On a rail

On a train bound for nowhere.
Kenny Rogers

Yet another morning finds me on the train to NYC. Anyone who knows me knows I love trains. It probably seems silly to some, but I still get excited when I get to ride the new NJT double-deck cars. Today I scored the singe seat with the baggage bin next to it. Ahh, luxury.

This week I've been working in Flushing, which means the E train from Penn Station to Queens. That's fun too, because I love the new NYC subway cars.

(BTW, right now I am side-by-side with a Metroliner, keeping almost perfect pace. Wait... taking the lead... and first into Newark Penn!)

Anyway, where was I? The new Subway cars (more information than you could imagine here). They have the clear automated voice and best of all, this electronic diagram of the line showing you what stops are ahead of you. Of course, you need to check the board and listen to the automated voice. The other day I didn't and ended up on the F which takes an entirely different route to Manhattan, crossing the E's line on the way.

That's happens a lot with the NYC subways. Other subway systems, the Boston T, for example, look much more organized. There is an organic quality to the NYC subway map which is annoying or cool, depending on how you look at it.

So, running out of power and no outlet nearby. A useful project would be mapping NJT rolling stock to show where outlets are....

Note to self

That's the political equivalent of reminding yourself to breath.
Daily Beast columnist John Avlon (on CNN's American Morning)

Thinking about the crib notes on Sarah Palin's palm, I suspect some are pointing out that a few scribbles are not the same as an entire teleprompted speech. Which is true, except that Obama doesn't hide the teleprompter.

But whatever, put aside the hypocrisy point. It's the notes themselves that kill me: "Energy," "tax cuts" and "lift American spirits." That is what she needed to write down. Really. No joke.

That is pure Palin.

A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
(Romer v. Evans)

It's time I dusted off this blog, and what better reason than tommorow's State Senate vote on Marraige Equality in New Jersey.

Everyone deserves to marry the person they love. It's that simple. I stole the following action list from Sharon:

1. Call your State Senators and tell them to do what's right. (When following that link, click the "state" tab.) If you already know who your Senator is, go here for contact information.
2. Email your Senator. It can't hurt to do both.
3. Go to Trenton tomorrow. Garden State Equality has info here.

This is our best opportunity. Let's not squander it.

Goodbye Green-eyed Lady

Green-eyed lady, lovely lady.

Green-eyed Lady by Sugarloaf
(words and music by J.C. Phillips and David Riordan)

We lost Gypsy last night. Her back legs weren't working and she was in pain, so we took her to the vet. It was likely a clot blocking the flow of blood to her back legs, but that didn't really matter. She was sixteen and in a lot of pain. They administer a strong sedative first, so nothing after will be felt. Almost immediately she stopped howling and slowly drifted off. That's when we knew we'd made the right choice.

We'll miss you lady-cat.

Space

Space, the final fronier.
Kirk

Let's put some space between here and election news.







That's better.

"Belched into the right-wing echo-chamber"

In law, this would create a mistrial.
Greta Van Susteren
No, it would get the lawyer fired.
Keith Olbermann

The right-wing noise machine is in full bluster mode because they "just learned" that Vice Presidential moderator Gwen Ifill is writing a book titled titled Breakthough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama News of the book appeared in print as early as July 23, weeks before the debate moderators were even chosen and agreed upon by both campaigns.

But I digress. Here is Keith Olbermann telling us what he really thinks about Ifill's so-call conflict of interest, among other things....

"If the McCain campaign, which could have found out about it at any time over the last two months and nine days by simply googling her name, if that campaign really didn't know anything about this book until Greta Van Susteren emailed them last night...

They're morons!"

Rick Wright 1943-2008

And no one called us to the land
And no one crosses there alive.
Pink Floyd
Echoes
(Waters, Wright, Mason, Gilmour)

Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright died today. Damn. At least they had this one last gig together:

And way back when...

The Soup covers Kathy Hilton's response to McCain

Now I'm not a political analyst, but when your candidate for president is wrong and Kathy Hilton is right....
Joel McHale

I wish I'd found this when the McCain's Britney/Paris add was still running, but this clip still cracks me up...

Cellist Zoë Keating

I like to think of it as a DJ scratch approach to the cello.
Zoë Keating

Another Radio Lab podcast highlight: Quantum Cello. Last season's War of the Worlds episode was live and cellist Zoë Keating provided the music. In this podcast, Jad Abumrad visits Keating to learn more about her music and listen to her perform a few pieces. Her music is really cool. There are certainly better adjectives than those, but that's all I can muster right now. Trust me, though, it's really cool.

As she plays, she digitally captures segments of her music which she loops back. As the loops are playing back, she plays additional layers over them. The result is sounds more like an orchestrated work than a solo one. What I though was especially neat is that she does this live. The loop capture is controled with foot pedals. In the podcast she performs three pieces live that sound more like studio recordings.

It's great stuff. Check it out if you get a chance.

Update: Here's a video of her performing live, so you can really get the idea:

You know what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like this?

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that:
"Have ya paid your dues, Jack?"
"Yessir, the check is in the mail."
Jack Burton
Big Trouble in Little China

Last night Sharon and I stayed up and watched a movie. We could have watched There Will be Blood, which we have from the library and haven't seen yet. We didn't. We watched John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China.

I love this movie. It is not a good movie. It's a bad movie, but it is so deliciously bad. It is corny and cheesey and makes no attempt to be otherwise. If it did, it would not be half as much fun. At no point does this movie take itself seriously, and that is what makes it so much fun.

You canna change the laws of physics

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics.
Brian Greene

Assume the universe is infinite, but the number of possible configurations of particles in the universe, while tremendously huge, is finite. That means that at some point somewhere in the universe, a particular configuration of particles must repeat. Somewhere, an almost incomprehensible distance from here, there is another version of me writing this exact same blog post in an identical office when he should be coding. In fact, there's not just copy, there are countless copies.

That is just one of the concepts explored in this episode of the Radio Lab podcast. Brian Greene, physics and mathematics professor and director of the Institute of Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University, sits down with Robert Krulwich to talk about the nature of the universe.

Two other tidbits from the conversation:

• The universe is actually a lot like a block of Swiss cheese.
• If you think about it, it is actually more likely we exist in a huge computer simluation than in the actual universe.

Krulwich keeps the science content accessible and the conversation tone fun and interesting. Take a listen if you have a chance.

Games' most ridiculous getups

Nothing says “I’m a competent combatant and a smart scientist” like a butterfly mask, tassels and matching G-string.
Winda Benedetti

A regular feature in the MSNBC gaming section is the Top 5 list. Many are what you'd expect: action games, strategy games, game villians, etc. This week's was a good one: Top 5 most preposterous getups in games. Reviewer Winda Benedetti channels Nina Garcia in choosing her top 5 examples of an "Absurd Outfit Obviously Dreamed Up By A Man."

Reading big

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
Dr. Seuss

Appearing on various blogs is a list of books that is published by, derived from, or inspired by the NEA's The Big Read or similar lists from the BBC. I got my copy of the list from Sharon, and I'm using her rules:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Asterisk (*) the books you LOVE.
4. Bang (!) the books you I left unfinished becuase you either hated it, lost interest, or (in my case) were in high school.

Here is my report:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
*2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
!6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
*16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
!18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
*25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
!28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
*(?)33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
*(?)36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
*52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
*94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, 29 books in all. Not bad. #18 and #28 I did not finish only because I was slacking off in high school. I've read many pieces of #6, but nowhere near all of it, and how many people ever do? As for #33 and #36, the (?) is because I love them less now than when I first read them. As for #75, that's definitely in the someday of my life.

And here are a some great (IMHO) books not on this list:

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (on the NEA's Big Read list)

That's off the top of my head. I'm sure there's more.

In stunning 3-D!

"Ha! Is it come to this?" thundered the Stranger: "then meet your fate: out of your Plane you go. Once, twice, thrice! 'Tis done!"
Flatland:
A Romance of Many Dimensions
Edwin A. Abbott

A friend of mine is seriously into stereo photography, and he has begun posting his work online. You can see it for yourself here. His galleries utilize a Java stereo viewer that offers several different viewing options, and he has some viewing instructions on his site. I ended up using using the "cross-eyed" method that requires no special glasses and, if you can do it, offeres the clearest viewing options. His viewing instructions have a link to a really good explanation of the "cross-eyed" method.

His site doesn't tell you how he takes the pictures, but I got to see it first hand. He built his own stereo camera array out of a pair of fairly low-end Canon point-and-shoot cameras. Apparently these cameras offer a wide array of undocumented features if you know how to enable them. Luckily there are plenty of camera hackers online to show you how. I my friend's case, he was able to rig a custom remote that connects the the USB port on each camera, allowing him to trigger both cameras in unison.

The results are really cool. Check them out!

Ice on Mars!

Salt can't do that.

Peter Smith
Principal investigator for the Phoenix mission

It's official. There is ice on Mars! Little chunks of material dug up by the lander have since disappeared. The only explanation is that the chunks are water ice that sublimated when exposed to the thin Martian atmosphere. That's cool.

Of course, other possible explanations were considered:

Back in NY

New York, New york
Does it feel right?
Does it taste light?

Deborah Harry and Moby

Right now I am under the Hudson river. Literally. On on the NJ Transit 7:30 New Brunswick express out of NY Penn Station... wait... yup, back in NJ.

I'm back working in the city, though not much fun in it I have to say. Fixing someone else's "Heart of Darkness" code. It's scary stuff - 1200 excruciating lines of SQL that could make your eyes bleed. It took me a day just to figure out what the hell it was trying to do, then a day just to figure out what I might be able to do with it.

One little positive is that I get to ride in one of these:

The new (for me) NJ Transit Bi-Level cars. I admit it - train geek am I. As evidence, I will note that having ridden twice now, I've made a point of trying both the upper and lower level. There is actually something of a difference. The upper level feels a little smoother. Being up that high makes things a little more scenic. In contrast, the lower level feels faster. I think it feels faster because you're closer to the ground. When you're at a platform, you eye-level with people's feet, it's cool watching the edge of the platform speed by when moving. The new seats are nice, also. With the low ceiling, there's almost this airplane vibe going on. Definitely the way to commute to the city.

Anyway, we're going through Edison, so my stop's coming up. Time to publish and pack up.

Buyer's remorse for the obsessive

Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
Gnarls Barkley

Okay, I admit it, this is just a little obsessive on my part. We just got the new Gnarls Barkley album, The Odd Couple. It's great, a worthy follow-up to St. Elsewhere, and lives up to my expectations. Except....

You see, on the album, "Run" just fades in from silence. It doesn't have that "kick-off" beginning that you hear on the radio and in the video. This kept bugging me throughout the rest of the track, sort of like Roger Rabbit with the unfinished shave-and-a-haircut. (TWO BITS!).

I went a-googling and found out "Run [Radio Edit]" is what I was missing. A little more googling and I found it online for £0.79. Yep, it's only available in the U.K. But hey, they take PayPal, and PayPal handles the exchange rate (currently $.50 = £1.00). That's a little more than the iTunes $0.99 songs, but it's also a 256K MP3 I can use anywhere. I figured what the heck and embraced our global economy.

The radio edit is playing right now. I have no regrets.

Bad gas holiday

This isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s an idea designed to get them through an election.
Barack Obama

It turns out that economists think the so-called gas tax holiday is a really bad idea.

I think it's crap. It's the kind of shameless pandering I expect from McCain, and now Clinton gave me one more reason to be glad I voted for Obama. Regarding the gas tax holiday, Obama had this to say:

It would last for three months and it would save you on average half a tank of gas, $25 to $30. That’s what Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are proposing to deal with the gas crisis. This isn’t an idea designed to get you through the summer, it’s an idea designed to get them through an election.

Spot on, as usual.

Better yet, many economists don't think we'll even see that half-tank of gas. Suspending the gas tax won't have any effect on the gasoline supply. However, demand will increase and with it, the price at the pump. We will end up spending just as much money on gasoline, except now more of that money goes to oil producers.

As Paul Krugman said on this issue, "It’s Econ 101: the tax cut really goes to the oil companies."

Hmmmmm

A podcast for people who ponder the puzzles of life.
Robert Krulwich

According to his NPR bio, Robert Krulwich is "a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk, reporting on the intersections of science and technology with culture, politics and religion. His specialty is explaining complex news — economics, technology, science — in a style that is clear, compelling and entertaining." He also teams up with with Jad Abumrad on one of my favorite NPR shows, Radio Lab.

I was psyched to find out he has his own podcast. Hmmm.... Krulwich on Science is basically a podcast of all his segments that show up on various NPR shows. He says in his bio that he likes "talking about 'invisible ideas' and trying to find a way to explain what you've learned so people can grasp it," and that's exactly what you'll find in this podcast.

If you get a chance, check it out. I think my favorite so far is the segment about yawning, and what triggers a yawn. (Hint: 55% of you might be yawning right now.)

The old McCain, he ain't what he used to be.

My friends, this is a defining issue...
John McCain
...until you get the nomination.
Keith Olbermann

Gone is the John McCain of 2000, that's for damn sure.

This is what I was thinking as I read this Washington Post story about McCain's recent tax policy reversals. It is not really surprising. He became a cheerleader for Bush's failed foreign policy, so why not do the same with fiscal policies?

It is just one more sign of his last-chance, stop-at-nothing bid for the presidency. Clearly he wants it badly, and he'll do whatever he thinks it takes. Hell, he has even welcomed the masterminds of the 2000 smear campaign against him.

None of this surprises me, not anymore. I knew McCain had no shame whatsoever since February. That's when he voted against a bill that would require American interrogators (including those in the CIA) to follow the Amry Field Manual. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discussed this at the time:

As late as November 2007 McCain argued that torture is a "defining issue" for America and that the Army Field Manual should be standard. So much for that.

McCain has abandoned so many "defining issues" that one wonders if anything is sacred. I seems like the maverick image is nothing more than a convenient facade, cast aside once it outlived its usefulness.