drorzel | November 29, 2006We've been having intermittent troubles with our DSL service for the last couple of months, and recently placed a service call to try to get Verizon to do something about it. Just a few minutes ago, I got a "courtesy call" from them, to inform me that they're still working on the problem, and they care deeply about having us as customers.
The message was a recording.
Yeah, nothing says "We really appreciate you, and want you to be happy" like an 8 AM robo-call.
drorzel | November 28, 2006Barring some sort of bizarre catastrophe, in a few short hours, I will take possession of a brand new Ford Freestyle. It's got lots of nifty features that the Taurus doesn't have, but there's one thing it lacks: a tape deck.
This is important because I have become accustomed to listening to my iPod in the car, through a tape deck adapter. The new car doesn't have a tape deck, and it doesn't have an obvious "Aux. In" plug, so it's not clear to me how I will be integrating the iPod with the new ride.
The options would appear to be either an FM converter, or some sort of after-market automtoive…
drorzel | November 28, 2006Professor Office Sex is trying to study the real-time dynamcis of the blogosphere, by manufacturing a "meme" that he'll then track:
While you do that, a script I've written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals. It will record the number of links to this post, register their authority and create a database the very size of which will cause my poor processor to fall tumbling, in flames, down a steep cliff. (So be it. We all must makes sacrifices in the name of science.)
Of course, like any good graduate student, he's also afflicted with angst:
My…
drorzel | November 28, 2006There's a nice article in the New York Times today about applications of the theory of vibrating strings. It turns out to be a lot more practical and useful than you might think, and there are people doing some amazing things with it.
What?
drorzel | November 27, 2006One of my current thesis students has been plugging away for a while at the project described in the A Week in the Lab series last year, and he's recently been getting some pretty good data. I've spent a little time analyzing the preliminary results (to determine the best method for him to use on the rest of the data), and I thought I'd explain a little of the process here.
Here's the key graph from the first set of results:
What we're working with here is a system where we feed krypton gas into a vacuum system, and illuminate it with light from two sources: a really expensive ($7000) vacuum…
drorzel | November 27, 2006I'm worried about Jay Bilas's job.
For those who aren't college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He's smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of them work games together), and extremely knowledgable about the game. Whenever he does a game, he clearly does his homework, and learns more than the token one or two facts about each team that most announcers do. When he does studio analysis, he always has his facts in line, and while he sometimes…
drorzel | November 27, 2006Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality:
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Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls. The night before I watched a TV show where a young cadet blew himself up at the police graduation ceremony - killing, as I recall, 35 people.
That was a bit of a shock.
The moments after I leave the desk at night, after a long shift, are very special to me. I read, listen to music, decompress and…
drorzel | November 27, 2006The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics:
An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from the fourth century B.C. What is slowly coming to light, scholars say, represents the most significant discovery of Hyperides text since 1891, illuminating some fascinating, time-shrouded insights into Athenian law and social history.
"This…
drorzel | November 26, 2006Speaking of weirdly compelling reads (as I was at the end of the previous entry), Jack McDevitt has a new book out in what I think of as the "Archeologists in Spaaaace!!!" series (which starts with The Engines of God, and includes Chindi, Deepsix and Omega). Odyssey doesn't include any archeologists, but it has a very similar feel.
As with the Recluce books, these are very comforting to read, in an odd sort of way. The protagonists are most quiet technical types, who don't run around indiscriminately blowing stuff up, and mostly just work at being good at their jobs. And in McDevitt's world,…
drorzel | November 26, 2006Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you've read pretty much any of the previous books, you know what you're going to get here, and you either like it enough to be keeping up with the series, or you gave up a long time ago.
I happen to find these weirdly comforting reads, which is why I'm still reading them. It's sort of strange, because they're very repetitive: A…
drorzel | November 26, 2006To Ride a Rathorn is the fourth book in P.C. Hodgell's Kencyrath series (the previous three are God Stalk, Dark of the Moon and Seeker's Mask), and as such probably wouldn't get to the top of the booklog queue-- there's just too much backstory, and the book wouldn't make any sense to a new reader.
However, the plot and structure of this one allow such a great one-sentence description that I can't resist posting it: This book reads like a cross between Harry Potter and the Malazan Book of the Fallen.
To do the backstory a grave injustice, our heroine Jame is one of the Kencyrath, a race…
drorzel | November 26, 2006I've been woefully behind on the booklog for a long, long time now, but we'll take a lazy post-Thanksgiving Sunday morning to catch up on a few of the more notable books in the backlog. These comments won't be in any particular order, and, in fact, will start with the most recently read of the lot, Schrödinger's Ball by Adam Felber.
The cover of this one has a certain chick-lit look, at least from a distance, but I picked it up anyway, for a number of reasons. For one thing, the title does tend to catch the eye, if you're a physicist. I also recognized the name "Adam Felber" from blogdom. And…
drorzel | November 25, 2006We had an enormous turkey carcass left over at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, so I said "Hey, turkey soup." The basic idea is simplicity itself-- cut the carcass into managable pieces, stick it in a big put, cover it with water, and simmer for a good long while. After an hour or two, you've got a big put of soup stock, with stuff floating in it.
At this point, most recipes suggest straining the stock, to remove the miscellaneous bits of stuff. Which raises the important question: Strain it into what, exactly? The stock is already in the biggest pot that we own, which is at least double the…
drorzel | November 25, 2006The articles in question are more than a year old, but I didn't see them when they were first posted, so James Nicoll's link to Monte Davis's "Thinking Clearly About Space" series (part one, part two, part three, part four) was very welcome.
Obviously, you should go read the whole thing (the parts aren't that long), but here are some choice quotes. On the politics of space:
So let's stop wondering who took away Humanity's birthright after Apollo 17. Let's assume that political leaders, who have the strongest possible motivation to assess what the public wants and will pay for, were doing just…
drorzel | November 25, 2006Via Miriam Burstein, everybody's favorite Middle English poet posts about what he's reading these days:
Battlestar Ecclesiastica
by Johannes Wycliffe
In this boke of science ficcion, a man ycleped Wycliffe is the bishop of the gret chirche of Seynt Paules, the which is lyk vnto a mighty shippe and kan moue thurgh the voyde of the planetes. Al othir chirches on the earth haue ben destroyed by the deuil and his feendes, who haue taken on the visages of men and look exactlie lyk friares. Ther is a mighti ladye of feyth called Margery Starbaxter, who ys a loyal warryour for the chirche and…
drorzel | November 24, 2006The Thanksgiving advice from Making Light got here too late to do us any good, but we had a fine first Thanksgiving anyway. My parents, sister, grandmother, and one of my great-aunts came up from New York, and Kate's parents came up from Boston, so we packed nine people into our smallish house, along with more food than we really needed.
But then, Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday: built around excess. What other country would come up with a holiday whose principal observation is gorging to excess, and then watching football on tv? So the turkey was a little too big-- that…
drorzel | November 24, 2006Yesterday's quickie photo-blog post came during the short break between running around preparing for house guests, and the arrival of said house guests (about fifteen minutes after I posted, while I was in the shower). Other than that, I was way too busy to even read blogs, let alone post.
So, crawling out from under my turkey hangover, and surveying the Internets, what do I find?
Sniping about whether string theory is good for anything.
Doctrinal arguments about whether a lack of enthusiasm for calling religious people stupid is a mortal sin or only a venial one.
(I'm linking to Mike's…
drorzel | November 23, 2006The table is set:
The turkey is in the oven, the house is clean, and two car loads of relatives are on their way. Our first time hosting Thanksgiving dinner is on track.
Wish us luck, and take a moment to be thankful for the Pauli Exclusion Principle, Democratic control of Congress, and friends and family with whom you can share holidays.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
drorzel | November 22, 2006Kate and I have a Netflix subscription that we've mostly been using to obtain various anime series. We're running a little low on Japanese cartoons, though, having recently finished Martian Successor Nadesico, and with only four discs left of Trigun (two of which will probably be polished off while lolling around Friday after hosting Thanksgiving dinner).
I've got other stuff on the Netflix queue-- various movies, season two of The Wire-- but I'm always looking for suggestions. So, recommend some DVD's: what movies, tv shows, or foreign cartoon series should I be adding to the Netflix queue…
drorzel | November 22, 2006The flip side of the pretty colors I posted about yesterday is that all those nicely colored leaves fall down. Which isn't a big deal with the little ornamental maple in the front yard, but when the fifty-foot oak tree in the back drops its leaves, it kind of makes a mess.
We deal with this in the traditional manner: we pay the next-door neighbors' teenage son to rake the leaves up, and drag them out in front of the house. I didn't get a picture of the whole pile, but it was close to three feet high, and stretched the full length of the front yard. Most of the houses in the neighborhood had…