Add this to President Barack Obama's problems in selling his health care overhaul: A lot of the tech-savvy activists who helped put him in office are young, feeling indestructible and not all that into what they see as an old folks issue.

I wrote earlier about the ridiculous and futile steps I took to attempt to participate in my representative's Health Care teleconference. Last Friday I got notification of the second teleconference, but the actual call to join the conference never came.

Update: The call was actually scheduled for Monday, and I did get (and miss) a call ten minutes after the scheduled start. Several more calls have been announced, and a few in-person meetings in September, but I'm moving to DC tomorrow and, I guess, giving up my representation in Congress.

I note that despite all his good sense, his list of what he would do to save a newspaper doesn't talk at all about how it will make money.

I will further note that for my stay in Palo Alto I was a fairly regular reader of the Palo Alto Daily Post, which has almost exclusively local news, is free, doesn't post its content on the internet, and seems to be financially stable. Any time I had a meal on University Ave while waiting for the carpool, I grabbed a copy of the Daily Post to read with my food.

All major league stadiums are now equipped with a system that measures the trajectory of all pitched balls. This set of cameras and computers is called Pitchf/x. You can get all of the data for free, one batter at a time, at mlb.com, and I frequently find myself diving to the computer to check a close pitch that sent the batter muttering and shaking his head back to the dugout. The sabermetricians are doing the hardcore data mining, but there's still plenty of fun watching one pitch at a time.

Here's a reasonably typical at-bat; Derrek Lee works the count full before hitting an inside-edge pitch for a single:

This at-bat shows Milton Bradley getting hit by the fifth pitch:

And in this one, Russell Martin is served a belt-high, middle of the plate, not especially fast fastball with as straight a trajectory as it's possible for a pitch to have, which he then struck into the bleachers for a grand slam home run.

With all the fuss about town hall meetings for health care reform, I was interesting in attending a meeting in person. Living in Half Moon Bay, my representative is Anna Eshoo. A few weeks ago I went to her web page to find out when her next meeting was, but her only in-person meeting for the whole month was something about high-speed rail in late August. I called, and was told that health care events had already happened and more were scheduled, and I could sign up on the web site to be notified.

I did, although the web site signup form is surprisingly intrusive, requiring much more information than is needed for the purpose, including looking up the last four digits of my full ZIP+4 zip code. Whatever.

Yesterday at 10:15 am, I got an email notifying me that there would be a phone-based town hall meeting at 6:40 pm, and that

If you’d like to participate in the meeting, you must go to my website http://eshoo.house.gov and fill out the webform with your contact information and phone number ... no later than 3:00pm

Did that, filling out the whole form again and looking up my ZIP+4 again. That was the last I heard from them. I did miss a call from an Undisclosed Number at 7:18 pm; maybe that was them.

Personally, I'm in favor of single-payer health care and a variety of other reforms; I'll talk in more depth about my own position on health care reform in a later post, in which I will also share with you some of the paperwork and costs from my own recent encounter with health care services. Why is it so difficult for me to participate in a town hall meeting, while the people who want to bring assault rifles to public discussions and talk about Nazis and death panels and other non-rational things seem to have no trouble?

Update: I called this morning. After getting put on hold for a few minutes, I learned that the call started late, there were glitches making calls, and that the 7:18 pm from an undisclosed number that didn't leave a message was probably my invitation to join the meeting. I was promised invitations to future meetings.

Iron Sunset, Charlie Stross

Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman recently had an on-stage conversation, which made for moderately interesting listening. My appreciation was somewhat limited by Stross's habit of conversing in bon mots and factoids, and Krugman's inability to collapse the universe of possible utterances to merely one or two before starting to vocalize a thought. But it was still good commute fodder.

I recently finished my second Charlie Stross book, and found it more frustrating than either the conversation or the first (Singularity Sky). Stross's ideas are great starting points for novels, but things like plot, character, dialog, use of words on the page, and other elements of writing often escape him. For example, it didn't occur to me until doing a bit of internet research on the books that the second Stross book I read is a partial sequel to the first, or that they share a major character. The character was unmemorable and undifferentiated in both books. I think her name was ... Rachel?

Here's a specific example. Based on these writing samples, all of which describe the protagonist, how old would you say the protagonist is?

"Sixteen years old and counting ... "(page 1)

"Age sixteen." (page 5)

"She was seventeen and sullen ..." (page 6

The ambassadors possess authentication tokens that the bombers crews can use to confirm their identity. ... if two or more of them send a recall code, the bombers crews are required to stand down ... (p 157)

So there have to be two ambassadors willing and able to call off the attack, or else a second genocide will occur. Got it. How many ambassadors are still alive, a reader might wonder?

Of the remaining ten, one committed suicide immediately, one died in a vehicular accident six months later—it was ruled an accident; he seems to have fallen in front of a train—and, well, this is where it gets interesting. I hope you all have strong stomachs . . . [section break]" (p 158)

Okay, so there are eight. We learn that the ambassador to Turku is dead at his desk from a sword to the back. The ambassador to the Frisian Foundation on Eiger's World is dead from a missile attack on her limo. And the ambassador to Earth is dead from strangulation. So there are five. And two are needed to send the recall code, so three more can die without guaranteeing genocide.

"We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets—ambassadors—such that if the total drops below three, 800 million people will die. (p 166)

Wait, what? Don't you mean, if the total drops below two? Anyway, there are only five left, so keep them safe.

It so happens that Ambassador Elspeth Morrow is in residence in Sarajevo, and Harrison Baxter, former trade minister of the Muscovite government—and the higher surviving government officer, he's also on the code schedule—is there, too. He was sent just before the incident, to attempt to resolve the trade dispute. I strongly suspect that they're the next logical target, being a two-for-one hit. (p 169)

.... If ideas are the strong point in your novel but the ideas are inconsistent then ... perhaps I'm just a foolish hobgoblin.

Dodgers right-hander Hiroki Kuroda(notes) was released from the hospital Sunday morning and cleared to fly home with the team after taking a liner off his head in the sixth inning of Saturday night’s game against the Diamondbacks. ... The 34-year-old Kuroda crumpled to the mound after Ryal’s liner deflected off his head and landed near the Arizona on-deck circle before bouncing into the stands for a ground-rule double. All eight Dodgers fielders stood on the mound as trainers tended to Kuroda ...

Kuroda was gracious to the man who skulled him:

"I will pay attention to Ryal in years to come when I am watching TV in Japan. I hope he becomes a superstar, and I can say I was hit by that batter. I hope that day will come."

Still and all, I was taken about by the prices at the new Phone Company Park here in San Francisco, where we saw the Dodgers beat the Giants Tuesday night. We got "View Box" seats, which are the bottom three rows of the highest deck. In Los Angeles in the 90s, I was paying, I forget, something like $9 or $12 for these seats, and you could often get directly behind home plate with a panoramic view of the field. Here, those seats are $26. Except that the Dodgers are a Premium opponent, so those seats are $34. And we weren't behind home plate; we were in the far corner behind the foul pole, with an obstructed view of part of the field where you have to jump out of your seat and down a few stairs to lean over to see Manny's home runs land 15 seats back in the bleachers. And you can't buy the tickets for $34, because there's a $5.50 service charge per ticket, so they are $39.50 tickets. And there's another $2.50 convenience charge per order, of course. And if you want to print them at home, instead of waiting in line at Will Call, you pay an extra $2.50 per ticket. So instead of $12 for surprisingly good seats, ten years later you pay $43 for lousy seats. What is the world coming to?

Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California [says] "People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they're trying to do." For example, if someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot's wheels. "You know that those things have been done before, probably better," says Gerkey. But without a common OS, sharing code is nearly impossible.

It's a very cool goal because it's a structural reform to the entire field of robots. Instead of trying to make a robot do a new kind of trick, Willow Garage is trying to make a system for making robots, so that the global community of robot researchers can share.

The other reason this caught my eye is that I'm sitting in Brian Gerkey's office, although sans Brian Gerkey. My office is being turned into a walk-in refrigerator, and Brian's out on vacation, so Kona and I are office-squatting.

Let me back up a bit. Last summer, when I was finishing my MPA in Singapore and was planning a move back to the west coast of the US, Gus offered to share his beach house in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. I started looking for a non-profit technology job in the Bay Area, but ended up working for an acquaintance's tech start-up in Menlo Park. We had three offices in the back hall of a bigger company that was working on robots. And Kona was allowed to stay in the office, as long as she avoided the robots.

The start-up ran out of cash at the end of the year, and I soon started consulting for the robot company. Not on robot technology, though. On some less sexy but equally important stuff: inventory management, accounting, and the like. I kept the same office in the back, right up until the much-delayed kitchen renovation finally claimed the back quarter of the building. Our daily catered lunches will be replaced by an on-site chef for breakfast and lunch starting in November, but I won't be here to enjoy them. I'll be in Washington DC.

While I'm excited about Willow's mission to establish an open-source robotics platform, and I certainly can't complain about the amenities of a well-funded Silicon Valley startup with Google roots, I spent the winter applying for, taking a test for, and getting Finalist status for, the Presidential Management Fellowship program. Last March I went to the job fair in Washington DC. And now that I've completed all of the paperwork, undergone a background check that showed I am not prone to betray the country to foreign agents or commit computer crimes with government property, and received a start date of August 31, I'm ready to tell you that I've accepted an offer from the Office of Personnel Management. I'll be working in the Product Development Team of the Center for Talent Services, in Washington DC. It's exactly what I was looking for after getting my MPA: doing public service in my area of expertise, which is making technology more helpful and usable for people. I'll start in less than a month, which would probably stress me out if I didn't already have a surfeit of experience moving thousands of miles to a new job (and great friends at both ends of the move).

So I'll miss the perks and the California life. But it was a bit of a rough summer for our household— here's one story from me and one from Gus, with a few more stories to come. But my left shoulder barely hurts these days, and I've gotten my new bicycle out for a few test rides, just in time to pack it up for the move. Kona and I are ready to start our next set of adventures, in Washington.

New beach videos are posted at Gus's blog. You may wish to read past that post for recent happenings in the beach house. I have little to add other than these brief messages: Gus' car is finally fixed, my new bicycle is still not ready, the last of my missing epidermis has grown back so that I am now 100% covered by my own skin for the first time in two and a half month, my office is being turned into a walk-in freezer, and I'm gradually catching up to the schedule for the Infinite Summer. Kona has nothing to report.