my estimates (I had no interest in ripping anyone off, and if I gave prices that were too low, someone might get suspicious). Sometimes a customer would catch on to the game, and suggest a lower price. I’d haggle for the fun of it, and we’d come up with a reasonable price that was probably not too far off the actual price tag. It took less time than a price check, and was more satisfying for me and the customer. Once a customer did insist on a price check, and I offered double or nothing: if the price was less than what I’d quoted, I’d give it to him for free, and if it was more, I’d charge double. The customer was so taken aback that he just agreed to my price on the spot. Anyone could have reported me to the managers for this, and it probably would have gotten me fired. Since I continued in my employment, I assume that no one ever complained.

The problem with naming my own prices was that every item had to be entered into the register with a department code and SKU – this was the real reason that price checks were needed. There is always a loophole, though, and I learned that there is a “dummy” SKU of 100-100 that can be used if the real one can’t be found. This was only supposed to be used in emergencies, but I decided that keeping the line moving on busy days constituted a sufficient emergency, and used it whenever possible to avoid a price check.

Now, you may remember that I mentioned earlier that one of a cashier’s duties is to make sure they collect the right amount of money. The register till is one of a store’s biggest sources of lost revenue, whether through fraud or carelessness. All of the cashiers were evaluated for the accuracy of their “count” – i.e., how well the amount recorded by the register matched the amount actually collected in the till. I’ve always been quite conscientious about money and counting, so this was never a problem with me. However, all that entering of department codes and SKU’s was not going unnoticed. I discovered this one day when the front end manager said to me, with a puzzled look, “Jim, you have the best accuracy on your counts of any cashier – but you also entered more 100-100’s than all the other cashiers put together.” Not knowing whether to commend me or reprimand me, she took the safe course and did neither.

As is sometimes the case when I’ve been scarce from blogging, I’ve been playing with my computer. I learned Ruby, which is like the offspring of Smalltalk and LISP raised in the wild by Perl. I like it. I’ve been customizing my Ubuntu Linux box and playing the arcade games of my youth on MAME. (Pocahontas has officially endorsed my building a MAME cabinet for my mid-life crisis — I’ll take her up on it at some point.)

But it’s time to stop neglecting my blog. I hereby commit to posting daily. For at least a week.

=v= In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, Beijing is hoping to clean up embarassing English translations around the city, in a program named "Use Accurate English to Welcome the Olympics Public Bilingual Sign Standardization Drive." China Daily reports on some recent discoveries:

Feel squeamish about entering "Racist Park"? ... Or look around for shady customers when you see "The slippery are very crafty"? [...]

There's nothing racist about the park, it's actually the Park of Chinese Ethnic Minorities along the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing. ... "Slippery" refers to the road and not any dodgy characters.

They've got their work cut out for them, particularly in the realm of T-shirts. Beijing has set up a website, www.bjenglish.com.cn, where English-speakers can suggest corrections (provided they can navigate a website written in Chinese). But who's going to tell them that the website's name is a euphemism for fellatio with a bit of a spin?

In this incredible optical illusion, an angry face and a calm face seem to swap places when you squint at them from a distance.

An innovator immediately seized upon the possibilities.

The naughty part of me has decided to see if it’s possible to do a similar thing with text — the idea of a t-shirt with something offensive on it that turns into something innocuous if anyone comes to complain tickles my fancy.

Hence: Buttons.

The U.S. Treasury Dept.’s Bureau of Public Debt is right up front about the increase in the U.S. national debt.

Here’s a version with the percentage increases included.

Notice any patterns regarding when the Party of Fiscal Responsibility was in power vs. those evil tax and spend Democrats? Nah, me neither.

Malcolm Gladwell tends to write articles in which he wrests surprising conclusions from a close examination of the things that surround us. So when I saw he’d written this piece on the U.S. health system that was quoted on Dave Ex Machina:

One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

I thought his talents were pretty much being wasted. It doesn’t take much paying attention to notice that our health system succeeds in letting us pay more to get a lot less.

And its conclusions were more obvious than typical for a Gladwell piece, but that’s a high standard — it’s worth reading.

A clever 19-year-old on a community website, MySpace, figured out a way to take advantage of an Internet Explorer bug so that IE users who viewed his profile would automatically list him as their friend and their hero, and add the code that did this to their own profiles. This is his timeline of the release of his script.

12:34 pm: You have 73 friends.
I decided to release my little popularity program. I’m going to be famous…among my friends.

1 hour later, 1:30 am: You have 73 friends and 1 friend request.
One of my friends’ girlfriend looks at my profile. She’s obviously checking me out. I approve her inadvertent friend request and go to bed grinning.

7 hours later, 8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests.
Woah. I did not expect this much. I’m surprised it even worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I’ll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.

1 hour later, 9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests.
Oh wait, it’s exponential, isn’t it. Shit.

I love that part.

If you’re alive, you’re duplicating your DNA. Odds are good you’re infringing on a patent.

OK, that’s not true. It does mean that you can’t put genes to specific purposes covered by the patents (regardless of whether you were born making copies of them.)

And the 20% figure is based on an estimate of how many human genes there are — it’s an estimate that’s looked good for a couple of years, but it’s a hard problem.

Just in time for the holidays, here’s a recipe for home-made tofurkey.

From Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist:

Vanna reached unsteadily off the barstool, pulled up a knit Guatemalan shoulder bag, and produced a brand-new cell phone the size of her forearm. “Instead, I got me this k-rad Motorola Iridium.”

“Damn,” said Starlitz, gawking. “That’s the first one of those I’ve seen!”

“Instant global access,” Vanna announced, bravely sniffing back her tears. “It’s linked up, like, literally out of this world.”

“Yeah, that gizmo is totally not of this century. It’s got the new stuff!”

“Calls cost six bucks a minute!” she said proudly. “If you pay for ‘em, that is. Of course, this unit’s been phreaked.”

“Well, of course.”

Starlitz stared in silent hunger at the satellite telephone. The device stank of futurity. They would probably go broke, being so far ahead of the curve and all, but the gizmo was an utter harbinger of things to come, like discovering a fossil in reverse. Starlitz felt a powerful urge to grip the phone, caress it, perhaps bite it, but he restrained himself. Vanna was sure to take that gesture all wrong.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about the Nokia 770. An 8 oz. handheld Linux computer with wireless Internet connectivity. An 800×480 pixel screen that, from the pictures, makes for better portable websurfing than anything short of a full laptop. It’s not weighed down with a stupid thumb keyboard — input’s by stylus (unfortunately, no word yet of a SHARK implementation, or anything other than a lame virtual QWERTY keyboard) or an external keyboard. Dozens of applications have been ported to it already (Nokia released a development kit a while back.) And all for $360. It’s got the new stuff. I want to eat it.

And, like Iridium, it’s doomed. It’ll be a favorite of geeks, and I bet a decade from now there’ll still be an on-line forum for its hackers and users. But it doesn’t replace a cellphone; it doesn’t replace a PDA (it could, but it’s shipping without PIM software); it doesn’t replace a laptop. It’s too bulky for anyone to want to carry everywhere, and how often do you really need portable net access when you couldn’t, without much more difficulty, have brought a laptop? (It’s not even cheaper than low-end laptops — the Dell Inspiron 2200 has been going for around $400 after rebates; rumor has it that Walmart will be selling an under $400 laptop as a Black Friday deal.) Its CPU is too slow and it has too little memory.

Oh, but. It looks like it’d make a decent e-book reader, something at which PDAs and laptops are clumsy. It could be used as a arbitrarily sophisticated remote control for a home network. I read somewhere that someone’s already using it to stream audio from his home network — all he has to do is attach it to powered speakers in whatever room he’s in.And the really interesting things will come later — the ones that aren’t obvious in foresight.

Another development I’m excited about is that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab demonstrated the hand-cranked (!) $100 laptop. I’m not sure how well it’ll help in directly improving the lot of impoverished children, the program’s stated intent, but I think the spin-off technology from this effort will, in the long term, be a great boon for everyone (including said impoverished children.)

I’m also excited about electronic ink, a display technology that apparently looks close to printed text, remains easy to read in direct sunlight, and consumes very little power. Sony’s selling an e-book reader with it, but only in Japan. Sadly, I haven’t seen e-ink in use yet; apparently, it’s also conspicuously slow compared to other computer display technologies — even e-books will have a pause to turn the page. It’s probably not suited for most other tasks. But if I won the lottery, I’d drop $3000 on a prototype kit.

I’m not going to get a Nokia 770. If it already had SHARK, it came with a Bluetooth keyboard, it could replace the PIM functionality I get out of my Palm, and I knew I could virtually rotate the screen into portrait mode (including sensibly rotating the functions of the directional buttons), well, I’d probably fail to resist it. But I’m worried they may have rushed it for a Xmas release (there have been reports of poor connectivity; its CPU is weak; its memory is low. I’ll let the early adopters sort out the early problems (and pray they don’t add a thrice-damned thumb keyboard in the meantime.)

In a year or two, could we combine all of the above? Give me something the size of the Nokia, with the hand-cranked power of the $100 laptop, beefier CPU and memory, and with a color display on one side, and electronic ink on the other, suitable for both e-book reading and general computing. And all for $200?

No, probably not. But I bet the next couple of years won’t have a shortage of gadgets to drool over.

(And while Iridium filed for Ch. 11 bankruptcy in 1999, it still exists, and one could even still get a satellite phone.)

An exhausting series of connections:

We begin this journey — for no particular reason — with the aforementioned Phil Hartman, who was a highschool friend of Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who later became a disciple of Charlie Manson, a jailhouse correspondent of John Hinckley, and the attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford, who was once a roommate of modeling entrepreneur Harry Conover, whose wife was the infamous Candy Jones, who was ‘treated’ by CIA-linked hypnotist William Jennings Bryan, who also ‘treated’ the purported Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, whose name was written repetitively throughout the diaries of Sirhan Sirhan, who was also ‘treated’ by Bryan, who served as the technical director on The Manchurian Candidate, which was directed by John Frankenheimer, at whose beach house a dinner was held on June 5, 1968 whose attendees included “Mama” Cass Elliot, Roman Polanski, and Sharon Tate, who was killed just over a year later by followers of Charlie Manson […]

It goes on and on and on.

I thought I’d put links to Black Friday ads and Buy Nothing Day in one blog entry, and let them fight it out.

And here are some images of American mass consumption.

=v= Just found a lovely little teevee story about people torching their own SUVs to (1) avoid high gas prices and (2) collect on insurance. The script takes that sympathetic-to-"you" tone:

Gas is costing more, as much as three bucks a gallon in recent months.

So if you are driving a gas-guzzler, you may be feeling a pinch. For some the answer is torching the vehicle.

Not to worry, though, because even though you're running over and killing people at an alarming rate, it's "just an accident;" and if you're committing insurance fraud, you're still an otherwise fine upstanding citizen:

The list of busted owners has been growing in recent months. Some say the increase could be tied to higher gas prices. But while arrests are on the rise, convictions are often harder to come by.

"We've talked to people who committed insurance fraud who otherwise wouldn't commit another crime ...."

So there you have it: burn SUVs for insurance fraud, and maybe pay a fine; do so for environmental reasons, and get 22 years in prison.

The Death of the Dinner Party:

Everyone is a fussy eater these days. The obvious culprit is California, where celebrity dieting whims are turned into gastronomic trends, but I suspect the blame lies much further north, at Starbucks’ HQ in Seattle. Starbucks, after all, can serve a cup of coffee 19,000 different ways, with five varieties of milk (whole, non-fat, “half & half”, organic and, of course, soy). The effect has been to escalate all food choice throughout America, and therefore the world. […]

The modern dietary requirements of guests could soon make dinner parties impossible. The days when “DPers” would politely eat what was put in front of them are long gone. Hosts are now expected to cater for highly selective 21st-century palates, as well as to cook dishes that comply with socio-political beliefs, obscure religions and popular weight-loss programmes. It is getting too much. My friend Jade, for example, recently began an experimental diet, the aim of which is to eat only your four favourite foods — in Jade’s case, spinach, tofu, mango and cheeseburgers. This made social eating impossible.

Edward Gorey’s The Unstrung Harp has one of the best things ever written about writing:

The characters have one and all become thoroughly tiresome, as though he had been trapped at the same party with them since the day before.

(I’m not going to say it.)

Work with the hands is the apprenticeship of honesty. — Gandhi

A favorite scene of mine in all of filmdom comes in Breaking Away. The townies’ antagonism with the students of the local college is culminating in a bike relay race. The bikes are uniform, issued by the race officials, and they’ve been given a crappy, beaten-up, obviously out-of-repair bike. While the others despair, our hero, Dave, remains sanguine, and sends them away.

He takes the bike apart into its smallest components, cleaning and lubricating each part. It’s one of the most loving sequences I’ve ever seen committed to film — his passion for bikes and the work he’s doing shines through every frame.

A few years ago, I bought a Park Tools Advanced Mechanic Tool Kit, though I’m not an especially advanced bike mechanic. It’s a high quality collection of close to every tool you could want for home repairs. I found a good deal on it, and I figured it was a lot easier, and, in the long run, cheaper to get the big toolkit rather than run to the bike shop over and over as I discovered each next thing I needed for a repair. I count it as a rite of passage each time I use another tool for the first time.

A few months ago, I used the pedal wrench for the first time — I’d snapped a pedal clean off on the way to work, and had to replace it. Today, I had to replace my chain ring lock bolts, so I dragged my old stereo into the garage, cranked some Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, and and removed the cranks and the bottom bracket. Removing the right crank made the job easier; for the rest, I was curious — I got to use a whole bunch of tools I never had. And it turns out the bottom bracket cartridge feels kind of gritty — I’m going to replace it (no great surprise given that it hasn’t been done in the nine years since I bought the bike used.)

I had a lot of fun — there’s a satisfaction to be had from mechanical work that I just don’t get pushing bits around. But I’m getting close to the bottom of my tool kit… I’m pretty much replacing the rear gear cassette, truing a wheel, and overhauling the rear hub away from the end.

But I’ll still be very much a beginner and I’ll just start over with the next repair.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE: ISAIAH, a three-year-old
DADDIO, his father

The curtain opens.

[DADDIO and ISAIAH are in the bedroom where Iko has just gotten dressed for the day.]

Isaiah: [turning to the bedroom door and holding his hand up in dramatic “stop” gesture] Stop! Don’t come into bedroom.

[Daddio knows they are alone in the house. He looks at bedroom door. Nothing there.]

Isaiah: No come into bedroom! Isaiah and Daddio in bedroom.

[Daddio reassures himself by remembering psychic buddy who just came to town and told him there was nothing evil in this house.]

Isaiah: [loudly, to half-shut door] You go away. You go away. No come in.

Daddio: Hehhehheh! [Gulp.] Who ya talking to there, Isaiah boy?

Isaiah: Daddio no say anything. Isaiah not talking to Daddio.

Daddio: I know. You’re talking to whoever’s at the door. Who do you see there?

[Long pause. Far away look in the kid’s eyes.]

Isaiah: The Red Opener.

[Daddio and Isaiah spend the rest of the day in the bedroom with Daddio cowering in the corner holding a hammer and a baseball bat.]

SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, currently pursued by listening to radio telescopes for something that seems more like a signal than noise (because we can do that much while earthbound.) This creates such a vast quantity of data that even the preliminary analysis to find candidates for closer examination is a big problem. SETI@Home is a distributed computing project to allow individuals to chip in by analyzing bits of signal on their home computers, many of which sit idle most of the time.

A crackpot is calling for increased security in SETI@Home lest leet alien script kiddies 0wnz0r the Internet by customizing a signal to take advantage of (unknown, theoretical) security flaws in the SETI@Home client.

Said crackpot is a Fermilab particle physicist, but he apparently learned all he really needed to know about computers from Hollywood blockbusters.

It’s difficult to describe just how stupid this is. It’s not that it’s absolutely impossible, but it’s more likely that aliens could arrive able to talk with bees. It would be a better use of time and effort to prepare a contingency plan for what we, as citizens, can do if Jupiter is stolen. It makes worrying about the coming mandatory barcode tattoos being the mark of the beast seem rational and even staid.

This Slashdot comment’s take on a possible outcome has been the most worthwhile thing to come of it.

I send you greetings from what you know as the smaller magelenic cloud. my name is ortion fleglar, and my father, the late ortion flekgar, left to me a sum of one hundred million kletlons before being pulled into a hyperspace anomoly. Before his untimely demise, he warned me never to trust my hive-mothers, gleblon flamkis and formta gleklar…

There’s currently a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that Secunia rates as extremely critical:

Typically used for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities, which can lead to system compromise. Successful exploitation does not normally require any interaction and exploits are in the wild.

Mozilla just released Firefox 1.5.

You do the math.