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A.M. Dagoski: Pundit, Elitist, Knowitall, Librarian
Delivering Sound, Fury and a side of hot wings to your door since 1968 |
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| 2009-07-14 22:09 |
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I need to shower with bleach. I just joined Facebook and I feel dirty somehow. This travesty was brought to you by the need for employers and schools to be able to read your fraceboook profile and see those pictures you dancing naked with only a Chihuahua covering your dignity at that wild beach party in Baja. Well, I'll not give them satisfaction. I'm running a clean facebook here. My employers and universities won't what a debauched bastard I am until they hire me!
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Remember a while back when I posted about the ins and outs of finding Social Security Numbers in a batch of documents? Yeah, well it it got even more complicated than I'd ever hoped it would be. One of the problems I had was that the federal bureaucracy liked the Social Security Numbers so much that they used similar numbers everywhere. We're got bids, proposals, orders, comments, invoices, part numbers, bulletins and Federal Cadaver Repurposing Routing Numbers(for the secret zombie Army program) all using the SSN format of 3 digits-two digits-four digits. How do you tell them apart? There are some basic rules for making SSNs which lead to regular expression that will pick out valid SSNs: \b([0-6]\d{2}|7[0-6]\d|77[0-2])([\,\-]?)(\d{2})\2(\d{4})\b. However, this cannot distinguish between things that happen to look like valid SSNs but patently are not. Instead, you have to look at the local context in which the string appears. There are words on either side which tell a human what this number is. In theory, you could write a negative look forward regular expression that would weed these out using a word list. The only problem is that these contextual cues do not appear in the same place every time. Because you never know quite where these cue words appear, your regular expression can never quite zero in on the pattern. What can you do if you need to redact these numbers for privacy in a document archive?
You're forced to do a proximity search. Proximity searching is something we may be familiar with in our everyday lives from Google or databases of articles such as ProQuest or ISI. We never really think about what goes into this all the while griping about advertising polluting our web space or paying for access. There's a reason why all of these services have to earn their keep. Writing up Proximity Searches is complicated and involves several labor intensive steps before you even get to the search. You have to created Inverted Files, also called Inverted Indexes. These are essentially concordances for the electronic age. And Inverted File contains a list of all the distinct words and the character offset or word position for each occurrence. The first step to generating these is to tokenize the input text. That means breaking up the entire document into single words. For my purposes, I also had to accurately record their positions as characters and words. From there, I read the file and turned the distinct words and their positions into an Associative Array or Hash. Turns out Hashes are ideally suited for this task. Once a word goes in, you have key to refer its list of positions and you don't have to loop through the more than once. And you can simply output the hash into a text file. The final structure resembles a database in many ways.
That's where I am today. I have my nice new concordance of the government documents. I have also spent some time looking at candidate matches and have developed a vocabulary to support or reject the assertion that string is a Social Security Number. However, in developing my vocabulary, I realized I could have done this in a day or so by simply presenting candidate matches to a human to who would tell the program whether or not to go ahead and redact the string. So why I have I gone to all this work? Well, I'm learning how do data mining which will be useful in my PhD program if I get in and am allowed to do the research I want to do. Secondly, I can now tell employers like ProQuest I know their business. Third, I have the beginnings of a broader system for deciphering documents using cues from their organizations culture. I can also make a useful corpus of human judgments vs machine judgments. Also, once I have the system working for the subset of files I was intially asked to redact, I can attack the whole archive which is pretty huge.
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There are times when I fear the Internet has been tamed. I guess I thought things went downhill when ESPN showed up on the net. I despaired last year during my ethics class when I realized that all the ethical problems of the net centered around money. I knew the net would never be strange again. However, my fears were unjustified. Just when you thought the Net was safe for your parents, along comes this guy with the weirdest CGI short films you've ever seen. They're not really safe work though not for nudity. They're NSFW on a conceptual level and that's what makes them pretty cool in my opinion. The video below typifies this guy's work. I am somewhat tempted to see see if I can get the scholars at Gallaudet University to include some of these in their video corpus of ASL. Not that they'd even consider it, but it'd be hilarious to watch their heads explode upon viewing these things.
Chalk this up to my fascination with what scholars call outsider art; art done by people who are not certified by the established institutions as artists. I love this kind of thing because such people are driven by very powerful impulses that sometimes border on shamanic possession. There's a museum dedicated to outsider art somewhere out near Santa Fe, if I remember it right. I remember the exhibits clearly, but I'm fuzzy on which New Mexico city we were in at the time. The experience was intense and I couldn't get many of the pieces out of my head for months.
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Or at least ride safely in it. Headlights get half the job done, but I've had more close calls with drivers who approach from behind. Without a tail light you're close to invisible, and even a good one fails to clearly reveal your outline to drivers. The result is that you get inattentive or ignorant drivers passing way to close or merging into you. Most drivers are neither idiots or mean, they just don't clearly know the boundaries cyclists need or even clearly see the rider's extent. There's a new device that solves these problems by projecting lane markers on the ground of either side of a bike using solid state lasers. It's not yet available, but looks like the inventors are pretty late in the development cycle and it should come to market soon. I'd love to get one of these in time for the change back to standard time.
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Yeah, we know we'll never wind up sitting across from Terri Gross, Public Radio's foremost dominatrix. However, we can do the next best thing and ask each other embarrassing questions.
The problem with Livejournal is that we all think we are so close, but really, we know nothing about each other. Hence, I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ (if you want to) and find out what people don’t know about you.
I may have some interesting stuff later this week. I've been doing some spreadsheet calculations on the consumer's costs and benefits for replacing common disposable items for durable or at least reusable ones. If I can manage, I'm going to do some life cycle analysis and calculate the tax burden of disposable consumer goods. Eco-partisans harp on the save the earth aspect, well they should, but they tend not to make an economic case for using such things. That argument always seems to come somewhere near the bottom. I contend that consumers can realize real savings pretty quickly from going reusable. I further believe that the tax/government debt burden poses a real economic problem. We'll see whether the numbers support my hypotheses. There's a further wrinkle that comes in when you analyze employment supported through constantly manufacturing single use goods. What does society do with people displaced by sustainable practices. This is an extension of a basic conundrum I see in the world, namely that, as populations increase, the value of things that humans need outstrips the value that human labor supplies especially when technology automates production. This problem demonstrates once again why economics is the Dismal Science. The solution to this problem involves estimating the value of a human being in terms of commodity inputs. Or, phrased another, given that currency provides a metric for labor, does the labor needed to support any given individual equal the labor an individual can supply. These are nasty questions. They are also, primitive, tribal questions. In the past, tribes answered this question by splitting and driving off individuals deemed of little value or even by the murder of such individuals. Nation States appear to solve this dilemma through war.
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Normally spam amuses, occasionally annoys, but rarely does it get me frothing mad. I got one entitled 'More power for your spaceship'. This had me excited. My spaceship has been blighting the apartment complex's parking lot for a couple of years now. Last flight test, all I could manage was the near mesosphere. No where near true space. I just needed a better power source to increase the heating in the ramjet modules and something that would get some bowshock fusion going in the plasma conduits so I could do the Moon-Mars circuit in a weekend. As you can imagine, that spam really had me excited. I was hoping for nano tech ultra caps that could store a few dozen farads to power the lasers. Or maybe it would advertise a baby Tokomak fusion core. But, nooo, the spam was just another penis enhancement ad. Like I need that. I put the long in schlong after all.
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Big changes are coming up in the dagoski household. Not only is Michelle heading to the midwest for a spell, but I'm shaking things up here in Philly. My 1999 Saturn wagon is due to an inspection which it will certainly fail. I'm not going renew my registration for the thing. I'm going to junk it and do without a car. I added up the costs and decided that car ownership is too expensive in this part of the world. Instead, I'm opting for Philly CarShare. It requires a bit of forethought, but when the cost of sharing is $150 per year plus around six bucks per hour of actual usage, it's worth it. I spend close to $1600 to insure a ten year old POS. As if that weren't enough, every six months, I'm droping something like $600 in repairs. Hell, past few times the charge was closer to $800 just to do the minimum fix. Nope, it's definitely time to go to the alternatives. With the money saved in operating my own car, i can get a new touring bike, front panniers, and the good ones too, and some top of the line rain gear. And I'll still have money left over. One thing I'll need to do though, is have on hand emergency cab fare sufficient to get to the vet in an emergency.
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If you want to become a Regular Expression Kung-Fu Badass, take a a Federal Government archive of legal cases and scrub the Social Security Numbers out for privacy protection. That's hard for a number of reasons. You might be tempted to do use something like $Foo =~ s/\d{3}\-\d{2}\-\d{4}. Three digits dash, two digits, dash and four digits. That will find valid SSNs, but it will also find invalid ones as well. The key to spotting a valid SSN is in knowing that the first three numbers range from 000 to 772. With that in mind, the regex becomes something like $Foo =~ s/\b([0-6]\d{2}|7[0-6]\d|77[0-2])(\-)\d{2}(\-)\d{4}\b/ XXX\-XX\-XXXX/g. What's going here? The \b tells the expression to start at the word boundary. Next, the first pattern simply constrains the range of each of the first three digits. The first single digit ranges from 0-6 and 7 followed by another 0-6. The last pattern in this triad is 77 followed by 0-2. This amounts to three distinct sub expressions needed to cover the permutations. From there, it's just two digits, dash, four digits up to the word boundary. The word boundaries are important. There are longer numbers that contain valid, delimited SSN like fragments. Stenographers throw another twist at you, sometimes they use commas to delimit SSNs. The regex becomes something like s/\b([0-6]\d{2}|7[0-6]\d|77[0-2])(\-|\,)\d{2}(\-|\,)\d{4}\b/ XXX\-XX\-XXXX/g.
You might think that you're set, but the bureacracy, especially the military bureacracy throws you one more curve. The dash delimited 324 pattern worked so well for the Social Security Adminstration that bureacrats all over the government used it for just about everything else. However, bureaucrats are detail oriented obsessive compulsive types so they always tell you what the number is. That means you can use a proximity elimination scheme to weed out the inappropiate numbers. There are a lot of word cues which might tell you what you're dealing with. When a bureaucrat actually states thats that a number is an SSN, they begin with SSN, ,SSAN, Social Security Number, or even Social Security Administration Number. Anything else begins with a "No.", "NO.", "no.", "Nos.", "nos.", or even "NOS.". That means you can eliminate the vast majority with conditonal logic and $Foo =~ /\b(N|n)(O|o)(s\b|\b)/g. The only problem is that you remove the majority, not all of the SSN look alikes. For the rest, you need a prohibited vocabulary list and some sort of logic for proximity. Fortunately, the line length of my documents are so short that if a prohibited word appears anywhere on the line, I can reject it.
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Today is not good for me. I made the mistake of listening to conservative Christians crow about the court upholding California's Prop 8. So this scumbag pastor is going on about how evil gays are and how nice and wonder good Christian menfolk like him are and I find myself just wanting to put my fist through a wall. He's talking all this talk about how anti family the other side is while his side has so totally sodomized the economy that Michelle and I have to live in two entirely different regions of the nation for the foreseeable future. Given my need for benefits, the ridiculously low pay starting PhD scientists make and the sheer dearth of jobs anywhere at all, we can't make it in the same city or region together. If there were a National Health System, we could tighten belts and do without on a great many things until I could find or make something happen in Toledo, but we don't have that. No, nationalized healthcare is the first step to creating a godless, atheist Socialism. Taxes would be high, never mind that putting a spouse on health plan is a tax. Never mind that we still need to make 401K payments for a retirement that we may never get. It's just infuriating. Michelle and I did everything right. We've been responsible pretty most of our lives even in our childhoods. We took care of people when we got a chance give, we lived up to all our adult duties, got educations, held down jobs, saved, lived below our means and all of it. And none of that, none of it, lets us live together as married couple in the same place. The system that 'good Christian men' created pulled our family apart in this time of Family Values. This is only temporary. The hardship can be endured. Our marriage is made of stronger stuff than this. However, and pay attention, folks, we are the lucky ones. We both have jobs, nay careers, and we have the privilege of bitching about having a long distance relationship. Others have not been so lucky. Whose fault was this? Was it Gay people wanting to have the same legal standing for taxes, end of life care, and all the other legal benefits that Michelle and I have in the legal system? Or, just maybe, was it a cabal of corrupt business men who like to lie about what's actually written in the Wealth of Nations? Was it the fault of corrupt souless evangelicals who wanted government grrant the freedom to act on their hatred? I'm going with the last two because I have seldom seen either of those two come out to support education, to make sure the people are healthy or any thing else, but give them a group to hate, a foreign national to massacre and they they open up those wallets and savings accounts.
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Check it out! The story of Siracha Sauce. It's ain't Thai, it's yet another American invention created by inspired immigrants.
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I've been off the air for a bit. In part I've been driven nuts by work and Michelle's impending graduation. Loads of stress here. Then there's the fact that my latest asthma medication seems to have been messing with my energy a bit. Zyflo sounds like it should be an ass kicking drug when it comes to inflammation, but it basically just kicked my ass. Nor did it seem to have an especially profound effect on my asthma. Getting that infected tooth out seems to have really helped things more than any one drug has. So anyway, zyflo seemed to have made me somewhat groggy most of the time and really sapped my interest in doing things. Dunno if this is what's behind the grogginess, but the drug has a strong impact on caffeine metabolism. Anyhow, it was definitely worth trying out. I bet this one of those drugs that works very differently from one individual to the next. Your mileage will probably differ, so don't dismiss just on my experience. Remember, I have cozy little ranch house in an exclusive neighborhood at the very far end of the Bell Curve. I have the GURPS disadvange, Weirdness Maget: strange otherworldly beings drop by for tea and the world's only talking dog comes to me with his problems.
I've also been doing a lot of reading as I knuckle down to work on my PhD application. I'm trying to figure out just what it is that I want to study. I've been reading books on Social History, Economics, Political Science, Social Philosophy and Erotica. Well, that last is totally unrelated at the moment, but give me a couple of weeks and I'll unify Public Political Theory with a theoretical framework that descibes the construction of the private self. I'm reading all this to essentially figure out how to study and research the Social Life of Information and figure out how to study the diffusion of ideas throughout a society and how that society collectively comes to conclusions about things; how it forms norms and how certain ideas become part of our cultural and intellectual landscape. Throughout this all, I've been wondering just what to call this unruly discipline I thought I was inventing. Turns out that there's been a wide variety of social researchers going at all this for a while now. None of them, however, have come up with a catchy name that describes what they're doing. Turns out that Science Fiction has come to our rescue. I want to study and apply Asimov's Psychohistory! Overly dramatic, but better than Karmatron Dynamics. Especially since I can't eat Flan due to my egg allergies.
And work, as usual, gets stranger, more stressful and a bit more wonderful. Turns out that the project I'm being asked to help with is an effort to develop an Oxford Arabic dictionary. The first step is to develop a historically annotated concordance from Mohamed to the present day. The Zero step is to digitize by hand all of the significant literary, philosophical, scientific and mathematical works in the language and gather them into a series of digital library collections. All of this is part of an effort to build the infrastructure needed to develop a standard pedagogy for teaching Arabic literacy. Why's this important you might ask? Illiteracy in the Arab world both creates persistent poverty and persistent fanaticism. Spreading literacy in the region is a big step towards stabilizing the region.
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Seasonal bronchitis aside, the first week of cycling has gone pretty well. I'm still in shape after the winter and the bikes are freshly tuned. The wife's still game for two wheeled commuting since she has new panniers to try out. Still a bit cool, but now that my lung crud is dissipating, that's no big deal. Some of the people who read this blog might want to get started in bike commuting as spring becomes a reality. As it happens, I developed a web site aimed at the cycling novice last year for my web design class. It's still up on the server and I'm going to revamp it a bit this season. Check it out over at A to B, Getting there by bike. I have to update quite a few links and fix some typos, but the site is still quite usable. I'm going to get some better bike pictures in there including one of Michelle's bike. We got her a general purpose commuter/fitness bike last year and it's just the thing a recreational and commuting novice needs to get them started and keep them going. I'm also going to do a section on the newer breed of "bike trucks" that I've been seeing. What do I mean by bike truck? Check these out:
- Kona Ute: Have surfboard, will travel, dude.
- Surly Big Dummy: High priced urban utility rider
- Barge Bike: This is the truck that my local bike shop uses for schleping their stuff from warehouse to shop.
- Burly Bike Trailer: Not a bike, but a sturdy trailer for any bike. This is an accessory, I'm thinking about getting. It looks big enough to hold two cat carriers for that trip to vet.
I hope y'all find what's left of my web design project useful(you'll even see my real name revealed). I'm going to fix it up and find a backup server to use when my alumni account goes bust. Aside from that, is there anything else y'all might want to read about cycling wise? I might make some time to go hang out at Neighborhood Bike Works to see what they have to say about restoring truly old bikes on the cheap for commuting. I turned over my crashed road racer to them and saw it on the street after my shoulder healed. They did a great job reincarnating that thing. I might also have to write up something fair about single gear bikes. I've, perhaps, not been fair about them in my judgment. I just see them as a post modern deconstructionist fad enjoyed by urban hipsters. On the other hand, there's not a lot that can go wrong with them. So, I should look into them a bit more. I'll definitely want to have a section about the Bike Trucks. There are some truly imaginative designs in this area and not small amount of tinkering in basement workshops.
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Well, the wife and I did our bit to keep the economy going. I got new boots. First new shoes in like over two years. These boots are cool. They're basically reproductions of the work boots that men in trades of various sorts wore from about 1930 to 1950. They're handmade with cork and rubber soles. They can be resoled and that's why I shelled out the green for them. I am so sick of footwear whose soles wear out in a year or so while the uppers look virtually unchanged. Most shoes in this day and age cannot be resoled, so you have throw out what should still be a good shoe. Not these. I can turn them into what would essentially new boots in a couple of years. And I can do it for less than half the original price and use less than half the material of a new boot. This is the kind of thing we need look at as we hit resource shortages. Forget the high tech stuff. That needs to mature even if it will usher in a new age of prosperity. In the meantime, we can learn a lot from the way things used to be done. I'm sort of a fan of antique footwear. My feet are hard to fit and the shoes from previous eras seem to work better for me. I used to comb the thrift stores back in LA for shoes from the World War II period. Not only did they look fantastic with a little polish, but they fit and the wore very well. Back then, shoes really were an investment, but they kept you walking for years.
Then we went to the bike store and blew a lot of tax return money on a new set of panniers for Michelle. Now that she's invested in cycling she's about due for a good set of bike luggage. Looks like we're both on two wheels starting monday. The weather's really warming up here. I also test rode a really nice touring bike which I will probably purchase in a couple of months. Michelle will be heading out to Toledo following her defense and we're going to have a long distance marriage for about a year. After that, it'll likely be a commuting marriage as I'll, hopefully, be working on my own PhD at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Part of the fall out of this decision is that Michelle will be taking the car. Philly has relatively decent mass transit while Toledo probably does not and what there is will be under budget pressure. Philly was down far enough that the recession hasn't really hit too hard yet. So, SEPTA appears to holding its funding. Between a bike that can mount front panniers, the bus,and, possibly, Philly Car Share. I should have all my transportation needs served for a fraction of the price of a new or decent used car. Provided no one scoops me on it, I'm going to pick up a 2008 Kona Sutra from the local bike store. Apparently, despite it being a superb touring bike, the touring crowd hated it because it was painted in nice, bright colors. Seriously. That crowds likes their bikes in colors like pea green, gray, tan and olive green. The store has it massively discounted because they just can't move the thing. If someone does scoop me, I'm going to grab a Surly Long Haul Trucker(the bike, not a truck driver on I 76) which is also an awesome bike. I'll shell out twelve hundred or more for that once once I throw in the price of racks. Still with decent used cars starting at five grand, it's still a steal. I figure, I bungie the carrier with the heavy, conservatve cat to the rear rack and bungie the carrier with light, adventurous cat to the front and I'm good for the trip to the vet. Then again, this might be a job for Philly Car Share.
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Man, I love spam sometimes. Not only is it good with with collard greens, okra and a touch of wasabi, but it sometimes approaches the level of literature. That's today's fun. SPAM stream of consciousness fiction. Here's how it works: Open up the message part of the spam in your mailbox and post your favorite line(or two) behind the ones I'm posting as a seed. The next person takes what the previous contributors have posted and adds their favorites and so on. Add whatever you need to make it parse correctly as a sentence, but try keep it as close to what hit your inbox. Participate as much as you like. I'm starting with:
She carefully sterilizes the stunngily lagomorphous chauffeur. He quivered in his unbleached ligonberry bootees, but everything was nonetheless nominal. There ya go. See what y'all can do with that.
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Man, it's been a day. First off, this month's One Virus, One Philadelphia is influenza. I've got, Michelle's got it. every third person on the street has it. Then, today was a day for Philadelphia drivers to play chicken with a POed emigre from Civilization. I swear, every other block, some idiot decided they couldn't wait behind a safe driver and charged past them in my lane. If I can find any surplus Mk 40 grenade launchers, the Saturn is going to have some improvements made to it. I don't even need turret, just a centerline hard point and a magazine of DP rounds and I'm set.
The real horror, however, was waiting for me at Reading Terminal Market. This weekend is the first weekend of Flower Show. Phear it. This even brings the masses from the suburbs over the river. It's bad enough that they take up my parking spaces, but they don't stop there. They should be quarantined in the Convention Center, but the health department refuses to see them for the health hazard they are and they let them spread to the market to gawk at the Amish. Or rather they gawk at the people the Amish hire to hawk their wares in the Pennsylvania Dutch ghetto of the market. I shop in another section entirely, but I still have to endure hordes of Ugly Americans strolling past and saying things like "Oh, look, how quaint. It's food, dear! Don't these people eat Soylent Green like we do in Cherry Hill?" "Now, honey, don't stare, they have different customs than we do."
And that was just the cheese shop. By the time I push through to the produce stand, I'm confronted with the elite shock troops of Cherry Hill: The middle aged Jersey Girls. Good, Gawd... You think they only make these in limited numbers in some West Coast FX shop, but no, they are quite real. They're plump, they wear exepnsive clothes that would fit their college aged daughters better and the hair... Aquanet is not sufficient to totally deny the reign of gravity. There has to be a shop that sells alien technology somehwere in Pennsauken. The hair floats in tangled halo, yellowish gray halo about bronzed, fat faces covered in livid reds and cobalt blues. They honk and scronk in gravelly nicotine tuned voices, extoling the virtues of produce. Produce of which they are almost completely ignorant of. One such went something like this:
"Oh, maye Gawd. Would yoo lawk at all da green?! Just lawk at these Belgian Endives! Ya can't get endives like this back haome."
This was in front of the Broccoli Rabe. I hit my limit and told the woman that this was produce stand and not a fucking tourist attraction and belgian endives were on the other side of the stand. Just as I shooed off one bunch of Jerseyites and started loading up on bell peppers, a fraggin flash bang grenade went off in my face. Only it wasn't a stun munition, it was some TravelSmith blazer clad yuppy holding a camera rig that costs two years of my salary. And, he'd decided my nose hairs were just sooo pictureesque. Using a flash that's sold with welder's goggles probably means the shot was overexposed, but it's still really crass to just take extreme closeups of some random guy doing his shopping. I just about swung on the guy but a one of the Mexican grocers at the stand stopped me in time.
"Man, you can't hit these people. We need 'em. Flower Show is when make our bonuses, man. I stilll got two payments on my beemer, so don't make a scene."
So, that's why we put up with Flower Show and the invaders from Jersey. They doing enough advernture tourism grocery shopping to keep our favorite merchants in the black and pay bonuses to their employees. I swear, each one of the tourists bought exactly the same thing: One sock of garlic and one random leafy green. They all left clutching them to their chests. This leaves with the impression that South Jersey has no vendor of garlic or iceberg lettuce. It must be an unholy land indeed.
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Okay, I just could not resist this time. Take that book nearest you. Not the cool book, not the one that shows you read something other than Modern Urban Fantasy aka Hot Elf on Vampire on Werewolf Pron. No, grab the book that's actually right at your hand. Open it, brothers and sisters, to page 56, Verse 5 of Cornithians vs Lakers. Or rather, turn to page 56 and quote the fifth actual sentence here.
However, because collective phenomena are the outcome of myriad individual decisions, knowing what motivates people to act one way or another is a stepping stone in any satisfactory explanation(of aggregate behavior).
The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms by Cristina Bicchieri. This is a book I just started reading as part of my reading on sociology and information diffusion. It's a work that exemplifies the emerging field of Computational Sociology. All the other times this meme's come, I've had that book of Hot Elf on Vampire on Werewolf Pron a little too close on hand for comfort. In other news, I'm starting to really get into writing that Big Concept sci-fi story I came up with a while ago. It's weird and getting weirder all the time.
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Next time, some "expert" goes on about how information is not a physical quantity and can be moved around teh intarwebs without effort, please bonk him over the head with sand filled bag, taze or otherwise stun him/her. Then ship the pundit to me COD at the Linguistic Salt Mines. I will put him or her to work organizing my hard drive cabinet. I just shuffled around something in the neighborhood of 40 TB of information and my muscles are sore! 40 1TB hard drives don't weigh so much individually, but they add up. I'll be glad when these things leave my cabinet for good.
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Lately at the gym, the Plant Guys have been joined by another equally impressive group. For those don't know, I work out noonish at the University of Pennsylvania gym and there's this group of hugely muscled West Philly guys who work out around the same time. They really stand out against a backdrop of very privileged students at this private and very elite university. I initially guessed that they worked in Penn's physical plant. I was wrong, but they all look like pipefitters. In any case, they do physical labor of various kinds to keep the university running. And then they go work out for a few hours. Add the clear previous history gangs and prison time stenciled on their bodies in cheap ink to their huge muscles and theyr'e a pretty intimidating presence. They're all nice though. Whatever happenened is whatever happened and that's all in the past. Which is why their number includes a guy with old skinhead tattoos. Of late another group of powerfully muscled cheerful guys with positive attitudes and scary tattoos have shown up. They're not Plant Guys. They do, however, sport shirts with captions like "Wheels of Soul". Yes folks, I pump iron with the Black Bikers from Hell. Except they're all middle aged or older now. Noon at the Penn gym is an ever more interesting study in contrasts.
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