Things there ain't

Uploaded by Dick Dangerous

Ain't no wall impenetrable enough,
Ain't no void vacuous enough,
Ain't no slur insensitive enough,
Ain't no nuclide radioactive enough,
Ain't no venom deadly enough,
Ain't no international sanction threatening enough,
Ain't no mutation repellent enough,
Ain't no history obscure enough,
Ain't no grammar difficult enough,
Ain't no cemetery gloomy enough,
Ain't no predator vicious enough,
Ain't no sickness debilitating enough,
Ain't no explosive energetic enough,
Ain't no galaxy remote enough,
Ain't no pitch shrill enough,
Ain't no ghost frightening enough,
Ain't no recession severe enough,
Ain't no packaging hermetic enough,
Ain't no budget tight enough,
Ain't no robot destructive enough,
Ain't no canine aggressive enough,
Ain't no spectacle disgusting enough,
Ain't no famine widespread enough,
Ain't no extinction total enough
To keep me from you...

Sounds good to me

Walking by the tubes.,
originally uploaded by Gabba Gabba Hey!.

A great many people give former Alaska senator Ted Stevens flak for comparing the structure of the Internet to a series of tubes a few years back, and I will not attempt to defend the gentleman's conception of the subject in full. Yet in the resulting furor, I would just like to point out that if I had to choose just one metaphor between "a big truck" and "a series of tubes," the tubes would win decisively. For what is more tubelike than the high-speed Intenet backbone network, the submarine cables, the dedicated satellite links, and the urban microwave trunks that do the heavy work of piping the traffic about, routing around congestion and breakages, rarely caught up in traffic jams, as photons rarely are wont to tarry? And if somewhere the end of a tube is exposed to our feeble senses, raw effluent pouring out in a stomach-churning mix, what can a modern net user do but express his or her wonder at the fluidlike medium that geeks in the know even refer to as a torrent? For something more like the opposite, look at the Netflix distribution scheme which relies on honest to goodness mail trucks to get the content to the consumer.

Rendezvous with mouth

Essential tremor is a condition that can affect the ability to use one's hands in a steady fashion and often causes the person who has it to have problems feeding themselves, drinking, or grooming. Medical researchers are working on treatments involving neural stimulation as well as pharmaceuticals, but there are also technologically assisted methods of helping sufferers deal with the unwanted motion.

A device which fits on the person's body to attenuate the motion caused by essential tremor has been the subject of a Mechanical Engineering thesis. I was thinking, though, of a way to compensate for the tremors by using special utensils which were instrumented to correct for the shake much the same way that high-end digital cameras compensate for shaking, or perhaps like the automatic docking system used on the ESA's unmanned transports to ISS. I imagine a fork, knife, or spoon with 3-axis acceleratometers inside the handle, along with a miniature video camera pointing at the destination (the mouth), with an articulated drive holding the working end of the utensil steady despite hand tremor. Now that they have tiny motors built into mascara applicators, it cannot be too difficult to put one into a piece of flatware.

I can foresee one issue with the invention, however: would it be dishwasher-safe? Perhaps if the water-sensitive part were detachable from the spoon/knife/fork part in a way similar to the interchangeable heads on an electric toothbrush, one could get around this too.

Compare and Contrast III

Ding dong merrily on high.

This post has been removed due to bitrot of all of its content over the years. Sorry!

Denotatively bankrupt

The other day I went to the bank for some help.

"I have a question about my High Performance Money Market Account (broken link)," says I.

"Surely, sir, what is the question?"

"I'd like to know why it is that I am getting $0.80 a year in interest when I think I should be making $80 instead."

It turned out not to be a data entry error, as I'd hoped, but a pitiful 0.04% APR for deposits under $5000. And if you want to crack the 1% rate of return, you have to put no less than $10000 into the account.

To her credit, the bank representative agreed with me that the cash might be better off stuffed under a mattress.

This, by me, is a sorry way to use the term High Performance and worthy of being mocked. Here for any marketer with the chutzpah to embrace the notion is my list of that choice of words extended to other areas:

• High Performance Windows - panes made of opaque black glass in frames that do not open.


• High Performance Perfume - a small flask of water with a vaguely swampy aroma


• High Performance Air Conditioning - a damp and stale whisper of air, roughly at ambient temperature


• High Performance Camouflage - white fabric with black piping

Relief President

In the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, it was customary for baseball pitchers to finish all the games they started. Relief pitching was very rare, signalling at the time a mark of failure. In the modern game, teams have moved all the way to a model where a good starting pitcher is expected to put in a good set of innings, perhaps six or seven, but when the pitch count climbs upward of 100 or so to hand the ball over to a lineup of relief pitchers to close out most games.

I propose something similar for the office of the Presidency of the United States.

Now that we have seen that the resignation of the chief executive does not automatically bring with it the downfall of the Republic as a whole, the long-standing reluctance to leave office may be lessened, and calm, rational political thinkers may well want to consider the benefits of ceding power in an orderly way. Maybe the concept of the Vice-President as primarily the one "a heartbeat away" from the highest job in the land could be tweaked to one of a person with the skills to pick up that job in the waning months and weeks of the term and inject a new energy at the time it is most needed. The change at the top would make a generalized turnover of the other key Executive Branch positions at this time a natural thing to do. In situations when the Administration is embroiled with tense negotiations (whether foreign or domestic in nature) could be spiced up with the prospect of having a Presidential switch in order to achieve some kind of strategic advantage, much as when baseball managers switch pitchers to get the kind of matchup they want with the upcoming batters in the lineup. Also, the impact of the handover in power could be parlayed into a partisan advantage if it could be timed for the optimum time in the campaign season for the next term.

The new President would be expected to name a replacement Vice-President who would make sense as the next President in line, in the event that circumstances call for a second change at the top - or a third or fourth, as the case may be. Although the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution makes it impossible for a person to be elected to the Presidency more than twice, it does not appear to forbid a person from ascending to the Presidency more than this through vacancy. Thus, one could imagine a deal whereby the person who was originally President is confirmed as the new Vice-President, ready to step back into power when the time is right for the relief President to stop down, and so on, ad infinitum. (Note that here the baseball analogy breaks down; the rules do not allow a starting pitcher to re-enter a game after having left.)

This kind of scheme would raise the profile of the Vice-Presidency from it traditional low assessment. Perhaps if the expectation that an elected President will ordinarily cede power over to their running mate becomes sufficiently ingrained, one who delays doing so will someday be regarded as distrusting or snubbing their Vice-President, and may well take some damage in the public opinion polls as a result.

As I think of this idea, it seems to me that the trickiest aspect of this scheme would have to do with the lack of anyone fulfilling the role of a baseball team manager when it comes to politics. There really isn't any one person who by Constitutional law has the authority to tell the President that enough is enough and that it is time to withdraw. On the other hand, the nation as a whole might be inspired to take on that function, maybe by expressing their opinion through the press, maybe more formally (by voting?), somehow.

I am not proposing this kind of process at the current moment, since the electorate did not really have this setup in mind as of the time of the last Presidential contest and could not have considered the Vice-President very seriously as likely Presidential material. But I think it is not already too late for this to become part of the deal for the next four years in office.

Spinning screens

By now everyone has seen the Apple ads (Broken video link) showing off the iPhone's ability to sense its own orientation and display either in "landscape" or "portrait" mode, right? Well, why couldn't they make regular TV screens do the same thing? They could attach a remotely controlled motor to allow the user to twist the screen 90 degrees, and adjust the picture to suit. Some scenes, after all, work better in that vertical format (see the example), or if one is using the monitor to browse the web, one could accommodate webpages with vertical layouts comfortably as well.

Also, you could watch movies in a super-letterboxed format, with lots of empty space above and below to put lengthy captions.

My take on the story of the day

Bullfighters are people who fight bulls, right? Well, I think that dogfighters ought to be people who try to take on man's best friend in the ring.

To make it something like a fair fight, the dogfighter should be equipped the same way as his opponent - claws and teeth only. Anything less equitable would seem to me to be cowardly.

Evil dogs.,
originally uploaded by This Year's Love.

Show your axes

People don't know just what to do with the metaphor of the learning curve, speaking of it in such a variety of terms:

Type of learning curve	Hits in Google (13 June 2007)
steep	90700
high	41900
fast	28700
sharp	22300
shallow	19700
slow	12800
gradual	9290
excellent	4490
gnarly	5
grotesque	2

I think everyone agrees that the horizontal coordinate is time, but the confusion is whether the vertical coordinate is effort or results. The Wikipedia article suggests that the original sense had to do with the outcome of the learning rather than the difficulty of it, which seems to be the more prevalent interpretation these days. My idea is that anyone throwing around the metaphor ought to provide an actual picture of the curve they have in mind, with labels along the axes, so that the person hearing the phrase knows which sense is intended without having to resort to context.

We are in hot pursuit

I was at the gym this morning without my headphones and saw some NASCAR up on ESPN, with cars crashing into others and into barriers, and started thinking about how one could make the sport more of a realistic depiction of driving. If, for instance, they deployed a police cruiser with siren and flashing lights at the back of the pack, would the drivers slow down or would they speed up? Would they start reaching over for their registration?

Then I thought about how in the Olympics they have pursuit races where competitors individually or in groups circle around trying to lap one another. Seems like a natural thing in an automotive form, and I am a little nonplussed why I have not been able to find anything along these lines on the net. It could be carried out with two cars or teams starting at opposite sides of an oval or otherwise closed track, or for added thrills and realism, in a road racing format with actual hazards (perhaps somewhat mitigated) that the drivers in pursuit would have to negotiate as they go round and round. Instead of seeing cars running into padded walls and bursting into flame, you might see them running into padded buildings, which would be something. That is something I could imagine watching, unlike most motorsports in this country.

Bright lights, big city, Ballard,
originally uploaded by jbrownell.

I thought they'd have more salt

Thinking about what to bake for Valentine's day? Perhaps Cori Crooks' Mexican Divorce Cookies (broken link) would hit the spot.

It's my birthday?!

Today I logged into Distributed Proofreaders to discover that it was was my birthday. Birthday - that's not for another couple months...? Then I noticed the numeral "4" next to my user ID and figured out that it was my DP birthday they were talking about, and that I must have signed up four years ago today, which sounds about right. Although with the redesign of the workflow, I have gone back to being a relative newbie in the scheme of things. That fits, because by their having called it a "birthday" instead of an "anniversary," I now feel like a four-year-old.
IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE
Pretty cake! Maybe I should have it scanned in so it can be proofread.

Why doesn't my ISP, to whom I actually give money, send me a greeting on the date I began service, which puts the year count up there in the double digits now? After all, one cannot really feel to have been born unless one has internet access. The telephone companies, the cable company, and the water company might well in on the act as well, to help inspire customer contentment. Perhaps because the customers would start to expect gifts and good customer service and things like that.

For the den

Mounted Tyrannosaur head (broken link). Good, but I think I might prefer a mounted grey instead.

Rubikation reprise

The tactilely-enhanced Rubik's cube should, I think, be in greyscale (broken link), don't you? That way, the sighted spectators would really have to stare at it to know whether it was solved correctly or not, whereas the blindfolded solver would just know.

Tearjerkers for guys

Women often report enjoying going to the movies to have a good cry, so maybe men (and I'm talking about conventionally straight men) could benefit from similar stories with them in mind. Unfortunately, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with much in the way of ideas of film stories which have a high likelihood of making your average guy really weepy, rather than enraged or just quietly humiliated. But maybe if the special effects are really good, a big Hollywood studio could clear that obstacle.
Droplets (broken link),
originally uploaded by whyizit.

Rubikations

I read this story about a world-class Rubik's Cube solver and was befuddled in two places.

1. "This weekend he will try to regain the title of world blindfold Rubik's Cube champion" Blindfold Rubik's Cube? How can that be? I did a little searching around and found that the idea is that one receives a scrambled cube, studies it, then dons a blindfold and unscrambles it. Silly me, I thought that they would first put on the blindfold, then receive a scrambled cube where the colored faces are replaced with tactile cues (sandpaper, grease, Braille dots, thumbtacks) and then solve it just by touch. It might actually be easier than what the fellow's doing. Ah well, not a completely original idea after all, though I didn't know it at the time.
   
   I think I thought this because of my other idea for a Braille condom. But that's for another time.


2. "'That was also a lot of fun,' said Mao, who is now working for a constancy firm." Pardon me, a what? I Googled around and found hits for web constancy firm, management constancy company, and that kind of thing, but no clue as to what the definition of this (apparently Commonwealth country) entity is.

I've never figured out Rubik's cubes myself. For me, the most fascinating thing is taking them apart to see how they work anyway. I think some architect should adopt this scheme to build a Rubik's apartment building (not an office building, for God's sake), so everybody could have a different view every day. Or a Rubik's fridge, to make it easier to rotate out those things which usually get stuck at the back for far too long.

Visibles

Visible Man
Originally uploaded by bcostin.

I did have one once. It was great.

You can buy along with the Visible Woman, Horse, and Cow here, as well as the mechanical analogues.

I would also appreciate it if someone well versed in sculpture would devise these:

• Visble Pig


• Visble Tyrannosaur


• Visble Whale


• Visble NCC-1701-D


• Visble Cray YMP

Regrettably, although the Visible Alien does exist it is only in virtual (Shockwave) form. I'd love to see one in actual styrene plastic instead, life-sized, preferably.