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Minnesota
Posted 11:13 AM, Aug 29, 2006 |
What’s up? I’m posting from a park in beautiful, sunny Minneapolis. Sitting here on the grass, surfing the Internet, stealing off someone’s wireless network. Ah, life is good.
The weather here is magnificent, and I continue my streak of 134 days without a serious rainfall. I am a ray of sunshine to all.
I could take a serious nap out here on the grass, but someone, even in this nice part of town, would probably hit me on the head with a trout and then steal my possessions.
And, since I’m sitting in a park, it isn’t long (it’s happening now) until my beautiful silence is disturbed by the shriek of children, clamoring with utter disregard for their surroundings. Children should be seen, not heard.
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Farecast + USA Basketball
Posted 10:34 PM, Aug 24, 2006 |
And one thing I meant to add a while ago - well, two things actually.
1) Go check out Farecast. You thought those other travel sites were good? Well, Farecast uses math (yes, math!) to analyze ticket prices to and from your destination (assuming your destination is one of 55 cities currently being analyzed, which it probably is) and give you a suggestion, based on ticket price history, regarding whether you should buy your ticket now or wait. It gives you a graphical fare history, searches airlines for rates; gives you a grid of prices by day; gives you a grid showing prices around your target travel date, if you have a flexible schedule; and even has an option where you can look at flights to several locations, if you have a flexible… err… destination? If you’re thinking about flying anywhere (and why wouldn’t you be, especially now, with all the other greasy-haired, foul-smelling, acne-riddled passengers), this is the site for you. Oh, and here’s the link: Farecast.
2) Have you seen the USA Basketball logo?
What the? This is the crappiest logo I’ve seen in a long time. It’s been around for a long time, and it shows.
Seriously. What the hell is this logo about? It’s got this crappy font with a dark blue that’s too blue to be the blue from the American flag, and the word “basketball” printed lamely below in a generic font, and then this goofy star with some Harlem Globetrotter basketball in it. The star’s only purpose is to fit snugly into the bottom part of the A, which is not an original thought. Why is nobody else as outraged about this as I am?
And, in a side note, in going to the USA Basketball site, they have a Haiku of the Day. Are the USA Basketball people taking massive amounts of heroin? What are they thinking?
Sixteen teams alive
Heading to the Eight-Finals
Next up … the Aussies
Huh? “The Eight-Finals”? In a haiku, where you just have to be able to count syllables, and “the Eight-Finals” is the best they could do?
Well, this has turned into an extended rant. I tried to offset it by all that nice information about Farecast up above. Really, go check it out.
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Hate Mail
Posted 10:10 PM, Aug 24, 2006 |
I always thought I would accidentally say something really offensive on this site and that it would generate tons of hate mail. Well, “tons” is overdoing it. But I never expected that simply not including the captions as normal text on the photographs in the gallery would inspire such emotion in people.
The captions were in as ALT text and popups when you held your mouse over the photo. They’re still there, but now I’ve also typed them out down below. All those that complained can just relax. You might have to refresh the page in your browser, and if that’s too much trouble, I’ll come over and do it myself. Just let me know.
I’m kidding. It’s no big deal. But I did add the captions.
Starting tomorrow (Friday), I’ll be in Minneapolis and Duluth for a little more than a week. I’ll post updates as necessary, but no photographs (although hopefully there’ll be some when I get back).
Stay tuned, little campers.
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Gallery: Santa Monica Pier and Beach
Posted 11:42 PM, Aug 22, 2006 |
I did quite a bit of work (too much - it’s late) reworking some things around here. I decided, to allow me to post larger pictures and to not have them slow down the loading of the main page and not be constricted by the size of the column I use (bored yet?) to just create separate galleries for viewing. So when I have a set of photos (I’ll probably still just post individual ones here), I’ll link to the gallery from here, like this:
Santa Monica Pier and Beach
Now you can click there and leave this page and look at pretty pictures. I’ve also made a link in the sidebar to a page that will provide access to all the galleries I’ve posted (so far, just this one).
You can’t leave comments in the gallery itself, but you can leave them here. Or not leave them.
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Misleading Headline
Posted 4:54 PM, Aug 21, 2006 |
Headline: Porn broadcast stuns news viewers
Quote from actual story: “[The producer] said there had been no complaints from viewers about the mishap, but ‘enormous interest from media.’”
Note to CNN (I sent them this): “Try to make your headlines match the story. I’m sure you get a ton of these emails all the time, but don’t sensationalize headlines just to attract readers, especially when the headlines are patently false, and definitely not when the headlines are contradicted by the story they precede. It makes you look like you’re attention-hungry and more interested in reader clicks than providing actual news.”
I expect a form letter response, hopefully with typos.
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He’s Putting On a Little Show
Posted 10:53 AM, Aug 21, 2006 |
Over a month ago, I talked a little bit about sign-spinners and tried to explain it in words. Now that I have a new camera that can take movies, I decided to test out the movie-making capabilities by filming one of these sign-spinners.
In an effort to save space, I shrunk the video and reduced the quality - the camera actually takes really good-quality movies.
And, this also qualifies as part of my multimedia blitz. I’ll be producing music videos for Cleveland the Indian pretty soon. (Not really.)
Sign-Spinner
Enjoy.
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Photos: Two Flowers and a Window
Posted 11:33 PM, Aug 18, 2006 |
Two flowers and a window.
The flowers here are in bloom, but they should all be dying, it seems to me, because it never rains.
A bunch of little white flowers. That is all I have to say about this one.
The window of some modern-architecture building.
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Sometimes a Cigar is a Sphere
Posted 8:13 PM, Aug 17, 2006 |
At heart — oh, wait. Before I get to that, here’s a video (it’s been around for a while, but I’m behind the Internet times) that shows an octopus attacking and killing a shark. If you’ve seen it before, you don’t need to tell me how lame/late I am.
Okay, now, again, from the top:
At heart, I’m a math geek. I love goofy theorems and math news. I’m serious. So this NY Times piece is right up my alley. Grigory Perelman showed up a few years ago and dropped a proof of the Poincare conjecture on the world. For the most part, nobody noticed. And then he left, but he left his proof behind.
From the article:
Depending on who is talking, Poincaré’s conjecture can sound either daunting or deceptively simple. It asserts that if any loop in a certain kind of three-dimensional space can be shrunk to a point without ripping or tearing either the loop or the space, the space is equivalent to a sphere.
The conjecture is fundamental to topology, the branch of math that deals with shapes, sometimes described as geometry without the details. To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar and a rabbit’s head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.
In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this “anything” had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent: no matter how far you strike out in one direction or another, you can get only so far away before you start coming back, the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the Earth.
In the case of two dimensions, like the surface of a sphere or a doughnut, it is easy to see what Poincaré was talking about: imagine a rubber band stretched around an apple or a doughnut; on the apple, the rubber band can be shrunk without limit, but on the doughnut it is stopped by the hole.
With three dimensions, it is harder to discern the overall shape of something; we cannot see where the holes might be. So by now you’re either asleep or clicking on the link.
Over at the Clay Mathematics Institute, you can read the proof for yourself, if you’ve got the time it takes to read 327 pages of math-speak, or you can just take that result on faith and spend your time reading about Ricci Flow with Surgery on Three-Manifolds (which is actually related to the Poincare conjecture, not that I have to tell you that, genius.)
If I start a band, Surgery on Three-Manifolds might be the name I would choose.
I’ll see you on the flip-side, which is really the same side.
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A Battery-Sucking Zone
Posted 10:46 PM, Aug 13, 2006 |
So on my birthday I went to North Hollywood to play in an AIDS charity poker tournament. I finished 7th out of 19, got some coffee and tea, a free smoothie, a CD, 2 t-shirts, and a car that somehow had no battery power left. I tried to get one of the guys from the tournament to jump it, but for some reason, that didn’t work - I don’t know if the connection was bad or… well, I guess that was it.
Anyway, so then my cell phone died - it was like I was in this battery-sucking vortex.
So I’m walking down the street, just sort of thinking, looking for someone to help me jump the car, and this old couple in this parking garage, fenced in, totally safe from me, are getting out of their car. So I say, “Excuse me,” and get their attention, and, “can you help my jump my car?”
At this point the old guy takes a couple of quick steps towards me, gets this panicked look on his face, and says, “The jewels?” I think he thought I was going to rob them of their jewels. I’m not kidding.
I tried talking louder, because they were old. I don’t think he understood me, but he said in a thick Eastern-European accent, “I cannot help you.” Well, okay.
So then in another parking garage these two ladies were standing around with this gigantic dog - like a police dog, perked-up ears, etc., and I said through the gate, “Can one of you help me jump my car?” at which point the dog goes crazy and is barking and wants to rip my head off and stick it in my exhaust pipe.
So one lady takes the dog away and the other one says she can help. And she’s wearing a “Beowulf” t-shirt, something I can’t even begin to imagine where one might acquire.
I hook up the cables, start the car, motor my way home, put the car in the garage, and then try to start it again, just for kicks, which fails. I suspect I didn’t drive far enough to build up a charge, or the alternator is bad. But this isn’t Car Talk, so I’ll stop now.
“The jewels?”
The jewels.
Happy birthday to me.
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Cleveland the Indian Instrumental
Posted 10:41 PM, Aug 11, 2006 |
Like I promised you, I’m dropping a new instrumental, non-studio demo right here, right now. Like the other demo, this was recorded on sub-par equipment primarily used for recording educational lectures, and I was still at the boards “mastering” the recording, by which I mean making sure I didn’t screw up too badly while playing it, and if I did, trying to hide my flaws. (Actually, I didn’t do anything to fix or hide my shoddy guitar work on this piece.)
Straight from my axe to your ears, I give you:
Cleveland the Indian (Instrumental Non-Studio Demo)
Play it to your heart’s content. It’s the song of the late night on August 11th, a small, small fraction of the entire summer.
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Getting All Up On the News, Like
Posted 11:31 AM, Aug 11, 2006 |
This article talks about teen sex (boy, I’m sure this website will score 1,000 hits from that phrase alone). It notes that the percentage of students having sex with multiple partners is 14.3%, down from 18.7% fifteen years ago.
It also notes that the CDC defines “multiple partners” as at least four.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t multiple mean “more than 1”? (It does.)
Can we feel artificially happy now?
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Mandatory Voting
Posted 10:16 AM, Aug 10, 2006 |
This Op-Ed from the New York Times proposes mandatory voting. The writer, Norman Ornstein, bemoans the low turnout in the Connecticut primary, and says that low voter turnout is leading to “ever-greater polarization in the country.”
Has it occurred to Mr. Ornstein that the ever-greater polarization in the country is not from the lack of people voting, but from candidates being polarized? That the issues that consistently make it to candidate debates are — well, the one issue — is abortion, and that it’s a polarizing issue? Do you really think if 100% of eligible voters showed up to vote that the country would magically agree on this issue? Or that those whose candidate didn’t win would just shrug and say, “Well, we sure gave it our best to get our guy elected. I guess I was wrong about abortion after all…”?
Now, Ornstein does mention the divisive issues in his fourth paragraph. You might miss that paragraph because it’s only two lines long.
And hey, Singapore does it! Maybe if we do it, and you don’t show up, instead of fining you $15, we can just cane you? Singapore does it!
Is it possible that the reason people don’t vote is because it’s consistently like choosing the lesser of two evils. (Bumper sticker I saw once: Vote Cthulhu! Why settle for the lesser of two evils?.)
Of course, the Australians can always show up at the polls and vote for “None of the above.” Lines at the polls, while not really long, would be, well, twice as long if twice as many people voted (with the average 50% turnout in midterm general elections that Ornstein cites). So now I have to stand in line for a couple of candidates I don’t even like? It’s like sitting down to take a 100-question test about quantum mechanics. I don’t know any of the answers, so why even bother?
And Ornstein himself even notes that we value the freedom not to vote. He then says, “Well, that’s okay, because even if we make you go to the polls, you still don’t actually have to vote! So it’s like you’re free not to vote. Or something.” What?
Ornstein’s argument is flawed. People don’t vote because the candidates don’t give them reason to, not because the system doesn’t make them. Get it together, Ornstein.
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Photos: Trees and Churches
Posted 8:42 PM, Aug 8, 2006 |
A few photos of a nearby tree and an abandoned Protestant church.
There are a few trees with massive root structures around the neighborhood. The roots are like giant fingers.
Here’s a fern camped out in between some of the roots.
The front of the abandoned church - you can see the fencing across the porch. Since when do churches have porches? This is the churchporch, anyway.
There was the church, here is the steeple. (I’m sorry these captions are so horrible.)
The paint peeling off the corner of the church.
The bark peeling off the roots of one of those giant trees.
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Album Update
Posted 9:47 AM, Aug 7, 2006 |
A couple of notes while waiting for other things to happen.
1) The album is really coming together. You might ask, “Is he really working on an album?” To which I might say, “Am I?” I’ve written two musical things that some might categorize as songs, while others might categorize as advertising jingles, accidental strummings, mistakes, or unlistenable garbage. I have song titles:- The Coupon Song
- Cleveland the Indian
- A Song for Chone
- Come Into My Tin House
Do all these things make up an album? I think so.
2) I’ve ordered a new camera, about 6 times better than my old camera, which is about 5 years old and has been used on about 5,000 pictures, maybe. So that should be good - hopefully that arrives before I return to Minneapolis.
And so this is like a real letter to you, dear reader:
PS. I’m working on recording an instrumental, non-studio demo of Cleveland the Indian. Look for that to drop like the atom bomb in this space soon.
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Photos: Sky and Spider
Posted 10:03 PM, Aug 2, 2006 |
Two photos taken recently. Nothing in common.
Taken from our balcony.
I found this little guy hanging from the ceiling fan.
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