Two Dishes But To One Table

A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

I am trying out a web page that force feeds you anything you paste into it.  It is my first experiment with speed-reading software.  I am mad slow by nature and have seldom reached the last page of a novel honestly. 

I can think of three reasons why I might like to use a speed-reader webpage:

1. To benchmark what my normal pace is (I think I have checked my typing speed but never my reading),
2. To actually come across the finish line on an assigned reading on time, for example the nightmarish reading pace in a 400-level Class I took last fall on Cancer Genetics, or
3. To see if something like The Brothers Karamozov feels better at high speed.

I discovered the Zap-Reader by chance while tracing backwards the html links that pointed towards a NYTimes article. That then took me to a website of a place in South Dakota called The Aspire School that ultimately linked to the ZR.  This software was designed by Ricky D. Spears.

I tried Zap Reader with Chapter 39 from Moby Dick and then with a 3000 word blog post.

It has a little red bar that that serve  as as a gas guage, growing in length to tell you how close to the end of the passage you are. 

I set the up arrow to 625 wpm, which worked about fine for a blog post, maybe helped by the pause that comes when a sentence concludes and the sentence length of modern writing.  For reading Moby Dick, 625 wpm was a little uncomfortable.  I think I missed words here and there.  But is that what speed reading is?  And is that why I'm so slow usually? 

I think my comprehension was still >80% and the enforced pace definitely kept my shoulder to the wheel during a strange Melvillean digression comparing whaling to lawyering with me proceeding apace through the mud that would have normally derailed me if I were reading it by hand. 

Reading it at not my natural pace gave Moby Dick a sort of remixed feeling.  What would epic poetry be like?  Beowulf or Homer at 625 wpm.  Joyce?     An enforced pace could be either faster than normal or slower, both to some dramatic effect.   Such tweeking is a sort of poor man's duct tape remix remedy, like taking a Chuck Berry single down to 33-and-a-third and realizing that you've reimagined the King of Rock and Roll as Black Sabbath. 

If you come up with any suggested passages and recommended playback speads consider posting your remix here in the comments section...   (click the zap reader up and down arrows to adjust speed) 

In seeming support of the notion that the Internet has experts on every possible arcane fetish, here is a hand drawn remembrance of an electric catsup dispenser from the defunkt chain Burger Chef (inventors of the 'Top Shef' sandwich, works bar, and widely imitated 'Fun Meal').

Scaffolding in Learning

As an adult learner,I should, in theory, be able to self-teach a lot of stuff.  I'm currently trying to digest probability on my own, especially the Poisson Distribution.

What's annoying in self-teaching is that there is often some sort of assumed background concept ( can we abbreviate this as ABC?) that, missing, massively impedes understanding. This makes me ask dumb questions, repeatedly, to the smart people around me, which on its own is fine (I'm mathematically humble) but, with me lacking the ABC, I just stand there blankly while my friend's carefully chosen words of explanation fly past my ears, uncomprehended. I do this two or three times and then go to the library.

I was able to observe this from the other end yesterday, with me as the explainer and someone else lacking an ABC  I was trying to explain the event horizon of a singularity to our lab intern, probably the smartest kid in her whole high school, and couldn't get through. 

Being only in the first week of 11th grade physics she lacked experience thinking about object behavior in  a gravity field (esp, say, an orbiting so-called 'weightless' satellite).  Without that ABC, the rest of the argument was going to take 3 times as long and the final understanding was still going to be a pearl built up around a fundamentally flawed core.  I couldn't tell her to go read sections 9.1 and 9.2 of her very basic physics textbook to learn the ABC and then her black hole question could probably be answered in about ten seconds.

In my own case I found my missing concept for knowing the Poisson Distribution more deeply.  This morning, as my uptown 6 train passed Bleecker Street, I saw that chapter 4-7 (Poisson) is merely the punchline, coming after the methodical introduction of 4.3 (Expected Value) and even the crucial chapter 1-3 (Permutations).  There are no shortcuts!

Feeling better now.

Slightly related:  I found the best ever, free tutorial book on how to learn R (the open source bastard son of S-Plus language):go to the CRAN documentation page and scroll down to Verzani for his free PDF (110 pages, with great examples).

How The NEXT Generation DNA Sequencing Might Work

High throughput DNA sequencing will be available soon ( probably <5 years). 
Today at my lab, albeit with no sound card, I greatly enjoyed seeing a short video of how one next generation DNA sequencing technique works.

In dramatic contrast to current techniques, the DNA which is being analyzed does not need to be amplified. These so-called single-molecule methods smash the dna into tiny bits, just a few dozen bases long.  Using solid-support and microarray fluorescence they can then sequence it.  To do a single human DNA set (23 chromosomes) requires analyzing 3000000000 "letters" (A, T, G, C) that need to be checked one at a time.

A little history:  The Human Genome Project, using pipettes, test tubes, enzymes, incubators, was able to analyze the DNA of one anonymous cell donor from Buffalo, starting in 1990 and finishing in 2000, crossing the finish line with a total time of 10 years.  Then Craig Venter, the CEO of TIGR/JCVI analyzed his own (or rather his company did) finishing by 2007.  Last month I read that the fifth ever human DNA had been completed, this time of a Korean man.  According to the article in Nature (Aug 20, 2009 ) it cost $200,000 to complete and took six-weeks on a trio of robotic, high throughput Illumina Genome Analyzers.

As a quick of how much data these labs are dealing with, I did a crude experiment: I tried just saying letters from a printed page.  I was able to sustain a rate of  4 spoken letters per second.  At that rate it would take me 23.8 years to say my DNA sequence out loud. ( I was actually a little disappointed; I thought I was going to get some even more outlandish number!)  Bottom line though, I  lost badly, even compared to 1990s era gene sequencing (which was, admittedly a worldwide project trumpeted at the time as being the closest modern thing to the Apollo Moon Missions).

Let me know if the above link to the movie works for you. 

For true DNA fans, here (  link  )is a review of the technical questions that will hopefully now be answerable with relatively cheap and fast Next Generation Sequencing Technology (NGST).  My favorite newly-solveable question: where did social insects come from? (preliminary answer: heightened expression of maternal caring-genes throughout the entire swarm). 

Completely unrelated but discovered by chance just now, probably the most controversial article ever for The Journal of Trends in Ecology and Evolution: Exploring the Evolutionary Consequences of Same-sex Sex: Lessons from the Animal Kingdom  , a typical example of why chemistry class doesn't grab kids attention the way that biology class does.

And here's a completely different NGST strategy, this one from Pacific Biosciences.:click on the link at the lower right of the page that says 4:05 minute Technology Demo.  

Worms Show How to Be

Last Saturday WNYC-FM played an hour of John Cage, including a long tape of street noises with Cage reading Zen koans over them.  How amazing to realize what a debt Laurie Anderson owes to Cage.  (An influence I'm sure she openly acknowledges.)

The koan that stuck with me was a tale of two holy men walking, one a Hindu guru, the other an orange robed Buddhist monk.   Coming upon a daunting deep stream , both are initially taken back by the obstacle.  After sitting awhile in intense concentration, the guru begins to float up into the air.  The Buddhist objects, saying "That's not the solution."  Continuing to concentrate, the Hindu levitates above, and across to the other side, coming to a soft landing on the opposite bank.   The Buddhist repeats "That's not the solution", and points to a gap he spotted in the stream where he then walks easily across on some rocks.

---X----

I was thinking about the Buddhist injunction to "just be" the other day while looking at some worms in a compost bin.  From time to time we have to turn over the bin, or dig in the bin, or occasionally, empty out the bin, all of which causes displacement and agitation of the worm environment.  I wonder whether I should feel any compassion for the worms feelings at the disruption, which inevitably includes severing them in half or smashing them in the lid sometimes as I snap it tight.   And of course, the worms can barely have any feelings on the matter.  If you've dissected a worm, you know there aren't a whole lot of neurons up front.  And I got to realizing that worms seem to be experts at just being.    Bees too.   I imagine a bee going about his very focused routine with no conflict, no anxiety, no self-critique about a quota, just a focus on excellence, and an ability to be.   

Coming higher up the tree of life complex fauna start to have a certain amount of un-Buddhistic nature.  As we go from fish to frog to dog, behavior shows a loss, a lack of desire to be, creeping into the inner dialog.   I  admire the cat, as opposed to the dog in this regard.   Buddhism echoes this progression, saying that the stillness we need is not something we need to go get, its something we had that we lost.  Memory of how to "just be" can be rekindled to restore us to the peace we once knew.       

 

A Bell is a Cup Until It is Struck

Here are demonstrations of waves in both the very large and the very small:
1 - Sound waves in the sun's plasma in words and pictures at the Stanford Solar Observatory.
2-  "Sound" waves in a single atom -- the waves of a "particle in a box", a wave of probability actually, not sound.  PIAB is the simplified version of an electron orbital from third year college chemistry.   Go to Molecular Workbench then choose Particle in a Rectangular Container. The demo is interactive and customizable.
Thanks to This Recording blog for the SSO link.

Coffee Cake Recipe

My Russian grandmother needed some new cooking ideas way back once upon a time so one of her neighbors in Rochester NY  wrote down how the instructions for, how you say in this country, "coffee cake".   The square of paper pictured here fluttered out of an old 1930's cookbook last week when I was visiting my mom in Michigan.  

It doesn't say what temperature.   Can we assume 350?   My sister suggests that back then it may have just called for a medium oven, like the kind you can hold your hand in while you count 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi.

The B & W Satellite

I don't think many things rank higher than star gazing in the ranks of unrequited love.  Same for planet gazing.

I looked at the moon for quite awhile tonight, trying to line up where the Americans landed in the 70's but I couldn't really line much of the landmarks up with my map.   One problem, surprisingly, was that the moon was actually too bright.  I have a 4.5 inch mirror on my Celestron telescope and it grabs too much light to be good for looking at a full moon. Still, I spent about 15 minutes staring.

I tried to imagine myself standing up there, exposed to a day much sunnier than the brightest blazing noonday sun on Earth. 

I tried to imagine what we'd see from Earth during a large meteor impact event on the moon.

I wondered if the astronauts left any "blue bags" behind, the first interplanetary coprolites.

I wondered if anyone ever slept much up there, and if so, what they dreamed about.

I wondered which the orbiting 3rd man felt more of:  envy for the guys going down or loneliness in anticipation of spending a day as the most isolated member of the human race.

Whither Flipper?

I realized recently that the animals most cherished by the collective public are not the same from era to era. As Peter points out in the comments below, this could be linked to the society itself: what it values and how it thinks. There's a small sociology research paper lurking in here somewhere. Any sociologists out there need a theory to hang a thesis on? Just footnote me! I was just doing it for fun but I'd enjoy seeing anyone take this ball and work it up properly...

decade	Era-specific Charismatic Megafauna	Defining charactaristic
70s	Dolphin, whale	intelligence
80s	unicorn*	combable-mane / pink
70s	Baby seal	White fur, big eyes
2000s	lemurs	Wild striped tail, glowing eyes, odd dancing gait (see You Tube for confirmation)
1990s	Sea turtle	motherhood
1980s	orcas	Theme park servitude
1990s	Polar bear	Soda-appetite
2000s	Polar bear	CO2 poster child vainly seeking an ice floe
1970s	Sea horses	Bizarre, affordable (~$9) as home pets.
<1940s	bee	Work ethic
1970s	bee	Venomous & irritable
2000s	bee	sustainable farming
1990s	ladybug	Sustainable farming
1990s	deer	Presence anticipates Captain Planet arrival
1970s	shark	Revenge of the Earth against hubris of 70s humans
1970s	bear	Early adopter of the move West (esp to Colorado)
1980s	wolf	Friends with Kevin Costner and other Native Americans
1960s	otter	Oblivious to the rat race; thriving without a work ethic

Can I Keep a Compost Bin In An Apartment?

Composting works, even in a third floor, Manhattan apartment. Here is the expereince from 10 months of worm-wrangling in an apartment compost bin.   FAQ's:

Do they smell? They smell as clean as pristine Wisconson dirt in a fresh-plowed field.

Do they eat everything? No, they are really slow with corncobs taking several weeks, even if diced up-- not surprising since all they have are lips, an intestine, and a sandy gizzard. Fruit attracts fruit flies and harbors fruit flies so we add it after freezing it. Here is one of the big successes: a plastic beer cup that was labeled 'compostable'. I was skeptical about this apparently styrene cup. Even after a month it looked brand new. But somehow in the third month, this compostable plastic turned into a slimy scumbag (see below) and I presume it dissolved soonafter.

Do the worms try to get out? Not to scare you but, on four different occasions we have seen a dozen worms make a break for it. They were halted by the lid. We think they were protesting too much moisture. When we leave the lid off they don't try to escape.

How do you scoop out the rich black dirt but leave behind the living worms? The worms flee light so you scoop out the dirt onto newspaper, wait 15 minutes, take the top inch or two of dirt, repeat. Eventually, you get all the dirt and the newspaper is 100% worms, terrified, huddling in little clusters, at which point you toss the worms back into the compost bin. (see piles of worms, below, fleeing the light at dirt harvest time).

  (plastic bin is in the background, separating worms from the compost based on photo-phobia, in the foreground)

Is the food in an apartment compost bin rotted? No, it is eaten by the worms and their bacteria. Very little slimy mold or rotting seems to occur. Maybe it is like yogurt, with the good decomposers crowding out the objectionable, smelly ones.

Can you stock a composter with “worms” from outdoors? If you mean earthworms no. Bloodworms (Red Wigglers!) work well for us, bought from a non-profit urban composting table set up at a farmer's market in the city.

(here's the biodegradeable cup in closeup and the worms in closeup )

Towards a Theory of Everything

I liked the last part of this:
"If spin states in quantum computing turn out to have 4 possible states it would be kind of like how DNA comes in 4 types of bases...I want to them to prove that humans are just computers and that introns are commented-out lines of code".  
                         --Vincent, this morning, at my lab.

(Possibly helpful definition of "commented-out".)

A Shoutout to Vesta

There was a “star” shining in my eyes this morning. I was lying in bed, one eye open just enough to spot it through the screen. By the time I got my telescope out, the sun had risen and obliterated it, but I checked the charts and my “star” was Saturn.

The chart said that you can see the brightest asteroid (asteroid, not meteor) this week, Ceres. Who knew they were observable ! “Easily spottable with binoculars” says Sky & Telescope's Sky at a Glance.

That led me to John Beadreau's awesome photos of planets and other things.. He's using a pretty big telescope and all the photo/filter technology available and getting photos that I thought weren't possible from home, or even from the ground:

Check out 7 moons visible in a single shot here:

  Imaged with a monochrome CCD-modified Philips ToUcam Pro webcam @ f/7 through a TEC140 APO Refractor. North is up.

Fraternal Greeting Too Short at My Church

There is a part of a Christian church service when the peace is supposed to be “passed”. In my current parish, Grace Church NYC, this is done in a pretty muted fashion. I timed it before and it takes about 15 seconds, which probably allows most people to pass the peace to 2 people, maybe 3, tops. I regret this brevity. Tilting toward the other end of the spectrum, I found mention of a longer version in a book about the history of church gestures.

Originally (the passing of the peace) meant a kiss...This kiss was however given in a very precise and stylized way. The person giving the peace placed his or her hands under the arms of the person receiving it, leaned his or her head to the left and kissed the right cheek of the person receiving the peace, saying, “The peace of the Lord be always with you.” ... (medieval Christians, uncomfortable with this intimacy) invented the pax-brede, a disk of metal which was passed around and kissed...we are closer to the original idea when we clasp hands gut this needs special understanding. The tone is not “Hi, how are you?” but an expression of desire to be one in Christ, forgiving and forgetting any faults and wrongs.

This is from Lundy Pentz's Body Language, a little book, the kind that you pick up for a 50 cent honor system donation at the back of the church. Pentz is a biology professor. I was surprised to find her book was displayed in full at Google Books.

21 Years Since Barry Gordy Sold the Label

I was trying to find an article about Michael Jackson and instead, ran across an interesting report about the retention of black ownership and loss of black ownership in large black-owned companies. It listed some landmark purchases in recent years:

BET black entertainment tv	2000	sold to: viacom
Essence / Ebony magazine	2005	Time-Warner
Phat Farm / Baby Phat	2004	Kellwood (Liz Claiborne, Calvin Klein women's sportsear)
Motown Records	1988	MCA / Universal Music
Soft Sheen Haircare	2000	L'Oreal
Ultra Sheen cosmetics	1998	Wella AG

The authors interviewed the owners of The Charlotte Bobcats and also Black Enterprise magazine who are trying to groom a line of succesors to ensure that the companies they founded will remain in the family in some sense.

If you are searching for a black-owned business you might try the search window at The 100s, a list maintained by Black Enterprise Magazine, which unlike Essence, is black owned still.

Calesthenics

Not really useful to anyone but me, but I find it handy to have a workout routine that I can get access to when I am not at home, by looking here at my website. So here I will archive my exercises, almost all taken from the Annette Lang book mentioned previously.

WARM UP

• lifted toe tap 10x
• standing press (2 barbells, 10# each) 25x
• seated rotation 10x
• plank 20 sec
• lateral hold on hand 20 sec each side
• back extend 5 x 10 sec
• opposite arm reach 3x each side, ten count using pennies
• pushups

WORKOUT

• reverse crunch (10x) counted 8-2,4,6 8... 9-2,4,6,8... *body forms U shape*
• cable to doorway standing rotation turn 20x each side
• standing press 25x
• opp arm reach 10sec 10x each side, really go for linear pointer-dog form
• plank 60 sec
• lateral hold on elbow 20 sec
• *seated rotation with dumbell
• dancer diagonal situps 15x
• supine rotation 15x go slowly
• back extension 15x, 10 sec, use pennies to count
• rowing with cable to doorway 40x

which is a chicken's closest relative?

I just spent 45 minutes digging at The National Center for Biotechnology Information getting DNA sequences for all kinds of organisms.  You may enjoy some of the results. Try your hand at these three questions on phylogeny:

1. Which is a rat's closest relative, humans or chickens?
2. Which is a human's closest relative, rats or bears?
3. Which is yeast's closest relative, rickets-bacteria or a chicken?

(It would be fun if you could submit your guesses as a "comment"! Then scroll down a couple posts for the answers...)

And then, if so inclined, (that's a big if) you can make family trees to show who is related to whom.  Here are the steps:

• If you know some gene names from biology class, get the name of a gene that is so basic to cell-chemistry that most living things have it.  I chose cytochrome c oxidase, subunit 3 (aka 'cox3').
• Enter it in various search windows at NCBI, along with organism names in the same window.  (for example, search myoglobin whale or search hox1 human)  Especially useful is the gene search button.
• Save the protein sequences from each animal.
• Feed this text file to an alignment program like CLUSTALW.
• Feed the results of that into a distance calculator, like Phylip.

Admittedly the last two steps are hard to do the first time, but if you are sort of biology-oriented , the first step above can make for some fun surfing I think.  The database has extremely exotic organisms, including a small amount of neandertal mitochondria DNA.

Password Idea

Maiden names and first pets are not sufficiently secure against "dictionary searching" by hackers.   My new idea is, when prompted to set a hint answer at a web site registrar, I am going to set the answer to a phone number from my past.   It will be sort of a non-sequitur to claim I had a pet named 555-1212...

To add to the password paranoia, here is a link about how to guess someone's s.s. #.

Review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at R2R

Review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the River To River Festival in Rockefeller Park (August 1 & 2, 2009)
(Battery Park City, behind Stuyvessant High School)

MCDC gave a free, very intimate OUTDOOR performance this weekend .
They set up two raised stages in the grass, about 100 feet apart, and performed a dozen or so dances from
their repertory. 

Set list, with times (note the two unrelated programs in column A and B for the near and far stages):

  The 4 channel sound system was really excellent --
very dramatic, crisp, clear ambient sounds, ala 2nd wave John Cage, done by
I loved some of the later pieces in the set, especially the duets.  Also amazing were the solos by Rashaun Mitchell
and Andrea Weber. 

The audience had some very serious long time fans.  Almost no children were there, although the ones that were seemed to respond emotionally to the movement on stage.  A 3 year old near me was definitely shaking a
tail feather so hard that it annoyed one older fan and the dad had to sort of restrain the kid.

People were wearing hats and shirts with Cunningham's name on it, so they were definitely knowledgeable and loyal.  It was even more of a diehard audience than the ones that line up for Fall for Dance (the well attended ten dollar a seat event that, intended as a popularizing introduction to dance is, ironically, so hard to get tickets too, that only insiders tend to go).

Usually I sit really far from these things.  The view from the cheap seats emphasizes choreography and sound
but at Saturday's performance, I was in the front row , sitting on a picnic blanket in the grass, and was so overwhelmed by the presence of the dancers and their physicality that I was distracted from the dance.  It was like getting good seats at the US Open and seeing crushing tennis serves from a frighteningly close distance. 

The best seats would have been on the New Jersey side of the lawn so that you could sit
with your back to the sun and see both stages at once. 

The style of dance was un-visceral and unfunky.  MCDC does not "swing" in any sense, and I can see how  they were the perfect troupe to do site-specific dances for various galleries in the Dia:Beacon recently (2007 - 2009).

Seeing snippets of MCDC, with no overall arc or buildup to the action, was a little tiring.  There's a James Joyce/Ullyses feel to the stream of randomness, both random sound and random movement.  It's pretty demanding for the viewer.  If MCDC were an oil painting I would hang it near Cy Twombly and Piet Mondrian. Not having much to compare it to, I'm going to say I liked Saturday's potluck program a lot more than when they danced Radiohead/Sigur Ros at BAM and liked it a lot less than when they danced Ocean at Lincoln Center Rose Room.

The pale indoor aclimated dancers survived full sun-exposure -- just barely.  
The sun was hot on audience and performers alike, illuminating them dramatically.

It was interesting to see some of the dancers smile while dancing but that they do not as a rule smile, in contrast to the ballet where it is sort of a given that the dancer will smile through much of the dance.

Afterwards the dancers all changed into less-revealing garb and came to hang out on the lawn with anybody who was still around.  That was an added bonus.

Also, with his death this week, the dance functioned as a public wake and celebration of Cunningham's work.  It's still a sad week and one member of the company made a very short announcement at the end, thanking everyone for marking the occasion of his passing.

Inserted in the program:

BTW, if you are a Tom Otterness fan, there is a MAJOR collection of his sculptures in this park -- as big an assortment as the ones installed throughout the Eighth Avenue L Train subway Terminal and even more thematically cohesive.
Between seeing the sculptures and the dance, we felt really lucky.

SLA = super long acronym

If you are looking for the longest possible conversational acronym I might suggest IYKWIMAITTYD.  I found it while doing a computer programming assignment.  It gets 1000 hits when Googled.  At least one 20 year old friend knew it when I asked.     IYKWIMAITTYD = If you know what I mean and I think that you don't".

----------------------------------

ANSWERS & SUPPORTING DATA FOR THE cHICKEN POST ( supra)

1. Rats are closer to humans than to chickens.

2. Humans closest relative is the rat

3. Yeast's closest relative, by a longshot, is a chicken.

This is a truncated table because the width wouldnt fit here.

bear-grizz     0.00000  0.02040  0.08182  0.13667  0.15412  0.20881  0.32959 
bear-black     0.02040  0.00000  0.08574  0.13583  0.15641  0.21965  0.31937 
horse          0.08182  0.08574  0.00000  0.12904  0.15640  0.20816  0.30970 
rat            0.13667  0.13583  0.12904  0.00000  0.14091  0.21205  0.32122 
human          0.15412  0.15641  0.15640  0.14091  0.00000  0.21101  0.31792 
turtle         0.20881  0.21965  0.20816  0.21205  0.21101  0.00000  0.26500 
chicken        0.32959  0.31937  0.30970  0.32122  0.31792  0.26500  0.00000 
toadfish       0.23526  0.24705  0.23493  0.26955  0.25335  0.16148  0.25702 
zebrafish      0.24167  0.25086  0.24291  0.26667  0.23377  0.16788  0.26950 
guppy          0.23786  0.24131  0.22676  0.25503  0.22829  0.16827  0.24604 
barracuda      0.29088  0.29330  0.28204  0.31067  0.26472  0.22318  0.29594 
flounder       0.34327  0.33960  0.32738  0.33489  0.32312  0.24943  0.31906 
fruitfly       0.50075  0.49908  0.50801  0.47908  0.48856  0.44181  0.55949 
rickets        1.02298  1.02089  1.04164  0.98845  1.06936  1.04696  0.98937 
yeast          1.00944  1.02097  1.01792  1.06818  1.06367  1.03375  1.10490 
leafbacteria   2.57247  2.59022  2.63536  2.46193  2.67957  2.65434  2.64677 
bee_mitoch     3.97335  3.91426  3.82322  3.70631  4.14014  3.95915  3.50075 

To read the table, find your organism of interest, run sideways from that name.  When you hit a zero, you are in a column that shows all of the distances from your zero organism to the other organisms!

Statistics Without Tears

Woozy.
Not sure if I'm awake.
Did I really do sums in my head all night, dreaming of math output?

Maybe I'm entangled like that every night and simply shed the memory when I go through the Final Rinse at 4:45 AM.

For a half hour or more, I walk around feeling like all my thoughts are inside out.

12 Year Orbit

 Just now when I was going to bed, I switched off the light, turned back the covers and was trying to get into bed but was instead practically struck between the eyes by one of the six brightest objects in the sky.  I was really sleepy but the planet was really beckoning so I checked it out.

The big spot turned out to be Jupiter.  Three of its moons are showing tonight and, this is a first, I can see a couple of its bands.  They make Jupiter look like it has a big equals sign on it.

It was a good ten miutes of viewing on the Celestron telescope. Only thing is, now I'm wide awake. 

Judging the Characters on The Wire

I have watched 80% of The Wire, the HBO cops vs drug dealers show.  I can confirm its reputation: good screenwriting, seeming realism (how would I know).  They had year long themes, including a season where the public schools role in drug culture was implicated, a year where real estate developers were featured.  The Mayor's office and the Baltimore Sun are shown extensively too.  In the end, it hooks people because it is a great soap opera, made greater because it frequently kills off main characters.  Also, it answers a question you might have had: "why is selling drugs an appealing vocation?"

I think and talk about the show all the time now (maybe annoying to people around me).  The chart below is an attempt to exorcise some of my obsession.  It is a 2-D graph (click larger) of the characters.  First, are they good people, second, are they conventional company men or are they mavericks?

Epiphet Expressions *&%%$ =~ /.*dam.*/

If you are geek-enough to know Regular Expressions, imagine what a cool motivational tool it would be, to have computer science classes study the Wikipedia BADWORDS regex's!  Excellent motivation for the delinquent in the back row...
(FYI for nongeeks, a regex is a shorthand way to match words and terms during a search.  More here if you are curious.)

Scottish Translator

I was trying to make a computer program to insert creative spelling into a document.  I wrote it in PERL on my laptop while riding the train to work. 

I named it Ben Johnson in honor of the famousist diary writer ever.   But instead of creative spelling, my program seems to give a strong Scottish bias to the speech -- sort of a Trainspotting Translator.

What follows are two sample translations my program made of, respectively, Dirty Harry, and President Obama.  After that I have attached the actual Perl script if you are curious.
-------------------------------
"I knoo ohaht yoo'rae dinkin, ponk, did I virae six shots or only vifae? oaell, in ahll dae aexcitaemaent I kind ov vorgot mysaelv - so yoo'rae goin to hahfae to ahsk yoorsaelv ah qoaestion: 'Do I veael locky?  oaell, do yoo ponk?' "
-------------------------
"On onae aend ov dae spaectrom, oae'fae heahrd dae implicahtion daht my cahndidahcy is somaehoo ahn aexaercisae in ahvvirmahtifae ahction; daht it's bahsaed solaely on dae daesirae ov oidae-aeyaed libaerahls to porchahsae rahciahl raeconciliahtion on dae cheahp. On dae odaer aend, oae'fae heahrd my vormaer pahstor, Raefaeraend Jaeraemiahh oright, osae incaendiahry lahngoahgae to aexpraess fieos daht hahfae dae potaentiahl not only to oidaen dae rahciahl difidae, bot fieos daht daenigrahtae bod dae greahtnaess ahnd dae goodnaess ov oor nahtion; daht rightly ovvaend ohitae ahnd blahck ahlikae. "
--------------------------------
PERL SCRIPT (The following lines mostly just tell the program to look for certain letters and swap them out for other letters. For example, "Turn F's into V's and vice versa."):

open RH, shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
open OH, ">>", shift(@ARGV) || die "Did you enter two file args? $! \n";
for(<RH>){

    my $line = $_;
    chomp($line);
    $line=~y/fv/vf/;
    $line=~s/w/o/ig;
    $line=~s/ph/f/ig;
    $line=~s/ing/in/ig;
    $line=~s/a([^aeiou])/ah$1/ig;
    $line=~s/e([^aeiou])/ae$1/ig;
    $line=~s/u/o/ig;
    $line=~s/th/d/ig;
    print OH "$line \n";
}
print "\n\n";

Art Review -- from Flatbush, Brooklyn

I had no camera that morning and it rained in the afternoon, so you'll just have to trust me:

Display Location: a sidewalk on Argyle Street near Cortelyou Rd, outdoor
Media:  Chalk, sidewalk.
Dimensions: 90cm x 900cm
Date: June 7, 2009
Artist: (unsigned work)

Working in mostly yellows and whites, the artist has made a very large outdoor drawing which is indistinguishable from a hopscotch board except greatly exaggerated.  This outsider art shows an almost childlike desire for the game to go on forever, implying both haste and crudity in a board which, rather than terminating at "10" as most hopscotch boards,  goes all the way to "220". 

Assuming that the hopscotch player must hop to the terminal and then return to the origin, a single turn at this hopscotch board would take an estimated 3.5 minutes. Such extended focus from a 9 year old might serve as an alternative to Ritalin.  Hair would have time to grow, coffee could go cold, and the ice cream truck could serve your entire block.  One imagines an entire Gnarles Barkley song playing in the space of one player having a go, taking a single trip up and back on this hopscotch figure.

The Farther You Stray From Humanities, the Cheaper the Education

Once again, I find an entire, state-of-the-art computer training manual online and indexed.   This postgrSQL book sells for $35 right now at Barnes and Noble.   (SQL is a database system and a computer language.  It exists inside many of the web pages you have probably visited.)  Here is the book:
http://www.commandprompt.com/ppbook/x17149  

Erased deKooning -- er, Caesar

When you vote out the old leader sometimes the new leader feels the need to erase memory of the previous leader.   The Roman senate was so glad to get rid of Domitian that after they assassinated him, an official act of damnatio memoriae was passed.  Not only were his images decapitated, but written references  on public buildings were erased.  From the stone.   Here my sister examines a plaque at UPenn Museum of Archaeology. 

The original plaque said:

"to the imperator caesar
son of the deified vespasian,
domitian augustus
victor in germany, pontifex maximus
holding the power of tribune for the fifteenth year, imperator for the twenty second time
consul for the seventeenth time, perpetual censor, father of the country
the flavian augustan colony
of puteoli
by thee indulgence of the great
and divine princeps
having been moved closer to his city"

I didn't take a close up to show how the plaque looks "post-damnation" but it resembles the cream cheese plate after a brunch: just grooved, dragged furrows where the sentences were.  I was a little stingy with the camera that day so you'll have to use your imagination.  In fact, the picture above was taken with the built-in web cam on my little Asus Eee Netbook.

Respect for the Lightest Metal. And Best Battery.

If Wikipedia is trustable on lithium batteries I learned three things today:
1 - They mostly degrade just from shelf life, no matter what you do to them: up to 20% loss per year at room temperature, much more if hotter.
2 -  Letting them go below their lower limit voltage is bad.  Overcharging probably not dangerous, not even possible anymore with internal safeguards.  The voltage monitoring circuitry is right inside the battery pack, not in the computer.  So almost a bigger hazard is putting them away on the shelf long enough for them to dip below that 8 v threshold or whatever.  I let that happen to laptop #1.  (I'm on #3 now, just bought a netbook last week).
3 - M.I.T. demonstrated a full sized battery with smaller internal atomic structure thanks to -- how cool is this, virus-grown fiber structure inside.  They engineered the viral DNA to contain/attract iron, and so have achieved the smallest iron phosphate wires ever (iron phosphate is one option for the cathode material and the smaller the better)

Which President Did Jiu-Jitsu on the South Lawn?

Theodore Roosevelt.  And 1906 was probably before Asian martial arts were 'cool'.
Article here.   And the graphic that the article doesn't include online (do they ever?) is below (click larger).
    

For some reason the Wall Street Journal has been kind to the president so far.  The way I see it, this article, running in the sports section, answers the tacit question "Is the Prez someone you'd like to have a beer with?" with a firm "Yes.".  Even the WSJ editorial page uses respectful language about him.  

Throwing Rupert Murdoch into the mix may have confused the Journal's Conservative zeal.  Murdoch is dating some sort of young liberal last time I heard.

My First Enjoyable Tax Reckoning in Years

There are three things I wish I'd known about sooner:  Electric Tootbrushes ($100 is not a lot to spend if it prevents 3 root canals), The Birthday Party (this 80's Australian rock band is the blueprint for The Jesus Lizard and several entire punk rock record labels), and finally, tax preparation software.

I must be the last guy on earth to discover this way to make tax time easy.  Tuesday I spent from 3 to 5 pm in the friendly, capable hands of a tax robot, who, for a mere $13 asked me numerous probing and helpful questions.  Why leave home!  Many are the years when I had incompletely filled out tax forms or lacked correct paperwork.  This year I had zero stress and learned a lot from the robot.   And buying Turbo Tax must cost more than $13, yes?From now on, doing tax paperwork is the one thing I won't try to learn about at the library.

What part of a movie hits you the second time

Seeing The Big Lebowski for the second time was worth it.  There's a 'mad caper' theme to the movie, which means lots of excuses for Jeff Bridges' character, 'The Dude', to get hit over the head and enter dreamland. All of those dream sequences, off-putting and disorienting the first time around, are now the highlight of the movie for me.  Viva la Coen Brothers.

The Dude on a sort of 50's diner stairway to Valhalla.

The Dude in an anxiety nightmare that he is trapped in the finger holes and taking a roll down the lane from the ball's perspective.

Unsubscribe x 5

Like a ponderous Leviathan encrusted with barnacles my inbox is stuffed with the junk of countless lists.

Unlike a whale, I invented a barnacle-removal routine.  My online housekeeping project for this month goes like this: every time I sit down to do some work on the computer I take out five coins. I unsubscribe to a mailing list and then put a coin back in my pocket, similar to how I keep track of reps when I exercise. It's to make sure I don't get lost in a neverending sea -- I just want to spend a few minutes a day until my inbox gets under control.

Today I deleted my name from the email lists of:

• Google Alerts (Taiwan, Chemistry Teacher, Sarajevo, Joel Klein)

• Oxfam (sorry!)
• Friendster (remember them? Today's email subject line was "Now in Tagalog"!)
• Spirit Airlines Richard Foreman's Hysterical Ontological Theater

Remembering Especially __________ , Our President

Here is an obscure souvenir: humble but singular evidence of Inaugaration 2009. A hand corrected note for the weekly form prayer from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer:

I took this scribble-amended prayer script from the podium after the service.  This hasty footnote will be my scrapbook keepsake for the changing of the guard last month.

Show Review: The Bad Plus played Tuesday at the Bowery Ballroom

Very amazing seeing tB+ record release party on Tuesday.

Main thought prior to the show was: will it suck, adding a vocalist?

All around relief from us in the audience as the band went for an initial 50 minute stretch, playing as God-made-em:  (not nude, silly) an accomplished, telepathic instrumental trio.

Still, a persistent worrying thought was: how can they allow a girl into the clubhouse?   Will this upset the testosterone-apple-cart?

All concerns vanished at 10:09 pm when a deferential but assertive Wendy Lewis popped up in the band's midst, managing to take a Kurt Cobain vocal "Lithium" and make it her own.

I don't have enough reference points to make a closer triangulation but I would describe the vocal style as Patty Smiths range but with post-Boomer sense of irony.  Closer to PJ Harvey than to Kim Deal, though less grand and scarey than PJ Harvey, more approachable and healthy.  I'd like to see her sit in on vocals for either The Descendents or Deerhoof. 

I'm sure we all appreciated the added visual appeal of having a girl crash the male clubhouse. 
The crowd was wildly endorsing of her presence and wouldn't stop clapping.    I'm not sure if the band can go backwards again after this to an instrumental format.   It's like the vibrating bed at a motel:  initially you didn't see a need for it but when the last quarter runs out, you miss the vibrating presence.  

The boys may have a hard time putting this genie back in the bottle.

Conclusion: TBP with WL are a worthwhile further iteration on the Nouvelle Vague concept, with both vocalist and band being superior in every way to NV.

The new Bad Plus album includes many covers from the show:  Pink Floyd's 'Comfortably Numb', Yes' 'Long Distance Runaround', and Nirvana's 'Lithium' all worked great live.  Some enjoyable tension occurred when lyrics written for a 4/4 time were played in the odd time-signatures of the Bad Plus.

Follow Up: Do The Math makes numerous interesting observations in their blog  account of what the band did the following day:  live accompaniment to the New York Fashion Week tent show of Isaac Mizharhai in Bryant Park .

Caught Between Being not-Dylan and (I think) Suing Don McLean

Poor Phil Ochs.
For starters, consider that my entire generation from the 70's, even avid students like me of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (et al, et al) has no idea who he was.  I only learned about him in 2001, from Stephen King's novel Hearts in Atlantis, where Ochs is repeatedly namechecked as a humble but broadly important figure of the counterculture.  The proto-protesters of King's 60's aren't listening to Dylan's "Masters of War" but rather Ochs' "Fogey From Muskogee".

Ochs seems to have been slighted from multiple potential fan bases. Consider:
1) Dylan, a peer, abandoned sincerity for crazy imagery, facile chameleonism, and cynicism to, finally, great aclaim.  Ochs, appearing to be a step behind, evolved with less sureity and mixed reviews, slipping in stature.
2) In a Robert Bork/ Michael Phelps moment, Ochs had what could have been a pretty cool, rambling epic radio hit, "Tape From California" become censored because one character in it, a burned out Nam vet is described as "passing his pipe" to the song's narrator, Ochs.   It's funny to think of the hypocrisy of bands in the 60s not being allowed to admit that they got high.
3) Ochs had a lesser-known rival zoom past him, aping his style a bit, I think.  Sitting here today in a coffee shop on 34th Street, I heard "American Pie" for the millionth royalty-generating time in my life and realized that Don McLean's voice (his voice itself!) and song both derive from Ochs just as much as, say, Sum 41 derives from Green Day nowadays. To me, "American Pie" seems all-Ochs, both the rambling narrative and lingering pre-occupation with pre-Boomer culture (i.e. fifties rock and roll-- see Ochs gold-lame-suit appearance in his late 60s "Gunfight at Carnegie Hall").

    ---------------------------------------

In 1976, after Ochs hanged himself at his sisters home in Rockaway, Queens, Bella Abzug had the following entered into the Congressional record:
Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, a young folksinger whose music personified the protest mood of the 1960s took his own life. Phil Ochs — whose original compositions were compelling moral statements against war in Southeast Asia — apparently felt that he had run out of words.

While his tragic action was undoubtedly motivated by terrible personal despair, his death is a political as well as an artistic tragedy. I believe it is indicative of the despair many of the activists of the 1960s are experiencing as they perceive a government which continues the distortion of national priorities that is exemplified in the military budget we have before us.

Might Have Counted As School Lunch Vegetable

Words to live by:
    "There is no season for Jell-O; Jell-O is always in season."
        --my mom, sagely reflecting on the popularity last week of a crushed pretzel Jell-O mold she brought to the office potluck at her school.