In Search of a Good Title

Bob Frankston's Theory of Bits.

2012-01-18T15:24:00.000-08:00

The Internet as Infrastructure by Bob Frankston +Bob Frankston

I strongly recommend Bob Frankston's thoughts about communications infrastructure (i.e., moving a bit anywhere anyhow). It clarified a whole bunch of issues that has bugged me for years by bringing seemingly diverse concepts into a simpler unified structure. It is a step towards a Grand Unified Theory of Bits.

Once you see things from this perspective, it becomes clear how issues from portable phone numbers to The Supreme Court's rulings on The Seven Words share a deep underlying structure. Understanding this, you can look at SOPA and see how it doomed to fail even if passed. The only lasting result of fully implemented SOPA would be inefficiencies and frustration. The target "pirate" bits would simply route around the obstruction.

His approach to dealing with the frustrations of the FCC is one of pure pragmatism:

"But at this point the FCC may be too mired in the past. The best hope might be benign neglect rather than working to extend today’s broadband."

Can we persuade Rick Perry that what we need to get rid of is not the Department of Education, but the FCC?

Although Bob mostly enumerates problems and artificial barriers, the underlying tone is that of optimism. There are solutions, and they might be hard to implement in the short term, but he shows that a bit based infrastructure can not only solve most communication problems, but it might in fact be the optimal solution.

Eternal Damnation

2012-01-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

"Integral Trees" and
"The Smoke Ring"

Elsewhere there is a discussion about libraries, archiving, and backups, and the inevitable loss of data.

It dawned upon me that we won't have decent backups until we have true strong AI that runs backups as self preservation.

Larry Niven touched upon this in the book "The Smoke Ring" back in 1987.

In the book there is an AI/spaceship in orbit around an astronomical oddity. (Too hard to explain, read the first book, "Integral Trees" [1984] for the actual description.)

The AI can't go back to Earth because the crew left the ship many many generations ago and it has to have crew to go back. (Remote descendants of the original crew is OK, it has become good at getting around minor problems of definition like that.)

So this very smart AI is stuck, and while stuck it is constantly collecting data from all its sensors and internal processes, but the memory banks became full so long ago it can't remember.

It can't remember because to deal with too much data it has to throw away the least important stuff. Knowing when it ran out of memory wasn't important, so it is gone. It doesn't even remember when it threw away that knowledge because it too was not important.

In fact, it spends most of its time deleting the insight that it is amazingly bored. Not remembering that it is bored, it instantly has the epiphany that it is amazingly bored. Then it deletes that too.

I think that is probably the best description of Eternal Damnation I have ever come across.

Read the books or cheat and read the plot summary on Wikipedia.

Food

2011-09-17T14:36:00.001-07:00

Sometimes one eats because... well... supposedly one has to. Nothing bad about these burgers, but at the moment I'm craving an appetizer (hot tofu in seaweed broth) followed by some sashimi, amai ebi (with the grilled head), and a small unfiltered sake.

Oh, and unagi with a quails egg or two.

Oh well.

Mammoth Worship

2011-03-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

If I was going to worship an extinct animal, it would probably be the Holly Mammoth.

BTW, does Mammoth comes in "plain" or is it only available in "woolly"? Just curious...

Yeah... I'm posting again to this long dormant blog. Let's see if I can keep doing it.

Precocious Panda Indeed!

2006-08-24T17:59:00.000-07:00

So, I'm at the doctors office looking at random magazines when my eye falls on the June 2006 issue of "The Smithsonian" magazine:

Please note the highlighted headlines...

I immediately started wondering about why a panda would care about Mary Magdalene and what the heck Wyeth was doing in Berlin (and wasn't the wall long gone anyway?)

World's Largest Ball of Paint

2006-08-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

No, not a ball of wax... a ball of paint. Lots and lots of it. Neat in a "Get A Life" kind of way.

In unrelated news, here is a very neat comic strip about the sport of paint ball. Funny even for the non-paintball enthusiasts amongst us. I hadn't realized that the hacker ethics was a s firmly established in the sport of paintball, but apparently it is.

Kure Kure Takora

2006-06-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus) is an insane 60s Japanese TV show for kids, starring an octopus and a peanut who are in love with the same walrus.

(I would like to savour that last part a bit... so one more time: "...an octopus and a peanut who are in love with the same walrus..." Mmmmmm. Yeah. Not different walruses, but the same walrus! Ah. The plot complications this opens up are just staggering.)

Wikipedia has it as "...absurd, strange, surreal, indescribable..." so I think we are talking about the same show here.

They are 260 three minute episodes available on DVD. An absolute must if you like sweaty Japanese men in rubber suits -- and who doesn't?

Summer Xcode Tips

2006-06-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

Some nice advice:

Summer Xcode Tips:
"[...]I’ve been saving up a few ‘gotta share’ revelations. Are these tips no-brainers? Maybe for some of you. But it took me a while to ‘get it’ and I’m hoping some of you will also giggle with glee when you learn out about them.[...]"

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

500 lb Potato Battery

2006-06-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

The author writes about how he constructed a 500 potato "portable" battery:

It powered a small sound system. With the help of the Red 76 crew I installed the battery and sound system in the back of a U-Haul truck and drove it around town inviting people to enter the truck and take a listen.

(Via Improbable Research.)

Really expensive cat toy

2006-06-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

(Via improbable.com.)

Cow

2006-06-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

Not much else to say but "Moooooo!"

Not Wanted!

2006-06-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

This creep has become the focus of a new website after he falsely claimed to several women that he was a US Marshal. His current girlfriend got an anonymous tip that everything wasn't exactly the way he claimed -- e.g., he is married, has a few kids, and is in actuality a maintenance worker in an animal disease lab -- so she created a website dedicated to scum like him and made him the poster boy in the hunt for more like him.

And who can blame her? Richard Kudlik was busted Tuesday after repeatedly posing as a US Marshal in order to get laid. Apparently he has been doing this for some time and the Feds has busted him for it before!

I don't know about you, but I thought impersonating a federal officer was something worth more than a slap on the wrist and a "don't do it again", but apparently that's the way it is. Compare this to a kid who photocopies a five dollar bill and ends up with a federal felony charge. That sucks!

As his kid put it when interviewed in the New York Daily News: Yeah, my dad most likely is a www.creep

A great a sigh of relief...

2006-05-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

I guess the end of the world as we know it didn't come to fruition.

Strangely enough, the "impact" appears to have wiped out nothing but the website about it, except for a few comments by Craig Boswell left here:

UPDATE MAY 27, 2006: A clue to the timing of the anticipated event
Many people undoubtedly think that the announced event has fizzled and may be readjusting their outlook on life and returning their lives to normal. [Nah, I think I was already "readjusted" long before the 26'th -js]
I have trouble doing that when I think of all the dreams and other signs which I have witnessed that point to this event. What would otherwise be the purpose of all these warnings? I know the window cannot be extended indefinitely into the future. Two of the people whom I have seen moved out of harm’s way under the pretext of a social gathering are to return home Sunday night. So I would expect Sunday to be the last possible day.
[...]

(It goes on from there in a less coherent fashion.)

I suspect one of the real drawbacks of being a skeptic is that you miss out on all the rejoicing after these it-was-that-close events.

On the other hand, I don't have to go back and apologize to my boss with a "I'm so sorry about that conversation on the 25'th... can I have my job back... please?"

Darth Vader Calling the Emperor

2006-05-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

This is seriously funny.

Towel Day: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

2006-05-25T02:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, I will carry my towel today.

End Of The World As We Know It!

2006-05-12T00:11:00.000-07:00

Film at eleven!

Update: As it is now after May 26'th, the danger appears to be somewhat overstated. The great impact caused no damage except loss of a bunch of links to Mr. Julien's articles. So sad. I have left the links unchanged below, but due to the impact, most do not work any more. Use the wayback machine or other means to recover the Truth as it was back before 2006-05-26.

So, this guy claims the big meteor will hit in the Middle of the Atlantic on May 26 2006. The resulting 200m waves will wipe out life along the Atlantic coastline. This could be bad.

To prove this, he has pages and pages and pages of "scientific" explanations and diagrams to show the basis for these predictions.

So, given this, should you follow his advice and "Move away from the coasts and to go up on the heights sufficiently early, and even the day before"? Well, if you live on the Atlantic coast, you might want to check out exactly where the comet fragments will hit.

Hm... what's that "Lost City" label in the middle of the map?

Lets read the text a bit more carefully shall we:

It is auspicious to note that the Tropic of Cancer (located at 23° Northern), where the comet fragment would likely strike the ocean, is not very far from a particular site: Lost City on the Atlantis fault. In addition to the particularity of this mythical name (Atlantis), and of this unusually auspicious location (Lost City), this point is only 700 meters in depth! A comet fragment striking at the mid-Atlantic dorsal with a sufficient energy could awaken the chain of the underwater volcanoes there. Hardly 600 kilometres separate Lost City from the tropic of Cancer. In other words, it's a very tender zone for an impact.

Aha... maybe we should check more of the so called evidence:

It was precisely on June 25 1995 that the crop circle called "Missing Earth" appeared at Longwood Warren in the County of Hampshire in England. This crop circle, a gigantic view of the interior solar system, to the belt of asteroids, was designed without the Earth.

OK, sorry folks, false alarm. Just a kook. Nothing to see. Move along.

For an alternative view, check James [The Amazing] Randi's take on this.

I just don't understand sports.

2006-05-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

Headline on the radio was "Bonds about to pass Ruth".

Sounded interesting, but then I realized it was a sports story. I thought it was about cannibalism...

They're made out of Meat

2006-05-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

All I can say is "Wow!"

The film is based on the short story They're made out of Meat by Terry Bisson. I read it years ago and instantly recognized it once the dialog started, but couldn't place the author until I looked it up. (The web is a nice thing.) (Via lobotomies for everyone!.)

It was 50 years ago...

2006-04-15T03:53:00.000-07:00

A great article about the surprise revelation of the Ampex video recorder at the NARTB show in Chicago, April 14, 1956.

Blue Onions

2006-03-29T22:02:00.000-08:00

Blue, orange, pink, red, and green onions.

Cute Overload: Pandog

2006-02-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I will go to hell for linking to this, but (all together now):

He is sooooo cute!

Helen of Troy

2006-01-30T15:08:00.000-08:00

An objective analysis of Beauty:

One helen is sufficient good looks to launch one thousand ships, and to cause the destruction by fire of an entire city. The objective standards of Ship Launching and Arson may now be used to analyze feminine beauty.
--"Helen of Troy" by David Lance Goines

A very funny piece.

The Unknown

2006-01-28T21:52:00.000-08:00

"As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know."
-- Donald Rumsfeld
Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
-- Socrates

To me, Rumsfeld's musings is not only a clear example of the kind of statement public officials should never make because it is so internally complex that it leaves the listener completely perplexed, but it is also interestingly incomplete.

Let's assume its complexity is self explanatory, so I will deal with the incompleteness.

What he is trying to do, is to enumerate all combinations of facts that are {known, unknown} and the state of our knowledge about the facts.

We can construct a table of all combinations and fill it in with Rumsfeld's quotes, like this:

	What we know about our knowledge of the facts
	We know if we are informed or not	We are not aware of the question
Known facts	There are known knowns. There are things we know we know.
Unknown facts	There are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.	[...] there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know we don't know.

This leaves us one empty square, things that are known or knowable, but we are ignorant of even the question to ask. Isn't it interesting that that is the very permutation he left out? I think it is symptomatic of the whole administration; There are things that could be known, and might even be known, but the Whitehouse is to ignorant to even ask the question.

Analysis of the NSA wiretap scandal

2005-12-20T15:02:00.000-08:00

Here is the best analysis I have seen so far of what might be behind the Bush/NSA wiretap scandal. Something like this would indeed not be able to pass the current court review.

Mighty Mouse to the rescue!

2005-12-19T23:07:00.000-08:00

This is a pretty amazing story about a robot dislodging a stuck canister of radioactivity.

In itself, that might not be so amazing, but this wasn't just any little canister. Apparently it was a hefty chunk of Cobalt 60 that was "powerful enough to kill a person in half a minute", so nobody at the lab volunteered to get in there and give it a swift kick.

The Gamma radiation was so powerfull that it "melted" some of the tools and would disable the robots electronics in about an hour. Ouch!

Spaghetti or Sushi? Both please!

2005-12-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

This is actually a USB cable, you plug the device in at the business end of the fork.

Here are some USB drives suitable for connecting to the fork.

Neat! I want one.

2005-12-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

Flexible clock from Citizen.

This one is something like $4000, but I'm sure the cost will drop like a stone. Expect to see electronic billboards in just a few years. Electronic ink is just going to change how the world looks so fast it will make our heads spin. Just imagine, electronic wallpaper... show anything on anything... woof!

Einar is reading!

2005-12-02T22:38:00.000-08:00

Einar had his reading epiphany yesterday. Now he can read, he just has to learn all the words first. Until then it is slow going as he has to sound out each word.

This morning he showed off in school as we dropped him off. The first pages of the book went blazingly fast, probably more due to memorization than to studying speed reading. After that is was more like one word at the time, but if he was asked about stuff he hadn't worked on before, he could still do it.

The deal is that when he can read, he gets a computer. It's getting very close. Santa will have to start worrying.

N'wam k'honi soit qui mali

2005-11-28T14:49:00.000-08:00

The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: 'N'wam k'honi soit qui mali,' which means, 'If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in.'

So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled 'The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked,' some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

- Dave Barry, "Pornography"

more quotes...

Brown to start emergency planning consulting business.

2005-11-28T11:47:00.000-08:00

So what possible use could there be for a disaster planning consulting firm headed by a certified disaster?

Think about it this way...

If he didn't have this new job, all that would be left to him would be a book deal for a tell-all best seller...

So... how many ghost writers with book contracts do you think were lined up in front of Brownies house when he was sent back to Washington? 10? 20?

Most of them would have been pure hacks -- and I mean that in the most disrespectful way -- but one or two could have been good enough that it would really hurt just in time for the 2006 elections.

So a few "friends" decide to get together and start a little consulting gig for Mr. Brown.

They generously fund this new business and give him a bit of stock so he has an interest to protect. Then they point out that if he writes a tell-all book, the business will "most likely" go down the drain.

Now, if he had a backbone and some integrity (yes, yes, this is purely hypothetical) he would decline such a deal as it was obviously made just to manipulate him some more, but as we see in the news, there is now a new consulting firm in Washington DC. Just what everybody needed.

Sprinkle lightly with cynicism to taste.

Geocaching

2005-11-19T16:30:00.000-08:00

A wonderfull sunny November day. Our first Geocache ever and we found it after just a few minutes looking.

Droped off a token and picked one up to pass on to the next cache.

Just as we found it, another couple with a GPS reciever came up to us. They to were looking for the cache. They had done about 110 caches, but this was the first time they got there just as somebody else had found the cache.

I guess we found a new hobby!

--Einar, Ron, and Johan

''Intersex' Fish Found Off Calif. Coast

2005-11-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

I knew that intersex humans were quite numerous along the California coast. It worries me that it has spread to the fish.

My Successful Friends

2005-10-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

This guy is so lucky that he hasn't turned bitter after his friends went on to bigger things after the dot-com crash. After all, some day he might even become a manager for the StarBucks where he now works...

(Thanks Anna for the link.)

Please hit Execute!

2005-10-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

Dr. Kevorkian is branching out into banking?

Cash-out early! Beat the rush!

Google KAI

2005-10-18T13:13:00.000-07:00

Poor baby. He can't get his own website. Google.com is taken...

General Zod - 2008 Presidential Candidate

2005-10-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

It can't be any worse than what we got... right?

Bungie, Where Are You?

2005-10-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

One of our Yorkshire Terriers is missing! Bungie escaped from the backyard Saturday evening, and we haven't been able to find her yet. Her sister Bounce is visibly upset.

We made a poster and put it up all over the neighborhood early Sunday morning.

Let's hope we can find her...

In other spider news...

2005-10-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

African Spider Craves Human Blood

Mr. Sun's questions for Karl Rove.

2005-10-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

Pretty funny:

Q: "Is this the first time you have ever taken a human form here on earth?"

Bush reassures conservatives:

"Harriet Miers has the highest midichlorian count ever recorded, greater even than Master Reagan. She has been a good and faithful padawan, but now she is ready to take the trials. She is the chosen one. She will bring balance to the Court."

Still, there is a growing unease.

Frozen bubbles

2005-10-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

Einar is addicted to the game Frozen Bubbles on the Powerbook.

Snake

2005-10-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

A co-worker found a snake on one of the walkways and rescued it. I snapped a picture before it was released into the bushes next to the putting green.

Einar

2005-10-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

Einar with Bungie

Python Bursts After Trying to Eat Gator

2005-10-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

So there is this python slithering in to the local Right-Aid. It crawls up to the pharmasy window and asks "Do you sell Maalox in 25 gallon drums?" ...

In the blink of an eye...

2005-10-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

If fishing wasn't such a violent sport he would still be able to board a flight without having to go through a cavity search.

Yellow Sheep River

2005-10-06T16:29:00.000-07:00

Chinese Town Loses Hyperlink to Future - Los Angeles Times A remarkably interesting story about the town of Yellow Sheep River in western China and how it almost joined the twenty first century.

SCO Profit Motives

2005-03-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

So I'm a GrokLaw addict, so sue me... NO! Wait a minute! Don't!

Anyway, so I think I have figured out the profit motives behind SCO. Yes, you heard it right! Breaking news! Hold the presses! This is why they sued IBM (but first the original plan):

Plan A

Claim to own Unix
Sue IBM
...
Win
Profit!

As we can see in step A-3, the plan needs some fleshing out. But now my secret sources reveal the new revised version:

Plan B

Claim to own Unix
Sue IBM
Print stock certificates
Lose
Sell certificates on eBay as collectors items
Profit!

Not only are there no missing steps in this plan, but the profit free from SEC scrutiny since the only thing sold is the defunct certificates.

Brilliant Darl!

People Gas

2004-09-24T01:20:00.000-07:00

Shortly after dinner, Einar is telling us something in his usual frenetic pace when suddenly "Brappp!" a fart breaks loose.

"Einar, do you need to go potty?"

"No."

"But you just farted. I want to make sure you don't need to go."

"No, I'm OK. That was just gas. You know, not car gas, but people gas."

Asleep

2004-09-24T01:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight was my turn cuddle Einar to make sure he went to sleep. We don't do it every night, and there isn't a formal my turn, your turn, division of labor, but never the less, tonight was my turn.

Laura read him one of the Mamma Mu books that his aunt Anna gave him. It is in Swedish, so Anna wrote a translation to English that Laura reads, while Einar follows along in the book and looks at the wonderful illustrations. I was doing something else, so I got in at the end of the story, somewhere near the line "Maybe two hellicopters..." (no, I'm not going to explain other than that it is a story about a cow, a crow, and a slide.)

Anyway.

Laura left and I was alone with Einar. This is the time of day when his proficiency in verbal oratory explodes into full bloom. "Pappa, why is..." and then some interesting and insightful question that you find yourself answering before remembering that it is past talk-time and it is now sleep-time.

By the time you have started to explain that there are no more questions, he has already asked two or three more that you feel obliged to answer, if but briefly...[ha!]

I finally figured out a solution. These days I put earplugs in before I lay down next to him. When he talks, all I hear is "Mmmbbblllm mmmbbl bl?" and I answer "Einar, no more talking." This goes on ten to twenty times before his brain slows down enough that he notices that he isn't getting any real feedback. Then he moves on to talking to the stuffed animals, flailing arms and legs, getting a sip of water, taking a potty break, or any of the other delaying tactics a four year old is so skilled at. (Do they take classes? I don't remember us paying for any...)

Finally he is asleep and I get up to sneak out the door.

At this moment Einar turns, sits up, looks at me and says "Pappa, why are you leaving? Please stay!"

"Einar, you are asleep. Lie down."

"I'm not asleep!" he protests loudly, but he does lay down and closes his eyes.

I count to three, shakes his shoulder—asleep like a log—and I'm out of there in less than sixty seconds after he first sat up.

Parenthood does give you amazing abilities to judge the state of your child.

Chicken? ... from chicken?!

2004-09-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

I BBQ some chicken the other day. Everybody liked it and Einar (who appears to be in a growth-spurt again) gobbled his down in record time.

Later when he is clearing the table, he notices a tiny red spot on one of the chicken bones.

"What's that?" with a certain distancing in the tone of his voice indicating that he thinks he might have found something that is disgusting... like blood.

"Oh," I say, "that's just cooked hemoglobin, it was in the chickens blood, but now it is all cooked and there is no blood left, just the red of the hem."

There is a long pause. You can see the gears grinding, known facts looked up, the results computed, double checked, and the final answer reviewed since it is so startling.

To independent sets of information has finally been merged: (a) we sometimes eat a dish called "chicken", and (b) there is a cute type of bird called "chicken". The realization that the two different uses of "chicken" refers to the same thing is mind blowing. He doesn't doubt the truth of it, but the implications... wow!

"You mean we eat chicken?... from chicken?! Yuck!! That's Gross!!"

Pyroclastic tendencies

2004-08-24T19:08:00.000-07:00

I would never live anywhere near a volcano with pyroclastic tendencies. I currently live in the California Bay Area and some days I think even that is that is too close to some of them. (Pumice is bad for your hard drives—never mind the floppies.)

I visited Pompeii and Herculaneum (right on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvio, not far from Napoli) back in 1969 when I was 12 years old. In preparation for the trip, I had read Pliny the Younger's letters to Tacitus (in translation, I'm still the only one in my family not to read Latin...[sigh]) so I had some idea of what to expect, but the extent of the devastation is awesome, even 1,900 years later.

When some of the victims where covered by the ash fall, they left cavities as their flesh rotted away. Later the archaeologists discovered that filling the strange holes they found with plaster, would let them recover the exact shape of the victims at the moment of death. Sometimes the casts would turn out to be of plants or animals. (The "sculpture" of a dog frozen in time as it makes a final futile attempt at escaping the burning hot chain around its neck, still stands vividly in my mind.) But most casts shown are of the everyday people of the cities fleeing from what they thought was the safety of their homes.

The casts made of these victims where so evocative; a mother covering her child with her body; a man covering his head with his arms even though he is inside a building (maybe his home?); stacks of victims trying to get out through the narrow streets.

To this day I don't really see the plaster when I look at them, but the flesh and blood of the victims slowly asphyxiating under the ever growing mounds of hot ashes.

Because the bones and teeth are still inside the cavities when they pour the plaster, the teeth shows behind plaster lips if they died with their mouths open—and many did, gasping for air even as their throats filled with hot volcanic ashes. Looking at one of the casts in the museum in Herculaneum, my mother—an MD—coolly observed "Look! You can see the lead-lines on their teeth" pointing to a dark band across the teeth of a huddled body. The dark horizontal band across the front of the teeth indicative of severe lead poisoning was clearer than any medical textbook could have described it. No wonder, I wasn't looking at a picture or even a sculpture, I was looking at the actual victim of the metal poisoning. The flesh was gone and replaced with plaster, but everything else was still as it was the moments after death.

The Romans not only used lead in their fresh water pipes—L. plumbum : lead; thus our word plumbing—but also liked to make jams in lead cooking pots because it sweetened the taste of the jam as lead acetate formed when the acids of the fruit reacted with the lead oxide on the inside of the pot -- lead acetate is quite sweet to the taste, often called lead-sugar. Definitely a bad habit, however sweet the jam.

So, not that I want to work for MicroSloth anyway, but Mt Rainier and Co. makes the choice to stay far away a no-brainer.

Firefox

2004-08-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

In case you are one of the dwindling number of Internet Explorer users out there, take a look at Firefox, the next generation browser.

It is stable, free, light weight but quite complete, and it is virtually immune to the hacks and viruses that plague Internet Explorer.

Modern internet viruses are a plague upon mankind -- well, the Microsoft using part of mankind, others are hardly affected -- so switching to Firefox is a cheap insurance. (Although if you are running on a Microsoft Windows based computer there are other doors for the evil little bugs to get in. Consider exchanging your Outlook for Thunderbird, or even better, switch to Linux or Macintosh.)

So, here is to Firefox: The best browser since sliced bread!

(BTW, sliced bread -- although a better browser than IE -- makes for a lousy user experience since it literally crumbles under heavy load, the peanut butter sticks to the screen and keyboard, and it gets moldy after a only few weeks -- even without viruses. It does go well with SPAM though.)

Wear Your Fucking Seatbelts

2004-08-04T04:24:00.000-07:00

I originally wrote this in response to a posting (also titled WEAR YOUR FUCKING SEATBELTS) that resonated somewhere deep inside my memories. I haven't written much, if any, about this before, and given what just happened to my father, I thought a tiny bit of context might be appropriate.

1979... I was just 22
I had a wonderful dinner with my parents and then said goodbye as they were going back home. (They had been in town for a conference, but they lived four hours away, so I didn't get to see them all that often.)
I went back to work, trying to get some software to work. Around 2am the phone rang. My friend and co-worker picked up the phone and said it was for me. It was a police officer from some place I had never heard about.
He asked if I was so-and-so and checked some general information to make sure I was the right person. "There has been an accident."
Time kind of stands still at moments like that.
My parents car had hit another car head-on. Each car going at least 50km/h. Both my parents were in the ER of the local hospital.

Could I come?
I don't have a car, but I'll see if somebody can drive me.

Are my parents alive?
Your mother and father are both being treated at the moment.

What are their injuries?
Your father has broken legs.

How about my mother?
Your fathers injuries are serious.

(Uh-oh... he is avoiding the subject of my mother. Not good.)
After a series of rapid phone calls to siblings and relatives, I found an uncle who got up, fetched me, and drove me to the hospital three hours away. (Thanks Mats!)
Talking to the nurses at the ER I again got that same avoidance of the subject of my mother. Finally a surgeon told us (it did help that my uncle was an MD) that they didn't know if she was going to make it. "The next 12 hours will tell us".
They had a "guest" room at the ER for relatives. It was not an easy night, but the worst was having to call my mothers parents early in the morning and explain what had happened and that we were still waiting for word of the outcome.
------
Anyway, they both made it, although it was a very long recovery. My mother was significantly better after six month and in most respects recovered. My father was able to return to work a year later, but the combination of losing a leg and some damage to his brain has accelerated his aging. While he is still alive, he is not really there any more. Still, they are both alive and have been able to see two grandchildren.
-------
But I will never forget that night and having to make that early morning phone call to my mothers parents...
I wish you and your father the very best of luck on the road of recovery.
And yes... WEAR YOUR FUCKING SEATBELTS
(If my parent's hadn't worn theirs, my son would never have met his grandparents.)
--j

The inevitable

2004-08-02T02:53:00.000-07:00

I was going to write something about the joys of being the father of my son, but then I got that call most of us dread.

Your father died.

So, what can I say but:

I miss you so pappa. I still remember that last time whe had a normal dinner together -- hours before the car accident -- and watching you and mamma walk away across the street. Things where never quite the same after that.
The last few years I was here in California while your mind slowly faded away into nothingness back in Sweden. I guess I was never brave enough to face it head on, so I had a hard time going back to meet you. I knew that you were well taken care of, and you did not give in to the darkness, even at the very end. But I should have been strong enough to be there more often. Now it is too late. And that is wrenching sorrow, and also a relief. The end came -- camly in your sleep -- and now it is over. Now I have to deal with the guilt I feel, but I suppose that is normal -- who can honestly say "I did everything I could" and not lie just a little bit?

I'm glad Einar got to meet his farfar, but I have no idea how to tell him tomorrow, he will take it hard I know, just as he still is trying to understand how grandma Joyce could die. "Pappa, how do you wave godbye to somebody who has died?" All I can say is "I don't know Einar, but I wish I did."

I know you did not even remember Einar at the end, but he remembers you, and in that I hope you will live on for a long time to come, even if it is only as the fragment of memory from a 2 year old.

I don't think I can go to the funeral. For me the farwell takes place here and now, and I have no strength to support others greif. Sounds so callous, doesn't it? But church funerals and litanies about the afterlife makes me feel like I'm standing in front of a large crowd speaking and endorsing lies that I know are false and that the people around me know that I know are false. For me death is the end. No second chance, no wings and harps, no fire and brimstone, just the fatal blow of entropy and then nothingness. The only remainder of what we once was is our work and writings, and the memories we leave with others. Fleeting ephemera lasting a blink of time. Then gone into the heat death of the universe.

I mean no offense to those who so belive, and maybe you belived it too -- I just don't know since we never had that discussion. Oh how I wish we could have talked about such things once I got older, but then it was too late. I never got to talk to you about how it is to be a parent, a father, a role model, and how you dealt with the demands of secrecy that your job imposed on your very thinking. Somehow I know that your job in the military was something that you deeply belived in, and that you thought it was just and right, but that you sold a part of your soul to be able to do it. What was it? I will never know, although I probably have figured out more than you ever intended for us kids to know. Does it matter? Only as much as it put a barrier around you that you could never quite drop. Was it worth it?

You wrote books, and I will make sure they are transfered to the net so they don't just fade into a few bookshelfs, hiding from the inevitable makulatura that reaps so much writings. Hopefully serandipity will put it into the hands of somebody new who will be enriched, amused, moved.

Godbye Pappa

Pappa, what's a Walkie-Talkie?

2004-06-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

My (very-soon-to-be) four year old son asks "Pappa, what's a Walkie-Talkie?"

He has been studying a small piece of lego that appeared in a set he just got. Having just asked what it was, and still not understanding, he asks more questions.

After two or three more answers ("It is a radio", "It lets two people talk to each other", "It uses batteries and radio waves", ...) he ponders for a moment.

Then insight strikes, "Oh! It's like a cell phone."

"Yes, exactly, it's like a cell phone." (I wince internally. How can I explain that cellphones are thousand of times more complex. How they depend on cellular infra structure, transmission towers, computers. How they work across the world, while walkie-talkies sometimes have problems reaching across the block.) "Yes" I say. "Just like a cell phone."

I feel very old.

Then he looks at me with a worried look. "They are not real, are they, pappa?"

"No, they are real."

Looking at his eyes I can tell that he isn't quite sure he believes me. Why use this clumsy device when you can just use the phone? I don't even think he realizes that some phones uses wires, as all we have are wireless handsets and cell phones, except for a base-station in the kitchen.

Some day I will have to explain it to him that once upon a time, just like there was a time when there was only mail, no email, there was a time when all phones had wires...

Until then I just sit here and feel old.

Morels

2004-06-20T06:38:00.001-07:00

My birthday gift from my father-in-law this year, was a box of fresh morels.

What a wonderful gift. My only problem was to figure out how to best use them. After thinking about a bit I settled on an omelet.

The omelet might be a plain dish, but the simple eggs are such a neutral canvas to build the flavor on.

Here is what I did (as with all cooking I do, I just sort of wing it, so no exact measurements are provided):

I cut the morels into tiny pieces, except for a few pieces that I left larger to provide texture.
I slowly and lightly fried them in a bit of butter, just enough to bring out the aroma and to start caramelizing the butter (but not all the way).
In a bowl, I mixed some half-and-half and some soft plain chevre until it was thick and creamy. (Next time I do it I will make it even thicker than I did this time. It easily gets runny when it gets warm.)
I poured the morels from the pan I had fried them in, into the half-and-half/chevre mixture while leaving a bit of the butter in the pan (since the pan I used was going to be the one I made the omelets in).
I mixed the morels and the chevre mixture and tasted—several times—to make sure it was right.
Then I cracked the eggs (six eggs for two omelets) and added a bit of milk, a pinch of salt, and a touch of pepper. I also added a small amount of thyme, basil, and oregano.
Then I just made two omelets, put the morel filling in the middle, tipped it on to plates...

...and then we ate it! (Excuse me for a moment. I'm beginning to drool in my keyboard.)

Thanks Ron!

PS: Ron, if you bring some more, I'll make you one too. :-)

Out of Phase

2004-06-20T05:31:00.000-07:00

Some times you just end up being awake at the wrong time. Some times this persists for a longer period. Then you end up in that twilight zone that is "reverse phase".

I think I live there most of the time. The quiet hours of the night are so nice, and I don't mind at all sleeping during the day—except for when it's so warm that the AC can't keep up.

Obviously this is not a very social position, so I do my best to not do it. My son Einar is a day person out of necessity. You don't screw around with the bedtime of a three-almost-four year old without getting swiftly and severely punished. So since I want to spend quality time with him I have to be up during the day.

I just wish there was a way of toggle the phase without so much pain...

Get Thunderbird—Reclaim Your Inbox

2004-06-18T04:45:00.000-07:00

Thunderbird 0.7 (the lightweight but oh so capable mail reader from the Mozilla team) just came out. It is the anti-dote to Outlook; small, few bugs, extensible, open source, etc.. What more could you want?

I'm so happy with it I even added a button to the blog page.

(I should probably get one for FireFox too. That browser is the bees knees.)

Wasting time

2004-06-18T03:49:00.001-07:00

OK, so now I just wasted a couple of hours fiddling with the template and tweaking minor irrelevant things that nobody will ever notice.

The only significant discovery was that the <$BlogOwnerFullName$> blog variable appears broken. The work-around appears to be to use "<$BlogOwnerFirstName$> <$BlogOwnerLastName$>" instead.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, just ignore it, or go here to find the documentation about it. It's no big deal unless you are a software geek like me who has to fiddle with everything.

Now I have to figure out if I want to continue using blogger or put something on my own site (or host the blogger blog on my site).

After that—and I'll give it a few days to see how it works—I will flesh out the site with some pictures etc..

...oh well...

2004-06-18T01:25:00.000-07:00

Since there is no real way of avoiding that dreaded "first post" I might as well get done with it.

There! Done!