08.30.03

Three Men and a Container Full of Bath Toys

These past few weeks I've been listening obsessively to Eminem. It started innocently enough - a VH1 special back in March, a pleasant evening spent watching 8 mile. Next thing you know, I've turned into Michael Bolton from Office Space, shocking the cows with explicit lyrics as I zoom by on the morning commute. I realized that things had gotten bad today when I walked in on the better half singing "Kim" to herself as she stirred up a pan of chili garlic tofu. "So long, bitch you done me so wrong... gack!... mgghh!"

I have nothing to say about Eminem that's remotely as interesting as this pair of Rolling Stone interviews, one in 1999, and the other in 2002:

Lately, I've been taking [my daughter] to the studio, because that's where I spend most of my time. She has fun there, there's video games for her and stuff. Coloring books and crayons - thank God for those. We watch a lot of movies, just typical shit. She's real into The Powerpuff Girls and Hey Arnold! and Dora the Explorer -- ever seen that one? It's the same episode all week long because it teaches kids numbers and how to speak Spanish. By Friday, you know it by heart. I watch that with her, then I go listen to my songs over and over. I'm gonna fucking jump off a bridge.

Resistance is useless!

----

When the music stops, I've been reading and re-reading books by Chris Ware. In Los Angeles, I finally shelled out the money for Jimmy Corrigan, and now I have that familiar feeling of kicking myself sore for waiting so long to discover something I should have read years ago. But in the dim hope that there are still people left who haven't read the book, another pair of interviews to whet your appetite:

Our culture permits, even encourages, middle-aged men to buy fast red cars and listen to sexually-charged fertility music. It's unsightly. We've finally found the fountain of youth in America, and it's our major export. One of the reasons teenage kids are shooting each other is that they have nothing to look up to -- in a culture which celebrates their age group, what do they have to anticipate? How can any kid respect a dad who's wearing muscleshirts and listening to Van Halen?

Don't miss it, or his books, including the ACME Novelty Library.

--

Next week brings the world a new album from Frank Black and the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears. The best I can do in the interim is offer two final interviews and complete the trifecta. Especially nice is the Blogcritics interview, where Frank Black demonstrates how to handle a whole string of stupid questions in a row without losing his cool:

KL: I had a column about crazy UFO stuff in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, and a reader caught me describing Montana cattle killings as a "wave of mutilation." Yet I didn't realize I was quoting a song at the time. Can I sue you for subliminal attacks?

FB: You have a very odd way of connecting things. I don't understand why you feel there needs to be litigation.

DO: Also - what if any chance is there of a reunion tour with new Pixies material? P.S. I love Teenager of the Year

FB: Sure there's a chance. Know any promoters that want to do a show on the moon? P.S. Thanks.

If you're searching for a unifying thread in this post, the tip-off is that Frank Black is fresh from a divorce. So any way you slice it, you'll be getting a dose of vicarious emotional pain.

---

If you want nothing to do with emotional pain, read instead the heart-lifting story of a lost cargo of rubber duckies that have crossed the Arctic ice, and are making their way to a New England beach near you.

Collect them all!

08.29.03

Physics 2, Business Administration 0

"When a program agrees to spend less money or accelerate a schedule beyond what the engineers and program managers think is reasonable, a small amount of overall risk is added. These little pieces of risk add up until managers are no longer aware of the total program risk, and are, in fact, gambling.

Columbia Accident Investigation Report, pp 139

One of the most sobering conclusions of the Shuttle accident report is that the Columbia was an exact replay of the Challenger - the same false confidence, the same scheduling and funding pressure, the same lack of attention to an intermittent problem whose causes were never understood. There's even the same badly-designed briefing slide, failing to convey the urgency the engineering team feels, and the same old Edward Tufte on hand to point it out, once the investigation gets into full swing.

NASA has no excuses this time. Not only is the organizational behavior identical to Challenger (the normalization of deviance, and an assumption that things are safe unless proven otherwise), but even the mechanics of the accident were familiar territory. It turns out the doomed STS-107 mission had a Döppelganger.

In 1988, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was hit by debris dislodged from the top of a solid rocket booster, at almost exactly the same time in the launch sequence as Columbia. The debris crashed against the right side of the Orbiter's belly, gouging out over seven hundred gashes, three hundred of them over an inch long. The impact dislodged one tile completely.

By sheer luck, the tile that fell off happened to sit on top of an unusually thick aluminum plate, part of an antenna housing. Atlantis made it back safely, suffering structural damage, but with its hull intact.

The difference in response between the 1988 and 2003 incidents tells you everything you need to know about NASA:

After the discovery of the debris strike on Flight Day Two of STS-27R [Atlantis], the crew was immediately directed to inspect the vehicle. More severe thermal damage - perhaps even a burn-through - may have occurred were it not for the aluminum plate at the site of the tile loss. Fourteen years later, when a debris strike was discovered on Flight Day Two of STS-107 [Columbia], Shuttle Program management declined to have the crew inspect the Orbiter for damage, declined to request on-orbit imaging, and ultimately discounted the possibility of a burn-through.

The reasons for this maddening complacency will be familiar to anyone who has worked in an organization where the suits face off against the geeks. Every computer progammer learns early on that it's counterproductive to show a software demo to managers - if the demo fails, the managers will be displeased, and if the demo is wonderful, they'll probably decide to ship it as-is. "Looks great - let's go with it!". Just try to explain that there's no error handling, or an intermittent bug in the code, or that clicking the 'help' button crashes the GUI. Engineers are trained to ask "what could possibly go wrong?". Managers are, too, but they use the phrase with a completely different intonation.

The debris strike on Atlantis was unprecedented, and came hard on the heels of the Challenger explosion. It was easy for managers to see eye-to-eye with the engineers, and recognize the gravity of the situation. But fourteen years and dozens of successful launches later, the memory of Challenger had receded. In its place was a hugely overambitious launch schedule, and all kinds of political pressure to get the International Space Station 'core complete' by an arbitrary 2004 deadline. And there was also the experience of Atlantis and other debris strikes, which by perverse MBA logic had become arguments for the harmlessness of foam impacts. It had happened so many times before, why start worrying about it now?

In an organization like NASA, there have to be safeguards to make sure managers can't overrule engineering decisions, or people will die. The board report cites the US Navy's Naval Reactors program and the Air Force's Aerospace program as good role models in this respect - both of have managed to take the teeth out of hideously risky operations (shipboard nuclear reactors and military satellite launches, respectively) by rigorously separating oversight from management.

They've done this by turning their organization into a kind of geek sandwich. There is a lower level of engineers to do the design and construction, a middle layer of management to handle budgets and administration, and a top level of oversight geeks with veto power, overseeing the whole enterprise.

This setup is terrifying to managers - after all, the oversight geeks get a separate budget, and it's impossible (by design) for the managers to exert any pressure on the engineers. Naturally, it's frightfully expensive (unless you factor in the costs of a major disaster every few years), and a serious blow to the ego of your average suit, who believes that God made managers to have ultimate authority. Jack Welch would not approve.

It will be interesting to see if NASA can get the funding and muster the self-discipline to pull such a transformation off. If they do, it will be a nice irony, since the Shuttle is the very embodiment of managers promising something engineers can't deliver.

08.27.03

Things I Have Learned About Foam From the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

Insulating foam falls off of the external tank on every Shuttle mission, usually in popcorn-size pieces.

No one knows why foam falls off the tank.

On about 10% of missions, foam falls off of the left bipod ramp, part of the Y-shaped structure that holds the Orbiter's nose to the external fuel tank.

No one knows why this happens, either.

Pieces of foam that fall off of the bipod ramp are the largest bits of flight debris ever seen during launch. Some are the size of a suitcase.

When foam falls off of the bipod ramp, it is always from the left side, never the right.

Not a clue why.

Several mechanisms have been proposed for foam loss. They have elaborate names like cryopumping, cryoinjection, and explosive expansion of trapped blowing agent. All of them posit some kind of bubble of gas rapidly expanding and shearing foam off of its substrate.

None of them matches observed data.

The orbiter is not supposed to be hit by any debris during launch. The reinforced carbon panels on the Shuttle's wing are only required to withstand a minimal impact. By luck and good engineering, they are much, much stronger than the Shuttle design says they need to be.

The orbiter design does not anticipate anything ever falling off of the tank.

A piece of foam traveling at 550 miles per hour can punch right through a reinforced carbon panel.

Foam falls off of the external tank on every Shuttle mission.

08.24.03

In an Ivory Tower

This afternoon I paid a visit to the Getty, the unearthly palace of an art museum perched high on an L.A. mountain, overlooking everything.

Single people of Los Angeles: you must run, not walk, to the Getty Center. If you have a date, there is no other place you want to be, because the Getty Center is the architectural equivalent of a Barry White record. Just stroll around the grounds, and by the time the sun sets, you'll be making out by the west-facing railing.

If you don't have a date, then you must run even faster, because nothing can take the sting out of soul-crushing loneliness faster than the art on display at the Getty center. Even the building itself is a tonic, ethereal and white. The exhibits and grounds are so beautiful you won't even mind all the snogging couples lining the west-facing railing. Just concentrate on the panoramic view of the entire Los Angeles basin, and the big jumbo jets sinking towards the airport from out West. It's a sight like no other, and plate tectonics means it's not going to be around for long.

I wandered and gawked for almost three hours tonight, spending part of my time in the exhibits, the rest in the courtyard, and I only saw half the museum. It's not that the collection is immense (it's big without being overwhelming); what happens is that the pictures are so well chosen that you want to linger in front of each one. I was particularly taken by the Flemish paintings, the obsessive kind where the master spent several weeks drawing details with a one-haired brush. Every room was captivating, a far cry from big national museums like the Louvre, or even the Met, that seem to take pride in exhibiting every possible variation on Madonna with pin-headed Christ child.

What completely made my night was a temporary exhibit on medieval books. I had no special interest in medieval books before walking into the little room, but I left it a changed man. Instead of putting up a big set of explanatory wall texts, the curators had chosen to show every step of the book-making process, from preparing the vellum all the way to illuminating and then binding the manuscript, through a series of ingenious display cases. The gilding case, for example, showed a sample manuscript page from blank sheet to finished, burnished gold letter. The samples were created by master calligraphers using period techniques, so you could see the entire process step by step.

Each section also included real examples of medieval books, to great effect. The first case, for example, showed how a stretched kid skin was turned into vellum. After seeing the many stages required to produce a single square of parchment - stretch, scrape, tan, polish, cut - your eyes fell on a majestic Bible with at least five hundred oversized pages. An entire herd of goats was in there!

I had read countless times about medieval books being luxury objects, but it had never hit home before I saw that particular juxtaposition. The exhibit was full of such little epiphanies.

And there were many other exhibits to go with it, running the gamut from Renaissance illuminated manuscripts to the photography of George Winogrand. It was total artistic bliss; it cost five dollars.

Do not miss it!

08.23.03

A Night in Pasadena

Henry David Thoreau writes in with some timely advice:

This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up to the garret at once.

But is wise to take advice on living from the dead?

Tune in tomorrow for another installment of anxious hand-wringing.

I spent last night out in Pasadena with my glamorous friend M*, who is a writer and animator pitching children's programs to a variety of Hollywood studios. I get a little dizzy in the presence of so much ambition, but it's fun to hear about meetings with big stars and important people, and the intricate, interlocking circles of power around the big studios. I would not last two seconds in this world, but M* makes it look easy; she's a media industry version of the Crocodile Hunter.

We went out to a sushi bar where fishes paraded around a big central table on a motorized circuit of little wooden boats. Each boat had several platters of sushi on it, and you could take whatever you fancied as it passed in front of you, unless you were a stupid hick. I spent long minutes agonizing over the menu before M* pointed out that comestibles were floating past us for a reason. "You mean you can eat from the BOATS?!" I cried, and the man sitting next to us laughed so hard that he nearly choked on a large piece of squid.

For the next hour I felt like a total hayseed. M* told me all about Very Important Producers she had been in contact with, and her efforts to penetrate the inner circles of various creative departments, doing battle with evil personal assistants and three-headed factota. I plundered the boats in silence, listening to the man next to me wheeze and chortle as he continued to savor my stupid comment from forty minutes earlier. Thank you, I thought, I'm here all week.

I had ordered a large beer (sadly, there was no tanker of Sapporo among the little boats), and as the evening went on, I realized that one could beer-goggle sushi. A large plate of deep-fried tentacles that had looked distinctly scary on its first five passes suddenly started to look mighty damn good. I could almost see the tentacle tips curling towards me, calling me over to sample their tempura goodness.

No sooner had I eaten the tentacles than I found my eye drawn to the Urchin Bile Roll, a greasy bright orange cylinder that had been on the circuit since we sat down, and perhaps for weeks before. Someone had assembled it on a dare - can we really get stupid white man to eat this? It occured to me that this was a dangerous place to get drunk.

All of a sudden, M* mentioned a name I recognized. The biggest of the bigwigs, an unapproachable Goliath of a man, turned out to be the father of my childhood best friend, someone who had been a great help to my mother and myself when we were fresh arrivals in the States twenty years ago. M* had been despairing of ever getting an introduction, and here it turned out that I had spent a couple of Christmases in the man's house.

I had had no clue he and his wife were media moguls - they were just my best friend's parents, and it's hard to think of a more unpretentious family. But now I had the inestimable pleasure of giving M* an in with Mr. Big, and saying "ah, yes, tell him Maciej sends his regards". It was such a surpise to me that I even forgot to eat the Urchin Bile Roll, which probably saved my life.

Perl programmer, weblogger, Hollywood dealmaker... Adored by small animals, friend to the stars!

08.22.03

I Have a Poor Attitude

Premature mid-life crisis continues. I have been imagining myself facing a lineup of younger versions of me, and explaining what exactly I am doing here at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting. My twelve-year-old self asks why I am not in the Navy, my twenty-year-old self is shocked that I sold out to The Man, my six-year-old self freaks out at the fact that I'm still in the States, and my nine-year-old self is crestfallen because I am not in orbit around Titan. None of them gives a sympathetic hearing to the complex and exciting challenges facing the archival community. None of them is suitably impressed by the prospect of a reception at the Getty with the luminaries of the American curatorial firmament.

I have a poor attitude! I have a poor attitude! I click and clack on my laptop (I am the only one at this conference with a computer), and pause to sneer at Annoying Grad Student, who is finishing a PhD in linguistics and has written "idealogy" and "phenomonon" on his Power Point slides, multiple times. I click and clack and sneer, that's me in the back, hello conference-goers. Yes, I would rather be orbiting Titan.

I missed the Getty reception with the luminaries. Instead I went out for Japanese food with better luminaries, local bloggers who were nice enough to invite me out on their weekly get-together. The rendezvous took place in the Japanese enclave on Sawtelle Boulevard; I had my first taste of Japanese curry and my first successful attempt at drinking honey tea with giant black tapioca spheres, a beverage I had tried and failed at once with the better half. Straw diameter, it turns out, is critical.

I ate with Ryan Gantz, Andrew Baio, Leonard Lin, Jonah Manning, and Mark Allen. All of them smart and big-hearted guys, who are hospitable to the out-of-town traveller and make me wish I lived in L.A.

I came back from the dinner with a light heart and a trunk full of Japanese snack foods for the better half. I have to go back for more tomorrow - who knows when I'll be here again?

08.20.03

Our Man in Afghanistan

Ben Hammersley is going to Afghanistan!

Movable Type meets Mujahedeen. It's going to be fun.

Pretty soon we're going to have to buy this gentleman a whip and a Stetson hat. Good luck, Mr. Hammersley, and please be safe.

08.19.03

Hotel California

I've arrived in Los Angeles, waiting for the Big One to throw me out of the eighteenth floor of the Century Plaza Hotel. My room overlooks Beverly Hills and downtown Los Angeles, visible as a faint set of vertical lines through the brown mist.

Nineteen years ago, I lived just a mile or two from here in Beverly Hills. My mother was a housekeeper for a funny old bat of a woman named Mrs. Tannenbaum, and we lived out in a little ancillary house on her property, next to the big swimming pool. I attended third grade not far away, in an elementary school that I am determined to find before I leave here, and have vivid memories of rushing home each day so that I could sit in the little house and catch the daily episode of He-Man. I was a big He-Man fan in those days, and even had some nascent feelings for She-Ra, despite my tender years.

I don't remember much about Mrs. Tannenbaum, other than her very advanced years and her insistence that the only proper accompaniment to dinner was an episode of Hawaii Five-O, played at skull-rattling volumes on a faux-wood cabinet big screen TV. She was decent enough to let us have dinner with her at the table, so I got a fairly good grounding in Hawaiian criminology, later to be enhanced when my mother developed an obsession with Magnum P.I.

Mrs. Tannenbaum owned an enormous Cadillac land yacht, and this was assigned to my mother for driving me to school and running errands. The thing was easily a lane wide - I rashly volunteered my mother to drive a bunch of kids on one of our field trips, and watched her hair turn white as she negotiated a spiral parking garage ramp in a car larger than many Warsaw apartments. There was about an inch of clearance at the corners, and six rapt kid faces at the windows, watching to see if we would get stuck.

California was a kind of wonderland for me - I remember being awestruck by the little lemons and oranges that grew on trees right next to the pool, and by the whole concept of a snowless winter. School was nice - I was in third grade, in Beverly Hills, back in the day when California had an excellent public school system. When I left (in the middle of the year), my teacher and classmates even drew up for me an enormous farewell card, working in secret while I was banished to the library. That was back in the day when I wanted to be an astronomer - it features a particularly dashing crayon rendition of Jupiter.

We switched houses halfway through the California stay, moving from Mrs. Tannenbaum's cottage to a big house up in the hills. It was right next to the house where the Manson murders took place, although you couldn't see it - it was up the hill, behind a wall and some dense trees. All of three months ago I found out that one of the victims in the murder had been a friend of my mother's, from back in her young cafe-hopping days in Poland. It must have been creepy as hell for her to work next door to such a place.

---

Today in the hotel I went up to my room to fetch a clipboard, and walked in on the cleaning lady making up the bed. I excused myself for interrupting her, and she held up a printed list of names, asking if I was the Ceglowski on the list. I was worried there was some trouble, but it turned out she was just curious to find a Polish name, being from Wilno (Vilnius) herself. We talked for a while, swapping immigration stories - she had moved to the States ages ago, and didn't have much chance to meet Lithuanians or Poles. The same could fairly be said for me.

It was hard for us to talk, since Polish was her second language, and I don't know a jot of Lithuanian, but I understood enough to learn that her name was Stravinsky, and her late husband was distantly related to the composer. I got to tell her that my own grandfather had lived near Wilno before and during the war, back when it was a Polish city, and that my grandmother was from Bialystok, not far from the present border. Then there was a lot of awkward beaming, and we went on our way, me to eat a tiny breakfast at "Breezes", the hotel restaurant, and she to smooth the duvet and bill my room five bucks for the bag of Famous Amos cookie fragments I had injudiciously devoured. But it left me feeling good all day, a jot of human contact within this weird and vast Beverly Hills hotel. I am supposed to stop by the sixth floor tomorrow and say hello.

08.18.03

Our Lucky Winner

We have our one millionth blog, and you'll never guess who it is.

Who knew? I guess it's especially appropriate, since I'm listening to the book on tape as I type this.

08.18.03

1,000,000

Sometime this morning, the Blog Census will pass the million blog mark.

I'm tempted to call these BogoBlogs, in homage to Linus Torvalds and his dislike for dubious, arbitrary statistics.

But however bogus the count, hey - we got a million!

08.17.03

Upper Vistula, I've Been Missing Ya

I used to cringe when people told me they were thinking of visiting Warsaw. It was like hearing that someone was planning to go to a Bob Dylan concert. You knew that, unless they understood the complicated historical trajectory involved and had an immense reserve of good will, chances are they would have an awful time.

I have always been a great fan of my home town (and Bob Dylan, for that matter), but Warsaw was hardly a place I could recommend to the doe-eyed college friends who would periodically ask for travel tips. "Prague or Warsaw?" was the most direct and painful formulation.

What could I say? Prague had the beautiful Czech girls, the gorgeous architecture, the fantastic beer and ludicrously low prices. Warsaw had the beautiful Polish girls, the dodgy vodka, crazy high prices, and the architectural equivalent of a massive hangover. The reasons for that were as simple as they were depressing. During the Second World War, the city had been completely razed, subjected to a punitive demolition by retrating SS units after the failed Warsaw Uprising in 1944. When the Red Army rolled in (having waited politely on the outskirts of the city while the Wehrmacht finished off the Polish nationalists) it entered what was basically a large vacant lot.

The whole country rallied after the war to rebuild the capital, in a real show of heroism and community spirit. People dug through dust and rubble to find intact bricks, formed miles-long bucket brigades to clear the debris, reconstructed the entire Old Town based on a set of eighteenth-century paintings and drawings. But the rest of the city was rebuilt from scratch in High Stalinist wedding cake style, and later accreted block after block of those cheap concrete towers that are the hallmark of international socialism.

When the big revolution came (in 1989), the whole city was instantly inundated with Western cars, and suddenly everyone was on the road, whether driving third-hand Fiat microcars or large Mercedes land yachts of dubious provenance. The Eastern-made cars were little more than glorified lawnmower engines, spewing thick smoke and running on leaded gasoline. Dopey little Soviet buses packed the roads heading East, ferrying various 'entrepreneurs' from the crumbling Soviet republics to the large stadium in Warsaw that had become a giant bazaar.

The city was still ugly, but now also gridlocked and everywhere covered with grime. When you drew a bath, the water was a sickly yellow. The streets were lined with little plastic kiosks and currency exchanges (dollars were the only way to keep cash, given the inflation rate). Various government coalitions were dropping like flies.

Fourteen years later, things have turned around. As far as I'm concerned, the summit of achievement is seeing the capital city written up in the New York Times, as a bona-fide travel destination. It's finally turned into a place you can introduce to your parents.

The article is sympathetic and right on the money. The only advice I would add would be to warn vegans visiting Poland that they are more likely to be eaten than to find a decent restaurant meal, and to warn all visitors that they must not leave Warsaw without going to the one of the Hortex bakeries and sampling a plum cake (baba ze sliwkami) along with a glass of blackcurrant juice (sok z czarnej porzeczki). Tell them Maciej sent you.

Also, if you have the chance to catch a show, Bob Dylan has perked up right along with Warsaw. Take a date - take two! - and you won't be disappointed.

08.15.03

The West Coast is the Best Coast

Next week I am going to be in Los Angeles for the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. I am not an archivist, just a dabbler, and I figure this is a good chance to learn from people who actually know what they're doing.

I had visions of cardigans and wire-rim glasses in my head, but these archivists are a surprisingly active bunch. The list of pre-conference tours includes a camping trip to Yosemite (which I am too chicken to join), various historical walks around L.A. (which sounds vaguely masochistic) and the Holy Grail of tours itself, a visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I can hardly wait for that.

If you read this blog and/or live in L.A., do drop me a line and we can have a plate of tacos together.

Also, I could use some suggestions for where to run an 11-mile loop without being hit by too many cars. I have a car of my own to get around in; the hotel itself is just west of Beverly Hills.

08.15.03

Warbloggers are from Mars

If you're a political blogger, then chances are you have a penis!

Read all about it on the new Blog Census weblog.

My own theory on the scarcity of female warbloggers is that they're kept too busy ironing all those brown shirts.

08.12.03

Parallel universes

The unbearable weather continues - at seven in the morning I go for a jog, and the air is already stifling. It smells like a hamperful of gym socks pulled out of the drier ten minutes too soon.

It rains every day. I ventured out into the garden today to look for ripe tomatoes, only to find that half of them had split open, unable to take the pressure. The most promising survivor, large and red, disgorged a seedy pink paste when I tried to slice him. Only the basil plants have thrived. Try to yank some leaves off of them, though, and they just come up by the roots. The soil is so wet that some of the taller plants are tipping over.

I spent a lot of the weekend reading about parallel universes, the ultimate in escapism. I'm looking for a mirror world that is sunny and dry, preferably with flying robots. No word yet on how to get there, but I have learned that the go-to guy on parallel univeses is the cosmologist and George Stephanopolous lookalike Max Tegmark.

Tegmark confronts visitors to his homepage with an ageless philosophical paradox: how can a man who understands Riemann manifolds and Hilbert spaces make such a hash out of a simple website? But if you can tough out the frames, there's a lot worth seeing. I particularly recommend the goofs page, even for the resolutely non-technical.

Max Tegmark wrote a paper in which he describes four distinct types of parallel universe, and gives reasons why they are likely to exist. The paper comes in two strengths - regular and decaf.

Is there another copy of you reading this article, deciding to put it aside without finishing this sentence while you are reading on? A person living on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets. The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect until now, that is, when your decision to read on signals that your two lives are diverging. You probably find this idea strange and implausible, and I must confess that this is my gut reaction too. Yet it looks like we will just have to live with it...

"Bu-llet points! Bu-llet points!" I hear Idle Words readers chant. Mais bien sur:

1. The first kind of parallel universe is an inevitable consequence of the fact that we seem to live in an open universe with a uniform distribution of matter. Because all energy is quantized, a given volume of space can only contain a certain (unbelievably huge) number of configurations of matter (unless you do something crazy like turn the temperature to infinity). In an infinite Universe like ours, that means any finite volume of space is bound to repeat itself somewhere. An infinite number of somewheres. You just have to be willing to travel.
   
   According to Tegmark, the nearest copy of yourself is about 10^(10^29) meters away (he declines to say in which direction). Finding the nearest copy of our entire visible Universe is more of a slog - it's about 10^(10^181) meters away. There's also every imaginable near-variant to be found - a mirror-Earth where you're wearing a different colored shirt, a mirror-Earth with a monkey typing Shakespeare, an infinite number of mirror-Earths where Ann Coulter gets sacrificed to a volcano god tomorrow.
2. The second class of parallel universe is a consequence of inflationary theory, which holds that our universe is one of uncountably many pockets of stabilized space separated by regions that are still undergoing rapid inflation (Greenspan would be livid). Unlike the first kind of parallel universe, these other pockets of space may have basic physical constants that differ considerably from those in our own universe. Gravity might be stronger than electromagnetism, for example. They may even have a different number of space and time dimensions.
   
   If it bothers you that there can be an infinite number of universes of infinite size, separated by infinite inflationary regions expanding faster than the speed of light, then you haven't spent enough time reading cosmology. Who needs drugs, or religion? Give me high-energy physics!
   
   Incidentally, when I say 'uncountably many' up there, I don't mean "a zillion zillion", or even "an infinite number", but an honest-to-goodness uncountable infinity of other universes. Because infinities, like Big Gulps, come in an embarrassment of sizes.
3. The third class of parallel universe is a different beast - it depends on the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum theory. Quantum mechanics has always been plagued by metaphysical handwaving about the 'collapse of the wavefunction', most famously described in the paradox of Schrdinger's cat. The "many worlds" theory gets around the paradox (and the hand-waving) by assuming that the Universe forks as necessary to accomodate all possible outcomes of every interaction. This preserves some nice mathematical properties of quantum theory, resolves the paradox, and (as Tegmark points out, in the really annoying bit) doesn't even cost anything in terms of superfluous universes, since every flavor of universe spawned by the 'multiple worlds' model can already be found among the distant Type I parallel universes sitting out there in the great inky.
4. The fourth class of parallel universe is cooler than the first three put together, but it's just too weird to describe here. Really, read the paper.

08.12.03

Waypath RSS feeds for search

Waypath is now offering RSS feeds for individual search queries. That means you can monitor changing search results in your aggregator.

Very cool. We had per-search feeds working on LazyWeb for a while, but then I broke the search engine altogether...

Kudos to Steve and Martin for continuing to improve Waypath. It's quite usable at this point, and I'm sure they'd welcome some feedback from bloggers. Pay them a visit!

08.09.03

I've found it! The most boring weblog on the Internet!

08.08.03

Tonight we tested the better half's newly acquired vegan principles in the crucible of the Addison County Fair and Field Days, the local summer agricultural fair, where every animal on display is also conveniently available served hot on a kaiser roll.

Winner: Fair and Field Days, by a margin of one (1) BBQ pork sandwich and one (1) Italian sausage roll with onions. But we did also consume onion rings and the crust and outer mantle of a caramel apple, so you can't call it a rout.

The Fair and Field Days is the big summer event in these parts, and an enormous amount of fun. I saw my first bona-fide tractor pull, which wasn't as glamorous as the one the better half caught last year (she saw the souped-up, racing tractor category), but did feature the dirt equivalent of a Zamboni, a fascinating machine for smoothing out the ruts in a race course. We were too late for the piglet races, but we did make it in time to watch the arm-wrestling competition, apparently in the bantamweight division (either that, or it's been a hungry year for area arm-wrestlers).

The fair is part carnival, part trade show for local farmers, and part county fair and competition for local 4H clubs. Unlike other Vermont summer extravaganzas (like the Quechee baloon festival, or the eponymous Vermont Summer Festival in Manchester ), it's targeted more at locals than at tourists, which means you don't have to look at Sabra Field prints or endure innumerable stands selling maple candy. Instead, you get to gawk at sales displays of maple sap boiling equipment, which is silvery and bright and extremely impressive (except for the plastic sap sucking rigs, which look serpentine and evil).

There were many pavillions filled with great quantities of ag equipment for sale (as well as more sinister items, like the giant snowmobiles area rednecks use to persecute us in the wintertime), and even more pavillions filled with prize-winning quilts, cookies, vegetables, photographs, knit sweaters, and pretty much any other handicraft you could think of, all submitted by local craftspeople and gardeners of all ages. Some of these were beautifully made/grown/cooked/sewn/built, others were somewhat crude, but labelled in little-kid handwriting that melted your heart. There was a suspicious profusion of 'Grand Prize' ribbons this year, a kind of Lake Wobegon effect right here in Vermont. But if even Harvard suffers from grade inflation, why begrudge Addison County?

I haven't even mentioned the animals. Animals are everywhere at the County Fair. The most memorable exhibit by far is the Vermont Bloodsucking Insect Fiesta, which covers the entire fairground site and spills out into the rest of the Champlain Valley, as well as everywhere else in the state. But also worthy of mention are the dairy barns (where bored kids sit on camp chairs, and little calves sleep in that strange broken-neck posture they find so restful), and the horse stables, full of giant beautiful horses that are sick of being gawked at by the likes of me, and won't even look up.

I snuck over into the kids' petting zoo, and saw my first alpaca, an animal that looks like the Edsel of hoofed ruminants, an expensive and embarrasing animal design fiasco. There were also beautiful miniature ponies, and miniature donkeys - a whole section devoted to Bonsai farm animals. You could pet bristly cute piglets with one hand, while holding the BBQ-licious mortal remains of one of their brethren in the other, and there was even an exhausted emu in the corner, collapsed in a great pile of feathers next to a macabre sign extolling "my 100% pure oil and lean, heart-healthy red meat!".

There was probably a lot more to see, but the better half and I got suckered into playing a sinister gambling game, involving a flat metal sheet covered with quarters, with a precipice on one end and a sliding metal block on the other. The block moved back and forth a fixed distance, and there was a little chute down which you could roll quarters, trying to get them to land in front of the block. If you timed it so the quarter landed while the block was fully retracted, and if it landed properly, then the moving block would push the coin against the flat sheet of coins in front, and cause a chain reaction that would spill coins off the edge precipice, straight into your waiting greedy hands.

Coins were literally hanging off the precipice, dangling in midair, so that the slightest nudge would cause a semester's tuition to cascade down into the wooden tray. But no nudge seemed to do it, even as we fed money into the machine, each coin moving the whole mass out further and further, impossibly far.

We won seventy-five cents, spent six bucks trying, and made it home late and satisfied.

The Rutland State Fair - an even bigger event - starts on the last of August. Who can wait? .

08.06.03

Yesterday I went with the better half to my first lesson in Supreme Ultimate Fist. The instructor calls it by its Chinese name, T'ai Chi, but I think that's doing a disservice to the unsung marketing genius behind it. Go ahead and study "the way of harmony of the spirit" , "empty hand", or even "the way of foot and fist"*, nancy boy. I'll just be over here, with some deceptively peaceful-looking middle aged people, learning how to kick your ass. With my Supreme Ultimate Fist!

Yes, you learn to kick with a fist. That's how completely supreme you can get.

*( aikido, karate, and tae kwan do ).

Reading up on Chinese boxing styles, you get an idea of what the marketing guy was up against:

Tiger and Crane Boxing, Eternal Youth Boxing, Knight Boxing, Hakka Boxing, Buddhist Boxing, White-Eyebrow Boxing, Confucian Boxing, Southern Skills Boxing, Kunlun Boxing, House of Kong Boxing, Han-Exercising Boxing [...] Essence Boxing, Flower Boxing, Cannon Boxing, Hong School of Boxing, Full-Arm Boxing, Maze Boxing, Six-Harmony Boxing, Springing Legs, Jabbing Feet, Eight-Ultimate Boxing, Great Ancestor Extended Boxing and Silk Floss Boxing.

No wonder plain old "Ultimate Fist" wouldn't do.

Coming from a country with only one martial arts tradition (Drunken Vodka Boxing), I find this list pretty intimidating. And it gets even more intimidating when you add in the traditional weapons:

lance, mallet, long bow, crossbow, jingal, jointed bludgeon, truncheon, sword, chain, hooks, hatchet, dagger-axe, battle-axe, halberd, shield, staff, spear and rake [?].

Followed by the modern weapons:

broad-sword, lance, rapier, halberd, hatchet, battle-axe, shovel, fork, jointed bludgeon, truncheon, hammer, harrow, trident, staff, long-blade spear, cudgel, dagger-axe and wave-bladed spear.

I suppose getting attacked with a fork sounds funny until it happens to you. Particularly in China, where they probably had to go to extra effort to find a fork, implying a special venom towards Westerners and a flair for the symbolic. The list here isn't exhaustive - my sense is that any sharp object you can name has a Chinese martial arts tradition devoted to it. Given the strange proliferation of KFC's we saw on our trip to China, I wouldn't even be surprised to find a School of the Shaolin Spork. This is a people not afraid to specialize.

Our T'ai Chi teacher is a fuzzy-headed red-haired man with earnest eyes. He believes in letting the lesson plan evolve naturally from the energy that flows in from the Universe, rather than relying on a Western crutch like advance preparation. But still, he's been studying for twenty years, and knows his T'ai Chi. He worked us enough so that my legs were all tired and sore - I was glad of the fat raindrops on the walk home.

My grandmother, full of surprises, was an avid practitioner of T'ai Chi. She would have felt right at home in Wuhan or Chengdu, where a walk through any park revealed a group of people doing a morning routine, with loners off under the trees, going at their own pace. It may sound all morning-mist-and-pan-flutes described here, but it helped that there was always another group or two just a few meters away, practicing ballroom dancing to the tune of a boom box.

08.05.03

The Berkman Center Ourobouros strikes again: an essay about the importance of linking to others, where all the hyperlinks just point back to himself.

You can't make this stuff up.

08.04.03

Boring RSS Post

"I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on a full suit of armor and attacked a Hot Fudge Sundae or a Banana Split." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

That quote sums up exactly how I feel about the fight now brewing over weblog syndication formats. There's a prime case of tilting at sundaes up today at the CNET site - a histrionic article entitled "Battle of the Blog" (via Anil). The article comes out swinging:

As commercial interests have increasingly dominated the Internet, Web logs have come to represent a bastion of individual expression and pure democracy for millions of bloggers.

This "millions of bloggers" business is really starting to get on my tits. I've been crawling the web for three months, updating from every source I can think of, and I've come up half million sites that you could reasonably call live weblogs. Thanks to LiveJournal's excellent stats page, I know they have at least 300,000 additional active weblogs that are still not in the census list. But that number will still fall short of even one million.

I'm willing to believe that I wrote a really bad crawler, and that I have missed all kinds of blogs. Maybe Dave Sifry did, too. But seeing a claim like that, with no source attached to it, just makes me suspicious. How curious that this journalist interviewed a bunch of people, all of whom are really into weblogs, and then ended up with an unusually inflated high figure for the total blogging population.

Such a total lack of critical thinking permeates the article:

Despite the apparent pettiness of developers' sniping, their arguments over digital minutia may carry enormous consequences, and corporate interests remain poised to capitalize on the conflicts if they are not resolved.

Who are these corporate interests? What management genius at IBM is going to try and chase a market of under a million users, and sell them a service most of them now get for free? "Forget these enormous corporate clients, boys, let's go get us some bloggers!". It reads like the perennial Slashdot joke:

1. Get bloggers to argue over RSS
2. ...
3. Profit!

Any company that wants to make a serious foray into weblogs has two choices. Either they follow the AOL model, and grow the market by bringing in millions of new users, or they follow the TypePad model, and start small enough to be able to make a profit from the current market, growing as the market grows.

If they take the AOL route, then they can introduce all the proprietary formats they want, regardless of what the established weblog community has standardized on. Why make interop easy for your users, if you want to keep them locked in? Look at AOL Instant Messenger, after all. Try to build interop with AIM, and AOL sues you.

And for the little TypePads of this world, the incentive will be to support as many formats as possible. After all, you want people to be able to migrate over as easily as possible from the blogs they currently use. Again, no issue.

These kinds of claims are just stupid. If a dispute over syndication formats becomes the fatal weakness that will allow a huge corporation to step in and take over blogging, I will eat my arm.

What gets left out in all this FUD are the reasons bloggers should be delighted to see a new syndication format emerge:

• Language support:
  
  The format under development includes a required language attribute on content. This is a huge blessing for every one of the hundreds (I'm sorry, "millions!") of bloggers who write in multiple languages. Hell, it's a blessing for everyone, because it means better search engines.
• Clear technical definitions:
  
  Without going into excruciating detail, there are ambiguities in RSS that make it hard for programmers to work with the format. Proposals to clear up these ambiguities tend to mysteriously veer off into factionalism. A new format will give programmers clear definitions to work from, which in turn means aggregators and other tools will Just Work.
• More Power:
  
  That means support for photoblogs. It means support for people who post video and audio files, along with regular text. It means being able to syndicate comments along with the main body of your weblog post. The ability to move your blog to a different blogging with minimal hassle. The ability to update your weblog remotely and securely, using the same tools that you use to read syndicated feeds. One giant step towards a microcontent client.

There's no death struggle here. There's no reason to get worked up. RSS and the new format are going to coexist, just like RSS has already been coexisting with the nine zillion other variants of itself. Once you provide a syndicated feed in one format, why not provide it in other formats? And if you can't, why not use one of the compatibility toolkits people are working on right now?

There's no reason you can't. The whole debate is a red herring.

The effort to build a new syndication format has been unprecedentedly open, fair, and egalitarian. Sam Ruby's Wiki is full of contributions from people who have no history with RSS, who don't care about weblog office politics, who just want to roll up their sleeves and build something cool.

08.03.03

Two articles you shouldn't miss. The first, via Slashdot, is a lawyer's take on the strange Talmudic intricacies of copyright law:

It is, for example, technically against the law for Girl Scouts to sing "This Land Is Your Land" and "Puff, the Magic Dragon" around a campfire without paying royalties. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers tried to collect such royalties. It backed off only after it faced public outrage—which was fanned by restaurateurs wanting to play the radio without having to pay fees. It now charges the Scouts $1 a year, foregoing real profits while making it clear that the girls sing only by ASCAP's belatedly good graces.

The author compares existing copyright statutes to the tax code - both fine in principle, but hopelessly arbitrary and arcane in their current implementation. I hope he gets around to writing an article about patent law.

The second article is a piece about the slow decline of the Laurel Park race track in Maryland, and the men who make their life there:

Jahn is in his sixties, and he has been going to the races since he was a child. He hit his first win at the now defunct track in Bowie, when he was 8 1/2 years old. "I put down $2 and the damn thing came in at 90-to-1. $180. They asked me how I picked the horse. I said, 'I thought you were supposed to play the high numbers.' A lot of people out here are guys who won on their first bet like that. A lot of people get hooked that way. Some of the kids, they got -- " Jahn gazes at a monitor and then at the ticket in his hand, which is beginning to tremble. "Five-eight!" he roars. "Five-eight! That's me! I got it! I got it! I hit again!" He sits back on the bench and sighs in satisfaction. "Winning's great. There's nothing like it. It won't take away 9/11 or all the bad stuff out there, but it's a great feeling. At that moment, everything just comes clean. You just sit back and say ain't life great."

It's such a beautifully told story, I don't even know how to praise it. There's so many ways the author could have spoiled the piece, but it's told with perfect pitch.

Three to one says you'll like it.

08.02.03

It's another bachelor weekend here at the Idle Words compound, as the better half motors south into the haze to attend a Renaissance Fair(e?) with her sister. Since this sister is pretty handy with a sword, I think I am going to skip the usual cute comments about Renaissance Fairs, and just wish them a good time. I hear there is going to be jousting.

Bachelor weekend has so far meant the taking of several naps, the reading of much science fiction, and a dinner of tomato sandwiches. It was very hot and sticky today, and the cats and I spent a great deal of time collapsed in the cool library with no pants on (just full-length fur coats, for some of us). I dragged myself out for a long run in the late afternoon, part of my quixotic attempt at training for the New York Marathon in November, and barely made it home alive.

It turns out that nothing tastes better after nine miles in fierce heat than a fresh, cool margarita. But then it also turns out there is a reason why Gatorade and other sports drinks are non-alcoholic. Ouf.

---

I paid a visit yesterday to the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op, a kind of alternate universe within which I feel myself tempted to become a Republican. Why aren't there any right-wing natural food co-ops? I'd be the first to visit the Ayn Rand Organic Food Ranch - you'd still pay ten dollars for an apple, but at least the cashiers would be ruthlessly efficient.

As it was, I found myself stranded in the checkout line, watching people pay a hundred dollars for two sackfuls of groceries and take ten minutes to complete their transaction. I had already started in on a bout of eye-rolling when I noticed that the two women in line next to me were speaking French to each other, even though they both had American accents. That seemed a little over the top, even for the co-op, and I felt a fresh wave of indignation heading my way. But then I remembered that the Language Schools are in full swing, and felt much better.

Every summer, a few hundred students sign up for intensive language programs at the College. There are nine languages taught - the usual Indo-European suspects, along with Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian (Indo-European, but not a usual suspect). The programs last nine weeks or six weeks, depending on the level (beginners stay longest), and are unusual in that they require participants to sign a pledge promising to forgo English for the duration of their stay. As a result, Middlebury is one of the few towns in the world where no one will bat an eye at two black women arguing loudly in Japanese at a restaurant.

I was lucky enough to spend one summer at a Middlebury language school, my sophomore year at the college, when I signed up for the Arabic program. I knew nothing about Arabic whatsoever, but I had done the student surveys for the language schools the previous year, in my summer job, and I knew that it got outstanding evaluations.

My class had ten students in it, all of us complete beginners. We were allowed to speak English discreetly during the first week, but after that week passed, everything was done in Arabic. Only grammar lessons were exempt, and those only for the first half of the program.

Being a beginner in this kind of situation is exhilerating - the first week or so, you are doubling your vocabulary daily, sometimes hourly, and learning to pick out more and more from the language spoken all around you. At the start of week three, you learn verbs, and suddenly you don't sound like the Incredible Hulk anymore. I vividly remember a conversation I had with a classmate, three days after the verb lesson:

"Large news!"

"What happened?"

"OJ Simpson massacred his spouse!"

"Massacred? What means massacred?"

(makes stabbing motions with hand)

"OJ? OJ?"

"Massacre not nice. Not possible OJ massacre spouse."

"OJ?"

After nine weeks of Arabic, our class got tested for proficiency. The results averaged about four semesters of college Arabic, with some people testing as high as six semesters. Three years of college-level instruction, in nine weeks!

If you want to learn to actually speak a language in a single summer, there is no better place than Middlebury. It's very expensive ($6,700 for nine weeks), but worth every penny, and you can get financial aid if you apply early enough. The Arabic program has predictably become almost impossible to get into, but the other eight schools are just as good.

Middlebury also offers summer graduate programs, and programs for advanced students, but those are a waste - that kind of learning doesn't compress well into the summer. As a beginner, though, you get the best value. You may not know how to say everything, but you will become fearless about communicating in the language, and you'll learn to understand native speakers. Even study abroad can't touch it.

07.31.03

You too could be an instant winner!

The better half discovered that I have a webpage up on Dave Winer's test site. If you believe Manila, it's been up since February.

A little digging with a Perl script reveals that a there's a whole bunch of these pages - check out the complete list of names.

A-list? C-list? Enemies list? Nominees for a Harvard PhD, honoris causa? First against the wall when the revolution comes?

If any readers can clear up this mystery, I'll send them an invitation to IdleCon, the blogging conference so exclusive that I must never speak of it again.

Update:

Dave Winer nets himself the invitation, by being the first to explain what's going on.

Apparently, anyone who leaves a comment on his test site gets an auto-generated web page. This is done using the Hotel California approach - you can edit your user profile, but you can never, ever leave.

And my Winer number is now 1!