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blog-O-rama archive
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on the road againor at least in the airport again. I'm on my way to Padma Samye Ling in upstate NY for the annual Calm Abiding yoga/meditation retreat. Madison's one terminal building is being circled by jet fighters right now (practicing take offs and landings) with loud dopplering noises that make me think that some of the sound effects in sci fi films might not be too far off. My travel plans have become more complicated, due to the fact that I checked price and availability of rental cars when I booked my plane ticket, but I didn't actually reserve a car. Oops. Now that the holiday weekend is upon us, some rental agencies are sold, others are quotint weekly prices in the $400-$500 range. Unfortunately, my almost-but-not-quite defunct professional affiliation with the field of economics deprives me of the right to whine when an increase in demand is accompanied by an increase in prices. Indeed, the high price is an effective incentive for people to seek out alternative forms of transportation, so I will be taking a limo to my hometown of Stamford, then a taxi to my old homestead, and then borrowing my father's work van to drive to upstate NY. It was that, or riding with the gray dog. This will be my first attempt at a dial-up connection from the airport. No shortage of time to blog, as the flight to O'Hare is delayed over an hour. I may get that account of the drive east up yet. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?This AI version of 20 questions did amazingly well, guessing "clock" and "passport" outright, and "proton" instead of "electron" and "word" instead of "sentence". It's definitely worth checking out. The AI version has more original categories than the standard "animal, vegetable or mineral" and also has more possible answers than the binary yes/no: "Yes, No, Unknown, Irrelevant, Sometimes, Maybe, Probably, Doubtful, Usually, Depends, Rarely, Partly." (In fact, the number of possible answers increased substantially between the first and second times I used it, this is a beta version.) Other than the tagline "the neural net on the internet" there's not much information about how the algorithm works, other than that new entries are moderated by humans before being added to the database. Thanks to Ammon 'lizardboy' Corl for sending link.
Duncan J Watts, the sociologist who developed the "small world" network model to explain why "six degrees of separation" is often all that separates two people in very disparate parts of the world, and two other Columbia University researchers, Peter Dodds and Roby Muhamad, are running an online email experiment to estimate the number links required to connect two people in cyberspace. My first target was a woman working at truckstop in Nebraska, sent along to Donna on the grounds that Kansas is closer to Nebraska than Wisconsin. No word on whether or not actor Kevin Bacon has signed up to be in the experiment, but sadly Paul Erdös will be unable to participate. (BTW, now that the paper that Bill & I wrote on the El Farol problem has appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing my Erdös number is 4, because I've written a paper with Bill, whose Erdös number is 3, because he's written a paper with Tom Kurtz, who has written a paper with someone who wrote a paper with Erdös.)
gifts for geeksone task I managed to complete before leaving santa cruz was retrieving the wedding present I got for robin & veronique from the artist who made it, bathsheba grossman. I was quite keen to have a look at it myself, as I had come across bathsheba's work at last year's siggraph online art gallery and had only seen the pictures and description on her website. in fact, I decided that robin was getting one of bathsheba's crystal sculptures as a wedding present before robin decided he was getting married. I chose the ora crystal in part because I liked the bronze version so much. I was really pleased with it, and it seemed like robin & veronique were too. after ogling the crystal for a while in the living room we got turned off the lights and let the LED lights in the base cast thin blue light into the room. my housemates gathered round and we all sat their gazing into to it for a rather long time, considering that no drugs were involved. very very cool. I didn't think to take a picture of the crystal, but here's one of bill & robin playing backgammon on the lovely inlaid board that elise brought us from egypt, and for good measure, one of bill & veronique staring at the top of robin's head outside the santa cruz surfing museum. bathsheba has some newer metal pieces that are really cool --- I might have gotten this instead, if I had seen it earlier. also, if you're in the santa cruz area, bathsheba is giving a lecture on 6 sept, 2-4 PM, at the cybercafe in watsonville run by students, Net Cafe, that I mentioned near the end of the blog-O-rama entry for 26.07.03. also in watsonville, until 13 sept., there's an exhibit that sounds interesting, transitions to digital, but there's not much info about it on the website. |
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ew, I feel like I'm going to blogjust got back to madison, after a long hot drive back from santa cruz. my blog file is overflowing with entries from the road, still unfinished, and assorted notes on must-write topics. it's so bad, in fact, I'm going to have to transfer all the notes to a different file because they will slow the download appreciably the forlorn and lonely end of the ethernet cable, left idle on my desk all summer while I surfed the 'world wide wait' on a dial up connection in santa cruz, is back in business feeding a steady flow of electrons into wilma's brain, who is dutifully emitting photons into my brain from the LCD screen. anything been posted on slashdot? let's go check... I couldn't resist this comment by LordYUK (552359): I've always thought the word "Blog" sounded like something you heaved up... I heard my favorite geek slang for chundering at a workshop for econ grad students, in an explanation of the absence of one of the professors: J. M. can't make it today --- he's at home, rebooting his digestive system. stay tuned! this is a long entry because of the backblog. up next, descriptions of and links to 4 sets of pictures of hikes in the santa cruz area with bill, richard, doug, and ammon, then a quick review of gamelan anak saraswanti followed by the usual round-up of news of the world and finishing with an important revelation about the french.
digital overdosethe big advantage of a digital camera is that the marginal cost of taking an additional picture is close to zero. the big disadvantage of a digital camera is that the marginal cost of downloading, backing up and cataloging an additional picture is not close to zero, especially after accounting for the opportunity cost of my time. the longer the trip, the worse it is --- the 1 GB of photos from the grand canyon, the wupatki ruins and sunset crater volcanos in april and the 750 MB from the drive out here in june are sitting on an external hard drive in a big undigested lump. and we leave for wisconsin tomorrow, which will kick off another week of indiscriminate acquisition of digital images. in a doomed attempt to route the flow of bits away from my beleaguered hard drive I've put pictures of some recent hikes up online just before I left santa cruz: the shadowless forest with bill, 29 july 2003 bill & I went for a hike at the western edge of the ucsc campus, where the university's land meets up with wilder ranch state park. I had been up there twice before, the first time during my brief but ludicrous career as a secret agent in an indie action flick directed by a former housemate (the eerily blurred slow exposure photos of that incident in the dim forest still languish on my external hard drive, the video footage has been duly submitted to 'america's funniest home videos,' and the erstwhile director has moved on to producing underwater videos of plankton) and the second time as part of a bike & hike exercise extravaganza which combined the 2+ mile uphill climb on my bicycle with an hour long hike. on my solo hike, I followed the trail leading away from the dry stream bed near the road and headed out along a small, posion oak infested ridge in the redwood forest. clumping along in my new hiking boots and intent on avoiding the plants crowding both sides of that trail, I scarcely noticed when I descended through a bushy thicket and rejoined the stream bed, emerging into a shadowy open space formed by trees bending down on either side of a small gorge. an enormous moss covered stump of a giant redwood dominated the cathedral of trees, like the altar of an unspoken religion. the stump seemed to be the source of the eery light, glowing with its own ghostly green eneryg. beneath the shadowy canopy of trees emerald green moss covered all the fallen branches and a thin green lichen cast a glaucous gray-green shadow on the bark of the standing trees. I stood transfixed in the gloom, in awe of this silent memory of a towering giant. somehow, despite my rapturous description of the totally awesome stump that I had seen in the forest, I was unable to convince anyone to visit. finally, having heard far too much about 'the stump' and searching as always for the outdoor alternative that requires the least amount of effort, bill agreed to a hike. we decided to walk down the dry stream bed to avoid the poison oak. the streambed narrowed into small glen, and then the stream reappeared, clear and flowing. the surfaces of the small pools in the sculptured rock were still, then skittered with longlegged waterbugs as we approached. the trail narrowed until it was a small shelf winding up and down the steep banks on either side of the stream. we passed several massive stumps, green with moss and scarred shiny black by fire. the stream disappeared back undergound just before the steep banks dropped away and we entered the stump cathedral.
the forest of nisene marks with richard, 2 august 2003 this was my first visit to the forest of nisene marks state park, rumored to have good hiking trails and two waterfalls. after narrowly avoiding "lumberjack day," which, in addition to the high cheeseball factor, strikes me now as a rather morbid event to hold among the second growth offspring of a whole forest of fallen giant redwoods, some close to a thousand years old, that had been relentlessly cut down when the first round of lumberjacks arrived. we chose to head for the nearer waterfall, starting off with a few miles of wide, relatively flat trail along an old railroad bed. then the banks of the stream closed in and the trial crisscrossed back and forth across the stream and up and over rocks. we decided to try hiking directly up the stream and immediately came across two larval salamanders, giant california salamanders as it turns out, in a shallow pool. just a few more feet up the stream we found a large, but not quite giant, adult with plain brown skin, which, after consulation with several newt experts, has been identified as a rough skinned newt. (photos of the salamanders and newts are still not online, the link is to photos of the hike. scroll down to the horizontal formatted ones to see a picture of richard taking a picture of a salamander larvae.) a bit further up the stream the steep banks on either side narrowed in and fallen redwoods and brush had been carried downstream by rains to form an enormous pile, a small dark cave fomed by a dense mass of logs and brush. richard thought it looked like a good time to head back to the trail, I forged ahead to explore the 'cave' and found a small opening in the brush overhead and a conveniently located tree bough to use as a stepping stool, it's bark worn off by the boots of other adventurous hikers. I hoisted myself up through the opening. I could see the remains of a very small redwood (a tragic case of infant imortality) extending almost from the opening to the bank on the left hand side. "there's a way through up here," I called down to richard "no problem." (*) I swung myself up through the opening and reached down for my hip pack. and there my troubles began. the promising looking log bridge rolled and shifted treacherously as soon as I put my boot on it. I soon discovered that the whole mass of brush was similarly unstable, and it was quite a long way, actually, to the (relatively) firm ground of the (steep and brush covered) banks of the river. I ended up scrambling through and across the shifting underlay of brush more or less on my hands and knees, with branches crunching and cracking ominously beneath my weight, the severed remains of redwood tree trunks wobbling ominously as I attempted to scoot over them. richard's troubles began sooner, as the space I had climbed up through did not seem to want to accommodate him in the same way it had me, nor did the spiderwalk through the brush that I had taken seem a good choice. (**) he ended up squeezing through another hole in the tangle of branches, hoping to cross over the stream higher up on the larger trunks of trees wedged over head. unfortunately, these proved to be no more stable than the smalled trunk I had eyed in the first place and richard was forced to scramble back down the steep side of the opposite bank and make his way back across/through the brush pile. meanwhile, I stood by at the ready, camera in hand, so if richard fell to his death in pile of brush I would at least have a few photos of the event. after we fully emerged from the brush/log complex we spotted the trail, wide and clear, serenely descending from the opposite bank and crossing the river again a few feet further upstream.
the trail all but disappeared again before we reached the waterfall, but the lovely shadowed pool and streaming water were worth the effort. and we spotted another newt in the pool below the falls. and then another one. soon the two newts seemed to be engaged in an underwater wrestling match. it soon became apparent that wrestling was not actually what they had in mind. richard took some very cool pictures and plans to develop the finest newt pornography site on the web are underway. as richard already has numerous pictures of nudibranchs doin' that nudibranch thang on his website, perhaps the site could be extended to include all forms of underwater amplexus. of course, because we're talking about richard here, and because no alps of any size were available for a second round of hiking, the newt-and-salamander sighting walk-hike-scramble through nisene marks was preceded by a trip downtown to hear gamelan anak swarasanti (scroll down a bit for details) and followed by mexican food, photo processing and species identification.
big basin state park at waddell park with doug, 6 august 2003 doug and I went for a late afternoon hike at the lower end of big basin state park where the skyline to the sea trail actually meets the sea. doug hiked with his backpack filled with 40 pounds of firewood. (doug really knows how to have a good time.) the evening light was just beautiful --- I think this may be my favorite of all the photos I've taken this summer.
elkhorn slough national estuarine research reserve with ammon, 16 august 2003 this was my last chance to look for lizards before heading back to madison, and we saw many many large and small western fence lizards, as well as the last of the nesting egrets and cormorants and an acorn woodpecker neatly tucking the latest find into a hole. it wasn't exactly adventure hiking and the slough bears the scars of years of heavy abuse, dikes built to wetlands to pasture, train tracks running across the water, but it's a great place for wildlife and has beautiful groves of coastal live oaks and eucayptus trees. restoration efforts are underway, but including attempts to bring back native undergrowth that has been overwhelmed by invasive foreign species. they're fighting the good fight, but as ammon pointed out, if you had to bet on a plant species to succeed in a harsh environment, would you choose "poison hemlock" or "creeping wild rye"? alas, the smart money still seems to be on poison hemlock, the foreign invader. --------------- (*) in other words, it's not richard's fault. at least not this time. back to text (**) alas, none of which was richard's fault. back to text
gamelan anak swarasantirichard & I went to an 'art, wine & music' festival in downtown santa cruz before the hike in the forest of nisene marks, and saw the performance of gamelan anak swarasanti. they play in the balinese style, and finished with an interesting piece on a "marching gamelan" used primarily in funeral processions. in addition to the traditional pieces they played at the festival, gamelan anak swarasanti have also explored modern compositions: We have collaborated with several Bay Area ambient electronic musicians, including Rob Rayle, Randy Cone, Charles Uzzell-Edwards, AndyW, and DJ Lorin, and have pioneered gamelan in the San Francisco underground dance community, bringing gamelan music to raves and other contemporary music events in the San Francisco Bay Area and as far afield as the Sierra mountains. information about their cds is available at their extremely informative website.
"...america has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one ."I couldn't sleep my last night, I'm just not used to the midwestern heat and humidity. My feet felt they were burning, even though I ran cold water over them several times. ? Early menopause? Starting at the toes? Or in two months I've turned into one of those California weather wimps, moaning as soon as the temperature wanders out of a 20 degree range centered on 70 F. In any case, after thrashing around for a bit, waking up Bill in the process, and heading down to the kitchen for a 2 AM snack, I took the only reasonable course of action and surfed the web. The leading quote is from Jessica Stern, writing in the NYT originally. A few other items of interest:
Postwar Iraq has become magnet for
terrorists A thoughtful and well argued analysis from the San Jose Mercury News, demonstrating how the unrest and disruption in Iraq, combined with the large amount of guns and munitions left behind as Hussein's army melted into the landscape, have made it a popular destination for Islamic fundamentalist oriented guerillas and terrorists. Postwar Iraq has become what many U.S. intelligence officials feared and some predicted: a magnet for terrorists, who are finding shelter among a people growing more disaffected by the American-led occupation of their country. ---------------------------------------------------------- I found this article detailing the problems with security just as I was about to (finally) post this entry. It includes interviews with some key Iraqis.
Abandoned weaponry litters Iraq;
U.S. faulted for not securing Hussein-era munitions While U.S. forces hunted for weapons of mass destruction, Iraqis say, criminals made off with bombs, explosives and sophisticated weapons like rocket-propelled grenade launchers. ---------------------------------------------------------- Analysts Doubt U.S. Claim on Iraqi
Drones More evidence that claims about Iraqi military capabilities and intentions made by the Bush administration before the war have not been supported by the evidence uncovered in Iraq. Huddled over a fleet of abandoned Iraqi drones, U.S. weapons experts in Baghdad came to one conclusion: Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons. While the Air Force report was the dissenting voice, note that their source was much more objective and verifiable than defectors who have an incentive to lie in hopes of achieving their goal of ousting Hussein and taking power themselves. Also, the Air Force was the agency with the most experience with drones of the kind possessed by Hussein.
mystery unveiled:
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iraqis gloat over u.s. blackout;
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I love going to the dentistI really do. I just had my last silver/mercury amalgam filling removed and replaced with a resin filling. with a bit of care and luck my teeth will stay put in my mouth without further repair for a long, long time. okay, so they're kind of goofy looking teeth, big white chiclets with a gap in the front big enough that if I dressed up like a cherub and squirted water through it I could do a passable imitation of a fountain in an italian piazza. but they're my teeth and, with dr. brennan's help, they are staying put, thank you very much. it seems to me that people who dislike the dentist are missing a key point: they imagine that the counterfactual to going to the dentist is having a strong shiny set of teeth without ever hearing the whine of a drill or listening to the hygienist explain the benefits of flossing. in fact, the historical alternative to going to the dentist is having your teeth rot and fester in your mouth until at last they become so inflamed and painful that they must be removed, then the procedure is performed by the same gentlemen who cuts your hair, using the one tool at his disposal, which is a pair of pliers. the threat of nuclear annihiliation. the reality of genocide. global warming, mass extinction, and the accumulation of man-made toxins in living flesh. arnold schwarzenegger for governor. there are plenty of downsides to living in this particular historical epoch. but modern dentistry is surely one of the benefits, at least for those with access and the means to pay for it. ditto for modern medicine. it was my great good fortune to spend this morning in the dentist's chair. plus I got to wear cool shades and listen to the dixie chicks while sitting there. recall-apaloozawe're only three days into the recall process and I'm already sick of hearing about arnold schwarzenegger. he has had headline coverage every day since he announced his candidacy, no amount of money could buy that kind of publicity. case in point, yesterday's paper featured a picture of arnold smiling and waving with the headline: "candidate silent on issues." so how about covering some of the other 192 candidates that actually have some opinions and experience instead? preferably ones who have bothered to vote more than 50% of the time. worse, the coverage of "recall-apalooza," as it has been dubbed by the santa cruz sentinel, is squeezing out more important issues, like all that good news about the economy and the federal budget deficit, not to mention the still unanswered questions about the ongoing war in iraq. some recent articles of note:
IRAQ'S NUCLEAR FILE : Inside the
Prewar Debate
Powell's case for war given a closer look
(I also read an interesting article reporting that Bush was briefed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies on the possibility of a guerilla war in Iraq. Instead, Bush chose to believe the accounts of Iraqi dissidents that large numbers of Iraqi troops would defect and support the American invasion. Alas, extensive searching on Google news, where I originally came across the article, has failed to recover the link.) |
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yesterdaytime passed like water through a sieve, leaving nothing behind but holes. |
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wonk cityas some of you (specifically, the some of you that read my last entry) know, my effort to increase traffic at blog-O-rama is rapidly developing into an obsession. it now occurs to me that posting a long discussion of federal fiscal policy, and how it relates to persistent trade deficits, as illustrated by the national income accounts identity, may not actually be consistent with my larger goal of maintaining and increasing blog-O-rama readership. so, if the following quote from ursula k. le guin's novel the dispossessed sums up your feelings about economics, stop reading right there. He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.
Y = C + I + G + NX
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spam, I ambill has abused me relentlessly for sending a generic email message about blog-O-rama to my friends after I finished the archive on tuesday. okay, okay, I admit that traffic to the site has been a bit sluggish of late and my usual trick of posting more comments at slashdot hasn't had much effect either. if traffic doesn't increase soon I am going to be forced to pay wil wheaton 10$ to advertise blog-O-rama on his site which would permanently and publicly establish that I am a complete and total dork who can't even qualify as bisocial. however, there is some real information here: every entry now has its own anchor so you (and me) can make permanent links. here's the system: the file name corresponds to the month that the entry appeared, so an entry from 29 july 2003 is archived in the file "blog07_03.html" and an entry from november 2002 is archived in the file "blog11_02.html"; the anchor reference is just the date of the entry, blog-O-rama uses european dates so 29 july 2003 is "#29.07.03" and 28 november 2003 is "#28.11.02". the full link includes the normal blog-O-rama file structure: the link for 29 july 03 is http://annmariabell.com/alternate/blog/blog07_03.html#29.07.03 it's not pretty but it works.
political rant du jouror should that be political rant a la mode? bill came across a special feature on terrorism that appeared online at the christian science monitor back in march. After Sept. 11, President Bush consoled a nation reeling from devastating terrorist attacks. But he also threw down a foreign policy gauntlet: The US would make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. That point, now known as the Bush Doctrine, has become the backbone of the war on terrorism. It's a definitive policy that requires a definitive answer to the question: What is terrorism? check out their extremely interesting quiz that ask you to decide whether or not specific events should be considered terrorism --- the historical examples are well chosen. ----------------------------- paul krugman kicks butt as a columnist for the ny times, twice a week. today's column, a state of decline, shows that he can think clearly about the economy as well as politics, a rare ability among economists who typically can't see beyond the dense ideological fog of theories about how the economy ought to work that constitutes modern economics. krugman was also on form earlier this week with you say tomato which discusses how revelations about the abuse of faulty intelligence data has impacted blair much more severely than bush. ... in modern America, style trumps substance. Here's what Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said in a speech last week: "To gauge just how out of touch the Democrat leadership is on the war on terror, just close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet on the deck of that aircraft carrier." To say the obvious, that remark reveals a powerful contempt for the public: Mr. DeLay apparently believes that the nation will trust a man, independent of the facts, because he looks good dressed up as a pilot. But it's possible that he's right. -----------------------------
the emperor has no evidence:
KAP-i-toh-NIM
capitonym (KAP-i-toh-NIM) noun: As in the following poems: Job's Job from wordsmith.org via david reiley. |
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