Present at the Creation (now with pictures)
Thanks to everyone who told me about the
NOVA episode. I thought it was very good.
I spoke on the phone with the producers way back when, but evidently they chose to focus on: CMU, Stanford, Digital Auto Drive, Ghostrider, and Terramax. That's a good selection of the most interesting teams. I'd like to think it was a toss-up as to whether to include us or Digital Auto Drive.
Did we get any love at all? Well, if you don't blink too much:
- there is a three-second shot of Golem 2 driving around a parked car
- Jim Swenson walks past the camera
- I am visible as a tiny figure here and there
- my parents and (especially) Maribeth's parents get some face time.
V is very, very extraordinary
The movie was reasonably entertaining, but I was disappointed by the many questions left unanswered at the end.
- Where did V get all his resources from?
- Did V cause the explosion at Larkhill? If so, how? Or was that a fortunate accident?
- Why did Finch have a "feeling" that explosives would be delivered by train?
- What exactly was the goal of the Larkhill project?
- What was going on with the fried eggs?
- What are we to make of the two characters, thought to be dead, who reappear at the end of the movie?
Afterwards I went home and read the graphic novel, which had been lying around on my shelf for a long time. The comic book does deliver some answers to the first three questions, although the answers may not be that great. The filmmakers may have felt that rather than give weak explanations, it was better to give no explanations at all.
The comic book still didn't satisfy me on the fourth question. And the fifth and sixth questions don't arise in the comic book. If anyone has insight into those, I'd like to hear it.
As you might expect, the movie streamlines the plot of the comic book and condenses the number of characters. In some ways the movie is better: the flight and capture of Evey are more believable in the movie.
Hypermasculinity
I tried using the
face transformer to make myself look more masculine.
Repeatedly.
Quote of the Day
"[The low diplomacy content of Titan] gives good replay value, since high diplomacy content games, after you play them for a bit, always boil down to persuading other people to let you win. This is the same quality you find in Settlers. Don't get me wrong, I love high diplomacy games, but you can't play them a lot." -- Kim Milvang-Jensen.
Red Light Stories
I feel that I've seen a lot of people run red lights lately.
1. A few weeks ago I was crossing the street at Colorado when a woman driving and talking on her cell phone didn't brake in time. Her SUV sailed through the crosswalk before coming to a stop. I told her to get off the fucking phone. I think this is the only time I have ever yelled at someone on the street. The homeless people who had also been crossing the street were quietly appreciative, though seemingly too timid to say anything themselves.
2. A bit more recently I was walking towards the very same crosswalk. I was still about thirty feet away when another woman, also talking on her cell phone, drove through the light in exactly the same way! This time no one was actually crossing the street, though. In strict fairness, maybe I should have shouted at her too. But I didn't.
3. Earlier this week I was standing on the corner when an SUV tried to make a right turn through a red light without slowing or stopping... while another car drove straight through the green light. There was a near collision and the SUV was forced to stop. The guy in the
SUV started honking his horn as if he had been endangered by a reckless driver.
4. Another car running a red light... not distinctive, except that another pedestrian and I exchanged a few words on the dangerous drivers out there.
5. Wednesday night. This time I was driving, behind another car that was driving a bit slower than normal, say fifteen miles per hour. When we got to a red light, the 15-mph car just kept on going.
6. Later that same night: a guy in a Mercedes, driving fast and weaving through traffic. As we approached a light which was turning red, he cut in front of me. A few seconds later, he zoomed through the red light. Pleasingly, there was a police car in the immediate vicinity. The cop followed the Mercedes for a few blocks and then pulled him over.
Outbreak
I created my first Internet memetic virus, which is, "Recount a one-line anecdote for each state you have visited [and then demand that others do the same]."
Here's my own attempt to fulfil the meme:
Arizona: picked up Hopi radio station in vicinity of Grand Canyon
California: had best line in a crummy low-budget movie
Connecticut: discovered that campus legends about Yale buildings are eerily similar to campus legends about Harvard buildings
District of Columbia: found Supreme Court clerks are uncertain of how to get from Pentagon to Supreme Court
Florida: trapped in Orlando airport for eighteen hours
Georgia: crossed racial barriers by getting haircut in black-clienteled barbershop
Hawaii: drove a rented convertible into a ditch twice in 24 hours
Illinois: got married in a Catholic church
Kansas: saw numerous signs regarding tornado danger and tornado shelters
Kentucky: sought out "Thomas Edison House"... where Thomas Edison lived for about a year
Louisiana: saw a bearded transvestite in a bar
Maine: have vague memories of driving tours with family
Massachusetts: demonstrated that Avogadro's number is about 7 * 10^23
Michigan: accidentally given vast Presidential suite by Detroit Marriot, politely ignored daily efforts by hotel computer to check me out again
Minnesota: played miniature golf course at modern art museum, each hole an "installation" by different artist
Missouri: from top of Gateway Arch, observed that large former TWA building still said "TWA" on it
Nevada: failed to win $2 million when robot truck crashed after 22 miles due to software bug
New Hampshire: rented a minivan in Manchester to transport a bunch of undergrads to Boston
New Jersey: got sunburned at beach
New Mexico: drove through the most torrential rain I have ever witnessed
New York: went to jujitsu tournament
North Carolina: had some pizza in Chapel Hill
Ohio: listened to Triumph the insult comic dog on radio while unsuccessfully looking for Wright brothers' birthplace
Oregon: bought great Robert Graves short story collection at Powell's, giant used bookstore
Pennsylvania: flew across country to give talks there four times; on two occasions, actually got to give talk
Rhode Island: had clambake
Tennessee: had some barbecue in Nashville
Texas: inspired mime teacher who adapted my piece into his own routine
Utah: won BYU trivia tournament organized by Ken Jennings, future Jeopardy superstar
Virginia: got lost on an Army base
Washington: escaped being prankishly thrown off the side of a boat because I was wearing my Microsoft employee badge
Matt Weiner helped me
inject the virus into his readership. It appears to be reasonably infectious!
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9a 9b 10 11 12 13 14 15 It's interesting that it has already started to mutate a little bit.
But this meme needs to be spread further! So
everyone who reads this blog is
required to tell an anecdote for every state they've visited. And don't forget to make some other people do it too... That's very important.
Textual Ambiguity of the Day
"That's horses***." --
Dave McClure.
At first I went looking for the footnote that would explain the relevance of horses. But I guess there was no footnote and this was intended to be an expletive.
Roomba Discovery
After a lot of sitting in its box (I'm so lazy),
Roomba finally made its maiden voyage around the apartment. I was pleased with it, yet also see avenues for improvement. In general, I think the robot vacuum cleaner market has a bright future.
Room for improvement: since the Roomba relies primarily on its collision bumper to sense things, as it explores the room it bumps into things, e.g. chair legs, with a certain amount of force. The bumper is compliant, and presumably designed so that it would seldom damage furniture. Nevertheless, it's a little disconcerting to see the chairs get knocked about. I think a more advanced robot with some long-range sensing would have market appeal.
The remote control to guide Roomba around the room is useful, but here too the user interface could be made more advanced. Ideally you would point to where you wanted Roomba to go, rather than pushing buttons for it to turn or go straight. Since Roomba isn't very fast, steering it manually isn't very fun.
Quote of the Day
"Otherwise, download a version of Linux--most are free and resemble Windows so closely that you'll hardly know the difference."
--
Popular Science, April 2006, p. 80.
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Finally finished
this book by Bart Ehrman about the Marcionites, the Ebionites, the Gnostics, and other early Christians whose views and writings lost out in the battle to become orthodox and canonical.
The book was very interesting, but a bit unnecessarily repetitive. Perhaps Ehrman subscribes to the Jared Diamond School of Non-Fiction Writing. While reading the book I had a vivid impression of Ehrman lecturing to his Religious Studies classes. "As we have seen..." "We will return to this later..." I'm not surprised to discover, on the rear dust jacket, that Ehrman does audio lectures for the Teaching Company.
Also, perhaps in order to pump up the importance of his field of study, Ehrman likes to ruminate on how our whole intellectual development would be different if, say, Gnosticism had emerged as the dominant form of Christianity. Now, I am sure that history would have been different (in a "butterfly effect" sense, if nothing else), but I rather doubt that Gnosticism would have made all of us mystics today, any more than Christianity has made all of us pacifists.
Bad News
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer had a piece on Thursday about the declining newspaper business.
But I can't help but feel that this graph was a little deceptive.
What's with the identical twins?
This year on American Idol, two of the final twenty-four contestants had identical twins, and another pair of identical twins were doing well in the competition until they were ejected due to scandal. I didn't watch American Idol last year, but I understand a pair of identical twins did well last year also.
About 4 in 1000 births yield identical twins, and 12 in 1000 births yield fraternal twins, so I reckon the chance of an individual having an identical twin is about 0.8%. By random chance, American Idol should have had about one identical-twin contestant by now, but four to six?
Maybe it helps to study music with a singing partner who has a similar voice to yours.
Cheap Excuse for a Blog Entry
This is
my favorite dinosaur comic so far.
Women in Science
Philip Greenspun argues that there are few women in science because women are smart, and science is a bad career choice compared to business, law, or medicine.
I think that a career choice of scientist should be classed with career choices like musician, actor, author, athlete, or aviator.
- These careers are professionalized versions of hobbies. There are significant numbers of amateurs willing to pursue these activities in their spare time, for free. In contrast, there are few if any hobbyist accountants. There may be amateur lawyers who like to make impassioned arguments, but probably not many who like to draft wills and contracts for fun.
- The average pay in the hobby-jobs is not great. This is no doubt closely related to the first point.
- Young entrants may or may not fully appreciate that the average pay is not great. Even if they do appreciate it, they don't care, because they don't expect to be average; they expect to attain the top of the profession. Superstars in these jobs are well-paid, even spectacularly well-paid.
With these parallels, it may be interesting to consider the male-female balance in other hobby-jobs apart from science.
30.1% of natural scientists are women.
35.6% of musicians and composers are women.
38.8% of actors and directors are women.
55.2% of authors are women.
28.0% of professional athletes are women. (I was surprised this percentage is so high.)
3.1% of airplane pilots and navigators are women.
In comparison, 28.8% of lawyers, 24.5% of physicians, and 26.3% of computer programmers are women.
(All 1999 data from the U.S. Statistical Abstract.)
These numbers do not suggest to me that women are fleeing science for law or medicine at all. Nor does it seem that women are necessarily averse to high-competition, can-you-win-the-lottery career choices, since there are so many women authors. I guess in acting and sports, men and women tend to be segregated by sex rather than competing head-to-head for exactly the same jobs.
Quote of Yesterday
"People go in thinking they're going to be either Sean Connery or Jack Ryan, the character from, you know, the Tom Clancy novels, and then after a couple of years in, they find out that they're Dilbert."
-- Former CIA official Larry Johnson (NPR
Morning Edition, March 1, 2006)
Ticket to Ride
I played my first game of
Ticket to Ride last night. I liked it. I think it is my favorite in the very broad category of "railroad-building" games. But the red and green and brown tracks are tough on the color-blind.
