I think I’m in love with Jimmy Carter. I’ve started reading his most recent book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, and I’m totally taken with how improbable he is. Southern-raised, farmer, born-again evangelical Christian, yet he’s a liberal Democrat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. I yearn for a president like that.
I don’t get the newspaper, and I don’t watch TV news programs; instead, I get almost all of my news via the Internet and NPR. The problem with this is that I don’t often get a chance to see what places or people in the news look like.
For me, Flickr is a great way to follow current news events visually. Today, I’m keeping an eye on photos tagged with strike and the NYC group pool.
Late last year, I finally started requesting inter-library book loans regularly. As I started reading more (because it was now simple and free), my list actually got longer, so I started writing it down. One unexpected advantage to this is that I can go back and look at the books I’ve enjoyed (or not) over the last year. I’m not an especially prolific reader, but I’ve surprised myself with the amount that I’ve actually had time to get through.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
An epic fictional memoir that brings you through three generations of family conflict. Quite touching and surprisingly entertaining.
The Golden Ratio by Mario Livio
Phi is an interesting subject, but in the end the book was unfocused and a bit weak. I was hoping for something Simon Singh-esque.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Borrowed from Rosi)
Amazing. Somehow, Margaret Atwood explains absolutely nothing until the very end, and then you realize there wasn't really much to explain. Totally believable.
Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John E. Ferling (17 Feb 2005 - 10 Apr 2005)
I just couldn't get interested in this one. I had high hopes that it would be enlightening in the shadow of the 2000 and 2004 elections.
Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams by M.J. Simpson (10 Apr 2005 - 3 May 2005)
You appreciate the Hitchhiker's Guide books so much more when you learn how close they came to never really being written. A great biography of a hilarious, distractable author.
Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design by Henry Petroski (5 May 2005 - 17 June 2005)
I picked this up at the book store and was enthralled. But the chapters somehow were both repetitive and unconnected. I got bored about two-thirds of the way through.
Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (19 June 2005 - 23 June 2005)
Short and sweet. A great summer read.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (23 June 2005 - 30 June 2005)
A classic that I somehow never got around to reading. Despite the fact that this is a massive novel, I finished it in a week. The jumping point of view was perfectly done, and the plan to settle Mars was very well planned.
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks (2 July 2005 - 24 July 2005)
Dr. Sacks' book was one-half childhood memoir and one-half the history of chemistry. I don't know which was more interesting.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (24 July 2005 - 28 July 2005)
I can't say much more about this book. One of the best stories I've ever read.
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (30 July 2005 - 7 August 2005)
Another good summer read. It's nice to see how much numbers and carefully designed studies can explain. I follow their blog, now, too.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (8 Aug 2005 - 13 Aug 2005)
Waiting for a book to get to my library, I decided to re-read this classic. (See Ender's Shadow, below)
Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking (16 Aug 2005 - 5 Sep 2005)
A great introduction to modern physics and astrophysics theory. In fact, it's written so well that I want to read more Hawking.
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card (9 Sep 2005 - 15 Sep 2005)
Waiting for another book, I decided to re-read the parallel novel to Ender's Game (above). This time, I realized how much is left open at the end, and I was inspired to read the rest of the series (see below).
The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe (16 Sep 2005 - 10 Oct 2005)
This book is wholly remarkable. It suggests (and strongly supports) a theory of cyclic American history, and warns of a coming period of "Crisis". But it is so dense with information and concepts that it reminded me too much of college. I'm glad I read what I did, though.
Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card (6 Oct 2005 - 10 Oct 2005)
(See Shadow of the Giant, below)
Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (11 Oct 2005 - 31 Oct 2005)
Something made me lose interest by the end of this book: either Dr. Sacks' earlier writing is less engrossing, or the fact that every patient had fairly similar symptoms and reactions to L-DOPA. But he covers a startlingy insidious disease and its ambiguous "cure" in fantastic detail.
Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card (24 Oct 2005 - 28 Oct 2005)
(See Shadow of the Giant, below)
Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card (23 Nov 2005 - 27 Nov 2005)
By the time I got to the fourth book in the Bean Series, I was worried. Each book had become a little less strong than the last, and although I was still interested in the story, I was worried it was going to end badly. I was wrong. The finale literally moved me to tears. It was absolutely amazing. Another thing: In the original Ender Series, Card has this habit of introducing a new planet based on a single country (the Portuguese Planet, and later the Chinese Planet). It seemed really silly at the time, but he explains it well here, and is able to show the same deep understanding of different societies in these books without it seeming quite as clumsy. Looking back, this was (by far) the better series.
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has a blog that I was pointed to by a cow-orker a couple weeks ago. Half-surprisingly, he’s very well written, funny, and intelligent; so it makes a pretty good read. And he posts quite regularly.
The other day, he posted about the Evolution versus Intelligent Design debate. He didn’t debate the issue, mind you (he says “I’m not a believer in Intelligent Design, Creationism, Darwinism, free will, non-monetary compensation, or anything else I can’t eat if I try hard enough”), he decided instead to discuss the discussion.
As if that wasn’t meta enough, he focused on how both sides of the debate mischaracterize the other side’s arguments. As I was reading it, I thought “man, he’s not doing a very good job here; I’ve never heard any of these points that he’s complaining about.” And then I realized that was the whole point. He was either using his own misrepresentation as a meta-joke, or he was just interested in stirring up trouble. Or probably both.
He then got 300 angry comments from both sides.
Today, Scott posted a follow-up. He essentially verified my theory, but apparently he had taken it a step further. “I was waiting to see how many people fell into the irony trap and misrepresented my blog entry and then attacked it.” (The answer is “a lot”.) He links to one blog post in particular, but the page is currently down. He reiterates his point, and at the end leaves the whole thing open for more recursive straw men.
I applaud his willingness to be stung by hornets just for the sake of a joke. But what’s more amazing is that, in the end, his joke was proven correct by those who were trying to refute it. It’s also more than a little disturbing. Can’t we engage in intelligent dialogue anymore?
Although there’s a chance that she may get a couple more in the next week or two, it’s very likely that M’s received all the requests for interviews that she can expect. The following are the interviews she’s scheduled, in chronological order:
Solely based on percentages and how much we know about the cities, the Boston area looks pretty likely. All of the interviews are between Thanksgiving and January 13. She has to have her list sorted by February 22. Match Day is March 16. Exciting!
Welcome to WordPress. This is my first post with the new system. Things are going to be a little hairy here for the next week or so, as I make things work the way I want them. But the important things are all set.
I’m abandoning Moveable Type (the blog software I use right now) for something less.. er.. big-endian. I’ve been having issues with MT lately, and I’ve heard good things about Wordpress for a long time. Also, using MT templates and plugins to make the integrated home page is a bit complex. I’m thinking about switching to something like Planet. While I’m at it, the design for the page will likely be simplified and tweaked, but I’m going to try to keep it largely recognizable.
I think I’ve made this kind of announcement in the past, but this time I’m serious.
Update 8 Nov: The home page and the uberfeed are Planet-powered, now.
Update 10 Nov: And now everything is Wordpress. So long, MT.
I just spent the time this morning making a single over-arching RSS feed for Plutor.org. It should now include my Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, and moblog and blog posts, like the HTML version of the site does. Please use the new URL to follow my incoherent ramblings and unrelated links. For the uninitiated: What is RSS?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has ridiculously old versions of packages — especially those that are intended for a desktop audience. The GIMP 1.2.3 is so old that it's hardly worth using, so yesterday I spent an hour getting the latest version (2.2.8) working. There were a lot of steps involved because almost all of the prerequisites were a bunch of versions behind, too. So here's what I had to do to get Gimp installed and working on RHEL3.
The webcomic Goats is probably the second one I ever read on a regular basis (the first being the obvious and now-unreadable User Friendly). At some point, I lost my interest in Goats and it fell off my list. This was probably back when I used bookmarks instead of an RSS reader to read news and comics, and it was cumbersome to check more than a half-dozen a day. I re-found Goats recently, and started reading it from the present. I was intimidated by the huge archive, and was a little lost in the current story, but I remembered — vaguely — who most of the core cast was.
It wasn’t until Jon Rosenberg discussed the current story and alluded to a series reboot three years ago that I was able to start from a point in the middle and get all the back stories. Now that I’m caught up, this comic strip is suddenly one of my favorites. It’s definitely plot-driven, like Sluggy Freelance, but less epic (so it’s easier to follow day-by-day) and far more surreal.
Give it a try.
Am I the only one who doesn’t like keyboard shortcuts on websites? I find it far easier to navigate on the web by, I don’t know, clicking on things, than by remembering that “Y” means to archive, and shift-A means to reply-to-all-in-new-window. One of the things that stood in the back of my mind as not-too-nice about Google Reader was the fact that it forced these keyboard shortcuts upon you. Gmail is at least nice enough to default to shortcuts off.
And now Bloglines, thinking it needs to actually start (gasp) improving, took a look at Google Reader to see what they needed to do. Obviously, there was only one thing there they could learn from. Keyboard shortcuts! Don’t hit shift-A in Bloglines or you’ll end up marking all of your news items read. The “read all” feature itself is so ridiculous that even before they started “innovating”, I had wished I could remove the link that did that. It’s obnoxious — I end up with a page that’s several megabytes long. It’s dangerous — the only way I can undo it is by clicking “Mark all new” on every single feed’s header. And it’s totally unnecessary.
I’ve figured out what I don’t like about Google Reader, Google’s new RSS aggregation service. I keep having to think. I’m not used to doing that with a Google product. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a solid feed reader, but the navigation isn’t quite intuitive. “Down” should be at the bottom. There should be a way to scroll through the new posts without viewing them (or having to mark those you viewed as “keep unread”, which, by the way, is really far away). But one of the things I’d really like, in contrast to Bloglines, is the ability to see which feeds have new items at a glance (and sort by that criterion). In the “My subscriptions” view in Google Reader, I can’t tell what has new items nor can I even resort them as far as I can tell.
I have high hopes and I plan to keep coming back to it — it is the big G, after all, and they have a track record of improving services in response to user feedback — but I’m going to stick with Bloglines for now.
The following is M’s current draft list for where she’s applying for residencies. In most cases, I don’t know the actual hospitals or programs, so this is just a list of the cities. Farmington, CT; New Haven, CT; Boston, MA; Providence, RI; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; and Portland, OR. Possibly also on the list are San Francisco, CA and Rochester, NY.
Update: Oh yeah, I forgot Baltimore, MD.
Update, 9 Oct: We She applied today. Rochester, NY was on the final list, but not San Francisco or Baltimore.
Did you know that 4 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices now serving were confirmed by unanimous votes? And another 3 had fewer than ten opposing votes each. Only Clarence Thomas's confirmation was even close.
| Justice | Appointed by | Vote |
|---|---|---|
| John Paul Stevens | Ford | 98-0 |
| Sandra Day O'Connor | Reagan | 99-0 |
| Antonin Scalia | Reagan | 98-0 |
| Anthony Kennedy | Reagan | 97-0 |
| David Souter | G.H.W. Bush | 90-9 |
| Clarence Thomas | G.H.W. Bush | 52-48 |
| Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Clinton | 97-3 |
| Stephen Breyer | Clinton | 87-9 |
| John Roberts | G. W. Bush | 78-22 |
Recently, Sun released version 3.1 of the Sun Ray Server Software. It now has Linux support for USB devices connected to the thin clients. Instead of being kernel-level, this support is user-level — in the form of a modified libusb. Unfortunately, roughly 97% of applications expect kernel devices, and thus lack support for libusb. Luckily, pilot-link belongs to the minority. The following are my (roughly chronological) notes on getting a Palm (in the form of an old Handspring Visor) to sync with my Sun Ray.
bin/pilot-xfer --port usb: -s $HOME/.pilot-link
This command will fail unless you have the Palm already trying to sync. You'll also need to run it as root, although the pilot-link guys say they're working on a fix for that.I'm still on the hunt for something that will allow me to access data on a USB thumb drive.
My first reaction to the now-revealed Nintendo Revolution controller was to think of every remote control I’ve ever used. With very few exceptions, they’re uncomfortable and hard to get to do what you want them to do. But after reading that 1up article, and watching the intro video, I started to get it. “Revolution” is the only word that fits. If you think of this as turning a television into a three-dimensional DS-like touchscreen, the controller design makes a lot of sense.
Joystiq has an overview of Iwata’s whole keynote, with a lot of his (and Nintendo’s) rationale and point-of-view.
Even apart from the particularly catastrophic devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, this has been an extremely active Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasts for the season started out relatively average last December. But as the ocean waters warmed, updated forecasts were released: from 11 named storms to 13, and to 15. After a remarkably busy spring and the most active July on record, the forecasts had been increased to 20. Hurricane Dennis was the strongest storm to ever form before August, and eight days later, Emily broke that record. Katrina was the fourth-strongest hurricane ever measured. Ever. And thanks to its surgical strike on New Orleans, it already stands as the second most deadly Atlantic hurricane.
There have been fifteen named storms so far this season. The season officially lasts for 11 more weeks, and there are only six names left (Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma). After that, hurricanes will be named for letters of the Greek alphabet for the first time since they’ve had names.
My Uncle Steve will be racing his lawnmower at the Terryville County Fair north of Waterbury this Saturday at 6pm. Tickets to the fair are $7, and unfortunately no pets are allowed.
It’s kinda silly, but I’ll be there.
I just got an email from an HR person at Google. It was really personalized, not just a form letter, saying that I might fit in well with their Server Engineering team. And from the description of the job, I think I would. I had to tell him that I didn’t know where I’d be a year from now, but I might contact him in March.
Oh, even better, he told me how he came across me: my goddamn contributions to fucking Wikipedia.
Yesterday, I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with flying colors. I’m willing to call it a legitimate certification. The entire test was hands-on troubleshooting (“Here’s a machine that won’t boot. Fix it”) and installation and configuration (“Here’s bare metal, and a four page description of how we want the machine setup. Go”). It’s very indicative of the kind of work I do on a daily basis, so it’s far more useful than a multiple-choice test would have been.
Eris (my webhost) is doing some rolling OS updates, and I’m having some problems with the front page of Plutor.org. The blog portion still works, but the “links” will be missing, as will my most recent Flickr photos. I’ll get it working as soon as I have a chance.
Update 6 Sep: Fixed. Perl wasn't finding my custom modules, but now I'm not sure how it ever saw them.
Update 7 Sep: I've updated to MT 3.2, and I'm hoping that this will simplify some stuff. I'm going to be doing some ongoing cleanups over the next few days when I get the time, like making a master RSS feed, and maybe moving moblog stuff to a dedicated MT blog, so that it can be commented on.
I’m at Red Hat training this week in Westford, MA. The water bottles here have the logo on them, along with the following in tiny print: “Free (as in water)”. Geek humor at its best. (Read about Gratis versus Libre for an explanation of the joke.)
This morning, on the way to work, my car’s extended warranty expired. I’ve driven 72,000 miles since I bought it on 26 April 2003. In those 845 days, I’ve averaged 85.2 miles per day. Every time I calculated it, I got about 27 miles per gallon, which means I’ve used roughly 2,666 gallons of gasoline, or 3.1 gallons per day. I filled up my 20-gallon tank at least 133 times — although probably more like 150 times (once every 5.6 days) since I usually didn’t wait for it to empty completely. When I purchased my car, a full tank of gas would have cost me about $34 (roughly $1.70 per gallon in Waterbury). Now, that same tank costs me $52 ($2.60 per gallon). Based on my rough eyeballing, I’ve probably spent approximately $5,000 on gas since I purchased my car.
Update: Wow, my eyeballing was ridiculously accurate. Based on some real historical gas prices, I've spent $4954.02 on gas.
I love math. Not just complex math, but arithmetic, too. I simply adore mathematical shortcuts. That’s why I spent the last couple of days finding shortcuts for divisibility tests:
The rules for 7 and 13 can easily be extended to just about any number under 100 (and, in fact, the rules listed here for 3, 9, and 11 are simple variants). As long as you understand how those ones work, you don’t even really need to memorize anything.
Have you ever wondered why grain alcohol like Everclear or Graves are only 95% ethanol (190 proof)? I have. I assumed it was an ROI thing. My theory figured the increased cost to distill the alcohol to such a purity would force up the price, which customers would not bear. Apparently, there’s a different reason altogether, and it’s a chemistry thing.
The yeast that creates alcohol dies at around 14% concentration. This is why beers and wines are rarely found even above 18- or 20-proof. In order to make stronger drinks, the water-alcohol mixture is distilled, which is really just another word for evaporating them. Alcohol boils at a far lower temperature than water, so if you collect the vapor and recondense it, you end up with a lot more alcohol than water.
But a funny thing happens as water is left behind. The more alcohol there is in the solution, the higher its boiling point (and the lower of that of the water). Somewhere around 95% or 96% alcohol, they converge, and the two liquids boil at the same time (at only 173°F). Simple distillation will not allow you to do any better.
So what if you need absolutely pure alcohol? There is an option. You can add benzene to the mixture. This changes the behavior of the solution, and allows the alcohol to boil away again. Unfortunately, benzene is terribly harmful, even in extremely tiny amounts. Bone marrow damage, a weakened immune system, severe liver disease, and a highly increased chance of cancer are some of the fates that would await you if you were unsatisfied with 190-proof grain alcohol.