Here's an important educational tool from the United States government to help children process the Indian Ocean disaster:

http://www.fema.gov/kids/games/tsunami/

(as discovered by my friend Jason)
http://jmccargar.blogspot.com/2004/12/red-cross-priorities.html

Beaming like a kid who just met his favorite sports star, Mayor Anthony A. Williams signed legislation Wednesday to bring major league baseball back to the nation's capital.

So Councilwoman Cropp's resistance to the billion dollar tax giveaway to baseball faded in the face of a non-binding promise to try to get private funding for some of it cost. But at least Mayor Williams is happy. Sign me up as one disgusted anti-corporate-subsidy baseball fan.

I have a bunch of science text books without warning labels. I finally found a website with appropriate labels to prevent others from reaching dangerous conclusions from my books.

The original from Cobb County Georgia:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

From Berkeley:
This book does not contain the word evolution, the unifying principle in biology and in important component of the National Science Standards and Scholastic Achievement Test. For an overview of what your class is missing, go to: http://evolution.berkeley.edu

See 8 other stickers in the link. Also see the link to a CafePress t-shirt of these stickers. The t-shirts are not as stylish as the ones Joel is selling through (I think) the same vendor.

The link also points you to scary ID sites from the Discovery Center and the Intelligent Design Network.

I was riding my bicycle last Saturday when I noticed an irregularity in the rear wheel. I took it to bicycle repair shop on my way home, and the mechanic quickly removed and stripped the wheel, noticing in the process that it looked like I needed a new chain and that the gear cassette was also terminally worn, and then diagnosed a broken spoke. (I'd actually noticed that months before as a 'loose spoke' but not bothered to do anything about it.) I concurred that I was experiencing very disconcerting chain jump going up steep hills, and added that I also couldn't go down hills very quickly because my big front chainring, i.e., high gear, is no longer accessible because the derailleur no longer moved far enough. Also my pannier rack has two cracked welds, which doesn't seem to matter except that it rattles a lot. I've had the bike over nine years, at a total expenditure of US$3,835: it's a $500 bicycle, but I paid $858 the day I bought it, including helmet, gloves, lights, tools, bags, etc; later I added clipless pedals and shoes, the pannier rack and panniers, several ill-fated bicycle computers (which is why I can't give a total mileage figure for the bicycle, nor a cost per mile comparison, but we can estimate crudely: cars cost between $.375/mi (IRS) and $.56/mi (AAA) to own, fuel, insure, and operate— let's call it $.5/mi, so I would have had to get 852 miles a year out of my bicycle to save money over a car. Probably I fell short of this.), spandex garments, tuneups, new tubes and tires, a lock, a light to replace the stolen one, and a numbing sequence of ultimately defective rear lights. The mechanic interrupted my reverie to announce that the rear wheel was not just out of alignment but bent and unfixable. He put it back together with the new spoke and said he couldn't charge me anything for the work.

"So I should hurry up and get a new bicycle?" I asked.

He bent over my bicycle and cupped his ear. "What's that? 'Take me off life support'?"

So this morning I test-rode some recumbent bicycles. These are lower, longer, heavier, more expensive, more comfortable, and more aerodynamic than traditional upright bicycles, which are properly called "safety" bicycles because they replaced the "dangerous" penny-farthing designs. After riding three models around the block many times, my initial impressions are:

• I got used to steering very quickly; the key is to remember you are on a bicycle and to maintain balance, rather than to get sloppy like on a tricycle and steer by moving the handlebars. Within a few laps I was able to stick my arm out to signal turns without swerving.
• I sat much higher than I expected to.
• I'll have to use a rear-view mirror, which is probably a good thing
• There are perfectly nice recumbants for $550 to $750, which surprised me.
• The higher pedals of a short-wheel-base bicycle feel much more athletic.

And a purchase? Deferred until January.

Lars turned me on to the benefits of a dual-monitor desktop (and the Kinesis keyboard) in the Collaboraid office, and when I set up my home office I wanted the same. Having wasted more than a few Danish weekends struggling with X driver problems, I determined to do a lot more research. After wasting less than a day or two net, I've been working on my dual-monitor setup for almost a month without any problems, so I am documenting it on the internet for anybody else who was equally frustrated at how hard it was to find out what to buy.

The key features of my setup are:

• Two flat-panel monitors, each with 1600x1200 resolution
• digital connections from the video card to the monitors
• Both monitors driven from the same video card
• the correct video driver for Linux kernel 2.6
• Excellent performance

The hardware that provides this is:

• Dell UltraSharp 2001FP 20" monitor, US$800 each
• PNY Nvidia Quadro NVS 280 AGP video card, US$100
• LFH-60 to dual DVI splitter cable, US$30. The video card comes with a big 60-pin connector and a splitter to two VGA connectors, but the digital picture is noticably sharper.

Software:

• Debian Linux, sid distribution
• NVidia's binary driver, as per the Debian-nVidia HOWTO. There are two main ways to do multiple monitors in Xwindows; one is to use two or more video cards and have X span them, and the other is to let the video card manage the monitors and present X with a single workspace. In my experience, the second approach works much better.
• The relevant parts of my XF86Config-4 file are:

  Section "Device"
  	Identifier	"PNY NVS 280"
          BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
  	Driver		"nvidia"
  
  	Option 		"TwinView"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorHorizSync" "28-80"
  	Option		"SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "43-76"
  	Option		"MetaModes" "1600x1200, 1600x1200"
  	Option		"TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
  EndSection
  
  Section "Screen"
          Identifier	"Default Screen"
          Device          "PNY NVS 280"
          Monitor	        "Generic Monitor"
          DefaultDepth    24
          SubSection "Display"
  		Depth		24
  		Modes		"1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
          EndSubSection
  EndSection

• For high-resolution screen backgrounds at 3200x1200, PlasmaDesign.co.uk., £7
• The KDE Desktop includes Multiple Monitor support, which ensures that dialog boxes pop up in the middle of a monitor instead of splitting themselves in the middle and lets me maximize windows to just one monitor.

Since I type with the keyboard in my lap, the KellyRest Clamp-on Mouse Platform (US$20) was very helpful in getting the mouse tray close to the keyboard. My desk is an IKEA Ivar shelf unit (US$105 for two sides, five shelves, and a brace), which provides an adjustable monitor shelf, foot rest, and storage shelves above the monitors.

I'm a big fan of baseball, but I'm not a big fan of wealth transfer from tax payers to private corporations via subsidy. So naturally I'm deeply opposed to the deal between Major League Baseball (motto: "slightly less incompetent than the National Hockey League, but we make up for it with nastiness") and the city of Washington, D.C., in which DC would put up all of the money for a new stadium and the baseball team's owners would keep all of the profits. The fig leaf, that the money was coming from a new business tax, isn't worthy of being spit at. Are you telling me that businesses will submit to a tax for a stadium but not for schools?

I was pleased to hear a mainstream news source (NPR) finally mention on air what's been known for over a decade: that stadiums and arenas provide negligable or even negative economic benefits to their neighborhoods, and are therefore terrible ways for governments to spend money. But I'm even more pleased to find that the City Council has rallied behind dissident Councilmembers to defy MLB and their lapdog the mayor (motto: "Making you nostalgic for former mayor and crack addict Marion Barry") and demand at least 1/2 private financing. One half! The audacity. Let's hope this starts a trend of local governments standing up to extortion by sports teams and other companies demanding public funding in exchange for the pleasure of their company.

The Impossibility of God, edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier
A collection of philosophy essays presenting logical proofs that God can't exist. For what they are, many are interesting, but this is not a general-purpose entry in the dialog between theists and atheists. The proofs include such classics as, A) an omnipotent being can do anything. B) God is omnipotent. C) An omnipotent being can move anything. D) An omnipotent being can create a thing which cannot be moved. Since A-D cannot all be true, God does not exist. Woohoo. I'm convinced.

I suppose that the essays fill a niche in the thought process, and help to uncover inconsistencies in how we use god-related words and concepts. Lacking a specific interest in this precise niche, though, I wasn't able to muster more then a series of skimmings.

Closed Chambers, Edward Lazarus
A very detailed story by a former Supreme Court clerk (to Blackmun, 88-89), which sheds a lot of light on the functioning of the Court. In particular, Lazarus explains the legal issues thoroughly, clearly, and readably, and ties them to the actors and to a broader context. Reading this is enough to turn one into a Court junkie. I am skeptical of Lazarus' thesis that the Court worked better "before" and is on a barely reversible slide to dysfuction and to a role indistinguishable from partisan politics. It's not that I don't think that's where the Court is (cf. Bush v Gore), it's that I doubt that there ever was a golden age for the Supreme Court, when all of the justices were brave and smart and judicious. Even the Warren Court, a highlight for many of us liberals, did its work on as shaky legal foundation. Anyway, a great read, both entertaining (in a legal sort of way) and education (same).

The Secret Life of Dust, Hannah Holmes
A complement to The Secret House, but much more specifically focussed on dust. Where it comes from, what it's made of, how it moves around in the atmosphere, what effects it has on the climate and on people, and so forth and so on. Some key points: there's a lot of dust, all the time, everywhere. There has always been a lot of dust, going back millions of years. Some of the dust has become much more poisonous in the last few hundred years. Altogether dust (and, specifically, man-made pollution) are probably a key factor in many or most respiratory deaths and heart-related deaths, and in many other deaths. Cigarette smoke is makes just about everything worse, and just like the cloud of fecal matter/water vapor droplets that hang in the air of your house for hours after each #2 flush, cigarette smoke pervades everywhen even when you can't see it or even smell it.

While reading this book, I had to put it down a few times to remind myself that I wasn't dead or dying, and that human beings do in fact live for many decades despite inhaling a lot of dust. The author seemed to lose sight of that from time to time. Notwithstanding that caveat, and the complaint that there weren't any pictures, it was a good, informative, and readable science book.

[Comedian David Cross] even seemed to have a better handle on the mindset of Osama bin Laden than the Bush administration: "If the terrorists hated freedom, then the Netherlands would be fucking dust." Just a few months later, bin Laden released one of his tapes (not on Sub Pop), saying, "Bush has told you that we do not like freedom. Then why didn't we hit Sweden?" Whoa.

— Josh Modell, Onion AV Club