Air Sax!

Vulture Mob ii
Originally uploaded by iflizcouldfloat

Swash my buckle!

Ribbon Dance
Originally uploaded by reid.gilman

If this had been bees...

that doesn't look good...
Originally uploaded by joeshaw

we'd all be dead by now. It took me over an hour to get home last night. That's two days' worth of just crazy torrential end-days rain. Not at the level the mid-west is dealing with right now, but still... we're talking Holy Christ! level.

I worry my writing is like this...

The Learners: A Novel by Chip Kidd

rating: 2 of 5 stars
Uh.. it was only okay. Not as good as The Cheese Monkeys by any stretch of the imagination. It gets very emotionally neurotic towards the end where it just kind of stops. The Cheese Monkeys had a nice narrative arc with a satisfying conclusion. This just seems half-formed.

I've always been far more interested in the design aspects of the stories, and you get some of that here. But not nearly enough to satisfy me. The book is much more focused on the Milgram experiments at Yale than on design, and it suffers because of that. Am I the only one who thinks writing your character into the Milgram experiment is trite?

View all my reviews.

Cat Hobbies

Boom!

Dean Kamen's "Luke" Arm

I've got the use of both of my arms, and i still want one of these when they become available. Can you say Doctor Octopus?

Video of the arms in motion

Secret Pastafarian Recruitment Video

Utilikilts

I'm going to file this under WANT!, but I'm not sure I actually want it. In theory I want it. But, I'm pretty sure it's more statement than I can carry off. I have trouble enough with the snappy hats. Sadly, I think the underlying truth here is that I am neither punk nor nerd enough to wear something like this. Although I probably do have the legs for it.

Another drawback to these kilts is that they're damned pricey. I don't pay that much for my pants, and there's about a yard more material than that. If I keep enumerating the downsides, I will eventually convince myself that I don't want one of these. I need more courage, damn it! Or perhaps less common sense. The kilt is at least one thing that the wacky eccentricity-hogging guy at work hasn't gone for yet. But no!

Last.fm Goes Free

This is awesome news. You can now play supported tracks and albums on-demand at Last.fm. I've really admired their service for a while now, and I really enjoy looking at my own stats and news. The only irritation I've had is that I can't play playlists in any order I desire. Problem solved now. Cool.

clipped from blog.last.fm Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

A Disposal Solution

Certain acquaintances who shall remain nameless have requested that in the event of their demise they would like to have their remains tossed into the woods for nature to do with as it wills. I have on multiple occasions questioned the legality of doing that, but now I think I might have a compromise: The Body Farm

clipped from www.damninteresting.com The students knelt alongside the slumped form, seemingly untroubled by the acrid, syrupy tang of human decay which hung in the air. They remarked on the amount of decomposition that had become evident since their last visit, such as the sloughed skin and distended midsection. The insects which feasted upon the decommissioned man were of specific interest, prompting a number of photographs and note-jottings. After surveying the scene to their satisfaction, the students strolled across the glade to examine a considerably more decayed corpse in the trunk of an abandoned car. Their lack of alarm wasn't altogether surprising, for they were part of the organization responsible for dumping these corpses– along with dozens more– throughout the otherwise serene forest. They were forensic anthropology students from the University of Tennessee.

Unenforced Optimism

I'm still going through my backlog of interesting articles, and I read a couple of unrelated-but-not articles today.

The first is an article on Japan's manga industry and, in particular, the dojinshii [sic] markets, a thriving completely-illegal-but-tolerated public marketplace for the sale of fan fiction. The manga industry is tolerating the infringement of its copyrights both for market research and talent spotting purposes.

The second is an article about unenforced laws in the U.S. and both why and how they fell out of enforcement.

The confluence of the two articles is probably pretty predictable based on the sources that I pull from, but it makes me think that, despite the moral bickering that we get up to in this country, everything's going to be OK in the end. I can wish that people would have a little more perspective in the here and now but will settle for being right in the long run. I am the king of complacency.

• Wired on Manga
• Slate on Unenforced Laws
  

Compressed Air Energy Storage

I hadn't heard about this before. The idea is to use surplus wind farm energy to pressurize a sealed underground vault. Then, when the energy is needed, the pressure is slowly released to help power an energy-generating turbine. Kind of brilliant. I wonder if the idea could be miniaturized to use on a small scale, say on a private farm with one or two turbines or on a set of solar panels attached to a house. Seems like it would be a pretty location-oriented solution.

clipped from ecotality.com “The group is building a system that will steer surplus electricity generated by a nearby wind farm to a big air compressor (diagram). Connected to a deep well, the compressor pumps air into layers of sandstone. Some 3,000 feet down and sealed from above by dense shale, the porous sandstone acts like a giant balloon. Later, when demand for power rises, this flow is reversed. As the chamber empties, a whoosh of air flows back up the pipe into a natural-gas-fired turbine, boosting its efficiency by upwards of 60%.”

Tweet, tweet.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a zen book. Believe me, I know how stupid that sounds. But, bear with me; that's the best word I could think of to describe the experience.

It's by no means an easy book to get through, both for the flaying and the mystical reasoning that leads the protagonist from one set of events to another. But, if you can suspend the critical, solidly-logical bits of your mind for a while, then there's a lot of beauty here, in both phrasing and imagery. I actually marked pages that have particularly beautiful passages on them; I never do that.

I found the ending more satisfying than any book I've read in recent memory. I want to describe it as meaty for some reason. It may have been because I'd been awake for something like 32 hours at the time, but I teared up when the well was revived.

I want to go on about what I think Murakami was trying to say about contemporary Japan, but I'm not Japanese. I know very little about the culture, and I'm fairly certain I'd come off sounding a bit like a stupid American. But, it's a lovely, lovely book that was well worth the time it took me to read it, which was around six months. I'm slow.

I'm a Federalist at Heart

His Excellency George Washington isn't a studiously detailed biography; it's more of a psychological profile that puts Washington in the midst of his events and analyzes why he acts and reacts the way he does. It's a searching work that's probably open to criticism but interesting all the same. I found the discussion of slavery particularly illuminating because it manages to capture the difficult situation the average Virginia planter was in without trying to dodge the issues or make excuses for the man

An Off-Grid Vertical Farm Concept

How much would it rock to have a building with my own veggies in it? Answer: a lot. One of the things I love about the Fens in Boston is the community garden area. When I lived in that area, I used to walk through as often as I could just to soak in the vegetables and other greenery that people were working on. I hate gardening myself due to hours of back-breaking potato harvesting as a child, but I'd love to live in a building that had its own gardens. I'd plant a few little trees and make a nice shady area to have a barbecue. Or perhaps grow hemp for its many industrial uses. The trend toward greener buildings is a good one. I was very interested in the Macallen Building when it was going up in South Boston. The price tag is way outside my current range, though. And I would have to move to South Boston. And I would have to live in a condo. Not sure I could go for that; it'd feel like living in a commune where it's always my night to make the lentil casserole.

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Grant Mungo: Sci-Fi Archaeologist!

... is what I would name my book about the famed time-hopping adventurer who's latest adventure brings him face to fist with the Iron Fist of Caesar as Mungo attempts to rescue the Great Library of Alexandria from near-certain destruction.

Barring that, this article is pretty cool. I love it when Science solves problems.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk Now, scientists from the University of Cardiff have developed a technique that uses a powerful X-ray source to create a three-dimensional image of an iron-inked document. The team then applies a computer algorithm to separate the image into the different layers of parchment, in effect using the program to unroll the scroll.

Writer's Strike

So, that's where my Daily Show and Colbert Report went. Good for them. And hurrah for John Oliver.

Music Video for Friday: "Antibodies"

I think I'm going to add the pointing and humping move to my repertoire. Mix it up with the dice shake.

The Cambridge Civic Journal

I just linked to the Cambridge Civic Journal a couple of minutes ago, but it's pretty awesome if you're interested in Cambridge politics. All sort of graphs and bars and statistics. Like this (swiped because there's not proper permalink over there ):

That's the age distribution for the 2006 election. See that late-30s bump? Somebody made the young'uns come out to vote for Democrats. I wonder if that was a national trend that boosted the Democrats in.

Here's another little bit.

Council Orders and Resolutions: 2006 - 2007 through Oct 29, incl. late orders of Oct 22
2006-2007	P	I	R	M	D	C	A	F
Davis	125	66	28	64	34	146	17	6
Decker	49	31	5	30	7	116	9	1530
Galluccio	55	55	6	35	319	147	3	2
Kelley	83	122	14	41	2	39	3	1
Maher	1	3	0	4	10	7	0	0
Murphy	60	10	11	22	7	95	6	2
Reeves	37	10	5	17	62	421	78	2
Simmons	73	51	19	46	24	139	14	1
Sullivan	90	69	24	113	763	550	68	4
Toomey	48	32	7	55	264	154	19	3
Total	398	348	90	332	1155	1517	193	1540

where F by the way stands for Foreign and National Policy matters. What the hell is Marjorie Decker doing? Cambridge is a pretty cosmopolitan town, but REALLY?! You're not on the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee here. My god!

Cool stuff over there.