Having been reminded to do so by this, I've got a question:
Which is the more ridiculous yuppie beverage fad: cold-brewed coffee or kombucha, the fermented tea product?
Recently I've been drinking a lot of one of them (but of course it would be spoiling things to say which). Remember to show your work.
Wow. Well, yesterday was kind of terrifying, huh? I haven't got anything original to say but of course like everyone else I'm extremely glad that Brian is okay and seems poised to have an improbably, miraculously complete recovery. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised: he's pretty much the most unflappable guy I know. That his body is greeting three bullets with what amounts to an unimpressed shrug seems perfectly in character.
Beyond gratitude for his well-being, though, I'm not sure how to react. My instinct is to resist the urge to draw new conclusions about crime and guns and the city based upon this one horrible incident. Don't let the immediacy of the thing confuse you, I tell myself. Yet on the same day I read about someone else using the purely experiential to arrive at what I consider to be the truth, and it doesn't seem like he could have gotten there any other way.
I can rationalize together a system for how I've decided to discriminate between these two potential lessons, but I'm not really sure I buy it.
Roku has complied with the GPL and released the source code to its new Netflix set top box. This is the big step toward hackers breaking the thing open and loading custom software onto it, which would be pretty great. A wifi-enabled STB with HDMI output would, if untethered from Netflix, be a steal at $100. My hacked Xbox 1 performs (or performed) a similar function, streaming video from a drive on my network. But it's not capable of HD resolutions.
Actually, it's not an ARM processor. But the real chipset wouldn't have provided a title that affords nearly so much smug self-satisfaction.
Emily and I just got back from spending the Fourth of July weekend in Cazenovia, her implausibly idyllic Upstate New York hometown. We helped sort books for the library's upcoming sale; we strolled through an enjoyably awful craft fair; we had drinks with Emily's high school friends in a bar where they'd carved their initials years ago (a rite of passage for the town's kids). That, plus barbecues, fireworks, beer, and the generous hospitality of Emily's family all made for a pretty great trip.
Of course there was Yogaball, too — now potentially rebranded as CazBall (comma-rock-the) for marketing purposes. Sadly, I felt as though I had lost a step this year. The ravages of age, perhaps, or maybe just a lack of Yogaball focus. Either way, remedies must be sought. If Dana Torres can qualify for the Olympics surely I can find a way to hit an enormous rubber ball around the lawn in a more competitive manner.
The weekend's other novel activity was Rock Band, which Emily's sister Kjerstin somehow convinced her dad to purchase on the spur of the moment. Kjerstin and her husband Matt are kind of experts at the game; I've got some experience with Guitar Heroism and/or Karaoke Revolutionary politics, but RB proper was new to both me and Emily. Drumming — pretty fun, right?
Anyway, hopefully the above constitutes enough of an excuse to embed the following video, found via Penny Arcade:
Charles says they're slated to go on second, around 7:50. Looking at the sky right now makes my weather widget's dire predictions look unfounded. We seem poised to rock.
And hey, not only will you be able to enjoy a beautiful summer day, free music, and the sight of adorable children gamboling across the lawn as their embittered ex-musician parents look on, you'll also be able to soak up some X-Files-style conspiracy theorizing. Behold!
I know, I know: two YouTube videos in one day? But this is really neat:
Of course, the design is also a bit impractical: got any existing tunnels or stations? Well, I hope you've got a lot of money, too, because you're going to have to rebuild them all.
But it strikes me (the person who knows nothing about trains) as a potentially feasible idea if implemented by simply delinking individual cars. New cars could be brought up to speed by an engine that hangs around a given city, accelerating passengers, connecting them to passing trains and then heading back to repeat the process. Disconnected cars could coast into station or be picked up by such a system. You'd have to figure out the right car to sit in based on your destination, but the upside would be to make every train an express.
The downside is no doubt the complexity involved in synchronizing speeds so precisely as to make such a system safe. But surely it must be possible — after all, this is a problem that's been well-addressed for over a hundred years.
(The train link comes via Chris via the EchoDitto del.icio.us feed which I'll immodestly point out often has interesting stuff in it.)
A 22 year-old woman on a bicycle was run over and killed by a garbage truck this morning. Commenters in the DCist thread are speculating that she was in a bike lane, which makes sense given the location of the accident — the area north of Dupont is actually pretty bike-friendly by District standards.
Meanwhile, over at WTOP it took a whopping five comments before someone began complaining about cyclists' behavior. Classy!
UPDATE: Good stuff later in the DCist thread, too. Cyclists really need to clean up their act — think of how that poor truck driver must be feeling!
UPDATE 2: Jake mentions in comments that he rode past the scene of the accident this morning.
This is a few months old, but I've just now discovered it. And it's impossibly cool: controlling your Tivo from your iPhone.
Apparently there's a telnet port open on newer Tivos that allows you to issue remote control commands over a local network. Someone's taken that functionality and wrapped it in an iPhone app, which can be installed on any jailbroken unit.
It's totally pointless, of course — aside from saving me a ten-foot trip when I find myself in the kitchen without the remote I can't imagine a use for it — but it's really, really neat.
It's also a little unsettling. I didn't have to provide any configuration; the thing just knew where to find my Tivo. And while you can't view a list of recorded programs without entering the Tivo's individual media key, it's easy to imagine some entertaining wardriving pranks that wouldn't need the key. It would be relatively trivial, for instance, to write a script that automatically deletes everyone's recorded programs, or that sets any Tivos it finds to fill up with racy content. If you set your laptop on the passenger seat and drove around the city for an evening I bet you could find at least a few dozen vulnerable machines.
Not the end of the world, perhaps, but a sign of things to come as our appliances get smarter and smarter. Secure those networks! If you want to be a generous with your wifi, get a Fonera.
I can relate to Megan's instinct for early adoption, and I admire her fortitude. But the iPhone 2 experience is not for me. It's the price: I could be wrong, but my understanding is that, as a current iPhone owner who's already sold AT&T his soul, I'd be paying $400 more than the advertised, subsidized price. That's too much for 3G and a GPS receiver that's apparently incapable of TomTom-style realtime tracking.
In fact, I'm not even upgrading to the iPhone 2 software — not yet, anyway. I'd love to have a blogging client and NetNewsWire (which would sync my unread items). But I'm not quite ready to abandon my jailbroken apps. Twinkle's a great Twitter client already — I don't need Twitterific. Lexitron is a fantastic game, and certainly more appealing to me than Monkey Ball. Besides, as any geek will tell you it just feels good to know that there's a command line interface on your phone.
I'm sure I'll crack eventually, but for now I'm holding out. Who knows, I might not have to choose between the App Store and Installer at all.
Kriston sent me this link earlier this week, which discusses using water to cool our ever-hotter computer processors. It's an interesting read, particularly the part about using waste heat from datacenters for cogenerative heating.
But the ins and outs of the CPU heat problem are actually even moreinteresting than the article implies. So interesting, in fact, that I think I'll blather on about them for a bit.
First: this isn't a new problem. As we cram more transistors onto chips every electrical component gets smaller and noisier, and we have to crank the voltage up to be able to hear the signal. That produces more heat. As we increase processor clock speeds the heat-generating operation of all those tiny switches happens more frequently, too, which also produces more heat.
This is a pretty well-known problem in hobbyist circles, where overclocking — running your CPU at a faster speed than it's designed for — is a popular way to eke out more bang per buck. Doing so also produces a lot of extra heat, which these days translates into the CPU shutting itself down rather dramatically once it reaches the danger zone (earlier chips dealt with overheating in considerably more expensive ways).
In overclocking circles exotic cooling solutions are pretty common, whether in the form of beefed up fans, Peltier coolers or water. A normal CPU cools itself with a fan that uses air to wick heat away from a radiator-like block of aluminum, which is strapped tightly to the CPU with just a tiny smear of thermally conductive grease between 'em. But air is much less efficient at transmitting heat than the same volume of liquid, so if you're pushing the envelope it may make sense to shuttle energy around with liquid.
This isn't a particularly exotic technology any more — Dell was shipping water-cooled gaming systems over a year ago. But it's still unlikely to enter the mainstream. As you might imagine, the potential for disastrous failure is much higher than with a fan. And there are other inconveniences — if you don't use the right chemicals you might find your PC clogged with algae.
An amusing alternative exists: use a nonconductive fluid and simply submerge the whole system. Like, say, cooking oil. Dump your PC's guts in a tub, cover with oil and overclock away! As you might imagine, there are some downsides. First, atmospheric water may foul the oil and perhaps even collect in small patches sufficient to cause a short. Second, anything with moving parts — hard drives, for example — will need to be kept safely unsubmerged. Third, various compounds in your machine's electronics, like cable insulation, may slowly dissolve in a nonpolar solvent like oil. Fourth, you'll still need to circulate the oil if you want it to properly exchange heat. Fifth, and most importantly: it's going to be really messy and gross. Seriously, don't pour oil on your PC.
But there are other technologies being used to mitigate heat problems. One of them — admittedly, kind of a boring one — is the general trend toward multiprocessor computing. This is being undertaken primarily for other reasons, but a pleasant consequence of greater parallelism will be an ability to avoid some heat problems.
A somewhat more speculative (but still plausible) idea is to escape silicon and its heat limits by finding another semiconductor substrate material. Diamond is the one most often bandied about, as in this Wired article. It's a pretty neat idea, although so far as I know nobody's yet trying to build such a processor outside of a research lab.
The coolest, most semi-magical solution to the heat problem is reversible computing. I can't claim to be an expert, but the basic idea goes like this: if you keep track of every step of a computational process in such a way that, after arriving at your answer, you can run them all backward, the final result will be a much less entropically disordered state than a traditional processor would have arrived at. A result is that much less of your input energy is converted into heat.
I know: it sounds kind of ridiculous, as though we're expecting our mathematical doodlings to bend reality in a completely implausible way. There must be some obscured practical gotcha hiding beneath the theory, ready to spoil our cool-computing aims in the same way that every magnet-based free energy machine fails to live up to its imagined performance. But the idea's been around for decades, and not in fringe circles. It's just that it's a sufficiently advanced technology, indistinguishable from... well, you know.
A Flickr user gets struck by lightning while taking video:
She says both that she's fine and that the edit is in place to provide context from before the strike. Via Nedward.
I guess the apparently counterintuitive idea that pork is among the most efficient meats to produce doesn't strike me as all that strange. Obviously larger animals take more time to reach full size, wasting more energy on metabolic upkeep. But equally obviously there's a certain amount of overhead associated with being a mammal that may not scale constantly with the total amount of food that the animal provides. Consider the relationship between volume and surface area — same idea.
On the other hand, the pig is generally considered the smartest animal in the barnyard. So if you're looking for a reason to be uneasy about pork consumption, there you go: if you suspect that sentience works on a sliding scale, and if you believe that the moral outrageousness of a given act of violence against an animal is weighted by the animal's level of consciousness, then your pig-slaughter is far more ethically objectionable than ordering a serving of chicken tenders. This strikes me as a much better source of liberal guilt than the difference in carbon footprint between types of meat.
In other blog news: the New Yorker has made a cartoon and it's not funny. People are... surprised? Anyway, Ezra has the smart take. For now I think we'll just have to cross our fingers that the New Yorker's much-vaunted influence upon the middle-American swing voter zeitgeist has been overstated.
First: the plan to move DC's intercity buses to the L'Enfant wasteland is on hold. I got the following in an email on Friday:
The District Department of Transportation as of July 3, 2008 has suspended the new intercity bus permit regulations to allow for additional evaluation and review of the program. Originally intended to begin in early July, the regulation seeks to better manage the use of public space and institute curbside management practices through new permitting requirements and by identifying specific locations for passenger drop off and pickup. [...]
Further details will be available as DDOT continues to evaluate the new policy.
Hilariously, the email's author appears to have simply cc'ed everybody who wrote in about the issue. It looks like they got about 400 complaints.
On Friday Kriston and Matt tried to convince me that the whole bus terminal project was a sinister plot to legislate Greyhound's competition out of existence, delivering yet another crooked victory to Big Bus. Key to this undertaking, they said, was a little-noticed but crucially important new rule forbidding the bus companies from selling tickets at curbside. Instead the companies must maintain a storefront — a requirement that, given the lack of available real estate at the new depot site, could not be met. Presto: no more intercity buses.
I was dubious, and after reading the text of the (now tabled) proposal, I'm even more so. Here, have a look yourself. Section 3307.8:
An intercity bus operator shall not:
(a) Vend tickets in the public space;
(b) Arrive sooner than thirty (30) minutes prior to scheduled departure in the intercity bus zone;
(c) Remain in the intercity bus zone for more than thirty (30) minutes after arrival; or
(d) Allow intercity bus passengers to obstruct the flow of pedestrian traffic in the public space and into adjacent buildings.
Obviously the curbside ticket-sale question would have hinged on what "public space" means. I am not a [etc.], but 3307.8(d) strongly implies to me that the interior of the bus isn't considered a part of the public space — certainly it's legally distinct in at least some ways, since the bus operators can charge admission to and eject people from it. And of course many of the intercity bus companies sell their tickets at the pickup site, but do so as their representative moves through the loaded bus checking tickets. Sometimes you pay as you get on, sometimes you pay once you're seated. I can't imagine mandating one or the other would dramatically disrupt these businesses' operations.
Besides which, the proposal sidesteps more obvious ways to inconvenience Greyhound's competitors. Fines for noncompliance are only $200 or $300 (depending on whether it's a first offense); the fee for renting space for loading and unloading works out to less than $2.50/hr. This isn't to say that moving these buses to L'Enfant is a good idea, but I don't think it's a conspiracy, either.
WashCycle has a good post on scofflaw cyclists and the outsized anger directed at them by pedestrians and drivers. It's worth reading the whole thing, but here's a bit about jaybiking:
[A] better question is "why don't drivers 'jaydrive'?"
Is it because they love the law so much? Did you skip the previous section?
It's because their risk/reward calculation is coming up with a different answer. And that makes sense. In a car you're several feet farther back from the intersection and you're often a foot or two lower, meaning you can't see as well (I bet those on recumbents don't jaybike as often as those on standard bikes). In a car you're in a soundproof enclosure so you have no stereoscopic hearing. And if you make a mistake you aren't as maneuverable as you are on a bike or on your feet. You can't just ditch to the sidewalk. Driver's don't jaydrive because, in their own estimation, they can't. But if they could, I'm sure they would.
Still, that doesn't explain the anger. Drivers get — I feel — irrationally angry about this. After wondering why for so long, an anthropologist friend of mine helped me to understand. Running a red light is so dangerous for cars that it isn't just illegal, it's taboo. You're breaking a social construct. Which means people find it objectionable and abhorrent. So if education is needed, maybe it's needed to explain why it's safer for cyclists to do this than for drivers.
[...]
The way to end jaybiking violations is to decriminalize them. [...] Idaho has changed its law — and California is considering it — to allow cyclist to treat stop signs as yield signs and stop lights as stop signs.
I agree with all of this, although it doesn't really apply to me any more: over the past few months I've become a very, very good citizen cyclist.
It's not that I think patiently waiting for a red light to change is making me or anyone else safer — it's just that I can't stand the thought that I might provide grist for those who whine about bicyclists' lawlessness. Besides, the instinctive anger that drivers feel upon seeing a bicyclist is no doubt that much more intense when they can't put their fingers on a handy excuse for why the biker's presence infuriates them.
My traffic safety habits are now entirely spite-based.
I've been friends with Charles for a long time now. There's no use trying to fool anyone, so I'll fess up: I'd support his musical endeavors even if they were terrible.
But it's awfully nice that they're not. I'm not sure when it happened, exactly — the frenzy of the Iota show and the vastness of Fort Reno may have concealed the exact moment — but last night at the Black Cat it was clear that the City Veins' live show has passed a new threshhold. God damn but they killed it. Maybe it's just Stockholm Syndrome; if it is, I'm prepared to embrace it.
Watching them play, I couldn't help feeling a pang of envy: it's tough to see such wholehearted commitment to the moment without wanting more of it for yourself. Fortunately it was easy to drown that wistfulness in joy, and pride, at watching your friends throw themselves so completely into something they clearly love.
It looks like it's easy now, like the songs have been worked and reworked until they're so pliable that they can be twisted into whatever shape the band imagines during the count-off. I'm sure that's just an illusion. But it's a convincing one, and a testament to how good these guys have gotten at playing together.
I'm sorry I didn't mercilessly promote last night's show; if you weren't there, I wish you had been. I'll do my best to step up my harassment when their next DC gig rolls around.
Interesting: the author of the HackMii blog has posted an entry requesting that Nintendo get in touch with him about an exploit he's discovered that would allow piracy of Wii games without modification to the console. He notes that he's tried emailing Nintendo but hasn't received a response. Then he indicates that he's planning to follow the disclosure methodology outlined here. Key parts:
A. [...T]he ORIGINATOR is to email the MAINTAINER about the problem.
B. The MAINTAINER has 5 work days respond. [...] The ORIGINATOR is technically free to do whatever they want to do after 5 work days—however, they should be fair and wait if the MAINTAINER shows adequate initiative to fix the ISSUE.
[C, D, E and F concern the procedure followed if the MAINTAINER acknowledges the communication and works to resolve the issue]
G. If the MAINTAINER feels it's appropriate to alert the public of the issue, then there's no reason why the ORIGINATOR should not. Traditionally, alerting the community of a problem (but not providing full exploit details) has proven to be futile; other researchers are then just as likely to discover the problem as well—and they may not bide by the guidelines set by this policy. Therefore, if the issue is to be disclosed, all aspects of it should be disclosed.
In short, if Nintendo chooses not to respond, there may be piracy-enabling exploit code for the Wii published in as little as five days. This is a real possibility: Nintendo's historical reaction to issues raised by the hacking community has been to ignore it and hope it goes away. There don't appear to be nearly as many institutional resources devoted to mitigating these issues as at Sony and Microsoft — that's apparent from their consoles' relatively simple security systems, the slow and somewhat half-assed manner in which the Twilight Hack was ultimately patched, and the lack of attention paid to piracy on their handheld consoles relative to, say, the PSP's constantly-updated firmware.
A lack of attention shouldn't be confused with a lack of calculation, however: Nintendo might be right to ignore these issues. The Wii's success owes to its adoption among a new demographic — one that's not traditionally associated with gaming, and one that can probably be counted on not to do much damage to Nintendo's bottom line by burning patched ISOs from the Pirate Bay.
Image by Flickr user michaelsharon, used under a Creative Commons license
UPDATE: Nintendo has responded through private channels, and consequently it looks like the exploit won't be released until after a patch is issued. It's still entertaining to check out the comments at the linked post, though, which are full of morons impersonating Nintendo representatives in order to get the exploit sent to them. A hint for these overconfident confidence men: most major corporations don't ask to use IRC to discuss trade secrets.
I'm also sorry to see Rob and Libby go. Not only because they're great people who I already don't see often enough, but also because this means Bostonians will suddenly get to learn fascinating new things about their city as Rob discovers, researches and writes them up — a luxury that I've grown accustomed to having for myself over the past few years.
If there's solace to be had, it's that Rob's membership in this city's secret transit cabal seems unlikely to be affected. So take heart, and if you're feeling wistful, go reread my all-time favorite Goodspeed Update entry.
There are a number of stupid jokes that I'd like to make but which I am not quite willing to spend $40 on:
Anybody take the plunge? For a moment I thought my idea to buy http://jetai.me was brilliant, but of course it's already taken.
Washington, DC: where you can be friends with really smart media people who aren't incredibly awful.
It turns out that I'm not a very good gambler. I've already learned this during my still-brief career as a blackjack player — once at Foxwood's, again in New Orleans. In between those trips Atlantic City had neglected to reinforce the lesson, but yesterday it corrected the oversight. Ficke and I had driven there after an idyllic beach weekend — the girls, seemingly blind to the sophisticated glamour of AC, opted to head directly home in the other car. I should've known my luck was bad after five-putting during our pre-departure round of mini-golf. At the time I'd simply chalked it up to the robot spider guarding the hole, but now I see that my problem was more metaphysical.
It was hardly a catastrophe*, but the fumbling, vacant dealers did collect our money with startling speed despite spending most of their time staring hopelessly into the space over our heads. That was the worst part: seeing so many good cards wasted on those for whom they could produce no joy. I would've thought that the place's delightful wild-west theme would keep the employees more cheerful. Maybe for them the mild disappointment Matt and I felt at the lack of period costumes has grown into a poisonous cancer that eats them away from the inside. I bet it's nothing that some leather fringe and a fake gunfight scheduled on the quarter-hour couldn't cure.
* Thanks in part to the casinos' exorbitant ATM fees. Am I crazy to think this is a bad decision on their part? Cutting down that $4.50 charge seems likely to make them a hell of a lot more money over the long run.
If you don't own a TV, go buy one. This way you'll never be tempted to unnecessarily mention that you don't own a television, preventing everyone else from thinking you're a supercilious jackass.
If you don't own a TV and are able to refrain from relating this fact, then, uh, carry on.
TO CLARIFY: You don't have to watch it, of course. That's your call. But by owning a television, most attempts to proudly explain your aversion to the medium will become so bogged down in qualifiers that they'll never escape your lips. This will be well worth the $19 investment.
ALSO: Obligatory Onion reference.
Alright internet, I need theories. We have a problem at work: it's our dishwasher. It's a relatively recent acquisition — one of those miniature units that feel dainty and ridiculous, but which are quite useful for taming the tower of coffee mugs and soiled tupperware that would otherwise teeter over the sink. For that, it's great.
The problem is that it smells. Not while operating, but when its wash cycle is complete, everything inside of it is suffused with a sickening floral scent. Not really floral, mind you — I mean bad fake floral, and with a distinct note of machine oil underneath it. It's pretty unpleasant. I've had to throw out more than one serving of food after forgetting to re-rinse the container I put it in. I once found my eyes watering from it as I tried to eat a mug full of oatmeal.
I thought it was the fancy-pants detergent capsules we were using, but after switching brands that suspect has been ruled out. The smell persists.
So here's the mystery: what the hell could it be? And how do I get rid of it?
Oh, and a dead body was found next to the dishwasher in a puddle of water BUT THE ROOM WAS LOCKED. But I don't think that's necessarily related.
I'm surprised to hear myself say it, but after reading Martin's writeup I feel a little bad for Bob Novak, who hit a pedestrian with his car this morning. It sounds like it was only a matter of time: the comments are just getting started, but so far about 10% are from people reporting incidents where Novak almost hit them, too.
But like I said, I feel bad for the guy. Bob and I go way back. When I was a little kid I used to watch the McLaughlin Group with my dad. I don't remember much from that experience besides McLaughlin's plaid Christmas jacket and the paternally-instilled lesson that Novak was a Very Bad Man. The situation became clearer during senior year of high school, when my government teacher would fulfill his educational duty by showing us taped episodes of Crossfire. It was an exciting time: Bill Press pioneered the disoriented, exasperated style of liberalism that would later help America ignore Al Gore; and the program itself was just beginning to metastasize into the odious force that Jon Stewart would eventually banish to another dimension. But the most remarkable spectacle was happening across the table from Press, where Robert Novak exuded pure reptilian malevolence with the sort of ease that made you want to stand up and applaud. When he tried to smile the entire class would physically recoil.
But now, looking back, I realize that Novakian evil isn't anything to fear. I didn't know it at the time, but the McLaughlin Groupies who should have been inspiring bone-chilling terror were Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke. They were the true harbingers, the types of guys whose ilk might lobby for offshore drilling on the strength of an invitation to an oil magnate's daughter's super sweet sixteen; or who might accidentally launch missiles while trying to play Snood, then refuse to feel bad about it.
So what if Novak outs the occasional CIA agent or runs down the occasional pedestrian? His is a totally comprehensible evil. And, for what it's worth, this Radar feature indicates that he's a perfectly nice old man, who delights staffers at every office holiday party with jigs played upon his famous golden fiddle.
My point is that Washington knows how to deal with his type: when we've had a few too many missing pedestrians and/or wars, the town's bravest men descend into the secret Masonic catacombs below and, confronting the beast with hemlock and holy water, force him to dissolve into shrieks and a foul, sulfurous mist. At this point the Washington Times prints a note indicating that Mr. Novak will be on vacation until the next solstice, and everyone declares themselves more or less satisfied.
That's the way things work around here, and it's a system we're comfortable with. Seeing misfortune befall ol' Bob seems like an imbalance, and that makes me sad. If I get my choice of foe I'll take reptilian evil over reptile-sized brains any day.
The only tech blog that matters shut down early this year, and after the traditional "does the blogger really mean it?" period I deleted the entry from my RSS reader.
But now, having just executed a botched subscription merge courtesy of the NetNewsWire iPhone app, Uncov has reappeared among my feeds. And, much to my surprise, it's got new entries! It looks like Ted started posting again in April. Persai, the project that he was working on, has recently launched as PressFlip, and consequently the content is more about the new venture and Java programming than about eviscerating idiotic startups — for now, anyway. Give it time. If you're feeling impatient, go read Ted's Register column about Protocol Buffers for some of that old flavor.
Curiously, uncov.com redirects to pressflip.com. So the return of Uncov is... secret? Who knows, cares, or can be bothered to figure out the answer? The important thing is that the RSS feed is working, so you should go resubscribe to that.
Morning Edition talked to the Hold Steady this morning, inconsiderately making me late to work. The interview's a worth a listen, as is the additional online clip in which Craig Finn talks about playing with Springsteen and his affection for the song "Atlantic City". That prompted me to go listen to the song again, which led me to this cover, which is really pretty nice. Go have a listen.
Iraq has been banned from the Olympics. But take heart!
War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq’s dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.
“As a country that participated in many wars since 1980, we have many disabled people,” said Ahmed Abid Hassan, a wheelchair fencing coach. “Our Paralympic team is better than our Olympic team.”
That's via last month's New York Times (original source: the perpetual crushing horror of this world).
I realize that our national conversation about Batman is already more or less over, but the weighty responsibilities of internet citizenship can't be shirked so easily. So: Emily and I went to see the new Batman movie on Friday, with Jason, Gen, Sarah and two nice folks who disappeared so quickly that I'm not sure they were ever there at all. Mr. and Ms. Soze, we'll call them (now and then not again).
Emily hated it, and at the time this prompted me to stick up for the movie in an attempt to defend the institution of comic book adaptations. They've only grossed, what, a billion dollars this summer? Clearly this struggling art form needs our support.
But now, thinking about it some more, I have some complaints.
Here's the thing about the Batman movie: I want to signal my approval. Christopher Nolan is clearly thinking about Batman in the right way; the actors associated with the franchise are all doing an excellent job of adapting an awkwardly large and sometimes-cartoonish mythology into a filmed perspective that is as realistic as is realistically possible. The basic thesis of the movie was a good one, too, and an appropriate arc for the second movie of a Batman reboot. The movie looks right, it sounds right, it moves right.
My only real problem with the film was everything that happens in it. Spoilers:
Getting back from Philadelphia yesterday was not fun. I imagine it won't surprise anyone to hear that the Chinatown bus has been getting more and more crowded as people respond to higher gas prices. What is surprising is how badly the bus industry is dealing with it. Are they running more buses? No. Raising ticket prices? No. They seem not to have noticed that anything's different, in fact, despite everyone else managing to — yesterday there was even a young guy shooting footage and doing interviews for what I presume to be a short documentary about the situation.
And that situation is not good. Sommer, Jeff and I showed up around 4:30, intending to catch the 5:00 bus. The 4:30 was late, so we were in time for that, too (buses to DC only depart a few times during the day, but these two are scheduled close together). But a couple hundred other people were waiting, too. The two buses came, loaded and left for DC, but we weren't able to make it onto either. Nor were a lot of other people. And it was nerve-wracking: the crowd was pushing and people were fighting. The situation wasn't helped by new riders who seemed to feel they were entitled to physically bar others from boarding while their families and friends pushed up to the front of the crowd. Understandable, I guess, but dangerous.
At that point we decided we'd had enough and, after confirming that Greyhound wasn't running another bus anytime soon, we headed to the train station. Amtrak, at least, has responded to the increased demand: they've jacked up their fares. That at least makes it easier to avoid being crushed to death, but it's still hard to understand why bargain-basement rail travel costs six times as much as the bus. I mean, sure: infrastructure. Overhead. Better service. Relatively paltry public subsidies. But six times?
I hope that the bus companies begin to respond to the demand for this route soon. All the new players — Bolt, DC2NY, Megabus — run NYC/Philly and NYC/DC routes but, despite the NYC/DC bus assuredly passing through Philly to drop off passengers, they won't let you book a trip that doesn't include New York. As someone already prone to seething over New York City's collective solipsism, it's pretty infuriating to see half-empty buses leaving for the Big Apple on the half hour while people are risking serious injury jostling for a $15 seat to DC.
I like to think I've got a healthily cynical outlook on these sorts of things, so I'm not sure why this never occurred to me:
The custom-rolled firmware from the US cellphone companies is also, of course, likely to tell fibs about signal strength. The telephony companies quickly realised that it's much cheaper to sell phones that show lots of signal all the time than to actually bother putting up more of those expensive cell towers. And, once again, the signal strength is not the same as the call quality. Lots of signal plus lots of noise is not as good as a little bit of signal plus almost no noise at all.
That's from the inimitable Dan Rutter, who, if you're interested at all in technology, you really should be reading.
There's a new credit card for Redskins fans. Along with the substantial joy to be had by having a custom logo in your wallet, it'll give cardholders the ability to skip through clogged lines at Fedex Field... and at airport security.
It's not like I had a lot of faith that the registered traveler program wouldn't become horribly corrupted, compromised and ineffective. But I did think it'd take a little more time and sneaking around before we got to quite this level of tackiness.
Don't miss Jason's annual commentary on the Hill Hotties list. My favorite line:
"Rep. Gresham Barrett (R-S.C.) is proof positive that a high school quarterback can marry his cheerleader girlfriend and live happily ever after." Phew! Glad that's been proven! It's certainly an improvement over the quarterback who was proof positive that being a fake cowboy moron could only take you so far if you were a crypto-racist goon (George Allen).
Other highlights:
I am on the record as being anti-Phil Collins. This puts me at odds with some good friends who have jumped wholeheartedly into the half-serious Collins renaissance that's been plaguing our great land as of late. Frankly, I'm surprised it's got legs given its likely provenance, which seems to me to clearly involve Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, This American Life and/or a need to sidestep mainstream America's rededication to all things Journey. The SWPLishness of the situation is so glaring as to be embarrassing.
But it's not just this specific musical throwback that worries me. Even though I enjoyed Yglesias's 90s alt-rock party, I have to admit that the theme made me uneasy. I believe that as we get older the first muscles to lose tone are the ones that, when tightly clenched, produce a convincing sense of irony. Sure, listening to Silverchair might seem like a great idea now. But if you aren't careful, before you know it you'll be no different than your uncle who paid $120 for an obstructed view at an Eagles concert that starts at 5pm.
I'll admit that the alternatives are grim. But I think there's at least somewhat more dignity to be had by clinging tightly to Pitchfork's Best New Music section and copies of Paste until the whole enterprise buckles and collapses under the weight of your teenage offspring's embarrassed disavowals. Nostalgia is best left to people who've given up or are too young to have been there in the first place.
But I know that most people don't find this very convincing. So let me try another tack: this past weekend Emily, Scooter, Lauren, Sommer, Jeff and I were at a bar in Philly — one of the few where you can still smoke, and therefore one that is certifiably cool. We headed upstairs, where we found a table and some DJs. These guys seemed authentically hip: sporting horrible beards and wraithlike t-shirts, they looked like emaciated bears that had staggered out of the woods and into a Salvation Army, where they constructed poor disguises before setting off to South Philly in search of PBR specials and/or salmon. It should have been a pretty good set, in other words.
Instead? Marcy Playground. Excusable, perhaps, for novelty value (which for some reason seems to be synonymous with "totally monotonous and unbearable"). But then they followed it up with Verve Pipe's "The Freshman" and I knew we were doomed. The biggest hits from the darkest days of the 90s continued to issue from the speakers at an uncomfortable volume (to replicate the effect, turn your radio up and tune it to DC101).
Emily eventually saved us and, pouring on the charm, got them to turn down that dag-blasted racket — we were the only patrons in the room, so it seemed okay to ask. Despite our miraculous escape, the lesson should be clear: ironic musical nostalgia is too dangerous a force to be trusted to civilians. It can go so horribly, horribly wrong.
But I understand the impulse. Maybe it's inescapable. For example, I can't help but regard this as being among the most awesomely moody things I've ever seen:
And no, I can't tell if I mean that ironically.
(Thanks to Jon for sending me that clip originally)
... or, "Kwisatz Haderacetylcholinergic Drug Alternatives"
This Rember drug that's showing promising efficacy against Alzheimer's is really pretty exciting. For a long time I've had blind faith that my generation wouldn't have to face Alzheimer's, at least not the way folks currently do. I was hopeful that the solution would arrive in time for our parents, too — now it looks like it might.
The story behind the drug is interesting. Naturally, Derek Lowe is the place to go for an informed perspective on the matter. He (and Wired) both note that Rember is actually a very old drug: Methylene Blue, which has been used for everything from malaria to psychiatric disorders to intestinal surgery. It's got a long history and seems to be quite safe.
But it is very, very blue. And that leads to some side effects. From the Wikipedia article:
Methylene blue was used at the end of the century as a successful treatment for malaria. It disappeared as an anti-malarial during the wars in Asia, as U.S. soldiers disliked its two inevitable, fully reversible side effects: green urine and blue sclera.
Blue sclera — as in the used-to-be-whites of your eyes. So yes: grandma might remain mentally sharp, but she's going to look like she just wandered off the set of Dune. Awesome.
Presumably the drug can be used synergistically with the Juice of Saphoo.
