January 2004 Archives

Check out World66, which has a neat way to make a map of the places you have been.

create your own visited states map

Both Florida and Washington, were only briefs visits to the airport on my way to or from somewhere else. I also may have been to Missouri, but I'm still thinking about it. (P.S. Feb 6th, I've decided I've been to Missouri.)

You can see from my map I am missing a lot of western states and almost all of New England, except MA, where I have gone on business.

I found a really nice essay on donavanhall.net entitled,"Realism and Subjectivity".

It's an interesting essay about the notion of modern art, although I suspect the author may mean abstract modern art. It leads the author to the breakthrough moment of understanding of why exactly modern art annoys him.

For the same reasons the author of the essay is annoyed with modern art, I find myself enjoying modern art . I enjoy standing back and just being enraptured by the sheer confusion and utter nonsense of a Jackson Pollock piece.

Finally last night we managed to put away all the Christmas decorations and the tree. Next stop, finish the Christmas Cards!

Again via boing^2 Merlin's List's of Five Things

where can timbu.org get venture capital for his kooky idea?

Or should it be more like this ...

neoteny funds talentless hack

We'll see if this google bombing works. It might help if more people posted this meme around.

I have a laptop that has had a flaky screen for over a year. Finally today I had enough, and I took out the set of tiny screwdrivers. I ended up with 6 extra screws, one brass stand-off, and the defective microswitch, which had been causing all my problems, left over when I re-assembled it. Whenever I have had the pleasure of taking electronics apart I am struck by how many different sized screws are used in the design. While I understand different length screws I am not sure I understand why one would want screws of a different pitch or width. It seems to unnecesarily complicate assembly and repair.

Via boing^2, a man ruins his health by eating at McDonalds every day, three meals a day, for a month.

I can't wait to get down to the St. Paul Winter Carnival Ice Palace. I plan to scope it out this weekend and then take the kids down there. I think the kids will be blown away by a castle made of ice.

I was talking about coinage/numismatics with a friend the other day. We spent a little time discussing the new dollar coin, aka "The Golden Dollar".

Here is my personal complaints about the new dollar, in no special order. Now, these complaints don't reflect incompentence on the mint's part, as some important design specs were codified by Congress.

• It's not quite golden enough. This is especially irksome if you get a new one that hasn't gotten much circulation. In the right light it reflects about the same way a quarter does. A bi-color approach would have been preferable in my way of thinking.
• It's too close to the same size as a quarter.
• I associate the lack of reeding on the edges with lower denomination coins, like pennies and nickels. It seems odd that this doesn't have reeding.
• I prefer presidents on my money. I know this might preclude women in the short run, but is it that cool to be on a one dollar coin which will probably only be slightly more successful than the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin? A Theodore Roosevelt coin would suit me just fine.
• It weighs close to the same amount as a quarter, so it's hard to tell without looking whether you grabbed a quarter or a dollar out of your pocket. (I know one has reeding and the other doesn't, but I'm talking about heft right now.)

What do I like?

• Although I know this in tension with my previous comment, I like Sacagawea on the coin. I have always been fascinated by the Lewis and Clark expedition, and she get's high marks for carrying a baby the whole way and making other contributions to the trip.
• I like dollar coins in general. It works in Canada just fine. I think the U.S. just needs to stop making dollar bills.

In the next month I am going to experiment paying for most small purchases with dollar coins. So far I have to say it brought an unexpected smile to the face of the cafeteria workers at my company and the barista at my local espresso shop.

I am the only health person in my family at the moment. The kids are shedding germs like white long hair cats at a black angora sweater factory. So far I have managed to stay healthy by washing my hands every three minutes. I have managed not to get the last few illnesses so I am crossing my fingers this time as well.

I found this quote on the web and nearly fell out of my chair laughing.

Unfortunately, it's a little wordy to go on a t-shirt, but it's still very funny.

Here's an odd bit in last night's State of the Union speech.

I was fascinated that this topic got an entire paragraph. It just seems strange to me. I'm not for steroids in sports, but it seems an odd thing to draw attention to in a nationally televised speech. Personally, I would have added talk show hosts to my list of people who shouldn't be using drugs as well.

I am in my 4th hour of conference call now. It happens about once every month or so. It drives me ape. I work on teams that are fairly geographically distributed so sometimes it's the only way to move forward, but man does it drive me crazy at times. Today was horrible in that the call was punctuated with eardrum shredding static a couple of times.

I was contacted today by David Griffith a fellow alumni from my high school, Hamilton High School in Milwaukee. They are considering having a 15 year reunion. That's good news as there was no ten year reunion. I am not sure whether there was a five year reunion or not.

I sure think it would be interesting to see the classmates now. Of course, now I suppose there will probably be children to consider as I expect some of the classmates have reproduced by this point, if the Class of 1988 can be used as a guide.

One utility I don't use nearly often enough. Screen, it's a funny little tool for detaching and re-attaching terminals in Linux. It's very cool. I can start a process at work, VPN back in an re-attach, picking up right where I left off.

I was reading a novel by Ellen Ullman called "The Bug" and I came across a quote that made me think of you.

If you see me hands bent over the keyboard, clacking away, with the door closed, likely I am bugging. However, I'll keep the term "bugger" off of my business cards and resume for the time being.

At a certain point in the winter I start to forget what it was like to be warm outside. I decided I would post a few photos from the early fall, when it was still warm. Check it out.

Here is my trail log from my Yosemite trip. I still haven't really cleaned this account up yet, so beware of faulty spelling and loose grammar.

Yosemite 2003

Wednesday:

I flew out of Minneapolis around 5:30, got to San Jose around 7:40. It was not a memorable flight. The food was incredibly skimpy with a postage stamp sized "submarine" sandwich. Then the lady sitting by the window had to pee twice. Each time she did, all three passengers in that row, including me, would get up and and go to the restroom in synchronized fashion. At the curbside check in the man who weighed my luggage noted that it weighed 48 pounds, which is far more than normal. I had packed one bag with my backpack and my camping paraphernalia while the other held normal stuff.

Ever have a day where there is no motivation to do anything? I am having a string of these days. Once I get started I am fine, but starting is the problem. Uggh. I am off to have sushi for lunch. Nothing picks me up like a little raw fish.

Somehow the index files for my trip to Yosemite were AWOL. I recreated them, and it's viewable again. I also need to clean up the diary of my trip for public consumption one of these days.

Tim's trip to Yosemite, down th John Muir Trail

This quote is the kind of material that reminds me of why I like to listen to Prairie Home Companion and The Writers Almanac. Garrison Keillor is a genius with words, with both an ear for interesting words and a knack for speaking them with a delightful midwestern cadence.

When I last went to Summerfest, in Milwaukee, I saw James Taylor in the amphitheater. The review in the paper said that Mr. Taylor was like a favored pair of old blue jeans, "soft in all the right places, and tight in all the right places." This sums up how I feel about Mr. Keillor's radio work as well.

The question I am left with is the following. If we desire to recapture the feeling of seeing and feeling the world as we did when we are children --- perhaps my time would be better spent trying not to teach my children to see the world the way I do.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

My blacklist, with imports from mamamusings.net's blacklist, inspired by Liz's experience.

On New Year's day I drove up to Lake Vermillion looking for some quiet time to unwind and take in some natural beauty. Check out what I saw.

Each day I walked across the frozen lake. Distances across bays, on foot, were much larger than I had expected, even though I have canoed, kayaked, and motored around for over a decade. It was very quiet.

I was really intrigued by how the islands seemed like isolated bonsai displays.

I'm now reading "The Bug" and "Close to the Machine" by Ellan Ullman. I like them both alot. I hope the stories finish as well as they start. It's fun to read a dramatic account of something that really does resemble my everyday life to some degree. I think I could write in this genre.

The Packers lost in the post-season to Philadelphia. While the loss was a huge dissapointment, the last six Packers games were a real treat to watch. The team played so well, even with serious adversity. Hat's off to the team.

I was surprised by a few things in the last game. I expected the Pack to put up three point in the first half rather than going for first down on "Fourth and inches". Those three points could have made the game. I was surprised they didn't run more. Green was doing well, and the Pack was ahead, running should have been the plan. The last interception was also a bitter pill to swallow.

Well, thanks everyone for another memorable season.

Having recently read the book, "A Beautiful Mind" and less recently "Who wrote the Bible Code" (don't worry I thought the Bible code was hooey before I read this book, this book just had some interesting approaches for suggesting exactly why it's hooey), I thought I would take two disturbing ideas and merge them. What are the two ideas? One, you can get messages from numbers by converting numbers into base 26 with all numerals represented as the letters A-Z. Two, by skipping every n letters you can get wierd messages out of a textual corpus. Why would I do this? Have I gone over the edge?

No, and no.

I don't think any words that might appear in my corpus could be anything other than chance, I am merely checking out the probabilty that text might appear in a seemingly random set of letters.

What's the method to my madness. One d/l the first 100,000 digits of pi. Step two, use a little perl and Ken Williams, Math::BaseCalc to convert to base 26. Step three, wait longer than you think (Ken, can you make it faster?). Step four, using various skip steps look for words.

How I love perl!

O.K., I admit it I don't follow celbrity gossip news very well. I don't read People magazine, even in a doctor's office when there is nothing else to read. However, even I usually hear about the marriage before their divorce/annullment. So it appears that sometime in the last month, I'm not sure when, Britney Spears got married and the divorced or annulled in something like 55 hours. The strangest part about this event, is why so many people care. Oddly enough, I became aware of it by reading a op-ed piece somewhere that suggested Britney's sham marriage meant that gays and lesbians should be legally allowed to marry. I guess the thinking was something along the lines of, if hetero's can marry on a whim, why can't non-hetero's marry after thoughtfully considering it. Not sure I follow that line of logic. In any case, on some days I am just libertarian enough to think maybe the state ought not to be involved in who can marry.

Today there are some good ones.

• Aluminium-ized apartment
• Tokyo's Lost and Found
• Rotterdam Cube Houses

I finished up Gibson's "Pattern Recognition". I wasn't too enthusiastic about it by the end. It contained numerous super clever idea's, but truthfully in the end I didn't find the story nearly as compelling as some of the ideas mentioned in passing while telling of the story.

I read "A Beautiful Mind", by Sylvia Nasar. This was fascinating to me. The book goes into much more detail about Nash's life, including better descriptions of his mathematical contributions, the story of how he got involved and left RAND. (His papers are available for ordering from RAND, BTW)

I then finished off "The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove", by Christopher Moore. I like is less than "Lamb" and less than "Fluke". It was funny in parts but I thought it got a little tedious by the end. Like Pattern Recognition, there were some very funny ideas embedded in the telling of this story. Just the idea of a whole town going off their psychoactive drugs all at once is a funny premise.

Arlitia Jones, which I discovered via the Writers Almanac.

Critical Section has a bit of a write-up bemoaning the two party system and suggest proportional representation. He later points out there may be some problems with this approach. I am not a fan of proportional representation, which I believe swings government away from a democratic republic to a more democratic-mob rule. I see this as problematic because it gives too much power to the fringes of political view and is to easily swayed by the issue of the day rather than a longer term strategy. I don't think a direct democracy would be a better system.

However, there is another way to be able to get third party views more air time, it's called Condercet voting. This would allow people rank their candidates as Nader, Gore, Bush, without them worrying that ranking Nader as their number one choice they would give the election to Bush. Another example of a ranking would be Perot, Bush Sr. (the first), Clinton. In this case the election in 1992 would have likely gone to Bush Sr. This kind of system would allow for a third party candidate to be successful enough to really install a third party into American politics. The system today encourages people to not "throw away their votes" almost enforces a two-party system.

One of the more interesting ideas I came across was in the trilogy, "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars". There lower house was composed of people drafted from fairly small districts. You were drafted by random lottery and it was civic duty much like jury duty. Being just like jury duty it was an honor people tried to avoid. Now you might say this is lunacy to let people chosen at random govern. Well, in many states people chosen at random sit in judgement in capital criminal cases. If they can choose who lives and dies they certainly could passs a few laws. Perhaps our laws would be more readable.

I haven't had many Iraq entries since the the Bush administration declared an end to major combat operations. Here are a few thoughts.

Still there have been no weapons of mass destruction found. This wouldn't be an issue at this point if the Bush administration had not made WMD the centerpiece of it's justification for going to war. Since weapons have not yet been found, I am left with three possible conclusions.

Weapons will be found. This would be the best case for the Bush administration and probably for the U.S. standing in the world community. I personally, don't think this will happen at this point, but I didn't think that they would get Saddam either.

Weapons will not be found. In this scenario, weapons are not found and the Bush administration knowingly lied about WMD. This is the worst case in my mind. Not only would this negatively affect our standing in the world, but it would be another example of the folks in government not trusting the governed enough to tell the truth, giving more reason for distrust and apathy towards government. (As one commenter noted, this could mean they were shipped to a third nation or hidden for a much later day.)

Weapons will not be found. In this scenario the Bush administration was misled by intelligence and genuinely thought they were there. In this scenario the intel was faulty or the intel was manipulated by Iraq expats. At this moment this seems the most likely scenario. The question that would remain is whether their was incompetence by any of the players.

As my High School history teacher used to say. "Time heals all wounds and time wounds all heels." Eventually, we'll know the truth. Unfortunately, I doubt we'll know much before the 2004 election.

One other lingering question. Is the mess in Iraq a remnant of colonization or the cold war? Are we cleaning up from the British Empire or repairing the issues left in the cold wars proxy nations?

I was playing a game of chess today. At the end of the game, looking for some way to force a draw or a stalemate, I started to wonder about winning the cold war.

The way I look at it he cold war was a war fought by four techniques.

• Proxy
• Secret Mini Wars
• "MAD"
• Diplomacy

In the end the U.S. is said to have won. The values of the west has achieved an almost universal currency versus a now discredited soviet style communism. The U.S.S.R. no longer exists and there is no global power who has the same military capability, yet.

But what did we win. Well we won the right to clean up a number of failed and failing nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, the states of former Yogoslavia, etc..

Metaphorically, it is almost like instead of having to blow up one massive asteroid headed towards the U.S. we are now left with having 25 different fragments of an asteroid headed in our direction. Not only do the fragments ahve great ability to do damage, but they influence each other.

The peace divident that peole dreamed about will take years to appear until the rule of law, local and international is firmly established in the left over proxies that both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. left scattered around the globe.

So when the cold war was on, it mostly seemed like a draw due to M.A.D., but the U.S. slowly kept winning economically until the U.S.S.R. collapsed. Once it collapsed we were left cleaning up the mess, they had created. Seems like a sort of booby prize to me.