Defective Yeti with punctuation-related Bushisms… and spinoffs:

“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, [the current violence] will look like just a comma.” (cf. original comma quote )

“The only way to stop the sectarian violence is to find a bridge between the Sunnis and Shiites, a hyphen that will join the two separate parties into one compound nation.”

“Victory is still possible in Iraq — albeit a victory enclosed in scare quotes and followed by an asterisk.”

Amy and Miles at the nursery, picking up some plants. Miles picked out one of his own to grow. An attendant putting a bag of soil into our car: “Should I put something down first?” Amy: “No, it’s OK, just throw it in - the rubber mat takes care of the dirt.” Miles, hearing this, takes a step back, cocks his arm, and throws his young plant into the back of the car from six feet away.

Miles was a brave knight in shining armor. Of course I ended up carrying the shield and sword most of the way, but he made quite a haul. At a couple of doors, for no apparent reason, when prodded to say “Thank you,” he instead broke into song: “Knights are brave and strong, and queens are never wrong.” At one point, heading up towards a dark-ish porch, turns to me and says “No daddy, you stay back there” - wanted to approach the door by himself. Of course that was the house where he was greeted by a big hairy gorilla and a robotic Frankenstein singing a mash-up of a Men-At-Work song. Scared the brave right out of my little knight (who wouldn’t be?)

Just after returning home, heard a thud and a clattering sound coming from the back of the house. Went out to find the lower leg and foot of a mechanical skeleton, electrical cord dangling, just landed in our back yard. 13-year-olds screaming off into the darkness of the next block.

Posted back in June about the fact that Devo are touring again. Embarrassing or not, knew I had to get me a slice of that goodie good good Jocko spud gravy. Went with Roger last night to see how the Boojie Boys sounded in their mid-40s / early 50s. Missed start of the show, but arrived in time to hear Smart Patrol / Mr. DNA, Wiggly World, and a few other choice “Duty Now for the Future”-era bits. They weren’t exactly spastic (one could call that a necessary condition for true de-vo), but neither was it the slightest bit lazy, sad, riding-the-coat-tails-of-the-past pathetic. A big chunk of the Devo catalog has real lasting value, and manages not to sound dated (either that or my ears haven’t evolved). And yes, it rocked.

Above: With absolutely no prodding from me, Miles arrives independently at the idea that flowerpots make great hats.

Didn’t get around to cleaning the grill at the end of last summer (I usually try to do it once every year or two), and we were treated to a conflagration last night. Actually the fire was relatively small, but thick black smoke was just billowing out — enough to result in neighbors running over to see if everything was OK. Which got me wondering: How often do most people deep-clean their grills? I don’t mean “wire brush the surface” — I mean remove all the pieces and get down and dirty, scraping the Flavorizer bars, catch basin, etc. Or do you just let it burn off from time to time? If you answer, please also leave a comment guesstimating how often your grill gets used.

Ubuntu Linux 6.1, aka Edgy Eft, has been released, and Birdhouse is proud to announce that we’re functioning as a seed for those downloading the distribution via BitTorrent from one of the official mirrors. The seeding occurs through an installation of the web-based TorrentFlux client, managed by mneptok.

Birdhouse is providing space and bandwidth for the seed as a small token of appreciation to the open source community for the innumerable ways we benefit from the efforts of OSS developers every single day. My life would be very different without the LAMP stack, both at home and at work. A moment of silence. ;-)

Now, go grab it while it’s hot.

No idea where this comes from, but it kind of speaks for itself.

via Dad

Nicholas Kristof for the NY Times:

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.” But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. … Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project…

Not to beat a dead horse, but this horse ain’t dead. Every minute we spend losing a war that not even the generals think we can win is costing us $380,000.

via pseudorandom

Having some Ajax fun lately, digging into the Dojo toolkit. Came across something in the documentation, where the developers are trying to explain whether Dojo is actually a toolkit, a library, or a framework. While some people might think the three are functionally equivalent, there are differences. They illustrate by example:

Geeks, Nerds, and Dorks: A geek has a very focused knowledge of a subject (that guy that memorized the language of Myst), a nerd is a master at many subjects (that girl you go to when you need homework help), and a dork is just plain socially inept (Napoleon Dynamite).

Walked into Miles’ play area this morning and found a big aquamarine rectangle scribbled in marking pen on the bamboo rug. And an aquamarine ghost drawn on his play table. Uh-oh. But where is Miles? Door to his room closed, a sign. Open it and find him sitting on his bed, evidence grasped firmly in hand. A big fat aquamarine polka dot scribbled on his bedspread. Aquamarine smudges all over his hands, neck, pants and shirt. “Miles, we need to talk about something.” He comes out to the play area and tells us “This isn’t really naughty Daddy, because see, it’s an invention for measuring your feet, like at the shoe store, see?” And he plops his foot down over the rectangle to show me that it fits, so proud. No need recounting the rest of our conversation here.

Spent the morning with Oxy-Clean and Murphy’s Oil Soap, scrubbing. Fortunately kids’ markers do come off with good detergent and a lot of elbow grease.

The converted boiler room I call my office is extremely dust-prone. A stream of delivery and construction trucks parades by just outside, leaving a thin film of black soot on everything. After a recent office cleaning jag, realized that my white Apple USB keyboard had become positively embarrassing — the keys stained a mottled gray and black, every crevice stuffed with grime.

Had read before that it’s possible to put a keyboard right into the dishwasher, and decided to give it a shot. Worst case would be that I’d have to get a new one if it didn’t work. When I left Friday eve, strapped the keyboard to my bike rack and headed home. Saturday morning gave the keys a quick pre-scrub with a plastic pot scrubber, then placed the keyboard upside down on the top rack, facing down.

Thought it might not make sense to use the heat-dry function, so removed it afterwards to air-dry. Blessed with warm, dry Santa Ana winds all weekend, but after 24 hours my heart sank when I tested the keyboard for the first time. At first all seemed well, but quickly realized that some keys were stuck on infinite repeat. But after a second full day of outdoor drying, I’m pleased to report that keyboard is in perfect working order (typing on it now). And it literally looks like it just came out of the box. Shiny perfect sparkling white.

Have seen other reports that keyboards will dry faster if you remove all the keys. Doing so may have saved a day of dry time, but if you can live without the keyboard for two days, I’d say don’t trouble yourself.

Excellent documentary on the Science Channel last night about British autistic savant Daniel Tammet, who recently recited the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places in five hours without a single mistake. After an epileptic seizure as a child, Tammet started seeing mathematics both visually and sensorily, as synesthetic forms and textures with distinctive colors, forms, and sounds.

He can raise large numbers to the power of seven in a few seconds, without calculating a thing. For him, a landscape simply unfolds in his mind. Every number from 1 to 10,000 has a distinctive shape and color, a mood, which he experiences visually. When doing math, he performs no calculations. “The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer.” And yet it’s hard to get your hands on a calculator that has enough precision to even check his work.

Unlike most autistic savants, Tammet is fairly normal in most respects, and is able to describe what he sees, how he does what he does, to the rest of us - a fact which makes him fascinating to researchers exploring the outer reaches of the mind.

His savant abilities also extend to languages - he currently speaks seven of them fluently, and can become fluent in new languages in a week. He undertook Icelandic for the documentary - one of the hardest languages to learn - and was interviewed live on Icelandic TV at the end of the week. The day before the TV appearance, his teacher thought it was going to be a disaster. Then, suddenly, he said he had grasped the “form” of the language. He then sucked up the entire Icelandic lexicon “like a vacuum” and performed flawlessly for the interview.

Stories about savants always bring me back to the same thought: If any human brain is capable of these kinds of feats, it points to the existence of mathematical and musical and linguistic structures flowing just beneath the surface of our lives that are just out of reach for the rest of us. If extreme math can be performed by any person without calculation, if savants are able to visualize and breathe musical structures in the way that they do, it’s like proof of the existence of mathematical and musical lattice-works that run through all of existence. They’re there, just waiting to be grasped by our puny minds. Knowing that those structures are there but out of reach for most of us is almost maddening. Though ironically, we’d all probably go mad if we could.

Nice profile on Tammet at The Guardian.

Recently installed an update/add-on to cPanel for Birdhouse Hosting - a package called MailScanner which integrates the usual complement of open source spam and virus controls (SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Razor, DCC) into a combined package, provides more spam config controls for individual hosting accounts, and provides the admin with a bunch of reporting tools. I can now see at a glance (graphically) how many messages are passing through the server each day, what percentage of them have been flagged as spam or virii, or drill down and get similar reports for individual domains or users. At left: A snapshot of mail and spam traffic on Birdhouse over the past week:

Highlights:
10,000 total messages processed on 10/16
77.8% of mail was flagged as spam today
(read that last one another way: less than 23% of the mail we’re spending money to process and handle is legitimate)

If you’re wistful for the good old days when you could use a “catch-all” address to receive mail bound for anything@yourdomain.com, note: 5,016 out of 6,449 messages received today were addressed to unknown email accounts on domains we handle. Which is why most hosts (including Birdhouse) strongly recommend against using catch-all addresses any more. Spammers 0wnz0r the ozone.

Pretty amazing visual study at Daily Kos on hard news content in American media. A reader took a screenshot of CNN’s homepage, then removed all advertising and promotional content. From what remained, he then removed all the “fluffy” news. Links to hard news stories that remained make up a sliver of the total screen real estate. Then he tries the same with the homepage of China’s chinaview.cn — hmmm… nothing to strip out — it’s all hard news (but is it trustworthy news?)

There’s something to be said for state-run media. Take the money out of the news equation and the content ratio rises (c.f. PBS vs. commercial media). On the other hand, check out how Iranian government censors take a pen to cartoon and advertising images in imported magazines in that country.

You want the frying pan, or you want the fire?

No more flats, air valves, repair kits, or spare tires taking up space and weight in the trunk. Michelin is working on Tweels — airless, rubbber-spoke tire/wheel combos, all intentionally deformable. Seen to the left at speed; more pix here. Law enforcement’s going to love the fact that old school back-up-spikes have no effect on them.

According to the Gartner group, “Sales of Apple’s Macintosh computers over the past twelve month’s have grown faster than any other major PC manufacturer, boosting the company’s share of the U.S. PC market to 6.1 percent.” Meanwhile the iPod bubble seems finally to have burst. I’m sure there are many factors that account for the rising marketshare, but wonder whether the iPod actually has functioned as a gateway drug (as planned), its user experience seducing new computer buyers to try a Mac?

Used to be that “organic” meant not only chemical-free, but also produced on small, sustainable, local farms. We paid a premium for these attributes because they mattered. But something funny happened on the way to Kellogg’s beginning production of Organic Rice Krispies (I’m not making this up) and Wal-Mart’s embrace of organic products.

Shouldn’t we be on our feet cheering to know that mainstream America will be eating healthier food, and ecstatic for all the cleaner air and dirt and water that will result? Well, yeah, except that it doesn’t work that way. Trouble is the USDA’s organic guidelines have been rendered nearly impotent under pressure from producers. And because there aren’t nearly enough small/local organic producers to supply clients the size of Wal-Mart. So ingredients are produced on factory farms, almost like before, and trucked long-distance to factories for production, burning just as much fossil fuel as ever.

Mark Morford, for the SF Chronicle:

“Organic,” according to the lobbyist-friendly USDA, does not have to mean the food is grown using sustainable (read: nondestructive) farming practices. It does not mean locally produced. It does not mean the ethical treatment of animals. Nor does it mean the companies that produce it need be the slightest bit fair or trustworthy or socially responsible. All it means now: no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, no bioengineering. And those compromises mean “organic” is a shell of its former self. Which brings us back to Kellogg’s Organic Rice Krispies. Industrial to the hilt, not the slightest bit locally grown, not the slightest bit sustainable, from the same company that poisons your kid with Pop-Tarts and Froot Loops and Scooby-Doo Berry Bones … Kellogg’s Organic Rice Krispies. It’s sort of like saying “Lockheed Martin Granola Bars” or “Exxon Bottled Spring Water.” Self-immolating, and not in a good way.

J-School professor Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a fantastic read) has been engaged in a public exchange of words with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on that store’s failure to live up to the healthy/organic image it sells. Read his two latest letters here and here.

Technorati Tags: organic, pollan

Amazing 1960s halloween costumes. I love costumes that spell out in big letters exactly what the wearer is “supposed to be,” just in case the plastic mask and flame-retardant body suit somehow didn’t get the message across.

I’m thinking of Pia Zadora as the beatnik girl in John Waters’ Hairspray: “I play my bongos, I listen to Odetta, I iron my hair.”

via No Smoking in the Skull Cave

We sometimes regard fish farms as a way to raise seafood in a controlled environment, not subject to oceanic pollution and other factors that ravage aquatic populations. But in reality, there’s often a horrible backfire to cultivating artificial populations. According to Environment News Service, as many as 95% of wild salmon migrating past commercial salmon fisheries are devastated by parasites raised within the facilities.

The debate over whether to buy farm-raised or wild salmon has long been a hot one, with many eco-conscious lox lovers opting for the wild-caught variety. But that may not be an option much longer, thanks to some tiny tagalongs. The Environment News Service reports that deadly sea lice have been feasting upon the flesh of juvenile wild salmon on their way out to sea. It sounds like a Halloween horror story, and indeed there is a daunting villain: the massive commercial fish farm industry. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “[p]arasites from fish farms kill as much as 95 percent of young wild salmon that migrate past the facilities.”

It’s ironic. Build a fishery to create sustainable artificial populations, and in the process end up devastating the remaining natural population.

As web applications become more desktop-like, URLs become less significant. Ajax does away with a lot of page refreshes as it becomes increasingly easy for state to change without requesting new documents. The “what about the Back button?” question has been well-explored in the Ajax community. Less-discussed is the fact that the same phenomenon wreaks havoc on traditional analysis of web traffic. Throw in the fact that access logs are already heavily skewed / made less meaningful by heavy RSS consumption, and the value of traditional, URL-based traffic analysis is decreasing.

Jeremy Zawodny: “How the hell do we count stuff in a zero page refresh Web 2.0 buzzword compliant world?”

evhead, in Pageviews are Obsolete:

There will come a time when no one who wants to be taken seriously will talk about their web traffic in terms of “pageviews” any more than one would brag about their “hits” today.

Technorati Tags: ajax, traffic

My post on Sam Harris a month ago raised some interesting discussion on the subject of whether it’s even logically consistent for an atheist to call themselves that. Many people immediately assumes that atheism means one core thing: The positive declaration that there is no god. But there are several strains of atheism, and many of the most prominent atheists do not subscribe to “strong” atheism. Good interview in Salon with “Darwin’s rottweiler,” Richard Dawkins. Asked “Why do you call yourself an atheist? Why not an agnostic?”

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

n.b.: The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster came about originally as as a response to the Kansas School Board.

Comes a point, heading home from work at 9:30, when you realize you just can’t do it tomorrow.

via says-it

Eudora is dead. Long live Eudora.

More info in the press release. Looks like there are already plans to blend Eudora and Thunderbird into a hybrid client:

The Penelope project’s intention is to join the Eudora user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it. We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.”

Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Not in the case of the Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife, which includes all 85 tools made by the company in a single knife. Individually, any tool on this knife could be a lifesaver. Assembled in small collections, synergy kicks in and its overall utility expands. But due to its size and extreme awkwardness, I can’t imagine it would be easy to deploy any single tool on this 9″, nearly-3-pound behemoth. Includes such invaluable assets as a golf shoe spike wrench, shortix key, bike spoke adjuster, and a “snap shackle,” whatever that is. Won’t fit in your pocket, you object? No worries - it comes with a keyring so you can attach it unobtrusively to a belt buckle. They’re practically giving this thing away at $800.

Roger says the Colbert on Zorn piece is his second-favorite Zorn item of all time. First? SF Weekly:

On May 15, 1997, out-there experimental saxophonist John Zorn was in the middle of a set at New York City jazz spot the Knitting Factory when he abruptly stopped. He proceeded to chew out a group of patrons in the balcony who, in a fit of impropriety, were talking loudly over his skronk-jazz stylings. “You up there,” he snapped angrily. “Shut the f*** up and listen to the music.” The chatterboxes at fault? Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel and his wife Dagmar, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Lou Reed, and Reed’s girlfriend Laurie Anderson.

Nevermind Zorn for a minute. What are Havel, Albright, Reed and Anderson doing in a balcony together? Picturing this gives me hope for the world (though it was nearly a decade ago).