For a moment, anyway. Beginning two Saturdays ago it was the beach in North Carolina; then it was Jeff and Marie's wedding in California; today it's Emily's birthday(!) in DC; tomorrow it's back to California for work; Friday it's the City Veins' CD release party at Iota; Saturday it's a belated birthday dinner with Emily in Philadelphia, hosted by our friends Tara and John Carlos.

In short, I am probably going to die. But then, I always knew that, and for a while now have been halfway-suspecting the Chinatown bus would be responsible in one way or another.

Some of you may have noticed that I updated my Facebook profile this morning in various ways, including the addition of an embarrassingly MySpacey profile photo (dig that soulful staring into space). Please note! I'm still not using that damn platform. I was mostly just trying to figure out how to put a note on my profile stating that I don't really use FB, and that folks should try contacting me elsewhere. Yes, I could just delete my account. But without a Facebook account many people cease to realize you exist, making detainment in secret government prisons all but certain.

Anyway, back to my attempts to add a note to my profile: they ended in abject failure. Which brings me to my suggestion: can somebody build a "I don't really use Facebook" Facebook application? Something that would display itself prominently on my profile page and respond to any messages by politely inviting the sender to email me instead?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I promise. I have more or less made my peace with FB; I just don't have the time or inclination to start using it seriously, and I'm getting sick of sending notes to new online acquaintances politely explaining that it's not them, it's me.

Julian posted about F for Fake yesterday, which prompted me to watch a few more clips of the film scattered around the internet. I have to admit that I'm not familiar with much of Orson Welles' body of work beyond Citizen Kane and his famous War of the Worlds broadcast. So I had assumed that there was no more complete and cruel affirmation of Welles' final, nihilistic hopelessness than his next-to-last acting credit: the voice of Unicron in the Transformers movie. But it appears that history has come up with innovative new sleights since then.

Within F for Fake there's a monologue about Chartes Cathedral in which Welles expresses the idea that our individual impermanence doesn't imply futility — that there's dignity to be had in the moment and within our collective history. It's quite beautiful.

Anyway, be sure to check out the associated Youtube comments, which together form a convincing rebuttal. I especially like the one comparing Welles' work (unfavorably) to that of Quentin Tarantino.

You might want to go check out Emily's first batch of photos from Jeff and Marie's wedding, which include a number of shots of me looking pre-tty stupid. I seem to have lost my camera somewhere between DC and the beach — it sufficiently close to death that I can't say I'm too broken up about it — but while I wish I could supplement them, the pictures Emily took are more than enough to convey just how beautiful the wedding was.

Marie and Jeff rented a gorgeous house in the middle of a bunch of vineyards in the middle of wine country in the middle of a state that's so beautiful it seems like it must be cheating. There were a number of high notes: driving down the coast in a rented convertible; lots of delicious food, wine and beer; hours spent playing an inscrutable German board game; Jon stripping down and jumping in the pool near the end of the reception. Arguably more importantly, the bride and groom are great for each other, and have been for a while now. They seemed to actually enjoy the wedding while simultaneously making sure that their guests did, too, which seemed like a pretty impressive accomplishment.

All in all: a huge success. Way to go, guys.

Well, I'm sitting in Dulles airport. Rain fell for about ten minutes during the drive out here, and the consequences have been dire: not only is my flight delayed, but the jetway has somehow been damaged and a power surge left the display board frozen in a cruel "ON TIME" rictus.

In other words, it's a great time for complaining. But not about any of this, actually: I've got the internet, a nearby Five Guys, and a power outlet. My boss, JP, is sitting next to me, obsessively checking our flight status in a way that ensures I don't have to pay any attention to what's going on. And the other guy sitting next to me has now made three consecutive phone calls expressing his nearly-outraged incredulity regarding the type of solder and flux that a subordinate suggested using for a project ("40/60?! Who does he think he is?"). I think he's talking about plumbing, but I'd like to believe I have it within my heart to embrace soldering in all its many forms, so this background noise still counts as soothing.

No, I'm pretty well set-up here. This carping has to be backdated: it's about what happened on Sunday when Emily, Charles and I flew out of SFO. The security area wasn't crowded. Charles had gone through the metal detector, I think, and Emily and I were the only two people at the table to which we'd been assigned.

"Excuse me, miss!" said a busty, bustling TSA representative. "I have a registered passenger here!"

The Registered Traveler program, you might recall, is a fairly new initiative by which air passengers can pass through expedited security lines by paying a $100-ish yearly fee to one of several private firms that then run regular background checks. Those who enroll pass through faster lines, and eventually may be allowed to do things like keep their shoes on or their laptops in their bags. It's meant for frequent travelers, and we, the public, are assured that the fees will provide additional lines and personnel — there should be no effect on those who don't enroll.

This was not our experience. The young woman brought by the TSA employee was allowed to cut in front of us, and was then personally led through the security process like a blind baby kitten. That was irritating, but not a particularly large inconvenience — like I said, the lines weren't long. But there also wasn't much of a point to plopping that lady's patrician ass in front of us and escorting her through — it probably made her feel special, and us less so, but nobody was saved or cost any meaningful amount of time. Still, if this is the system they use during busy periods, it really is going to make air travel worse for everyone who doesn't pony up $100/year to gain entry into the program.

Now of course there's nothing wrong with charging more for better service. But I think there's at least a little something wrong when that service is a government-mandated barrier to travel, and more so when it's one powered by secret lists and standards about which appeal is nearly or completely impossible. It also seems like a bad idea to give richer — and therefore more influential — passengers a way out of a system that, without some sort of opposing pressure, will inevitably become more and more irritating and inhumane as bureaucrats try to save their jobs by figuring out up ways to prevent plots that no one can anticipate.

I suspect the registered traveler is doomed to descend into the kind of corruption that surrounds Russian cars' flashing blue lights, although probably in a somewhat less glaringly tacky fashion. It's an inherently elitist system administered by private interests that's granted the power to short-circuit an allegedly vital security system. How could anyone think this will end well?

First things first: the City Veins were really, really great on Friday, and if you missed them I'm sorry. Their set seemed a little short and was definitely early, but man was it great. Special guest stars Kriston, Tim-who-I-don't-know, and Tom from These United States (henceforth: Tom_TUS) added a new dimension to songs that by now I know pretty well. Having heard this band start as a four-piece then refactor their sound and songs when Adam left, it was interesting to hear them return to a surplus of manpower. Interesting and nice!

I seem to have lost my camera and these days Emily's mostly spends its time making deeply pathetic whirring sounds, but friend-of-the-band dotslinesandpolygons took some great photos. More to the point, go buy their CD, why don't ya?

Now, to the boringly personal: I'm kind of surprised to find myself blogging right now rather than, say dead. Or traveling — the former would have been because of the latter. Because holy god, have I done a lot of it recently.

DC to Kitty Hawk for beach. Kitty Hawk to DC. DC to Sonoma for Jeff and Marie's wedding. Sonoma to DC. DC to San Francisco for work. San Francisco to DC. DC to Philadelphia. Philly to DC.

All of that happened over the course of the last two weeks, and there hasn't been more than 36 continuous hours spent in DC during it. Particular highlights included ten hours spent on an already-two-hours-delayed plane to SFO and a three hour trip back from Dulles right before the show on Friday.

Of course all of these trips were made in order to a) get drunk and have great meals with people dear to me or b) meet with interesting clients in a city with fantastic burritos. So I suppose I can't complain (the preceding notwithstanding). But holy hell am I glad that, aside from a Thursday meeting in NYC, the only travel I currently have planned will occur via bicycle.

Ezra links approvingly to a Wonk Room post complaining about Wired's new environmentalist-baiting issue, which, among other things, decries green enthusiasm for organic farming as detrimental to the more important cause of reducing greenhouse emissions.

The author, Paulina Borsook, doesn't challenge the article's contention that organic farming is less productive than conventional farming. But she finds fault with the Wired article because its carbon calculation fails to include a number of factors: carbon emitted transporting fertilizer, pesticides and hormones; the carbon capital costs of the companies that supply them; and carbon impact of increased healthcare costs stemming from the consumption of non-organic food.

Some of these critiques are legitimate. Some of them are pretty silly. None of them are quantitative in any way.

It's easy to see why. Seriously, how many fewer medical expenses will an average individual incur if they eat organic food versus non-organic food? No, no cheating: I said "seriously". No hunches allowed. You have to actually cite data and do the math. Good luck. I'd be impressed if you even manage to come up with a plausible justification for your answer's order of magnitude.

Doing this stuff is impossibly difficult, as is amply demonstrated every time someone tries to figure out the comparatively narrowly-defined problem of biofuels' net energy balance. This is the first problem: literally every human endeavor consumes energy — and of course, it's very hard to reduce any action in civilization to just one step. It's tough to figure out how much energy something took, very tough to accurately guess, and nearly impossible to know how much carbon it took to generate that energy.

This came up when I was out in San Francisco for work (a trip that was unambiguously environmentally awful, I'll be the first to admit). Over beers Michael told a story about a passenger on his flight jealously guarding his trash, refusing to surrender it to the flight attendants unless they promised it would be recycled.

But it's not that easy, right? Last I heard, metal is unambiguously beneficial to recycle; glass takes more energy to recycle than it's worth; and plastic — well, who knows? It probably depends on the type of plastic and where the recycling plant is.

Or take the great coffee cup debate: if a given ceramic mug is likely to get less than a thousand uses, you're better off drinking from a styrofoam cup. Probably, anyway. I'm sure it depends on your dishwasher, or its settings. Or if you don't have a dishwasher. Or the detergent you buy. And probably how far you are from the water pumping station, right? Maybe how much rain your area gets, or has gotten this year, or what floor you live on.

Which is the other problem: as individuals it seems like we all pretty much live within the margin of error on these questions. It adds up over the population, of course, but for one person it's nearly impossible to know what the right thing to do is. There are unambiguous things, of course: don't leave the water running when you brush your teeth, and minimize electricity use, and don't leave your car idling. Although sometimes even those wind up ambiguous: I've heard that restarting a car takes about as much gas as running it for a minute.

But then, I probably heard that from someplace like Wired. So who knows? This is the real problem, the meta-problem: while the only people with an incentive to really figure this out are academics, the only people with an incentive to talk about it are those who sell ad space to people targeting an audience that likes green content or an audience that likes counterintuitive content (both detestable in their own ways). And the press is more than comfortable enough with their anecdotes and innumeracy to continue publishing hunches they had while shopping at Whole Foods, as if a half-day's worth of googling and algebra was sufficient to untangle the world's unimaginably complicated economic and energy-use web (a pursuit that I admit I've indulged in myself — but at least nobody paid me for it).

All of which is to say that until we actually tax or cap or otherwise price carbon, Borsook's counterargument is just as silly as the Wired piece. We'll all keep doing our best, but it's inevitably going to be lame and probably ineffective until we've got some reliable, unignorable signals from which to make decisions. Until then I don't know what to do besides make my best guesses, muddle through, and rededicate myself to an overwhelming sense of defeatist liberal guilt.

Don't make me pick a favorite:

• McDonald's "Southern Style" Chicken Sandwich As the commercial points out, this is less a fried chicken and pickle sandwich than an ascendant generation's rallying cry. These people have different habits — and tastes! And they're not going to submit to the tyranny of traditional breakfast, old man. Also, the chicken is juicy and perfectly seasoned, two points which I'm mentioning in an entirely ordinary, conversational way.
  
  I wanted to reach out to the screen and plaintively tell these hip young sandwich consumers that I, too, have eaten chicken for breakfast. I understand! Oh god, take me with you! But their faces would have been no less implacable had they been in the room instead of on the screen. My time is over. I must go into the West, and diminish.
• Liberty/Freedom/Independence Disposable Catheters: DID YOU KNOW that a recent Medicare decision means that you no longer have to suffer with reusable catheters? I sure was sick of the tedious boiling and sterile procedure associated with my reusable catheters. But it was hard for a comparatively sexy, somewhat vivacious catheter user like myself to find time to call. Finally, my mother (STILL ALIVE) convinced me. Boy, am I glad I did! The folks at Liberty/Freedom/Independence were so friendly (YOU WILL BE LESS ALONE), and now I have much more time for my active lifestyle, pictured here (GINGERLY BENDING DOWN TO PET CAT). I use Liberty/Freedom/Independence every time I "cath"! (EW)

I'm in the market for a sport.

It used to be that I stayed in pretty good shape by going to the gym a hell of a lot. In college I'd make it four or five days a week — an undergraduate schedule and a lack of real hobbies besides binge drinking made this relatively easy. But as I've gotten older I've been spending more and more of my time sick*, traveling, tired, working late or complaining about my knees. My post-work gym attendance has fallen off to about once a week (generously), and I'm increasingly unable to fool myself into thinking this will change.

Charles' boxing and yoga adventures have been an inspiration, too, and I think he's right when he says that I need to change up my routine. My short term goal is to find something I can do outside on weekends that'll actually get my heart rate up.

My longer term goal is more important, though: I want to find an activity that puts me on the path to one day being able to play the crazy old coot: the sinewy codger whose tanned hide hangs off his shoulders like a chieftain's furs, and who takes no greater pleasure in life than embarrassing the callow, pudgy fratboys who show up at his mountain/river/field, unaware that they are about to witness geriatric feats of strength and finesse.

It's ambitious, I know. But I think it's doable. My first thoughts are rock climbing and kayaking. I'm terrible at climbing, but know I enjoy it. I've done a lot of whitewater stuff, but never kayaking. The former seems a little cheaper, but right now I'm leaning toward the latter. Although the Potomac is disgusting, and climbing will probably lead to a more satisfyingly leathery payoff. So it's tough to say.

Anyway, I'd be glad to hear any suggestions from you, good people of the internet. All I know is that I don't want to be one of the weird old guys at the Y** who compete in endless handball ladders.

* This includes now. Yes, I'm sick again.

** Ask me sometime about the guy who either has Tourette's or listens to too much WTEM

Rasmus Fleischer's essay over at Cato Unbound on copyright is a little muddled by virtue of its ambitious scope, but it's good and you should read it. My favorite part:

A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined.

...

For regulations like these to be effective, it is necessary also to censor the sharing of skills that potentially can be useful for coding illegal software. The circle of prohibition grows still larger: Acoustic fingerprinting technologies, which have nothing copyright-infringing to them, but which can be used for the same feared identification of individual tracks, must probably also be restricted.

This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses.

I like the texts/works/tools breakdown, but I suspect this last phase is mostly a temporary blip rather than a fundamental legislative shift. The content industry, increasingly cognizant of the inescapable technological truths Fleischer details, is thrashing around like a robot moaning "DOES NOT COMPUTE" over a logical paradox. The DMCA and WIPO's efforts to ban "circumvention devices" no longer seem to me to be a credible long-term threat. For one thing, noteworthy political opposition has mobilized in response. For another, such regulations pose a real danger to technological advancement, and thereby corporate bottom lines. If a legislative battle is between the media companies and private citizens, the media companies are a pretty safe bet. If it's between the media companies and a score of other industries, the odds shift — and I think that's exactly what has begun to happen.

Or maybe my optimism is just born of boredom over endlessly reviewing the same inescapable logic. At this point it's clear: the only way we're going to return to a scarcity-based market for mass-appeal IP is if there's some sort of global cataclysm. Which I'm not ruling out! (But which most sane people do.)

Failing that, I agree with pretty much all of Fleischer's points — except for the one about Google. I know the people behind the Pirate Bay (with which Fleischer is affiliated) don't think what they're doing is criminal. But from their choice of name — and Fleischer's essay — it's clear that they understand the confrontational, norm-busting nature of their work. They're unapologetic revolutionaries, whereas Google makes a good-faith effort to play by the rules. That's a real difference from both a legal and PR standpoint. It's dishonest to the point of counterproductivity to pretend that it's all the same.

Anyway, from what I can infer from the Cato website, Tim will have a response up later this week, which I'm looking forward to.

Tim's reaction to Rasmus Fleischer's essay is now online, and definitely worth a read. I think it's more interesting than the original, in fact, primarily because the aspects of how copyright will work that Tim proposes and discusses seem less inevitable to me than the ones Fleischer covered.

But I need some time to think about it (and to finish the workday) before writing anything in response, so for now you'd better just go read it.

Matt links to Nicholas Carr expressing concern over the diminishing length of the texts he consumes. Is the internet killing our collective attention span? C'mon, sing along if you know the words.

Well, as Matt says, probably yes, in the aggregate. That's probably okay, though. It's easier to consume stuff, there's more of it to consume, and so we're going to adopt strategies and purchasing criteria that maximize our opportunities. But this won't come exclusively at the cost of intellectual depth — there's plenty of fat to be trimmed. Books and albums are typically somewhat padded in order to make consumers feel that they're getting their money's worth. As the digital age makes media cheaper (and physical delivery methods less relevant), that concern will diminish. More novellas, short films that actually succeed, mass-market EPs, nonfiction books that top out at 150 pages. That's all sounds fine by me.

But the larger point I want to make speaks to what Matt says at the end of his post: on an individual level it's not clear to me that this progression is a steady or irreversible one. Matt says he's meticulously rereading The Brothers Karamazov, despite a level of online immersion that should have left him unable to finish sentences, much less books. For my part, I'm currently reading a lot more novels and long-form articles than I have since I was being graded on it.

Part of this is about getting older. But a big part of it is also about a cycle of getting bored with the internet, which I believe to be an underappreciated phenomenon. I think there's an infradian rhythm to internet use — a repeating cycle of enthusiasm, engagement and consumption; boredom, disillusionment and retreat. The period of this cycle is different for everyone, and depends on their age, professional situation, technological sophistication and who knows how many other factors. In itself this is not so different from waxing and waning enthusiasm for any other pursuit. But, crucially, for a large proportion of online citizens/proponents, these rhythms were more-or-less synchronized at the beginning of this decade, during a time marked by (if not causally related to) the explosion of blogging.

That synchronicity led to a lot of shared enthusiasm, unsustainable cordiality and utopian dreaming. Now our cycles are drifting ever further out of sync, sometimes in waves and sometimes individually. This leads to reflections like James Joyner's much-blogged observations about the changing nature of the political blogosphere, and to more meetings where people like me shift uncomfortably in their seats as junior associates suggest that creating a Facebook application for a client will change everything, man.

Of course it's important for people like myself, who (at the moment) feel a little burned out on the net, to realize that their lack of enthusiasm isn't necessarily more rational or sophisticated than the alternative. There's a tendency to complain:

"The internet was supposed to change everything, man."

"It did change everything. It is."

"Yeah, I guess. So what?"

But that's self-evidently dumb. Those heady early days are gone, but their collapse was inevitable. A roiling convection of enthusiasm and burn-out is probably healthier, ultimately. For those of us drifting back to the bottom of the pot, the only solution is to read some books and unillustrated articles in badly laid-out magazines (the sorts that one could never explicitly name as being badly laid-out, lest one invite lengthy, godawful discussions of typography). The people riding the upward current will handle building widgets and integrating with social networks and reading everything via RSS for a while; I'm confident we'll rejoin or replace them soon enough.

Someone I don't know is reading a set of essays I wrote about (and will write about again) using a tool I created. Neat.

Important business:

1. Via Matt S.: Leonardo DiCaprio as Captain America!? No no no. That's the wrong kind of earnest. He looks wrong, is a pretty atrocious actor and has never pulled off a convincingly alpha-male leading role.
2. Hulk is about the Cold War? I have to defer to Spencer's greater familiarity with the franchise, but this seems all wrong to me. The Hulk is afraid of himself and his lack of self-control. He's defined by rage, isolation and the hopelessness of ever achieving normality. He's a teenage boy, in other words, Peter Parker but with a worse temper and gloomier attitude. Hulk is for anyone who's felt like the anger welling up inside of them could destroy the world, and been unsure if they liked the idea.
   
   I mean, yes, radiation, etc. But that was just the unknowable technology of the day.

Seriously: try it; you'll like it. Toe protection! Ventilation! Drainage! I'll come right out and say it: for drunkenly floating down a river in an innertube, there can be no superior footwear. I'm even beginning to think the navy ones look halfway dignified. I'll be keeping my eye on crocs.com for a "formal" menu item.

(The extent to which they horrify friends and loved ones is pretty enjoyable, too.)

YES. It's time to face the truth: oatmeal-butterscotch cookies are gross — gaudy relics of a debauched former age peopled by those about whom the best that can be said is "they didn't know any better." It's a new millennium and we're going to spend it putting chocolate chips into our oatmeal cookie batter, as the arc of history now clearly shows we inevitably must.

Matt mentioned electric bikes in passing yesterday; as it happens, Hack-a-day had a roundup of electric recumbent projects the same day.

I can't say that I really want an electric bike — they tend to look dumb, and are heavy besides. And I just don't need one, frankly — my legs are more efficient, require less expensive upkeep and are filled with fewer toxic chemicals than EV bikes.

But I do occasionally daydream about a bike with regenerative braking. Partly this is stupid: if you're paying for a drivetrain and motor you might as well go whole-hog and build a complete electric bike. But it's at least a little bit defensible: by designing a system solely meant to capture energy and then release it as a from-a-dead-start acceleration boost, you may be able to lower the requirements for the motor. Certainly your energy-storage requirements would be diminished — no bulky batteries! An array of (admittedly expensive) ultracapacitors could likely do the trick.

Some actual EV bike manufacturers have crunched the numbers on regenerative braking and concluded that it's a bad deal. But they did so assuming a chemical battery; ultracaps don't have the same slow-recharge limitations, and are considerably more efficient besides.

It may seem like a pretty trivial thing, but I think this could actually make a big difference for cyclists' comfort and safety. When you've been biking for a while you begin to appreciate just how precious momentum is, and how irritating it is to be forced to abandon it due to a motorist's trepidation or inattention. This leads to a lot dangerous behavior — when observing a stop sign comes at the cost of sweat and burning muscles rather than a penny's worth of gasoline, it's tempting to try to make sure things are safe enough and then proceed without pausing. If I could get even half of my momentum back after being forced to stop I'd be a lot happier about pulling the brake lever. It'd let me avoid downshifting when I stop, too.

UPDATE: The Halfbakery folks considered the same idea a while ago using mechanical systems — hydraulic, pneumatic and spring-based. It sounds sort of promising! It's a bit more dangerous than an electric system, but would probably be somewhat cheaper and much more efficient. Unfortunately I know basically nothing about mechanical engineering, so there's not much more I can say about these systems besides noting that they sound cool.

Photo by Flickr user nedrichards, used under a Creative Commons license

This is pretty neat:

Explanation here. Also via Hack a Day.

Marriage-induced name changes! Everyone's blogging about it, so allow me to briefly chime in with my brilliant, completely foolproof solution to the problem. First, everyone keeps their name when they get married. That seems kind of obvious. Second, male children take the father's last name and female children take the mother's last name.

In this way each parent gets to preserve their family name, giving it to offspring of the gender that said parent secretly believes to rule (at least relative to the inescapable truth that the other sex droolz). Yet nobody has to mess around with hyphens! And, as an added bonus, if the practice ever became popular we'd soon have distinctly female and distinctly male surnames, which I think would be sort of neat.

More practically, of course, less-than-total adoption means that this would disadvantage female names. But that's all the more reason to embrace and fiercely espouse my crackpot idea immediately!

WHOOPS: How heteronormative of me! Obviously this wouldn't work for same-sex couples. In that case, I suggest alternating kid-by-kid, with first dibs going to the winner of an American Gladiators-style obstacle course. Or, failing that, rock-paper-scissors (3 out of 5).

Anyone who hasn't should go check out Dan Koeppel's op-ed about our impending bananaclysm in the New York Times. I bought Koeppel's book for Emily a while ago (she likes bananas!) and wound up reading it myself — it's good! Since then I've been walking around, using every opportunity I can find to ask, "Did you know that [fascinating fact about bananas]?" To which the answer is invariably "Yes, actually." But it's still an interesting book.

Via Catherine comes MyBikeLane, an effort to document (with license plate annotation!) drivers' lack of respect for bicycle lanes. This is a subject dear to my heart as, during my twice-daily commute through Thomas Circle, I often keep myself bitter/amused by pondering how unimaginable it would be for a driver to be ticketed for violating the space defined by the bike lane.

Thomas Circle is a hotbed of bike lane atrocities. Putting such a lane on the outer edge of a traffic circle is a bad idea to begin with: you're inviting cyclists passing through the circle to cut directly in front of vehicles leaving it. Without the bike lane those cyclists would presumably join the regular flow of traffic, making them a lot more likely to be noticed by drivers.

But it's not just a problem of design. Drivers have no respect for the lanes, and unless they've noticed a biker in sight are all too happy to drift into them, whether from wanting to turn less sharply, a desire to pass stopped traffic or simple carelessness. Fair enough — I'd be looking for a shortcut if I was stuck on 14th at rush hour, too. But given drivers' general awfulness at noticing bikes, there really can be no middle ground: they need to stay completely out of what few lanes we've been given.

Perhaps most mystifyingly, a hotel located on the Southern edge of the circle has helped itself to ten feet or so of the bike lane, setting up white traffic cones in it, presumably to save themselves a spot for their valet service or something similar. Bad enough that they feel entitled to do this — but white? The color of every miscellaneous marking on the road? A color perfectly suited to blending into the gray background noise of the street? Who would make a traffic cone white?! An idiot, that's who. I don't know about anyone else, but I've already creamed one of those asinine cones, thankfully without injuring myself in the process. Next time it happens I'm taking the goddamn cone home with me.

John Allison reviews Chinese Democracy.

I've been thinking of something like this for a while now. And I'd still like to build it — but maybe not one this big. A Hall Effect sensor, cellphone vibration unit and glove should just about do it, I think (although given my general ineptitude I'll have to integrate a microcontroller, I imagine). The main holdup is an unwillingness to commit to buying the parts — I'm not sure what kind of Hall sensor I need, and they turn out not to be as inexpensive as I'd thought.

Besides, I've got another project slowly coming together. But perhaps I'll bug the Dorkbot guys for advice once I'm done with that. In the meantime, it's great to see more of these things actually being built.

(Via the MAKE::Blog)

The Wii Twilight Princess hack (which I wrote about here) was killed by the system's most recent update, received this week by all Wiis connected to the internet.

The industrious hackers of the net have already figured out a workaround, though. Apparently Nintendo's fix is targeted to Twilight Princess, and scans for the specific corrupted save files that enable the hack. That's already an encouraging sign — there are almost certainly similar vulnerabilities in other games, and if Nintendo is tackling the problem in this piecemeal approach it means that the homebrew scene is unlikely to ever be thwarted for long.

But the specifics of the update are even more cheer-inducing: apparently there are some bugs in the update code which, when exploited in tandem, make it possible to continue using the TP hack. Hurrah!

All of this is comes from hackmii.com (via Hack a Day — yes, again), which seems to be home to some of the web's foremost Wii reverse engineers.

For some reason I perpetually forget about the existence of IronGeek.com except for a couple of times every year when it rises, Brigadoon-style, to the level of consciousness. I wish that weren't the case; there's a lot of great stuff on the site. Anyone interested but not well-versed in the security field (i.e. hacking) would do well to check it out.

The most recent bit of interestingness is this video explanation of DNS spoofing via Ettercap ARP poisoning. For some reason I had gotten it into my head that ARP poisoning only worked on wired ethernet networks. But it seems that's not the case, opening up a great deal of potential for hilarious coffeeshop mischief.

It was a busy weekend, one filled with baseball-watching, party attendance, delicious kitchen adventures, videogame acquisition and a screening of the better part of D.E.B.S. thanks to Logo (they're sexy female high-school-aged assassins who can't be stopped — except, perhaps, by the charms of equally sexy arch-villainess Lucy Diamond). But along the way I also managed to conquer my technical problem du jour: getting transparent proxying with URL rewriting working under OpenWRT.

Those interested can read about the associated trials and tribulations here — it proved to be a just-tough-enough nut to crack. Those not interested can click here and scroll down to see how this particular technical configuration can be put to mildly hilarious ends. All in all a pretty satisfying experience, and one that's left me considerably less intimidated and more impressed with OpenWRT than I expected to be. One weekend is about the right amount of time for a geeky challenge.

Kevin Drum writes a bit about John McCain's proposal of a $300 million prize for developing a new battery technology for electric cars. What this makes me really wish is that Marie had a blog, because, as a chemical engineer who just received her PhD working on fuel cell catalysts, this is right up her alley. I hope that she or Jeff will pop up in comments and say smart things. And be kind if I say anything dumb.

But at the least I should be able to avoid saying anything as dumb as McCain's battery-prize proposal. Not that I don't like batteries, mind you! But if someone were to invent a better one they'd already be poised to make a huge amount of money through its commercialization. Offering prizes for innovation isn't always a terrible idea — for pharmaceuticals with a limited market of potential users it can make sense due to the huge costs associated with developing and testing a new drug. But everyone in the developed world needs better energy storage technology, and they need it right now. And while it's important to make sure your new batteries are safe and robust (e.g. they don't explode too much), that's still much easier and cheaper to do than it is to conduct a set of double-blind human trials. So sweetening the pot is unnecessary. Anyone who has a good idea about how to build a better battery is already working on the problem.

The other thing to mention is that Drum's concern over lithium is probably misplaced. Lithium's great, and a ringer when it comes to batteries. A cell's energy density is largely determined by the electrical potential between its anode and cathode — the bigger the gap between them, the better. And as you can see from this chart, electrode potentials don't get much more negative than lithium.

But it's got its problems, too. Lithium wasn't incorporated into mass-market batteries for a long time because of its tendency to catch on fire when exposed to air or charged too quickly. And lithium batteries still tend to dramatically lose capacity about 18 months after they roll off the assembly line, mostly without regard to how hard they've been used. Both of those problems have and continue to be addressed by brilliant electrochemists, and the lithium polymer batteries we use today are fairly miraculous. But it would probably be a mistake to think that lithium technology will get dramatically better than it currently is.

It's also worth noting that not all hybrid or electric cars use lithium batteries. In fact, I don't think many currently do at all — the Prius uses nickel-metal-hydride, a less efficient but longer-lived chemistry. It would just be too expensive to replace the batteries on lithium's lifecycle. So worries about peak lithium should be tempered with the realization that we can make batteries out of other stuff, too.

But that doesn't mean we don't need a better battery. No-combustion vehicles are where everyone agrees we need to go, but they have much more significant battery requirements than hybrids. They have to charge and discharge faster and more completely, both of which are tough on batteries. And they need to provide more total power, too.

Right now the problem looks pretty tough. There are two promising technologies, though. First, nanotechnology and the unbelievably vast electrode surface areas it provides are making ultracapacitors look more and more viable. These devices will never be able to store as much charge as a battery, I don't think, but they can be charged and discharged very quickly and may not suffer the age-related effects that plague chemical cells. From what I've read, they also tend to be built out of less environmentally objectionable materials. As I said, this is no battery replacement, but it may make different kinds of vehicles possible — say, one that's inductively recharged every few miles by a plate embedded in the road. Or they may just replace the battery's buffering function in hybrids, and ease the charge/discharge speed problem in EVs.

The other technology is, of course, fuel cells. Marie tells me they're again falling out of favor, funding-wise, as their recent renaissance falls back in line with a century-long track record of failure to reduce cost and fragility. But it seems inevitable that we'll have to revisit the technology — there's just no better way to safely store lots of energy in a vehicle than with hydrocarbons or some other hydrogen-donating chemical system (I've heard some sort of ammonia pellet system suggested, too). And if you're going to store your energy as hydrocarbons (which isn't to say it has to be pumped out of the ground, of course), fuel cells are the most efficient way to turn it back into usable power.

That's my understanding of the situation, anyway. Hybrids seem likely to stick around for longer than many people suspect, I think. Electric vehicles may be great for getting around towns, but I think people are going to balk the first time they try to use the A/C and realize just how many watt-hours they're spending, and how few they have with them on board their petroleum-free car.

Christ: another one. Why is it that any time someone points out that despite bicycling being a clean and cheap mode of transportation our cities make it much more dangerous and difficult than it ought to be, the first reaction is always, ALWAYS for people to exclaim: "But sometimes bicyclists run stop signs or ride on sidewalks!"

I'm really trying to keep this short, so I'll just say: speaking for cyclists everywhere, out A-#1 top priority is not getting killed by automobiles. I'm sorry that this edges out "not startling those not on bikes" and "not inconveniencing those driving", but it does. The stakes are just a wee bit higher, is the thing. We're riding to get away from cars, to get seen by cars, and to avoid winding up under cars. If you don't ride a bike you don't understand, and you certainly have no right to make assumptions about the correctness of typical cyclist behavior based on your occasional prudish outrage at the antics of a few reckless downtown couriers.

Someday I hope we'll all be able to live in peace and harmony. But as someone who's employed all three modes of transportation, take it from me: right now irresponsible or dim-witted drivers put cyclists in danger much more frequently and to a greater degree than cyclists endanger walkers and drivers. Please try to apportion your outrage accordingly.

The only thing I feel like writing about at the moment is how much it stinks to be sick and how much I'd rather be on my couch assassinating people in the virtual Holy Land. So instead, two brief pieces of internet advice as you seek worthwhile content elsewhere:

1. Update your RSS reader! Spencer has a new home and a badass header. Don't let the weird teaser view (which begins after the third entry) bamboozle you into missing this post, which I especially liked, and which also gives me a good excuse to link to DCeiver's currently-running presidential ipod experiment.
2. Whatever you do, don't pay any attention to Stereogum's review of the new Hold Steady (now available on iTunes thanks to the record company panicking over the leak). I admit I was slow on the uptake — it's much better than I initially thought it was, largely due to the band deciding to stick its best stuff in the album's second half.
   
   But I didn't get it as exactly backward as Stereogum does: "Sequestered in Memphis" is actually one of the album's weakest songs; "One for the Cutters" is probably the best, newest thing on the album; and "Constructive Summer" is fun and catchy but completely incidental. He's right about "Navy Sheets", though: it really is bad.
   
   Anyway, a much better take can be found at Tiny Mixtapes. The only thing I'd add: neither review talks about the title track, which is understandable in that it only sort-of works on the record, but also too bad in that the anthemic, wistful "Stay Positive" seems poised to be an incredibly great song to hear live — something I intend to do as soon as I can.

Well, the gun ban is over. Unlike a lot of my friends, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about this. Guns are amazing tools, fun to use recreationally and capable of instilling such an awesome sense of power that I don't think people are very good at rationally considering the questions surrounding them. Certainly that's been my experience whenever I shoot one — for about six hours immediately thereafter gun ownership seems like a really, really great idea. Woo guns!

I think Yglesias is (sort of) right when he says:

From a policy perspective, what DC [was] trying to accomplish is just futile -- as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.

This is true, but probably misses the utility of a handgun ban from a police perspective. The ban was an enforcement tool: find some probable cause, search a suspect and if you find a gun they're an automatic criminal. Handy!

Of course, the MPD used to employ the "no unlicensed bikes" law toward approximately the same ends, which I thought was stupid and unjust. So maybe I'm a hypocrite. On the other hand, suspects with bikes are probably less nefarious, on average, than suspects with guns (recent comment threads notwithstanding).

At any rate, I think Matt is right to imply that this decision will have little effect on the level of gun violence in the city. And the Fenty administration says it's ready to respond, presumably with laws about triggerlocks and a draconian concealed carry permitting process. If the upshot is that DC residents can keep ready-to-use guns in their homes but not their cars or persons, I'll be happy enough, I suppose.

Oh! But let me reiterate Charles' previously-stated rule: no guns in our apartment, please. This includes parties! The knife fights are quite enough already, thanks.

UPDATE: Hmm. That excerpt of the decision quoted at DCist sure makes it sound like the court is calling triggerlock requirements unconstitutional. But hey, I'm no lawyer, and I don't recall the specifics of DC's triggerlock law. Hopefully there's some middle ground to be found, like requiring their use in any household with children.

UPDATE 2: Ryan==smart. I agree completely, with the previously-expressed caveat to his second point.

Tim, characteristically, has written the most reasonable thing I've read during today's Very Special Gun Control Edition of the internet:

[L]iberals and conservatives both confidently assert that the evidence is incontrovertible that gun control {increases, decreases} crime. I haven’t studied the data closely enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other, and frankly I suspect most of the other people with opinions on the question don’t know what they’re talking about either. But both sides seem able to marshall at least plausible arguments in their favor, which means that while I’m not confident of the sign, I am reasonably sure that the magnitude of the harm (or benefit) is small.

And therefore, as a liberal, my general attitude is that in the absence of compelling evidence of harm we should have a bias toward letting people do as they please. Owning a gun may not, on net, improve your safety, but it’s certainly no more dangerous than smoking, drinking, having unprotected sex, or many other activities that people are free to do in the privacy of their own homes. A lot of liberals seem to have a strange blind spot about this; liberals generally have a strong presumption in favor of letting people do as they please in the privacy of their homes, but that seems to get forgotten when the subject is owning guns.

He's right: I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to guns' costs and benefits. Nobody seems to, as Megan explained. Everyone's just got a hunch — a strongly-held hunch.

Thinking about it some more, I'm actually much more bothered by the idea of people buying firearms for self-defense than for sport. I try to put myself in their shoes: why would someone want to buy a gun? If it's to hunt or shoot or collect, that seems fine. All that NRA bullshit about instilling a culture of respectful, safety-oriented gun ownership isn't actually bullshit at all. I've seen it myself on NRA-funded ranges at Boy Scout camps. People who know guns know what they're going to do with their guns, and how to do it, and when they start to do it it isn't hard for them to get it done.

But when someone buys a gun for protection the situation is more speculative. Avoiding crime isn't really a hobby, per se. So what are they thinking about? I doubt it has anything to do with statistics. It seems much more likely that a buyer has an imagined scenario in mind — possibly vague but definitely present — that justifies the purchase. I'm sure these scenarios vary quite a lot, but if they have one unifying characteristic I'd bet it's that they're all completely ridiculous. Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but I imagine these narratives reflect Batman comics more than they do the realities of being scared, surprised or unskilled. This is the fantasy, the tautological trap that makes me view aspiration as disqualification: the idea that in that crucial moment you are likely to somehow be more than a laughable hairless ape — that somehow it will be helpful to add lethality to a moment of bewilderment — betrays a foolishness that shouldn't be trusted with a firearm.

In the abstract I don't begrudge anyone the right to defend themselves. But the experience in that adrenaline-filled moment is so alien and disorienting that it's a bit hard to take very seriously the cool-headed explication of an aspiring gun owner's anti-crime calculus. Of the fortunately few times when I've felt my life was in danger, the truth uniting the experiences has been that they've been nothing like I imagined. Plans would have been hilariously irrelevant.

Besides, to carry a gun for protection from crime means you'll need to have that device on or near you a lot of the time. You, the girl who spills tampons all over her shoes whenever she roots through her purse. You, the guy who can't stop dropping his cellphone in the toilet. I know you. You tivo Grey's Anatomy, for god's sake. I'm somehow supposed to be happy that your latest personal effect can kill me?

Of course, I don't mean to say I don't trust you. If you're reading this the odds that you're a friend or loved one are high. But y'know, I was standing only a few feet from a friend-or-loved-one when she accidentally discharged a firearm. This was a smart person! One whom I respect! Somebody that I would gladly hire to do any number of things requiring brains and responsibility and minimal bloodlust. But, y'know, whoops. It was really fucking scary, and I would rather not face that possibility on a daily basis and a city-wide scale. It seems like a bad idea.

Still, Tim's right. Philosophically, I can't reconcile this unscientific uneasiness with what I believe about others' rights. But I also can't help wondering if those seeking safety couldn't just try to forget about the inevitably-cited unstoppable PCP-fueled edge case, and instead invest in some pepper spray or a stun gun. Or a whistle. It seems like we might all be better off. But then, that's just another hunch.

Photo by Flickr user Shermeee

Techcrunch learns what a pastebin is. No word yet on the size of their VC round.

In other news, the web startup industry remains justly doomed.

Remember how awesome it is that Lady Ada's Boarduino is tiny and only costs $17.50? Well, the DuinoStamp is even smaller and only $10. Woo! You'll need to provide your own 5v power supply and USB programming cable, but that's easy enough.

Megan asks a question that I can actually answer!

I am very interested to know why Nintendo ramps up these launches so slowly. The Wii has been an astoundingly successful product, but it took over a year for them to get enough to market to get the standard price down to the MSRP. Now the Fit seems to be following the same trend. I would have thought that this was exactly the sort of thing they were trying to avoid--making women feel as if they were running after a children's toy. On the other hand, if it's selling at $172, I guess it's hard to argue with success.

The following comes with the caveat that it's wisdom received via the collective gaming press, which is perhaps the most craven, despicable quasi-journalistic industry on Earth that is not peripherally culpable for deaths in Iraq (well, unless you count their coverage of America's Army).

Commenter rlgordonma suggests: "The chips in these units, silly as it seems, are made with the latest and greatest (or next-latest and greatest) 65 nm process." This affects other consoles, but not the Wii, which uses a conservative chipset that's generally estimated to have about twice the oomph of the Gamecube console that preceded it. In the gaming industry, that's not much of an increase.

There are two factors that definitely affect the supply of Wiis and Wii peripherals, and perhaps a third.

The first, most obvious factor is the Wii's popularity. There's no question any longer: Nintendo has won this generation of the console wars in a way that nobody anticipated. Cruise ship fleets and retirement homes are buying them; Sony and Microsoft are both readying Wiimote clones. Nintendo's attempt to open an entirely new market for gaming is working better than anyone anticipated. That effect shouldn't be underestimated.

But now, twenty months later, why is Nintendo still unable to respond to this demand? The answer may lie with the second factor: Nintendo's business philosophy. The company is the only game manufacturer unwilling to take a loss on a console — they never have, and, as far as anyone can tell, they never will. Microsoft and Sony both subsidize the price of their boxes in an effort to capture marketshare then make it up on game, service and accessory sales — the exact amount varies as the supply chain shifts and refines, but at times analysts have estimated that the console subsidy is as high as $100/unit. This makes some sense: Sony and Microsoft share a lot of the same titles, and are both competing to have the best graphics in the industry. Becoming the dominant high-end player is important enough to merit a large up-front investment. Nintendo has more exclusive titles, targets a younger audience and has excused itself from the graphics arms race. But a side effect is that the rate at which Nintendo can make Wiis may be constrained by its unwillingness to lose money on each unit.

Finally, the third effect, though speculative, may be real: a lot of folks think Nintendo has limited the scale of their supply chain in order to create scarcity and media attention. Nintendo denies this; I'm not sure what to think about it. It certainly is a bit hard to believe that supplying Wii Fit's DVD and block of plastic poses the same challenges that the initial console rollout did.

You know what to do.

Emily has already chronicled what was a pretty fantastic Philadelphia weekend. So I'll just second the Philadelphia Brewing Company tour: it's free and fascinating, and, as you might imagine, comes with beer. Their Kenzinger is so embarrassingly good that I'm thinking seriously about how to get a case down to DC.

Naturally, though, all the talk about mash tuns and wort got me thinking about giving homebrewing a try. I know, I know: it's not a money saver. It'll smell. My beer will be just okay, and my friends will quickly get sick of drinking it. But it sounds fun! And I have a garage, which should help contain the unpleasantness. Besides, at the hipster flea market Emily and I bought this book (rescued from among piles of ironic VHS tapes, ironic video game accessories, and ironic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles merchanise). So really, what choice do I have?

But I could use some advice, o people of the internet. I've assisted a friend with siphoning and bottling before, but that was in the distant past. More recently I had a look at some of these videos and found myself mostly-convinced by the claims associated with the beginner's kit that they're pitching. Anybody have any other sage wisdom for me?

Image by Flickr user pusgums (ew), used under a Creative Commons License

Last night I finished Spook Country, William Gibson's most recent novel. Twittered snark aside, it's actually quite good — probably the best Gibson novel I've read, although it's mostly a do-over of Pattern Recognition, and of course will never be as influential or noteworthy as Neuromancer.

It's definitely worth a read, I think, if only for the unsettling sensation of being unsure whether Gibson has figured out how to relate to the present or if it's just that the present has become more compatible with his style. It's also a book that, when all is revealed, seems well-suited to the particular moment of our 9/11 coping process.

Anyway, I say all of this by way of introducing the following passage (which is spoiler-free, I think, although others might disagree):

"I remember seeing proofs of a CIA interrogation manual, something we'd been sent unofficially, for comment," the old man said. "The first chapter laid out the ways in which torture is fundamentally counterproductive to intelligence. The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets." He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. "If the man who keeps returning to question you avoids behaving as if he were your enemy, you begin to lose your sense of who you are. Gradually, in the crisis of self that your captivity becomes, he guides you in your discovery of who you are becoming."

"Did you interrogate people?" asked Garreth, the black Pelican case under his feet.

"It's an intimate process," the old man said. "Entirely about intimacy." He spread his hand, held it, as if above an invisible flame. "An ordinary cigarette lighter will cause a man to tell you anything, whatever he thinks you want to hear." He lowered his hand. "And will prevent him ever trusting you again, even slightly. And will confirm him, in his sense of self, as few things will." He tapped the folded paper. "When I first saw what they were doing, I knew that they'd turned the SERE lessons inside out. That meant we were using techniques the Koreans had specifically developed in order to prepare prisoners for show trials."

I have no idea if the above is true, but it's certainly an interesting idea: that, when it comes to torture, black & white bellicosity is a meme capable of self-preservation, rather than just a manifestation of the torturer's ignorance and imcompetence. Failing to get results, forcing everyone to play their assigned parts with conviction — that's actually the point.