March 2008 Archives

Much chatter lately about http://www.firstsounds.org/:

First Sounds is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

I downloaded some of their mp3 files & played them; the Au Clair de la Lune recording was barely recognizable as a human voice, but the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad recording was just static overlaid with random wah-wah effects.

Perhaps my hearing just isn't good enough to appreciate such things.

Big storms are just crossing the Mississippi this morning, headed vaguely east-northeast toward Macomb, Peoria, etc.

Looks nasty: lots of dark red in the radar image, plus the bow shape that means fast-moving, really bad weather.

I think it's going to miss Champaign, though. Lucky us.

I was hoping to post

http://www.approvalvoting.com/
http://www.approvalvoting.org/
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/
http://www.fairvote.org/

to my del.icio.us account, but they're having problems:

Internal Error
Apologies, it seems something is horribly wrong with our code.
If you keep receiving this message, please send us a message with the offending URL.

I suppose I'll have to try again later.

Finished (last night) reading Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It) by William Poundstone (which sounds to me more like an insult than a name: "Go pound stone, ya loser," etc.).

I would summarize thusly:

• Plurality voting (i.e., the system used in the U.S.) is too easily manipulated;
• Unscrupulous campaign consultants make big money manipulating elections to ensure that their clients win, regardless of whether that's what the voters really want;
• Most other voting systems - Condorcet, Borda, etc. - are also easily manipulated;
• Range voting seems pretty good, so why aren't we using it?

Numerous examples are provided of elections gone awry due to flaws in the voting system: Edwards vs. Roemer vs. Duke, Lousiana, 1991; Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot, 1992; etc., etc.

Much attention is given to arguments between proponents of different voting systems. (With lots of, "You're an idiot!" "No, you're an idiot!" "Am not!" "Are too!" and other such childishness.)

An interesting read.

Long ago - Nixon was still President, I think - we (that is: Mom, Al, Mike & me) used to go camping at a KOA campground (er, Kampground) somewhere near Demotte, Indiana.

This was before we switched to the campground on the Tippecanoe River, near Winamac. (Our first time at the KOA, we discovered just how cold it gets at night when you don't have a house around you. The next day, Al was sent off to buy some sleeping bags for everyone.)

One of our camping trips coincided with July 4th, so we headed over to Demotte to watch the Independence Day parade. I don't remember anything of the town, or the parade - too many years have passed; those neurons have been reallocated, or perhaps have simply expired - but I still remember that we spent July 4th in Demotte.

As it turns out, they have a web site: http://www.townofdemotte.com/.

(By a curious coincidence, a mere nine miles north of Demotte on US231 is Hebron, Indiana: home of Aunt Sharon, who made a brief but tumultuous appearance over on my Flickr account last week. Hebron also has a web site: http://www.visithebron.org/, which my failing eyesight & aged brain insists on reading as Visit The Bron. What's a bron?)

Thunderstorms this evening, as I drove home: thunder, lightning, even quite a bit of hail. There wasn't much hail here; most of it was a mile or so south of us, and over before I got there. I saw small snowdrifts of hailstones on the roadside.

A few streets were flooded, but nothing too deep for Mr. Explorer. (Eight inches of ground clearance means I laugh at blocked storm drains.)

At least there's no snow in the forecast. Perhaps winter really is coming to an end.

Finally managed to replace the valve thingy inside our kitchen faucet. Our faucet works again, and even looks reasonably normal.

Previous repair attempts did not succeed, apparently because I was turning the retaining bolt the wrong way. (I've had this problem for twenty years, at least. If I don't stop and think, hard, about which way to turn a bolt, I'll turn it the wrong way. Every time.)

Our faucet may be working again, but I'm not hopeful that it will stay that way. It's too flimsy.

The other day, over on FaceBook, I got a friend request from Corinne Valenzuela.

Who's that? thought I.

Her profile says she's 24, and lives in Georgia. She has five friends, of which three live in Georgia, one lives in Arkansas, and the last is some kind of job-hunter pseudo. Her profile picture is a bit racy:

So I sent her a message: I fear I am not who you think I am.

Days passed, with no reply from Ms. Valenzuela.

In the end, I decided she was just another spambot, trolling for email addresses, and declined her friend request.

Hillary Clinton is now backpedalling a bit on that speech she gave last week. It seems the second paragraph, which begins:

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

...wasn't entirely true.

"I misspoke," said Ms. Clinton, by which she surely meant, "It sounded dramatic, and I thought I'd get away with it. I'm sorry I got caught. Please vote for me anyway, because I want to be President."

(Didn't Joe Biden torpedo his presidential campaign with a similar "mistake", back in 1988?)

CNN tells me that Jericho, which was cancelled last May due to low ratings then - in response to viewer protests - brought back for a probationary seven-episode mini-season, has been cancelled again.

They just couldn't pull in the viewers, it seems.

I'm not surprised - the recent episodes seemed a bit unfocused, as if the writers had a bunch of interesting characters & scenes they wanted to get in, but didn't have a clear idea of how it all was going to fit together.

There's only one episode left; perhaps they'll manage to wrap everything up into an audience-satifying package, but I doubt it.

Over on Twitter, I followed mufan96 and mxbx, because they were following me and it seemed polite to reciprocate; but they're just too chatty. (Not as chatty as Scoble, who is notorious for posting two dozen times each day.)

My Twitter page was filling up with stuff I didn't want to read, so - sorry, fellas. You're out.

I must be too old for MySpace. The site navigation is bewildering - seems like I can't find anything; and when I do, I can never find my way back to it later - and the pages are loaded with huge, shrieking animated advertisements.

Still, Lisa and Cheri are on MySpace, so I want to be there as well. Maybe it'll get easier with practice.

In today's mail:

1. Two checks, totaling $81.40;
2. One bill, for $84.29.

...which leaves us $2.89 down for the day.

CNN says:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Two sisters from Virginia sold their Illinois-shaped cornflake on eBay Friday night for $1,350.

"We were biting our nails all the way up to the finish, seeing what would happen," said Melissa McIntire, 23. "There's a lot of relief involved."

I suppose if you're half-blind - or half-witted - the cornflake in question might look like the state of Illinois.

But anyone who'd pay $1,350 for the thing is a fool.

I signed up for a MySpace account this morning, mostly because Cousin Cheri has one.

I'm amused that the first thing all these social-networking sites ask for is a bunch of valuable demographic information. Sure, MySpace, I'll tell you what my annual income is, so you can throw even more ads at me.

I also registered for a ZigTag account. (Why? The ubiquitous Mr. Scoble, of course.) Alas, it's in closed beta so I have to wait for an invite.

The iPod song shuffler just now tossed out Lullaby by Loreena McKennit, which includes a fellow reciting - with one of those deep, rolling, faintly raspy English Theater voices - the following William Blake poem:

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressèd
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath causèd this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!

...so I thought I'd paste it in here.

Over on Flickr, a few comments showed up this morning from long-lost Aunt Sharon, whom I haven't seen since Nixon was president.

(Perhaps 'long-lost' isn't quite accurate. I'm sure she knew her whereabouts all along.)

Jake rode the bus to work with me this morning: a little adventure for him, since he's on vacation from school.

I think he enjoyed himself.

Barack Obama gave a speech today: A More Perfect Union:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time."

Hillary Clinton gave a speech yesterday: IRAQ: Hillary's Remarks at The George Washingon University:

Fortunately, ten months from now we will have a new president, and a new opportunity to change course in Iraq. Therefore, the critical question is how can we end this war responsibly and restore America's leadership in the world? It won't be easy. There is no magic wand to wave. Bringing our troops home safely will take a president who is ready to be Commander-in-Chief on day one, a president who knows our military and has earned their respect. Bringing lasting stability to the region will take a president with the strength and determination, the knowledge and confidence to bring our troops home; to rebuild our military readiness, to care for our veterans, and to redouble our efforts against al-Qaeda. If you give me the chance, I will be that president.

It's interesting to compare them. Obama is a much more inspiring speaker than Clinton, much more inclusive. Obama's speech is full of We and Us; Clinton's is all Me. Obama goes for a sweeping vision of America; Clinton rattles off her personal to-do list.

I expect Hillary will be staying home next Inauguration Day.

CNN is running a new item headlined, "Many still can't name Obama's religion".

That's because I don't care. Why should I?

Jeff Duntemann mentions a Boston Globe story about a Caltech / Stanford study in which subjects tasted various wines, knowing only the price of each:

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

Later on:

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

Somewhere, Ayn Rand's ghost is very upset, since that contradicts one of the axioms of Objectivism.

Sam's waistline: 19 inches.

Circumference of Pat's head: 24 inches.

Today's please-buy-something mail from Amazon informs me that I can set up grocery subscriptions. One of the items I can have delivered on a regular schedule to Stately Rice Manor: pemmican, from the happy folks at http://www.pemmican.com/

Well, now. Many years ago, I read something - an encyclopedia article, I imagine - about arctic explorers, which left me with the impression that pemmican was a bit like raw bacon, only made from seal meat instead of pork. Euwww, thought I.

It seems I was wrong about pemmican. Wikipedia says:

Traditionally pemmican was prepared from the lean meat of large game animals such as buffalo, elk or deer. The meat was cut in thin slices and dried over a slow fire, or in the hot sun until it was hard and brittle. Then it was pounded into very small pieces, almost powder-like in consistency, using stones. The pounded meat was mixed with melted fat with a ratio of approximately 50% pounded meat and 50% melted fat. In some cases, dried fruits such as saskatoon berries, cranberries, blueberries, or choke cherries were pounded into powder and then added to the meat/fat mixture. The resulting mixture was then packed into "green" rawhide pouches for storage.

I suppose that is less disgusting than uncooked oversalted seal meat. But not by much.

Noticed just now a few damaged images in my iPhoto library. They're both phone-camera images, downloaded from Flickr, so no big loss if they can't be repaired, but it's a little disturbing to think that iPhoto might not be as secure a repository as I'd thought.

I have over 13,000 images in my iPhoto library....

I've told iPhoto to rebuild its thumbnails. I don't suppose this will help much, but it needed doing anyway.

Update:: I had the notion that Time Machine had backups of the two images, but - alas - they were no good, either. Apparently the files were munged on download, and I didn't notice. Fortunately, the copies on Flickr were still good, so I downloaded them again. All is well.

Mr. Sam climbed the wrong piece of furniture yesterday, fell off & bumped his head. He cried for a minute or two, then was back to his normal rowdy self.

A bit later we noticed the enormous knot on the back of his head, and the blood he had smeared all over his hands, neck, shirt, etc., etc. (This brought Jennifer's phone chat with Amy to an abrupt end: "Sam's bleeding, I gotta go.")

He wasn't terribly happy about being grabbed & washed, which we took as a sign that his injuries were pretty minor. (Rule of thumb: the louder a kid cries, the less serious the injury.)

Sam's fine today, and the bump on his head is considerably smaller.

The new mailbox I created for myself a while back, to get away from all the spam on the old one, has been compromised by spammers.

Clearly, I signed up for something, or bought something, I shouldn't have.

If it gets too bad, I will have to take further countermeasures (i.e., create a few more mailboxes, and be more careful about which web sites get them).

The snow has pretty much melted, except for piles & walls next to people's driveways. (The last time I shoveled the driveway I purposely dumped all the snow into two big piles, for just this reason.)

Some people don't shovel their sidewalks. Some people shovel their driveways, and leave a knee-high wall of snow across the sidewalks. As I walk to & from the bus stop, I contemplate Dante-esque punishments for them.

Milestones:

1. The Playmate of the Month is younger than you;
2. Your doctor is younger than you;
3. The President is younger than you;
4. The Pope is younger than you.

I hit #1 a long time ago (and don't even subscribe to that magazine any more); #2 happened for the first time last year; and I am perilously close to #3: Barack Obama (who has a decent shot at being the next president) is only two years older than me.

(Barack Obama & I have the same birthday, which is mildly amusing.)

This morning I walked from home all the way to Crescent & John to catch the bus to work; this evening I walked from work to Crescent & Kirby to catch the bus home. My pedometer says I took 10,884 steps today, and walked 5.15 miles.

Alas, Google Maps says it was really only 4.1 miles. I thought I had the pedometer calibrated properly; perhaps all the icy sidewalks on Kirby this afternoon - just about nobody on Kirby bothered to clear their sidewalks after the last snowfall - threw off its calculations.

Poked around a bit in the iPhoto archives, found a bunch of pictures that were interesting but which somehow never made it to Flickr.

So I uploaded them.

(The loyal readership are cautioned that these pictures are from a long time ago. Jake has not suddenly and mysteriously reverted to toddlerhood.)

Of relevance in this election year: Arrow's Impossibility Theorem:

The framework for Arrow's theorem assumes that we need to extract a preference order on a given set of options (outcomes). Each individual in the society (or equivalently, each decision criterion) gives a particular order of preferences on the set of outcomes. We are searching for a preferential voting system, called a social welfare function, which transforms the set of preferences into a single global societal preference order. The theorem considers the following properties, assumed to be reasonable requirements of a fair voting method:

• non-dictatorship: the social welfare function should account for the wishes of multiple voters. It cannot simply mimic the preferences of a single voter.
• unrestricted domain or universality: the social welfare function should account for all preferences among all voters to yield a unique and complete ranking of societal choices. Thus, the voting mechanism must account for all individual preferences, it must do so in a manner that results in a complete ranking of preferences for society, and it must deterministically provide the same ranking each time voters' preferences are presented the same way.
• independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): the social welfare function should provide the same ranking of preferences among a subset of options as it would for a complete set of options. Changes in individuals' rankings of irrelevant alternatives (ones outside the subset) should have no impact on the societal ranking of the relevant subset.
• positive association of social and individual values or monotonicity: if any individual modifies his or her preference order by promoting a certain option, then the societal preference order should respond only by promoting that same option or not changing, never by placing it lower than before. An individual should not be able to hurt an option by ranking it higher.
• non-imposition or citizen sovereignty: every possible societal preference order should be achievable by some set of individual preference orders. This means that the social welfare function is surjective: It has an unrestricted target space.

Arrow's theorem says that if the decision-making body has at least two members and at least three options to decide among, then it is impossible to design a social welfare function that satisfies all these conditions at once.

This will not, however, stop politicians from tinkering with the system so as to maximize their (or their party's) success in elections.

A few weeks ago, some spud named 'dotdashcreate' showed up in my Twitter followers list. I noticed that his Twitter account was mostly advertisements, and that he was following thousands of people, so I blocked him. Almost immediately, he dropped off my followers list.

Yesterday, some pseudo named Osen Komura showed up on my followers list. He's had his account for less than two weeks, but already he's following over 18,000 people. So I blocked him, and - just like dotdashcreate - within a minute he was gone from my followers list.

Clearly, somebody is testing out some new twitter spambot software.

Everybody's grumbling about how they lost an hour of sleep last night. I didn't - I got up an hour later than usual. When I go to bed tonight, it'll be at the usual time.

Which means I've lost an hour of being awake, which I suppose I'll get back in the fall.

Woke up at 6:30 this morning - that would be late for a weekday, but is strangely early for the weekend - and couldn't get back to sleep.

Jake was already up and watching cartoons. Sam woke up a bit later.

Grandparents are coming to visit today.

No, I don't know how twenty copies of the previous post ended up here. I can only hope that I managed to delete them all before anyone noticed.

Two years ago, the manufacturer of our dishes - which were a wedding gift from...er...somebody; thank you very much, whoever you are - sent us a letter: We're discontinuing your pattern, buy now or lose forever.

We dithered a while, then bought - nothing.

Today, another letter: We discontinued your pattern two years ago, but we still have a bunch left in the warehouse. Please buy some so we can get rid of it. Please? And the prices have been cut to the point that the offer is actually tempting.

Maybe some pasta bowls, or a platter....

(Now that I think about it, the manufacturer is based in Arlington Heights, which pretty much narrows down who must have given them to us.)

Poor Jake: at bedtime this evening, he leaned in close to give Sam a goodnight kiss - and Sam smacked him in the face.

We're trying to teach Sam that hitting is wrong. So far, the lessons don't seem to be having much effect.

Jake was very upset, but I imagine that by tomorrow morning they'll be friends again.

Today, summarized:

I don't care whether [CENSORED] repeatedly crashes head-first into the brick wall known as Reality, but I'm getting really tired of being caught between him and it when he does.

After finishing The Phantom Toolbooth - which I suggested, thinking it would be more popular than it ultimately proved - we've embarked on an ambitious cycle of bedtime stories for Jake & Sam: we've started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and plan to work through all seven books.

At five pages per night, we ought to finish sometime in June of 2010.

The forecast for tonight & tomorrow is pretty nasty: ice overnight, snow tomorrow.

We're hoping that the Champaign schools take a snow day - also known as an everybody sleeps in day - but so far they have not.

Curiously warm weather today - even now, after sunset, the temperature is holding steady at 62° - so we took the kids to Hessel Park for a picnic.

Pictures were taken, but - alas - they're still in the camera. I imagine a few will show up on Flickr eventually.

Last night, 10:30pm - long after bedtime for Jake & Sam - the following was heard from the monitor in Sam's room:

Mama, where are you?
Papa, where are you?

Silly boy, you're supposed to sleep when we put you in the crib.

Sometime this summer, Sam will move into Jake's room and sleep in a big-boy bed - and we'll have to figure out what to do with the crib.