http://aufrecht.org/blog/ Joel's Blog OpenACS 5.0 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:41:41 GMT http://aufrecht.org/rss-support/images/openacs_logo_rss.gif http://aufrecht.org/blog/ 126 48 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1658959 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1658959 KonaCam #1 takes a picture every minute, although it skips some minutes more or less randomly. Here is the picture from 3:05 this afternoon; Kona was sleeping at home and I was at work. The dog walker was not scheduled for today. And here is the next picture on the KonaCam, taken automatically at 3:07. Notice anything different? Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:41:41 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1655920 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1655920 Neither my sister nor I has ever been able to keep our shoelaces tied for very long. We are both in our thirties and still can't tie our shoelaces properly. Naturally we blame our parents. I'm generally of the opinion that you can't blame your parents for anything non-genetic after age 25, but this is a clear exception. It is therefore odd that my father has chosen to post a video he found about the correct way to tie one's shoelaces: Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:05:38 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1652810 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1652810 Kona and I made another Youtube: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:33:13 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1626857 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1626857 This was a weird show, coming as it did on a Friday night on heels of a monstrous pair of blizzards that shut down most of the city for a week. And it was in a shiny new concert hall in suburban Maryland, which oddly enough is the home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. I say oddly because Bethesda is a suburb of Washington, not Baltimore, which is forty miles away. So we had a huge hall, with three ranks of balconies, and a fairly bedraggled crowd. Vega and Cohn are both veteran performers, and each did a competent set, but only the penultimate encore, when Vega and her guitarist came out to join Cohn and his guitarist in a Cohn-arranged version of The Only Living Boy in New York, was completely moving. And the show made me sad, because Mark Cohn has an enchanting voice, but his muse is clearly an intermittent one. He even said, introducing his new album of other people's music, that otherwise he would only be in the studio once a decade. Maybe that's why he seemed a little bitter, in general. It must be difficult to have a few big hits, to have a certain level of success, but to have spent many years knowing you're probably not going to get all the way back to that level, and that you don't quite deserve to on your merits. I hope he does turn some corner, find something that works for him. Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:18:11 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1620816 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1620816 I don't know why, but my default action at any web browser is to go to the Yahoo front page. I've been on the internet for almost two decades, and I've been going to Yahoo for as long as I can remember. I don't use them for anything else, like Yahoo mail or anything, and it's clear that they're a disastrously run company and a place to generally avoid, and they have an ongoing commitment to make their homepage mind-blowingly awful—in as many ways as possible but with emphasis on clutter, advertisements, and Flash animations that range from pointless to interfering to vomitously grotesque. But I'm still addicted to the news blurbs on the front page. Google news doesn't substitute. NY Times front page doesn't substitute. Nothing can fulfill this craving except six to eight short headlines and a touch of celebrity gossip or news of the weird. And it's changed over time, usually not for the better, but I'm still stuck there. The best was when there were always, I think, six headlines, and the last one was some kind of light-hearted human interest item. They've stopped doing that, but plugged in a few more columns of junk. The top left part with the rotating pictures is terrible, but it has brain-dead-magazine-cover-type lists that I'm utterly helpless to not click on. Six ways to reduce your mortgage. Ten cars to avoid. Five foods with more anti-oxidants. I probably even learn one useful fact for every ten or twenty lists I read. But make no mistake, the (mostly outsourced and syndicated) writing and the editing and the journalism is all terrible. Here's an especially cringeworthy excerpt, from this morning's article, Best and Worst 2010 Cars: ... Plus, with only 25.7 to 51.3 cubic feet of cargo space, [the Honda Accord Crosstour] doesn?t provide much utility. [...] [The Dodge Caliber] looks bold and provides a respectable 18.5 to 48 cubic feet of cargo room, but is marked by subpar interior materials .... Update: The editorial team outdoes itself by including this AP "news" item seemingly headlined and written by a publicist: Brilliant designer Alexander McQueen found dead LONDON ? Brilliant and controversial British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was found dead in his London home Thursday, his company said ... McQueen's sudden death robbed the fashion scene of one of its most innovative and successful young designers. His clothes were sexy and distinctive, dramatic and different, perfect for red-carpet presentations and late night rock gatherings. ...His pieces were coveted and treasured by stylish women across the globe.... Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:30:51 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1428092 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1428092 During the period last summer that I only had one working arm, various people came to help take care of things. So I thought it would be useful to label some of the kitchen cabinets and drawers for them. Of course, I wanted to warn them about the monster threat. Little did I know that we would soon, indeed, suffer from a monster infestation. It only got worse from there. A few weeks later, we had houseguests on their way back from some sort of national high school Latin competition. They found the label maker .... Apparently Aqua is Latin for faucet. Meanwhile, the monster was still lurking. And sometimes, there were victims. The Latin peoples were no strangers to monsters either. Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:49:53 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1610168 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1610168 If I ever have cause to order a hundred coffee mugs, say to stock up a new office or something, I'm getting a full periodic table set. Update: And of course we could get a periodic table table for the conference room. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:03:02 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1606143 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1606143 Whose flag is this? Answer Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:02:52 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1542159 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1542159 One of the basic concepts that I retained from grad school was Douglass North's framework for understanding societies, and in particular the notion of "limited access order". My preferred formulation of this idea is, "the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to maintain their wealth and power." History interpreted through this prism becomes a series of lurches back and forth between extreme concentration of "access", or wealth and power, and slightly less extreme concentrations. This is not a Marxist view, but class-based analysis is certainly complementary. Populism is, at its heart, the anger of the people on the wrong side of the access boundary. And one major strain of the antagonism towards our government here in the US circa 2010 is that, first, the goverment is part of the establishment that just bailed itself out, at great public expense, from a massive disaster that was entirely of its own making; and second, that the government was the only part of that establishment that was in any way accountable to the public, that might have broken the stranglehold on access, and yet it still aided and abetted the swindle. On a related note, these quotes from the Economist really grabbed my eye when they were published. (This is, I think, a separate case from the recent acquittal of Chirac's Prime Minister, Villepin, on unrelated charges.) The details are less important than the reaction from France's ruling class: The French have greeted the decision to put Jacques Chirac on trial for misappropriation of public funds with mixed feelings ... Many politicians are calling for leniency for an old man who has served his country. ... "Why seek to wound him now?" wailed Jean-Pierre Raffarin ... "Today, he's a man who deserves to be left alone," declared Ségolène Royal.—The Economist, "Liberty, equality, no impunity". 7 Nov 2009, p 51. Glen Greenwald and other bloggers have been calling this the Village Mentality, which is a specific manifestation of "limited access order". In the Village Mentality, the people wielding power and influence are a nice little club, and nothing they do as part of wielding that power could possibly be criminal; the only reason to consider any of it criminal would be as part of a partisan power play between factions within the village. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the notion of rule of law. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:24:08 GMT http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1605326 http://aufrecht.org/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=1605326 There is a long and fascinating thread of research about the health benefits of dogs. It turns out that the dog is a kind of wonder drug, an all-around stress reducer. Pet owners recover at a substantially faster rate from heart problems than do non?dog owners. ... ... Researchers at Azabu University in Japan found last year that the dog?s gaze at its owner increases the owner?s oxytocin level. ... ... specific canine qualities?the dog?s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human cues?evolved, a process that Serpell calls ?anthropomorphic selection.? What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons. According to one study, 84 percent of dog owners consider their animals akin to children?not a surprise, given all the baby talk. The British evolutionary psychologist John Archer has written, in critiquing Serpell?s work, that the dog?s ability to suck up human caregiving that could be going to human children while providing no evolutionary advantage makes them a social parasite. But possibly the stress-reduction effects, more than theoretical camp-guarding and hunting benefits, may have earned the dog?s keep.... —NY Magazine Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:08:02 GMT