Date: 2009-11-17 20:01 Subject: MI Folks, Detroit Advice Needed Security: Public

There's a job at Wayne State that's a real good match with my experience, education and interests. There's another at EMU I could do if I could convince the hiring people of that fact. I'd prefer that one, natch. However, the Wayne State U job is actually better. Aside from that fact that it's in Detroit, that is. Question for David and the other folks who know the area: Would I be able to live in cycling distance of the job without having to weld a hard point onto my handlebars and mount an FN MAG? And, which is worse in that regard, crime or traffic? Also, what's in the general of area of Wayne State that makes living and working there worthwhile? I simply don't know the area at all.

Date: 2009-11-17 16:27 Subject: Extreme Cataloging: shelving the works of the Old Ones Security: Public

Whenever I want to test some sort of cataloging system or scheme(mine or someone else's), I always catalog the Necronomicron. Since I don't quite know the Library of Congress Classification System well enough to shelve it off the top of my head, I figured I'd turn to OCLC's Worldcat to see if there's a catalog record in some other library. Sure enough, I turned one up: Necronomicron: 18 aphorisms for clarinet and piano.

Date: 2009-11-11 16:11 Subject: I heart University of California Security: Public

You can't really make this up:  UC Santa Cruz is advertising for a Grateful Dead Archivist.  Were not for my pathological dislike for the group, I'd apply for this one myself.  Then again, it's a good job at UC Santa Cruz.  Surfing, sun, good biking.  Yeah, I can put up with documents smelling of weed for that.

Date: 2009-11-08 15:00 Subject: An Important Milestone Security: Public

Whew.  I just submitted my very first, first author academic paper.  And it ain't just for some second tier journal either.  It's for a major academic conference.  I'm going to go lay down for a bit.

Date: 2009-11-07 11:46 Subject: Revisions, will they ever stop? Security: Public

I'm busy, very busy today trying to make a submission deadline.  I have about a dozen politically motivated revisions for my abstract that I have to include before midnight GMT Nov. 8.  And this is just for the abstract.  I'm having bad feelings about what they'll make me put in the actual paper.  And, when I say politics, I mean International Politics and not just organization politics.  Under no circumstances should I be distracted by internet memes, funny videos, web comics or porn in my inbox.  I'm serious.  No distractions.

EDIT:  Now that wasn't so bad, was it?  I removed two controversial sentences that I simply could not support.  I murdered one darling that didn't contribute anything substantive.  And, most importantly, I did a lit search to see what our overseas colleagues are doing and found two papers that I need to read and cite(not to mention learn from as I redesign our catalog).  What I meant earlier by international politics is kind of interesting.  This is a simple paper on Information Retrieval Systems, specifically Catalog systems.  The only problem is that  catalogs are no longer simple.  Thanks to OCLC's WorldCat and the Open Archives Initiative, catalogs have to work together nowadays.  That requires a standard descriptive and classification language that use fairly standard controlled vocabularies.  Up til now everyone with idiosyncratic holdings like the Linguistic Salt Mines has kind of done their own thing.  Now, all of a sudden, we have to rediscover the Universal Language of Mankind that was destroyed when God cast down the Tower of Babel.  It appears as if that language is a dialect of Dublin Core.  Anyway, in writing my abstract, I compiled a whole mess of solid Library and Information Science resources based in the US experience.  The problem is that I am presenting to an international audience in Malta this Spring.  The common criticism leveled against the US in all things is that we are too parochial; we pay attention only to ourselves.  Frankly, its an easy to mistake to fall into if you're a US scholar.  In a good many fields, you never need to go beyond the borders of the US.  Library and Information Science definitely falls into this category.  Because they are so dependent on language, practices vary widely based on the nature of the languages of the communities served.  For instance, the English Speaking world relies on the Anglo-American Catalog Rules to describe and classify holdings.  Understanding these practices will do you well in libraries from New Zealand to Scotland.  They will avail you naught in Germany or India among other places.  Strangely enough, knowing the Library of Congress Classification system will let you navigate libraries in Egypt, so you never know for sure.  Anyway, the oyabun of oyabun at work told me that I had to get some international references in my paper or it might be rejected out of hand.  Good thing too, because two other major Human Language Technology associations are struggling with the same things I am and they have some good lessons for me.  Back to politics here, this paper is caught up in worldwide perceptions of US cultural hegemony and disdain for said dominance.  I have to give credit where credit is due or I find myself alienated from the five or six other people in the world who do what I do.

Date: 2009-11-05 20:55 Subject: Fame at Last? Security: Public

So today as I was hurtling towards work, this slightly crazed guy standing in the bike path with an old, shitty bike at his side flagged me down.  I thought he was a newcomer to bike commuting who had pulled the rust heap out of his basement in a desperate attempt to avoid transit strike.  This by the way, is a really good idea right now.  If you drive, you suddenly have like 900,000 additional people in cars to contend with that you normally don't see.  Traffic volume is incredible.  And, believe me, you don't see them getting anywhere.  So pulling down that bike that's been hanging in your garage's rafters is good alternative.  Just take it down to the shop before you take your first ride.  Anyway, there was this guy with a crappy bike flagging me down.  I figured he had a flat or some other mechanical problem.  I also figured I would ride his rescue.  Turned out he was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  He was stopping cyclists, or trying to, I was the first one who stopped.  Anyway, he was trying to interview new riders to see if they had taken to their bikes in response to the strike.  I wasn't what he was looking for.  I figured I'd been commuting by bike for 22-23 years.  That raised his eyebrows.  Told him I started back in LA when I was a teen and I was  too poor to own a car.  Another lift of eyebrows.   A teen too poor to afford a car?  In LA?  Told him I rode until it snowed.  That led to the inevitable question:  Once you got a chance to choose to travel by bike, why did you choose that?

So, why did I choose the cycling life?  The answer I gave was that, at college, all the really cute girls rode mountain bikes.   That was all the motivation I needed.  The answer was flip and not especially true.  I've been trying to think about why and how I got into this.  I'll have to blame it on my roommates.  One was an amateur racer and the other had done a tour from Seattle to Tiajuana.  They always seemed to have fun and, Dave, the touring cyclist, always used his bike for errands and stuff.  So I went out and got a a mountain bike to have fun and to have transportation.  I think I got hooked on the first group bike ride.  That was a disaster in one sense, an epic adventure in another sense.  We rode up to Boston Harbor(not actually in Boston) from Olympia and that part was really fun because Dave took us through all the back roads he knew.  On the way back, though, our friend, Charles, said "Guys I know a shortcut!"  The way that shortcut went down is that we went careening through the bush on periodically crossing roads.  We hit fence that turned out to be perimeter of Fort Lewis.  We wound up hugging the fence and riding around a very large part of that perimeter.  We finally found some MPs on the other side of the fence.  They told us we were only eight so miles from a road that would take us...  Well, it would take us someplace and that was an improvement because we were somewhere between nowhere and Bumphuq Egypt.  We rolled in around 10:00 PM.  We had left sometime around 6:00 AM that morning and had logged well over a hundred miles thanks to Charles' shortcut.  I could barely move, but there was a dance in the rec center of the college and I had to go to that.  Next morning, I woke with no pain and realized I had to do this again.

For the four years of college, my two wheeled buddy was ready for grocery runs, dates and epic adventures.  BTW, the girl who will go on a date with you on mountain bikes is  a keeper.  Wish I'd known that back in the day.  We'd do rides in the ravines behind the college and find all kinds of weird stuff.  We'd do road rides up and down some of the extinct volcanoes that littered our corner of the Northwest.  We'd head out to old logging areas for some of the roughest singletrack you'd ever ride.  Studebaker Hill was what separated the pros from the pretenders.  It was a logging road that had washed out almost vertical.  Down a the bottom was a wrecked Studebaker truck that had been down there since the 1940s.  If actually got the cajones to take on that hill, you were rewarded by a skeleton staring back at your from the wreck with empty eye sockets.  It was a plastic doctor's skeleton that someone had propped up in the old truck as a joke.

Different place, different bike.  I had a swing shift job at a NOC.  I used to ride very late into the year and start up again very early.  This was Michigan and, some years, I could ride well into December and start back up again late Feb.  It all depended on how regular the snowfall was.  Sometimes we'd have a dry week and the sidewalks would get completely clean.  I was on my bike those days even if it was five below.  One such night I headed out from the NOC under a full moon.  The moonlight hit the snow crystals just so and the ground just glowed, lighting up my path with a wonderful pearly glow.  All of a sudden a deer came crashing out of the brush beside me.  We traveled parallel for quite a while matching pace.  Then, right around around Huron High the deer looked at me and said 'Let's put the pedal to the metal, and see what you've got'.  The deer and I did standing quarter mile all out under a faerie light ending in a draw over on Huron Parkway where I had to turn homeward.  

That's why I ride.  You can't really fit that into a report's notepad at 7:30 in the morning with the banality of a transit strike looking large over your shoulder.  

Date: 2009-10-24 12:47 Subject: Addiction is a terrible thing... Security: Public

I think I need to send my little grey cat to a 12 step program for feathers.  I borrowed this feather toy from a neighbor to see how he liked it.  I made the mistake of leaving it out one night.  He snapped it in two, but I kept the feather end for him.  He plays with it incessantly and gets terribly anxious when I put it up.  He'll paw at the drawer I keep it in for hours until I pull it out.

Date: 2009-10-24 02:54 Subject: How Melville Got his Groove On: The Politics of Information and Systems Security: Public Mood: insomniac Tags: info science, information politics

In an earlier post, I mentioned that information has politics. As an Information Scientist or Male Librarian, this seems a no brainer, but for most people the two words don't quite seem to go together. Note how my avowed identity there is steeped in cultural politics. That oughta tell you something. Our words, our nouns of the moment are fraught with politics. Hockey Mom didn't used to have a political connotation, but it sure does now. That term is now caught up in a political debate about identity and sovereignty and the everyday lives of US citizens take on a political character we haven't known before. That political character was there, of course, but most of us failed to notice even while Karl Rove was building a mighty Direct Market Machine designed to change our votes. Just in my flailing attempt to introduce the concept of Information Politics, I have demonstrated the politics of language. And language transmits information. If language has fallen in with its disreputable fellow noun, politics, then information will probably jump off the same cliff as its friends do. Before I dive into this more, let's work up some definitions.

( Read more... )

Date: 2009-10-21 23:01 Subject: Delta V becomes V or How many linguistis does it take screw up a catalog? Security: Public Music: DJ Pascal Buddhatomic

I was getting up to slow start on my paper.  I had just been chugging along by writing up a dull reprise of the history of catalogs.  Then an insight hit me and hard.  I realized that controlled vocabularies and classification schemes were constructed languages designed to unambiguously describe the content of documents and find them.  So I went through and read a couple of classics on cataloging to see if there was any evidence for this .  Lo and behold, Saint Svenonious actually used the term Descriptive Language and Subject Language.  She also developed more general terms of Work Languages and Bibliographic Languages.  The ISO standard for the construction of thesauri and controlled vocabularies also describes them as constructed languages. The literature in this area discusses grammars  vocabularies of retrieval and description all the way back to Panizzi and Cutter.  Heck, Cutter's seminal work on cataloging is even entitled Rules for  a Dictionary Catalog.  Cutter along with Dewey created modern catalogs as we would understand them in libraries.  All along, librarians and information scientists have been aware that their jargon went beyond a specialized professional pidgin and was moving along lines that would later produce computer languages.  

I have been fascinated by institutional procedures and non technological information systems ever since my first cataloging class and that interest only grown over time.  I'm interested in how our professional descriptive languages determine our perception of social reality.  This is the central issue described by Geoffrey Bowker in his book Sorting Things Out.  The answer certainly appears to be yes.  The other end of constructed languages is how they get constructed.  There is a politics to any controlled vocabulary and classification scheme.  The Dewey Decimal system definitely reflected the biases of its creators time and his class.  This aspect has been well documented in the literature.  What often does not get much attention is the force that technological systems exert on the development of descriptive languages.  A case in point is my own cataloging work.  I'm in the midst of developing a complete controlled vocabulary for describing publications and the organizational politics surrounding this is so well known that my boss and I are running an almost Nixonian campaign to force their adoption.  My subject language, the catalog ids, have so far slipped under the radar of those who would object because subject languages are arcane and because they don't describe.  They merely categorize and serve to point to the location of resources.  They're apolitical because, in modern electronic catalogs, call numbers and such are obscured by the user interface.  The system uses these identifiers to help a user obtain and find a resource, but the user no longer sees them.  A good case in point on this is that the customer service staff no longer has to ask me to produce things on media; they simply do a search on my inventory system and press submit.  They seldom see the catalog id, but my system uses that id to traverse our filesystem to find the resource and send it to the DVD replicators.  When I get a chance I'll add a keyword search to it and totally submerge the catalog id.    Anyhow, no one asks me how I developed my classification scheme.  All they know is that it works.  Our classification scheme sucks eggs.  It really does.  The system conveys very little aboutness or any given resource.  What it does tell you is who can use the resource and what went into it.  Two considerations went into the system.  The first was the precedent established back when my organization just needed a simple listing of the publication its inventory.  Decisions establish precedents.  Precedents become habits.  Habits become formal procedure.  Once that happens they have an inertia which makes change very difficult.  Catalog reach this stage only when they have a great number of records.  Thus, once the shortcomings are perceived its way too late to fix them.  Instead, you have to extend them.  You have to put ever more affixes on the end  of a catalog id to address current and future needs as well as ensure backwards compatibility.  The limitations of the technological system and institutional habit wind up determining both the grammar and the vocabulary of work languages, a subject language in my case.  Anyway, that's what my paper is going to be about in large part.

Date: 2009-10-20 21:19 Subject: Minor Disappointment of the Week(MDOTW): Rejected Titles Security: Public

Even worse than writing an academic paper is the job of find the right title for one.  My good pal, dspitzle came up with the coolest title for a paper I have yet seen:  "Baying at the Moon with the Linguistic Salt Mines: Building non-deranged catalogs from deranged holdings".  The bosses rejected this even though they loved it.   I am, however, going to use that title in the First Mondays version of the paper when I finish it.  That version will about dealing with legacy systems and the conceptual hacks catalogers have to make in order to extend their lifespan past what any sane programmer would expect.

Date: 2009-10-16 22:46 Subject: Colder 'n a well digger's left nipple and watertight as frog's behind Security: Public Tags: cycling, weatherproofing

Don't ask how I know how cold a well digger's nipple is...  Okay, I know one, a well digger that is. Let's call him Verne.  Verne is into alternative activities and he won't shut about them.  That's how I know.  Anyhow, I braved yesterday's rain and cold on my bike and found my waterproofing wanting.  First, it turns out that my Magic Sun pants are actually only waterproof rain pants.  That bummed me out because, until yesterday, every time I put them on to deal with rain, the sky magically cleared and the sun came out making them Magic Sun Pants.   Alas, I have to reject that hypothesis.  So anyway, the price of the pants was still worth it.  My legs stayed completely dry.  My feet were another story.  If you venture onto the roads late fall and early winter, you need to protect your feet.  Mine didn't get dangerously cold, but I received a warning.  For the most part, all a cyclist needs to do is keep his or her feet dry.  A pair of Goretex socks will do the job really nicely.   Neoprene overshoes also do the trick, but they're a pain to get on an off as I'm discovering.  Don't use neoprene socks, though.  They'll teach you new things about fungus.  Meanwhile, you'll also need to do some maintenance on that Gore-tex shell you use for your upper body.  They membrane is probably still just fine.  The nylon outer shell has probably lost its treatment.  This means that you'll be dry by the time you get home, but your jacket will have soaked through and will not dry overnight.  You might be tempted to chuck the jacket you spent a lot of money on, but hold up, there's a better way,  Your local outdoors store carries several brands of chemical treatments that'lll restore your expensive outerwear to its former glory.  I'm taking a break from treating my jacket with a combination of Tech Wash and Soft Proof.  These are but one pair of treatments that the local EMS sales dude swore by.  ReviveX also works pretty well from what I hear.  With a little luck, some work and small cash outlay, I'll be on the bike til the snow starts coming down.

Date: 2009-10-08 20:06 Subject: Reflecting on Martial Arts Training aka Wasting time when I should be studying statistics. Security: Public

I recently resumed my Karate training at a UPenn club that practices an offshoot of Shito-Ryu Karate.  Don't let all the names throw you.  When an unfamiliar Japanese word goes in front of Karate, it refers, usually, to the town where it originated.  Less often it denotes a phrase which the founder, or they guy we claim was the founder, thought described what he was teaching.  So you'll find names like Naha-Te or Shuri-Te.  Naha and Shuri are Okinawan towns.  Names like Goju-Ryu and Shorin-Ryu are descriptive and the 'ryu' means technique or school.  So Shorin-Ryu is the 'Small Forest' or, sometimes, 'Pine Forest' school.  Goju-Ryu means 'hard/soft technique'.  Shito-Ryu is a little bit of an oddball.  It represents an attempt by a master of Shuri-te to popularize Karate in Japan just like Funakoshi did with Shotokan.   Shotokan, by the way, means 'Pine Waves' and was the pen name that Geichin Funakoshi used in his writings.  So that's the mystery of the foreign names for martial arts; they're phrases which describe what's going on('hard soft technique', 'the philosophy of harmony' aka Aikido, 'the supple philosophy' aka Judo), names of the towns where they originated(Shuri, Naha, Tomari), or phrases that evoke the founder or founding locale(Shorin-Ryu, Shotokan). 

There's another bit of mystique that needs to be punctured and that's the distinction of the pajamas that martial artists wear.  In Japanese, the outfit is a gi.  That means something like 'work clothes' and that's exactly what they are.  Look in old photos of rural life in Japan.  What are the farmers wearing?  Something that looks a lot like what students wear in Karate or other Japanese arts.  The only difference is that their outfits are dyed in whatever color the owner liked, one that presumably wouldn't show dirt as much as white.  Gis are typically very utilitarian.  The expensive ones are made of canvas like cloth, durable stuff for sure.  Judo gis have a quilted stitching which prevents tears during throws.  Should you doubt the necessity of this, let me tell you about this judo seminar I once attended.  I don't study judo regularly, but enjoy going to seminars which present single techniques in depth.  Judo's fun, but I have other interests. I still need to get that Karate black belt and get back to aikido.  At this seminar, a couple of kung-fu students were there.  Kung-fu students go casual, they wear black pants and a school t-shirt for most occasions.  When it came time to pair up, one of the aikido students went to grips with a guy in a t-shirt.  He did a beautiful setup and was about to execute a terrific throw.  A loud ripping sound resounded through the dojo followed by a thud.  The ripping sound was the kung-fu student's shirt giving way and the thud was a very shocked aikido student hitting the ground with the remnants of his partner's shirt.  It was hilarious.  Almost as funny as the time the doddering old martial arts master threw me so hard that my feet hit the ceiling.  Anyway, those are the outfits.  Students make a lot of their belts when they shouldn't.  The belts that students of Japanese styles wear are not for their benefit or their pride.  They tell an instructor roughly where any given student is in the curriculum.  That lets the instructors give the student the proper instruction.  Most Okinawan and traditional Japanese schools only have a few colors, typically white, green, brown and black, sometimes with tags to indicate intermediate levels.  American associations have a rainbow of colors, but the meanings are usually the same. 

What have we learned so far?  First, the Japanese names aren't so different from what we'd come up with in English.  The outfits serve practical purposes and the belts serve as a sort of mnemonic for the instructor.  With very few exceptions, the Japanese martial arts approach the gentle art of butt kicking very pragmatically.  Just take a look at the basic movements of traditional karate:  The kicks go for the groin, the knee, the shin.  None of this movie style whirling stuff.  The punches follow a straight line and put the hips behind the fist, keep the should down and generally do things that look like boxing.  Judo's all about tossing a guy on the ground and doing it hard and fast.  Very pragmatic.  The planet can hit harder than your fist after all.  Aikido uses much more subtle techniques and Morihei Ueshiba taught some very profound philosophy to go with the technique.  However, Aikido rest on a very simple understanding: Don't do any work yourself when your opponent has given you all the force you'll ever need.  Putting that into action takes skill and lots of it.  In fact, Ueshiba didn't teach his art to anyone who was not already adept in another martial art.

So, what am I on about here?  I've been encountering a whole lot of sunshine and light in teaching styles around here.  The club I'm at now is sound enough for a university club, but my old dojo was the HQ of two international associations and instruction was very rigorous.  That means I'm like the kid who transferred to a decent public school from an elite prep academy.  What I'm objecting to is all this talk of how one kata or another is a meditation on peace.  Bull.  When said kata opens with a hammer fist, it's not about peace.  The kata in question is the pinan series which every karate school teaches(even if their version of the kata bear no semblance to other those in other schools).  Funakoshi renamed the pinans in Shotokan to Heian which means roughly 'calm mind'.  The pinans all presuppose multiple opponents and when you whip through them with fighting spirit, you really feel the the disposition of your imaginary foes.  They're about keeping calm in the face of bad odds.  Pinan originally translated as something like 'refuge' or 'redoubt' if I understand the connotation of the translation phrase correctly.  This kata was intended for high school students as part of a public school curriculum for Karate that Itosu devised.  I dislike needless mysticism in martial arts because it often serves and agenda of obfuscation that makes them seem like the occult.  Sometimes, the mysticism disguises fraudulent claims.  A prime example of this was something called 'Ninja-Fu'.  I saw a demo of this so called secret art a while back and it was nothing more than poorly practiced Judo done in black dyed gis.  You try some of their stuff on the street and you'd been a world of hurt.  Your foe wouldn't even have to menace you because you'd be squirming in pain on the concrete from not knowing any falling techniques.  Also, the gentle new age interpretations obscure a basic truth about karate and other fighting arts.  They are not especially peaceful.  Instead they provide techniques that increase your odds of survival in bad situations.  The confer no magical fighting ability on you.  If the West Philly thug who jumps you one night pumped iron during his last correctional experience and he spent his formative years fighting for his life against bigger and older thugs, he is going turn you into a grease stain.  Unless you get lucky, that is.  Martial arts do shift the odds a bit in your favor, but their advantage lies in statistics.  Karate evolved a form of resistance against an armed occupation force that confiscated weapons on Okinawa.  What were the odds of a local farmer surviving an encounter with an armored samurai or conscript wielding a sword or pole arm?  Slim to none even if he were an adept.  What about three or more of them? Quite a bit better.  What about repeat encounters with equal numbers?  Karate improved their odds as a population, but most of them still died.  The difference was that they inflicted enough losses on the Japanese that they gave up and left until the Okinawans decided that they were better off under the Japanese than the Chinese.  The best summation comes from Sensei Walter E. Todd who was fond of saying "The secret is that there are no secrets!"  Martial arts change neither physics nor biology, they just help you make the most of them.

Date: 2009-09-17 09:25 Subject: Uncle Alexendrei's Safety Tips Security: Public

Do not look directly into your new Cateye Singleshot Plus Headlight.  That's like taunting happy fun ball.  Just don't do it.  Remember, at Dagoski Underwriting Labs, we do the stupid so you don't have to pay for it.  I can also vouch for the fact that this a very compact, very bright bike headlight.  Just the thing cyclists need for the shorter days ahead.

Update:  I just did a little field test of this light off my balcony.  I think I blinded the neighbors across the street.  This small light really projects a strong, white light a long ways and it disperses well.  This means that the Singleshot will illuminate your entire riding path.  The mounting hardware is just about the simplest I've used in all my years as a round the clock cyclist.  Plus, the whole unit mounts on your handlebars because it's a single piece.  That's what made me choose it over Dinotte's little miracle light.  That thing has a separate battery pack and any light with two cable connected pieces is just a pain.  The model I bought is expensive at $140.  They have a single beam version that you can find on sale as low as $80.  The only difference between the two is that the Singleshot w/o the plus projects a narrower cone of light.  Michelle uses that one and can't imagine why I went for the more expensive one.  Basically it's because I'm male and I want bigger equipment.  Actually, it's because I've done more challenging night rides in the past including night trail riding.  The route home from the old NOC I worked at had a cool trail system along the valley wall that led to the Huron river delta and it was a good way to come off a stressful night shift.  My experience in night riding is that if you ride in places that are truly dark, you can't have too much light.  Select a good light and take the next model up.  The overall verdict I shall render is that LED lights have come of age.  You can get decent ones for $19 that will make you seen for city rides and other places with good street lighting.  They also help you see to an extent.  Powerful LEDs are showing up for as little as $60 on mail order sales.  The thing to watch out for in the lower priced models is battery quality.  The light is always cheaper than the battery.  The Cateyes I mentioned here both sport high quality NiMH batteries.  For more about riding at night, see my cycling page, A to B: Getting There by Bike.  I'm going to do some updates soon.

Date: 2009-08-28 12:53 Subject: A disturbing trend Security: Public

First my inbox overflowed with penis enlargement spam.  Now my inbox is overflowing with colon cleansing spam.  And everything is made with acai berry.  What are the spammers setting me up for?  Nosir, I don't like it.

Date: 2009-08-25 20:03 Subject: Operation WTF 2009 Security: Public

Words fail me. Utterly. This CGI video demonstrates the true power of teh Intarwebs. This is Not Safe For Work(NSFW) under any circumstances. Contains mild nudity, suggestive poses and, well, you figure it out, you let me know. This is more conceptually odd than the recent deaf goddess post. This comes to you through Fleshbot.com. I'm not generally turned on by most of what this Gawker site reports on, but they find some of the funniest and some of the weirdest stuff on the internet and link to it. Which is what makes reading it worthwhile.

By the way, this video also proves the entire thesis of Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks. That being that the development of the internet and low cost computing has so lowered the cost of creation cultural artifacts that the way humans create and work is being radically transformed. We're entering a brave new world in which everyone is an author/artist/musician/filmaker and in which every social network becomes a multidisciplinary collaboration. I'm sure Benkler really appreciates having his name associated with this video, but that's what he gets for writing such a good book.

Date: 2009-08-23 20:43 Subject: Lagging Indicators Are Positive Security: Public

Before I came to Philly, I'd seen prostitution ads in the backs of every metro area's free, counter culture weeklies. Nothing new there. What grabbed me by the short hairs and told me to cough were the transsexual hooker ads in the back of Philly's City Paper. Okay, the kinks of other people are no concern of mine. What got me though was the sheer, outrageous genius of these ads. They weren't over the top, they were on their way to rapidly decaying low earth orbit. I started reading them religiously because they were often laugh out loud funny. I also noted several patterns in the pages. The first thing I noted was a year long progression from 'shemale' to 'TS' to '100 %female' on the part of several of the advertisers. I think there's a need for consumer regulation here. The other trend I noticed was the number and outrageousness of the ads varied over time. In my Statistics class, I did a little exercise(which I only showed my professor informally). I tracked the number and content of the ads over a period of... I forget, it was the number of City Papers I had stacked in the recycling bin. Anyway, I did some Chi Squared tests to see if there was a correlation between the number and outrageousness of the ads and the Dow Jones Index. Oddly enough, there was. It looked like the ads were lagging indicators. When investors scored big, they'd go out and blow a wad(pun intended) on transsexual hookers. I haven't been keeping up with my research these days because I've had a life and one of the elderly folks here at the apartment complex had a cardio-pulmonary event when she flipped to the end of one of the City Papers which used to be dropped off in the lobby. I stopped in at a coffeshop for a sandwich today after my bike ride and found this week's copy. After reading the usual assortment of well written articles and reviews, I flipped to the back. Whoa man, the recession is over! Three pages, full color, small pictures. And the content? When you start seeing things like 'TS Rump Salad', get ready for another stock bubble.

Date: 2009-08-15 20:01 Subject: What's in Phoenixville? Security: Public

I actually knew the answer to that one already. This little town outside of Philly has a mess of really nice restaurants, a good independent coffee haus complete with performance space and a truly great old theater which shows classic films. It's just today when I hit Valley Forge, I decided to ride on to Phoenixville. Since I rode all the way into the downtown, I figure my round trip was something like 55 miles. To make matters worse, every time, without fail, some sort of competitive drive wells up on the way back and do the ride at a race cadence. I'll never understand why I do that. I mean it's a nice ride with some great scenery. What's wrong with relaxing? Anyway, I can't feel my legs any more.

In other news. I am a responsible cat owner; I run a cat friendly environment. Now, while curiosity will never kill the cat in this apartment, it will sometimes stick gaffer tape to the cat. Thankfully the tap had been peeled off of something else and wasn't very sticky anymore.

Date: 2009-08-13 22:39 Subject: Question of the Day Security: Public

What nutritional need is my cat trying to satisfy by gnawing on my heel calluses? Can my fellow cat owners help me out on this?

Date: 2009-08-13 10:59 Subject: a link past impasses Security: Public

Link cache for later investigation in how to promote civil debate: http://www.thataway.org/