We now have an RSS feed for Collaboratory. Blogger added the feature this morning. I'm hoping it'll start showing up on BlogRolling as recently updated, but it has other advantages as well, like RSS readers. Any of y'all use those?

Did we get our first comment spam?

Futility has nagged at Caroline for a long time. Four years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, she sat at her kitchen table in Claremont, N.H., and added up her life. It was the height of the economic boom. The nation wallowed in luxury, burst with microchips, consumed with abandon, swaggered globally. Everything grew larger: homes, vehicles, stock portfolios, life expectancy. Never before in the sweep of human history had so many people been so utterly comfortable.

Caroline was not one of them.

Crooked Timber's Harry Farrell has some pointed commentary regarding comments made on other weblogs regarding the New York Times article, "A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class", a vignette about one member of the working poor.

"You want to convince me of something, give me numbers." - young Jed Bartlet in the episode "Two Cathedrals" from The West Wing.

Filched from MeFi, here are some numbers on the Bush Administration.

Keep up the good work Start up the good work anytime now, Mr. President.

Collaboratory demographic survey time:

How many of you have taken the Best Places quiz before? I took it several years ago, but then again this morning.

What do you all consider the most important aspects of places to live, according to the categories they use? If you got to pick exactly where you lived, where would it be?

WE'RE GOING BACK TO THE MOON!!!!

(butwe'regonnacanceleverythingnotrelatedtothemoonormarsincludingkeepingHubbleworkinguntilareplacementisready! Shhhhhhdon'ttellanyonehaveaniceday)

Via Bookslut:

1. Someone named Caitlin Flanagan somewhat-favorably reviews Dr. Laura's new book.

2. Someone named Maud Newton isn't impressed.

3. I'm not sure why I'm posting this, but it struck me as interesting. I find Dr. Laura to be one of the most nauseating people in American life, and pretty much purely on that basis I tend to desperately want to ignore everything she does, which is pretty much what I do. Oh well.

Darn, I'm so easily amused. At the moment I'm collecting interjections which do a fairly bad job of masking swear words or mild blasphemy.

I'm looking for ones that are fairly well known although I know that many of these are actually obsolete and tend to only be used in ironic contexts. They also tend to be identified specifically as American, British or Australian words.

Here's my current list, I've grouped them around their root cuss word.

Christ	Jesus	God	Damn	Hell
crikey cripes crums	gee jeez sheesh bejesus (scared the...) heeby jeebies (gave me the...) jiminy (Jesu Domine?) jiminy cricket jingo jeepers creepers	golly gosh gadzooks (god's hooks) drat (god's rot) zounds (god's wounds) begorra (by god) strewth (god's truth) cor blimey (god blind me) by gum (by god)	darn durn dang dashed dog gone (god damn)	heck (Surely there are more of these?)

Can you think of any others?

When we think of Internet geeks, we often think of people like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, right? Big fat shut-ins who are social misfits?

Well, according to a new study, that's not accurate. Among other things, your typical Net geek has an active social life and shuns television.

Keeping with the air-related theme as of late:

It begins with an idea. The idea becomes a sketch. Which becomes a blueprint. Which becomes a wind tunnel model. Which becomes a prototype...

...and sometimes it just stops with the sketch.



Concept Aircraft of the past.

A day on Earth is roughly 24 hours. A day on Mars is roughly 24 hours, 40 minutes. The difference doesn't sound like much, but it adds up and it's screwing up the sleep patterns of the scientists in charge of the Spirit Rover.

The sacrifices for science, eh?

(Free LA Times registration required)

If this article is to be believed, the RIAA has come up with some new strategies to deal with "pirates" whom they think may not have as much knowledge of US legal procedures as others. Hmmmmm.

(Talk about losing in the court of public opinion, eh? I wonder sometimes if the RIAA sits around saying, "Hey, this ought to make people hate us even more!")

(via Lynn Sislo)

I got 10/10 on this space quiz. I'm something of a space buff, but this one's still pretty easy, I thought.

At the end of this blog post, I found the following generalization of what differentiates liberals from conservatives:

Conservatives measure how far they are from the bottom and are mostly satisfied. Liberals measure how far we are from the top and think we need to work harder.

Anyone agree? Disagree?

Here's an interesting thought experiment/parlor game question, via Terry Teachout: You have a lot of money -- a seven-figure amount -- that you're can donate to one arts institution in the United States. Who gets your money? Just one. (And no "Arts Councils" who will spread the money around to a bunch of artists!)

I'd give it to the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, myself.

So what do you do when a President you really don't like proposes something you really want? Like Bush's impending space policy announcement?

I'm a bit surprised by this, because Bush has never struck me as the kind of President who's remotely interested in science or much else in that realm. It's an election year, and obviously they kept this in a drawer just in case the Spirit Rover mission failed. But, I've long felt dismay over the "ho-hum" attitude toward space we've pretty much embraced since the Apollo missions ended, so if he's sincere, well -- it's not remotely enough to make me vote for him, but I'll be sorely disappointed if the eventual Democratic nominee pooh-poohs the idea.

Yet another variant of the "Geek Quiz", this one focusing on "nerdiness". I got fifty percent, which I gather is a decent score. This one's actually kind of fun, because the questions don't identify the subject matter -- you're just supposed to know.

La Befana, the Christmas witch. This is a really fine piece of writing, and a lovely fable.

This is in breathtakingly poor taste, but that's probably to be expected, given the source. I'm an animal lover, but I think PETA is just plain nuts. Anyone else?

(Although I must confess that given my particularly dark sense of humor, I found the picture of the psychotic knife-wielding June Cleaver-esque mommy rather amusing.)

Of all the crap I ever had to endure in grade school, I am firmly convinced that the diagramming of sentences was the most spectacularly useless. But it evidently occurred to someone that, since the Preamble to the United States Constitution is a single sentence, well by golly, it should be diagrammed!

Oy.

(via TNH's Particles)

So, did anyone else despise diagramming sentences the way I did?

OK, that last post obviously didn't take. Let's try another Wired article (though I'm dubious about y'all's love for Wired):

Memo
To: The next head of the Motion Picture Association of America (to be opened upon arrival)
Subject: How Hollywood can avoid the fate of the music industry

Do you dream of movies on demand over broadband?

From the latest issue of Wired (this was a good one): 101 ways to save the Internet.

Do you agree that the Internet is in danger? What are your favorite suggestions for saving it? Discuss.

FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
I thought that this was a joke when I saw it in my in box. I guess not.

Hey amigos, it's been a long time, but I finally returned to blogging, maybe for good this time.

Since I know how much folks like the maps, I thought I would share this:



With the 2004 Presidential Election fast approaching, we might ~look forward~ to the onslaught of maps that paint the U.S. red and blue, illustrating which states lend their political support to Bush, and which states will back the Democratic Challenger To Be Announced. CommonWealth Magazine takes a more nuanced view of the American Electorate, and has divided the country into ten regions that spread beyond state boundaries, using counties as their unit of analysis. Although it will take quite a while to truly absorb the methods CommonWealth used, much less understand the ramifications for the candidates vis-a-vis campaign strategy, I highly recommend taking the time to read about our fractured electorate.

(via Sennoma's newly-created, terribly promising Malice Aforethought)

I'll probably have more to say about this on my own blog, but I thought I'd send up a trial balloon here. In the course of the Lord of the Rings films over the last two years, I've seen the sentiment often expressed that the movies aren't merely excellent tellings of Tolkien's story, but superior tellings of Tolkien's story. For example, here's a representative quote from John Scalzi:

The filmed version of the tale is a better film than the book version is a book, because the storyteller in the film tells the story better. Middle-Earth is undoubtedly Tolkien's world. But Jackson is the better teller of this particular tale.

Part of Scalzi's argument is that the books are not great literature, an idea which I reject utterly, and in fact I've been holding off on responding to this because I don't want to foam at the mouth. Anyone else want to say anything on this? Are the books great literature? I, for one, think that they indisputably are, and as much as I love the films, I don't think for one second that they tell the story better than the books.

"Why I Hate The Lord of the Rings", by some hack Hollywood writer. How much of a hack is he? He uses two different spellings of "Isildur" within three sentences of each other, and neither is correct. And more hackery on display, too!

And to think, this guy got paid for this piece.

Yeah, I'm pretty geeked for Wednesday

Some links in the meantime: What not to do during Return of the King, A Peter Jackson version of the Hobbit?, and Fellowship of the Nitpickers. Anyone else already got their tickets? I got mine this morning for an 8:30 showing Wednesday night at a Digital theater.

I won't pretend to understand everything about it, but frozen light seems awfully cool to me.

I've been enjoying quite a bit of historical fiction lately. I just read 'Gates of Fire' by Stephen Pressfield about the stand of 300 Spartans against thousands of Persians at Thermopylae. It was excellent. One of my favorites is 'Shogun'. I recently read 'Horatio Hornblower' and enjoyed them.

Do you read historical fiction? What are your favorites?

The FDNY's "Dirty Little Secret": At least a dozen of New York's Bravest - some of them assigned to look after Sept. 11 widows - have left their wives for the spouses of their comrades killed in the terror attacks, sources told The Post.

"It's disgusting, heartbreaking what they've done," said Mary Koenig, whose husband, Gerry Koenig of Staten Island's Rescue 5 squad, ditched her and their two kids for Madeline Bergin, the widow of his friend and firehouse mate, John Bergin, after the World Trade Center attacks.

An insider who has worked with firefighter families and a counselor who worked for one of the FDNY services told The Post there are about a dozen cases similar to the Koenigs.

I can kind of see how this would happen, but it's pretty sad. I'm not sure that better counseling for surviving firefighters and widows would have a great impact, but I don't know what else could possibly work.

(via anil)

Hmmmm....here's a brief movie called iPod's Dirty Secret. Interesting....for iPod users, is the "Dirty Secret" true, and if so, isn't this the kind of thing that usually draws accusations of Evil Incarnate if Microsoft happens to do them?

(via The Punning Pundit.)

OK, as long as I'm dusting the cobwebs out of here, I should direct any readers with connections to small liberal arts colleges located in Northeastern Iowa to check out Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column, which is now hosted at NFL.com. Scroll down to "Obscure College Football Score of the Week #2".

1. CBS makes a movie about Ronald Reagan.

2. Said movie isn't sufficiently fawning about Reagan for conservative tastes.

3. Said conservatives scream bloody murder about the "liberal media".

4. CBS caves; moves movie to Showtime.

So, is this the liberal media run amok, trampling the memory of a great leader? Or is this thin-skinned conservatives unable to stand the slightest criticism of their sacred cows?

Time for the ever-popular "Where are you on the political spectrum?" quiz, which has me being pretty liberal and pretty libertarian. My results, and link to the quiz, here. (It takes five to ten minutes.)

Timothy Noah on Amazon's new "search inside the book" feature. Is this feature useful? I'm really not sure that it is, and I definitely think that it needs an off-switch. For instance, if I just want to get a Stephen King book, should I be forced to wade through every book that somewhere in its pages includes the words "Stephen" or "King"? This thing strikes me as an example of rolling something out before it's ready. Thoughts?

Kevin Drum posts a couple of excerpts from the President's news conference yesterday.

It's probably a given that George W. Bush is not the best speaker out there -- he's adequate with a prepared text, but in my ears he's dreadful off the cuff. Is this important? What should be our reaction to a President of the United States who uses words like "unsticker"? Should we be amused, mortified, ambivalent? Does this indicate anything?

Russia has a new clinic for alcoholics.

Children alcoholics.

Oops!.. I did it again

Ever get an earworm? You know, those songs that get stuck in your head, sometimes for days? For the longest time Ms. Spears had a strangle hold on my brain. Chili's jingles also often plague me. For the exorcism of these malevolent musical maladies, I usually try to get a more appealing song to force the worm out. Too often though this humming to myself will not work, and I am stuck with it until I can gain access to a more apt aural antidote. The most persistent may require a full dose of Beck's Odelay.

Most of the time though, I don't mind the infestations, as they tend to be songs I enjoy (Mitsubishi commercials usually fall into this category). They can even help when there is no stereo around. Friendly earworms are always welcome on long motorcycle rides.

So what are some of your earworms, and how do you get rid of them?

(cross-poted to ABOHO)

Speaking of book clubs, do remember to complete this (inevitable) Brothers Karamazov Personality Test on your way out.

A blogger named "Slacktivist" has decided to do an exhaustive review of the Left Behind books -- start here and move forward. What's interesting is that Slacktivist is doing this not a book at a time, but a page at a time. Of course, I don't expect him to get all that far into the project.

Has anyone here read these? I haven't, but I've scanned them several times in bookstores, enough to be turned off by the prose and the ragged right-hand margins in the copies I saw.

The people have spoken. Well, the Brits anyways. In April, the Beeb's "Big Read" began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked citizens to nominate their favourite books. Find the results here and here. Top 21 are here and you can vote if you fake being across the pond.

And is this just an excuse to bump the Collab Book Club discussion up a little bit? You're damn right! So, I Claudius or Brief History of Time?

OK, folks, is Mother Teresa worthy of Sainthood? (Depending, of course, on your level of hostility toward the whole idea of Sainthood in the first place.) Here's a MeFi thread about her.

Time for the ever-popular "Caption This Photo of the President"!

Keeping with the automotive theme, is anyone else here, like myself, a big fan of Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers? I love their show, especially the Puzzler and "Stump the Chumps!" Here are some of their classic clips.

Here's an article (a fairly commercial article, but an article nonetheless) about the return of the station wagon. So, what do we all drive, would we drive a station wagon, are minivans really inherently uncool, and what vehicle did we hate the most?

For the Cubs-fans among us: stuff that's happened since their last World Series championship. Wow.

OK, here's a question via Bookslut that I found intriguing. You're on a first date, you go to the person's apartment or home and while they're in the kitchen you glance at their bookshelf. What book's presence on that shelf would make you end the date as quickly as possible, tear up their phone number, and never contact them again?

(Yeah, lots of us here have wives already. Pretend. And if there actually are any women reading this blog still, because we've been so incredibly lax in keeping it up, feel free to answer too. It's not necessarily a "male" question.)

Stolen from MeFi, but an interesting question: What's the biggest mistake of your life so far? Here's how some prominent Brits answered that question.

OK, time for my periodic return to posting here, when I basically go, "Hmmm, I haven't posted to Collaboratory in a while...."

Anyway, there are nine announced Democratic presidential candidates. (Hmmm....nine of 'em....depending on your political allegiance, I guess the Dem Prez hopefuls are either the Fellowship or the Nazgul!) Of the nine, only six apparently have a legit shot at the nomination. (The odd ones out are Kucinich, Sharpton, and Mosley-Braun.) So, for those of you who might lean Democratic, have any of these guys tripped your trigger yet?

Because we all love lists, don't we? The Guardian Observer's list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time (read about the list here). So, thoughts?

Is here where I fess that I've not read any of the top 16, other than excerpts of Gulliver's Travels? I have read 20 of the overall list though....

One aspect of the American economy that's starting to get a bit more than lip service these days is jobs moving overseas. It's a familiar tale, of course -- we all know about manufacturing companies shutting down factories so they can employ incredibly cheap, non-union labor in another country. But now it's the service jobs, the ones that have been keeping America's economy afloat as manufacturing has declined.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Should anything be done about this?

Put back right good postpones
and you will hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful voyage
which started starting from this tropical port
on board this tiny boat.
The companion was a powerful man of navigation;
the courageous and sure captain.
Five passengers placed the veil this day
for a three hours excursion.
a three hours excursion.

To obtain started in rough weather.
The tiny boat was thrown in the air.
If not for the courage of the courageous crew,
Minnow would be destroyed.
Minnow would be destroyed.

The boat failed on the shore of this
uncharted the island of desert
with Gilligan, the captain, therefore,
the millionaire, and his wife.
The star of cinema,
the professor and Mary Ann
are here on the island of Gilligan.


translation courtesy of Matthew White

TGIF

The Bush administration seems to be following an axiom that guided many of its predecessors: To keep negative headlines to a minimum, release bad news on a Friday.

On a Friday last November, the Environmental Protection Administration said it would relax enforcement of the Clean Air Act so older coal-fired power plants could renovate without having to install anti-pollution equipment.

On a Friday in January, the administration said it would consider removing Clean Water Act protections from up to one-fifth of the nation's streams, ponds, lakes, mudflats and wetlands.

The resignations of Army Secretary Thomas White and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill were announced on Fridays.

Last December, Census officials admitted on a Friday that the 2000 Census undercounted the nation by 3.3 million people.

Busy, busy, busy.

Starbucks Imperialism, the economics of

The ubiquity of American movies, brands and franchises around the world tends to make people draw certain conclusions about America and American power. These range from fanciful myths like "no two nations with McDonalds outlets will ever fight a war" to America as a voracious "cultural imperialist" that is determined to impose its trashy and decadent culture on the rest of the world.

All of these views seek to draw inferences either positive or negative about American cultural "values", either for 'em: they want "our way of life" or their envious of "our way of life" or agin 'em: America and American multi-national corporations are engaged in a war of aggression against "our culture".

There is, however, another interpretation which takes no account of the cultural significance of exporting American "values" and instead looks at the economics of the chains and franchises themselves. Australian economist, John Quiggin blogs that chains require a certain degree of cultural homogeneity in order get established and, to put it simply, the largest and most homogenous market in the world is the United States.

One of the traps for writers on 'soft power' is that, observing the proliferation of McDonalds, Starbucks and so on, they imagine that everyone in the countries they visit is a customer of these enterprises. This is, roughly speaking, true in the US, but the market share for these chains is smaller everywhere else.

I'm really fuzzy as to what exactly this guy's crime was. Are we moving toward prosecuting people for what they think?

(It's a guy who was prosecuted on child-pornography laws for journals he wrote which basically detailed fictional accounts of...well, ugly stuff he thought about.)

Via MeFi: It's Banned Books Week. As always, many of the titles on the Most Challenged 100 Books List are surprising: How To Eat Fried Worms? Well, I recall not liking it in fourth grade, but banning it? Yeesh....anyway, the Judy Blume quote at the top of the page laments books that won't get written because they might end up on this list. Maybe I'm warped, but I'm the type to try to write books that are likely to get on this list.

Anyway, read a challenged book sometime!

MrWong's Soup'Partments






There's more...

I know you're dying to know the answer to this one...

Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity's disposal is closer to the storm's, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn't seem promising. [more]

-- Frequently Asked Questions at the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

It's caption time!

For those of you into the whole ten-plus dimensions thing.

Based on this article, and the one that recently got Sean rather upset, I think we should get a pool going on what will be Christopher Hitchens's next subject. My money's on "Why Not Eat Puppies?"

Media Planning based on a new demographic

"It's not that we're necessarily going to run ads for skinny people on shows that skinny people watch," she explains. "It's more about understanding what the marketing implications are for people of different weight classes and then building a media strategy around that."

For example, she says it would have huge implications for food marketers-particularly fast-food chains-if regulators were to move forward with plans to regulate certain types of food advertising, much the way they did with alcohol and tobacco ads.

Under tobacco marketing rules, tobacco brands are not allowed to purchase ads in magazines that have a significant composition of underage readers. "Let's hope it doesn't get that far, but if it does, we may not be allowed to advertise certain food products on shows that reach a high composition of overweight people," Nathan predicts.

How ethical is this and should it be regulated? To what extent?

Scrabblog. Nice creative use of the medium.

I wonder what kind of conversations might transpire, in the Great Beyond, between the father of the H-bomb and Hitler's personal film-maker.

Land of the Chocolate Makers


Map by uggabugga.

Keep Looking Up

Over the weekend I was able to get a good look at Mars through the 120+ year old, 15.6 inch refracting telescope at UW Madison's Washburn Observatory. The skies were less than ideal, but I was easily able to make out the southern ice cap, and some of the dark markings on the surface. The disk appeared to be slightly larger than a quarter held at arms length. It was certainly no Hubble view, because of the cloudy skies the red planet appeared mostly gray, but it was still well worth the wait in line. Between Mars, and my recent Lunar Eclipse cum Jovian encounter, I am really hoping to be able to buy a decent telescope in the near future. Here are some other night sky targets if you've been bitten by the bug too. Of course, you can always turn to Jack for weekly naked-eye targets.

I'm supposed to be on a blogging hiatus for a couple of days -- shhhh! -- but I didn't say anything about posting to Collaboratory, and anyway, this is too cool not to share right now: Warren Ellis had something called "Worldwide Wednesday" the other day, in which people sent him snapshots from their digital cameras or webcams or whatever for an entire day. Start here (this is the last entry in the series), and work your way back for some nifty bits of impromptu coolness.

On the 40th anniversary of its delivery, the annotated "I Have A Dream" speech.

So, to revisit John's post, how many of us have actually done any Mars-gazing?

Well, I don't know how it happened, but somehow I was allowed membership to this elite group. I'll take the opportunity of my first post to provide my profile.

On July 4th 1972, I was born in Des Moines, Iowa (firecracker kid, yankee-doodle dandy, yes I've heard them all), and lived in the (ahem) glorious capitol city through high school. I attended Wartburg College with Jaquandor and Sean (I really didn't know Sean, but I knew of him). I played in the Concert Band and Jazz Band with Jaquandor, although my first encounter with him actually came during my senior year of high school when he hosted me for the Meistersinger Honor Band. His roommate was gone for the weekend, so Jaquandor graciously allowed me to sleep on said roommate's bed, contrary to explicit instructions forbidding such slumber. One sore point from that weekend was that Jaquandor failed to warn me to avoid a certain religion professor’s classes. I still hold a grudge.

I started out as a Music Education major, but soon realized that I really wasn't a good enough player to make it through my required recitals (I really think would be a lousy teacher anyway). I did however have a knack for theory and composition. So I abandoned the Bachelor of Music Education path in favor of a straight Bachelor of Music, with an emphasis in composition rather than an instrument. I would still have to meet the recital requirements, but I wouldn't have to play, just write the music. At this point I suppose I should mention that my main instrument was trombone. I had switched from trumpet my sophomore year in high school when playing trombone meant a guaranteed spot in the top jazz band.

Somewhere along the way I started hosting a few radio shows on the college radio station (including a couple of all Beatles specials co-hosted by my advisor/theory professor) and developed an interest in broadcasting. I was never particularly that good on-air, but I did enjoy the production aspect of it all. The thought occurred to me that this might be a way I could earn a living in my post-Wartburg days. I certainly didn't see anybody paying me for my analysis of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck." I added a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Journalism (electronic media emphasis) at the beginning of my fourth year. Working on two degrees, a fifth year seemed to be in the cards. During the course of my journalism studies my focus shifted from radio to video. Still concentrating on the production end of things I became quite a decent videographer and editor. I did have an interest in the journalism side, but my lack of on-air talent precluded me from following a career as a reporter, and my journalistic standards were much too high to allow me to make it as a producer. So, I stuck with the creative/visual side of things.

Midway through the second semester of my fourth year I heard rumor that my music advisor, and sole teacher of nearly every course required for that degree, would be leaving at the end of the year. When I asked him about this he simply said with a grin "I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be." OK. I decided within an hour that I would drop the Bachelor of Music, and try to get out in four and a half years. Who really needs two bachelors degrees anyway? I talked my journalism advisor into an independent study, and it was all set. I still needed a science credit, but that was easily taken care of in the spring at Des Moines Area Community College, saving me a fair bit of debt.

While at Wartburg I also met my future wife Krista. She was also a music major (both education and performance) and played in the concert and jazz bands. Her main instrument is the marimba, as well as all other percussion. We were married in the summer of 1995. We live in south Minneapolis, near Lake Nokomis, in a house that we bought two years ago. I am a video editor at KSTP-TV, the ABC affiliate, where I have been for nearly eight years. Krista teaches percussion and piano (as well as the occasional wind instrument) for the Children's Yamaha Music School.

I tend to have too many hobbies. We played together in a rock band called “44” for several years (one song is still available at mp3.com). Krista was the drummer, and I played guitar, bass, and horns. So, in addition to working on our house, we are also trying to get a home studio set up to start recording some music. In these summer months a lot of time is spent bicycling and riding my motorcycle. I also enjoy photography (despite my being a total hack), and would love to get a telescope one of these days. There is also the possibility of a short independent film (making, not watching) somewhere down the line.

I don’t read as much as I should, but my favorite authors include Tolkien, Kerouac, and Vonnegut. My musical tastes vary widely. There is no genre that doesn’t have something for me (with the possible exception of the whole boy band/pop diva thing). To list just a few: The Beatles, Beck, Bj?rk, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash, Tori Amos, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk (my cat is named Monk), Dave Matthews, and the list goes on.

As far as politics go, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and I do not consider myself a centrist. My views tend to fall far to the left or far to the right, depending upon the subject. I won’t go into detail here, I will simply let it all come out as time goes on.

Now what brought me to Blogistan? The incessant nagging of Jaquandor nearly every time I would comment over at Byzantium’s Shores, “You should have a blog of your own.” So, I got a blog of my own. As you will notice, my posting is rather spotty on my own weblog, and I can guarantee that the same will be true here (how long has it been since Sean added me to the sidebar?) But I will try and bring something to the table.

Was that long enough?

Question: Is the current situation in the California recall more a result of

a) incompetent USAmerican politicians?

b) USAmerican's stupid obsession with 'celebrities'?

c) something else?

I know this much, it feels more like something out of Philip K Dick than reality. Truth is stranger than fiction.

This is the first image of Earth (top and middle) taken from another planet.

No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water..

—War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells (1898)

At 5:51 a.m. EDT on Aug. 27, 2003, Mars will be within 34,646,418 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) of Earth. This will be the closest that Mars has come to our planet in nearly 60,000 years.

Prior to the 1988 close pass, the two planets were even closer in 1971, just 34.9 million miles (56.2 million kilometers) apart. The 2003 approach is less than 1 percent closer than the one in 1971, Standish points out.

"So it's not like you're going to see something gigantic in the sky," he said. "It’s not like Mars is going to look like the Moon or anything [although I understand that you only need a fairly modest telescope (75 power) to make it appear so - JH]"

Mars will appear strikingly brilliant, however. It will be about as bright as Jupiter ever gets. It will shine like a beacon in its characteristic red or orange, in stark contrast to most of the other planets and stars, which exhibit little color.

Officially, Mars will reach magnitude minus-2.9 on a scale used by astronomers to denote brightness. Lower numbers indicate brighter objects, and negative numbers are reserved for the very brightest.

The Red Planet will present a large enough disk for backyard astronomers with good-sized telescopes to discern some of the planet's features, such as the polar ice cap, dark surface features and perhaps even storm clouds.

-- Orbital Oddities: Why Mars will be So Close to Earth in August

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of Mars during an opposition on June 26, 2001, when Mars was approximately 43 million miles (68 million km) from Earth.

The winter rains had been impeding my view of Mars until the last couple of days but since then the sky has been clear (and icy cold). Mars is bright and unmistakable and it's very conveniently rising at nightfall and rising during the course of the evening. Also conveniently for sky gazers, apparently there won't be a moon visible on the 27th.

Housekeeping notes:

You won't believe it, but I actually updated the sidebar. I added: Jason's long awaited weblog under his name; Cody; and Aaron. C and A, would you please both write a little profile like the rest of us did so it can be linked? I invited Sam a while ago, so if he ever comes, I'll add him to the sidebar as well.

To do: I'd like to add an RSS feed so Collaborator would show up as updated on BlogRoll, but not today.

Anything else we need? A new template was mentioned, once upon a time...

When confronted with a fairly new and unusual set of circumstances and you don't know what to do, you should call someone who's dealt with similar circumstances before. Case in point: It's the middle of August, it's really hot, your entire metropolitan region has just suffered a complete loss of electrical power. Who should you call for advice?

The Iraqis, of course.

Though, given this happened in New York City and parts of New Jersey, I suspect we've got Item #2 on their advice-list covered.

Pardon the self-link, guys and gal, but I can't post this on my personal blog and I wanted to share the news. I've got a new blog. I've obviously gone far over the brink of insanity. But shhh. My dad can't know.

Greatest Americans?

I've only received three lists (including my own) of the seven to ten greatest Americans (IYHO, of course). Jaq? Sean? Cody? Hardy, you want in on this? If I don't get at least five total (or two more) then I'll scrap the project. Don't be so lazy! e-mail them to me: nospamnospamssecrest48 AT hotmail DOT com. Remove the "nospamnospam". Gracias.

I'm sure we've all heard the comparisons of political candidates, especially popular in Presidential elections, of the form:

[Candidate X] is the new [Current or past office holder of note]!

Along these lines, Howard Dean is apparently the new....well, it's multiple choice.

A growing pastime, born of GPS technology, is striking out to see just what there is at places where latitude and longitude meet, and a whole website, Confluence.org, documents this fascinating subset of world travel.

Ever since I started publicly listing my email address on the web¹ I have been steadily receiving more and more spam. Nowadays, on average I get betwen forty and fifty a day. If I signed up to each and every one of these offers, I tell you boys and girls, my penis would have been lengthened to twice the circumference of the Earth by now! (I just thought you'd like to know that.)

Initially I started screening spam before I downloaded it from the server by looking at the subject lines or sender addresses but eventually the task became too laborious so I switched to an email spam filter like SpamAssassin (set up as an email proxy SAProxy which ran locally on my windows box). The results were pretty good but after a while I noticed that quite a lot of emails were managing to circumvent it.

Recently I switched from using IE/Outlook Express to Mozilla/Mail. The Mozilla project admittedly took a bit of while to get ready for Prime Time but I'm pleased to report that it's there now and that I'm no longer dependent on a Microsoft product for doing such an important job².

It took me a little time after I started using it to realise that the program actually has quite a nice little spam filter already built in to it. The filter is a Bayesian one and it employs the statistical algorithm described in an August 2002 article by Paul Graham : "A Plan for Spam".

Unlike conventional spam filters which recognize certain tell-tale features of spam (such as keywords: sex, teens, free, credit etc), Bayesian filters start with no preconceptions of what spam should look like at all. When a spam email arrives you simply mark it with the "junk" flag (and optionally have it automatically move it to a "junk" folder). After a while - and it takes at least fifty messages before it really starts to get a handle on things - the filter will automatically start marking certain messages as junk all by itself.

In this early stage you may need to unmark some of these emails, in my cases it erroneously marked a few HTML newsletters, one or two mail server notification message etc. But after quite a few weeks of using this filter, I've found that it does an excellent job. Now only a few spams a day manage to slip through to my inbox and while I still check the junk folder for false-positives I haven't found any more legitimate emails wrongly put in there.

So how about you? What's your daily dose of spam like and what strategies have you been using to deal with it?

---

¹ - the Collaboratory is coming up for its first birthday in two weeks btw
² - I'm also using OpenOffice which is quite a respectable and free replacement of Microsoft Office

The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill is raising quite the debate by asking incoming students to read "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America". I know that at least Jaq and Jason have read this book (as have I). Is this fair game as required reading or is it too biased towards an agenda? Can politically charged books make for good reading for students or should they seek these out on their own time? Would you still feel the same iif it were a Bill O' Reilly book?

John Hardy fixed the sidebar. Three cheers for John!

A common meme in American political discourse is that our country is divided sharply between the liberal, Democratic outposts of the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast, with virtually everything in the middle being solidly conservative Republican. This is commonly demonstrated by simply referring to the electoral map in the 2000 election:



But, the truth -- as is always the case -- is more complicated than that, and indicates that we're not as split an electorate as some might insist. The 2002 election results, which resulted in a pretty even split in Congress despite the conventional wisdom that the Democrats suffered a massive bloodbath, bears this out. If you instead combine the percentages of "red" and "blue" -- say, assigning 54% red and 46% blue to Ohio, just to make up an example off the top of my head -- you end up with what Brad DeLong calls "a purple nation". Check this out:



And, for Republicans who like to think that all that geographical space in their red area is impressive (or for Democrats who look at their tiny little blue area and suffer some kind of Freudian envy), there's this map in which state size is represented by the number of electoral votes.

Blogstop - each entry must be an acronym for the next post. (via mefi). Anyone up for an attempt?

Interesting special flash-based interactive guide to the fence that Israel is trying to build between itself and the Palestinians. Some Israelis view this with relief while others fear that it will reinforce the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders. Palestinians claim it will exacerbate the economic apartheid they currently suffer

Initially opposed to the fence and urging compliance with the "road-map to peace", President Bush is now backing out of the debate.

To begin the (brief but informative) Guardian tour, click here.

This morning's headlines:

:: Memo Warns of New Hijack Plots

:: Air Marshals Pulled From Key Flights

Well....allrighty, then.

UPDATE: A new headline appeared just now: Flip-flop on Air Marshal Schedules. I'm glad that wisdom has prevailed.

China needs breathing room. Russia's got too much breathing room.

A novel solution.

Have You Seen Me??

Have you seen Sidebar??

"Sidey" was lost in the blogspot area earlier this month and his loving
owners hope he was taken in by a well meaning person who just doesn't
know how to contact them.

Please contact either Sean or Scott if you have seen him.

REWARD!!

I just sent invites to Sam and Cody, so bring it on, fellas!

Further to Scott's post below...

More on Louisiana's MASSIVE erosion problem

Louisiana 1803


land area: 828,000 sq miles

Louisiana 2003


land area: 51,843 sq miles

Taken over a two hundred year period this represents an annual loss of just under 1.3%. This is a very serious situation indeed.

As Scott's article says:

In 2000, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Chip Groat, said: “With the projected rate of subsidence, wetland loss and sea-level rise, New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century.”

Hmmm...

101 Facts About Earth

Is the state of Louisiana growing or shrinking? (#74)

Does Earth have the worst weather in the Solar System? (#80)

The answer to these and 99 more ranging from basic knowledge to "whoa, that's cool" found here.

Into the Deep

Tanya Streeter broke the world free-diving record on Monday as, on a single breath lasting three minutes and 38 seconds, she descended 400ft (121 metres) towards the ocean floor and resurfaced using only a pair of giant flippers for propulsion.

She is still a little tired after Monday's dive, which saw her heart rate slow to 15 beats per minute, her lungs compress to the size of scrunched-up plastic bags and her blood cease circulation around her extremities.

Wow.

I did very poorly on this

The very pedantic and difficult Economist style-guide quiz. I broke in the "needs improvement" rating, but there were some things in there I hadn't thought about in a very long time.

TJ I can understand, but Reagan? Really?

Right-wing bloggers take a vote and rank their twenty greatest figures in American History. It'd be interesting to conglomerate a list of our own. Send me your top, um, let's say 5-10 via e-mail (ssecrest48 AT hotmail Dot com) and I'll put it together and post it next Monday.

Thirty-four years ago today:





Isn't it about time we went back?

Ugh.

"That invisible hand of Adam Smith's seems to be offering an extended middle finger to an awful lot of people." - - George Carlin

Here's a fascinating intersection of science and art: astronomers have figured out when Van Gogh witnessed a particular astronomical event which he later painted.

More here, including a photo of the actual painting.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

(It's a dolphin.)

Collaboratory's been sucking wind a little bit lately, wouldn't you say? Cody is interested in joining us, and i'm interested in having him, but I don't want to invite him to something that's languishing. What do we do?

Comment counting should be back now.