Category Archives: Observations

Who, Me?

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I was recently farting around with my Facebook profile. I uploaded a new profile image (which doesn’t really look very good as a thumbnail but apparently it doesn’t save my old profile photos, so now I’ll have to find the original to go back), and while I was at it, I glanced through my other profile information.

My profile is scant, not so much because I’m trying to protect my privacy as because I can’t imagine why anyone would care about most of that stuff.

In fact, the only ones who might be interested in any of that stuff are the ones who with the overt goal of invading my privacy. So, why not help them out? There’s a field I can fill in for my political leanings. It occurred to me that ‘anarchist’ would be fun, but ‘communist’ would be more provocative. Even though communism is an economic system. People get mixed up about that.

Hobbies? How about ‘recreational explosives’ and ‘euthanasia’? Maybe ‘book burning’ to keep people guessing.

Senate Committee Chairman: So, on your Facebook profile you declared yourself to be a communist! And a bomb-throwing murderer!
Yours Truly (trying to remember): Did I?
SCC: Yes! You also burn books, so you’re obviously not completely evil, but we demand an explanation!
YT: Simple. That’s not me.

And that would be the truth. I am not a Facebook profile. I’m not even a blog, though blog-Jerry and public-Jerry do have a lot in common.

East-Coast people often say they hate how ‘fake’ Californians are. In fact, Californians say the same thing about other Californians. But what does that actually mean? My theory: Californians don’t express anger as openly as others, and they don’t lean forward when they listen to you (the way southerners do), so they must be fake.

Whatever. Everyone’s fake. I’m fake. And seriously, that’s the way it should be. You know the me I’ve learned to project since my earliest days. The one who plays nice, gets along, and tries to make the world a better place (usually). You don’t want to know me the way I know me. I don’t want to know you that way either.

Then there’s the person you imagine when you read this blog. Not the same as the person you find when you run into meat-me at the frozen yogurt shop. Blog-me might be a little more articulate, since he reads most things he says before he says them. Blog-me talks about different things, sometimes more introspective, and doesn’t really worry so much about boring people.

Blog-me is a different person. A different fiction.

So why not Facebook-me? Why not create some whacked-out extremist commie bomb-thrower and be that guy?

There’s a good reason not to, actually. It’s hard enough work maintaining the personas I already have. All the -me’s are pretty lazy.

Thanks!

A Comfy Star

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Recently ‘they’ found a brown dwarf nearby. A brown dwarf is a star that never quite made the grade; when all the other stars in the dust cloud were snatching up fuel these hapless wanna-bes were left just shy of the mass (and therefore gravitational pressure) to squish hydrogen atoms together into helium, and as a side effect shooting off heat. They’re barely stars at all.

You can see a thoroughly uninteresting photo of one over at Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s pretty close to us — on a cosmic scale at least — a mere 40 light-years away. What made this one interesting (to me at least) is the surface temperature. It’s about the same temperature as the room I’m sitting in right now.

So let’s say, for the sake of Science Fiction, that one can travel faster than light. Only slightly more impossible would be dealing with the high gravity. Once those two minor things are taken care of, you could build your house on this star. Well, there probably isn’t a real surface per se, and there’s likely to be some pretty wicked radiation and magnetic what-not. And epic storms, like on Jupiter.

BUT – if you solved those things, you could build your house on a star. That would be cool.

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Kafka’s Playing Quarterback!

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Suddenly I’m an Eagles fan, just for letting me type the above.

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Ahh, Football

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I’m in a bar and apparently the preseason starts today. I’d say that this mattered not at all, but I do have this observation: On what I think was the Raiders’ first play of the first game of the preseason, there was a fight.

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I’m Sure it’s a Coincidence

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As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.

No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.

You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.

So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.

But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.

The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)

Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.

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X-Games to the Left, Soccer to the Right

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I am surrounded by TV screens, all showing things that resemble sport. In soccer, a Mexican team is playing a Spanish Italian one. I have to say I was pulling for Guadalajara over Seville or wherever Juventus comes from. [Um… Turin, actually.]

I didn’t see the goal, but I did see a few supposedly macho men lying on the grass crying. Not as many as I expected, which just goes to show you how far this league is from earning my respect. Only four episodes of babyism in the second half? That’s progress! I’d like to think the boys from North America spent less time on the soil than the Europeans.

Meanwhile, my left eye and right hemisphere have been absorbing X-Games. I watched an event where kids rolled their bikes down a ridiculous slope, up a ramp, through the air (tricks ensue) and then, if they land, they have a chance to do one more trick. I’d say maybe 30% landed the first flight. Probably less. These kids fell a long, long way, sometimes with a bicycle in the crotch, and when things came to a rest they took a deep breath and walked off, trying as hard as possible to NOT look hurt. A nice departure from the soccer.

And yet. Does the double-front-flip or the backflip-with-the-bike-spin score higher? That’s for the judges to decide. Ultimately most of the events in the X-Games are slightly-more-dangerous figure skating. Contestants do stuff and someone else decides who wins. Interesting, occasionally entertaining, but not satisfying from a sporting point of view.

When does hockey season begin again?

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Darn that Science

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I’m in a bar right now, trying to get the blog mojo working. On the TV I just saw a commercial that featured some sort of record-breaking car jump. I just couldn’t get excited.

Back in the ’70s the guys doing jumps just put a big motor in their cars, set up a ramp, and took a shot at the other side. Sure there were some estimates of how far they would fly if they were going a certain speed at the top of the ramp, but there was still a seat-of-the-pants feel to it. You started small, you jumped farther and farther, and learned to land on your wheels.

Now, I see a specially-modified car sail through the air and all I see is math. The driver has only to hit the ramp at the right speed and keep level and Bob’s your uncle. [This has always been the case, but ‘the right speed’ was not as exactly-known as it is now, nor was it so easy to hit that speed back in the day. I contend. And now that I think of it, some ramps back then might have doomed the driver no matter the speed.]

Daredeviling, like tennis, has suffered from the advance of technology.

WWEKD?

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A Quick Word to the Folks at the Emergency Broadcasting System

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I was tooling up the highway yesterday, somewhere in the vicinity of Stockton, CA. I have music on my phone, but I thought while I was around civilization I’d check the airwaves. I’d found a station that at least for a moment didn’t suck, and all was well with the world.

Suddenly: a grating series of beeps that sounded like they’d been put through a blender assaulted my ears. This is the attention tone for the Emergency Broadcasting System. Those beeps were followed by a long purer tone. Then another tone at a different pitch. Lesson one for the EBS: Quit with all the tones. I almost turned off my radio, figuring that there wasn’t going to be any information, just some sort of beep-fest. The only thing that kept me listening was the bank of thunderheads looming ahead of me. Just this once, the EBS might be giving out useful information.

Finally the broadcast tired of the beeping and booping and hit me with a burst of static. From within this noise, a distorted voice that sounded like it had been bouncing through phone lines since 1920 began dispensing… what? I don’t know. It was completely incomprehensible. Lesson two for the EBS: the information won’t help anyone if no one can tell what you’re saying. I think I picked out the word “alpine” and later “water”. That’s about it.

Flash floods? Possibly. Were they anywhere near where I was heading? No way to tell. Was there something I should do differently? Only one way to find out. I drove on.

I had the top down, so I was not in ideal listening conditions, but I could understand all the other people on the radio, all too well. Now there was something I actually wanted to hear, something intended for public safety, and it was just a jumble of noise.

Now it may be that the guy who recorded the message was not in a position to make a high-fidelity recording, but come on. Surely somewhere in this entire damn country there was someone who could have taken one thin minute to re-record the message in better circumstances.

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New Album Out!

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I haven’t seen the cover for the Foo Fighters’ new album, but if the song I heard today is any indication, it’s pretty easy to imagine what it looks like. Here is my humble rendition:

The cover to the newest Foo Fighters album

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Obvious in Retrospect

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There’s a show coming out on ABC, the title of which escapes me even though I saw an ad for it less than a minute ago. Here was the pitch to the network executives: “It’s M*A*S*H, in Iraq, only patriotic.”

That phrase, right there, with maybe a dash of crime drama, would have got you a $50 million budget (if you could tell the right person). But you didn’t think of it. Alas, neither did I.

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Now with Extra Extras!

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I’ve seen a few car advertisements lately, and one thing’s for sure: they’re sure putting a lot of gizmos into cars these days. But where some people see “cool feature”, I see “distraction” and “point of failure”. Electric windows were bad enough, now it seems I’d be hard-pressed to find an automobile that doesn’t tie my shoes for me and tell me how devilishly handsome I am.

If I were king of an auto company, every new proposed feature my marketing whiz kids threw at me would have to answer these questions:

  1. Does it add weight to the vehicle?
  2. Does it divide the driver’s attention?
  3. does it require an instruction manual?
  4. Does it increase maintenance costs?
  5. How many different ways can it break?
  6. When it breaks, how will that affect the owner of the car? (Crash? can’t roll up the windows? Can’t unlock the door?)

I don’t know if there exists a new car (within reason) that I would prefer over my ten-year-old, already-too-fancy car.

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Must be a Very Long Train

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I’m traveling to beautiful scenic Lawrence, Kansas this summer, and I thought I’d see if taking the train was an option. On the plus side, the Southwest Limited passes right through town; if I flew I’d have to arrange transport from Kansas City. On the minus side, traveling by rail in this country is pricey. Back on the plus side, a stop in Santa Fe for a few days is trivial – the train goes through Lamy.

As I perused my options I came upon this table:

The Southwest Chief

Note that, depending on how I reach Los Angeles, the Southwest Chief departs at different times. The back end of the train catches up with the front end over the course of the journey; the arrival time is almost the same.

Sometimes a movie maker will see a shot in a film and have to ask, “how did they do that?” Most of the time, a question like that is a compliment. But here I am, a Web/database guy, asking, “how did they do that?” and it’s with a disbelieving shake of the head. Who on this planet would design a system that allowed such inconsistency? Trust me, it takes extra work to get system behavior like that.

Don’t tell the people signing my time sheets every week, but this stuff is not that hard.

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Note to Chrysler Marketing: Dictionary.com is Free

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I was waiting at a traffic light today, thinking about the name of the car in front of me. Thinking about it more, perhaps, than the Chrysler marketing department did.

The car is a modern, sporty car, with aggressive and unique styling. It looks fun to drive. The name: Chrysler Crossfire.

Crossfire. As in: “If you get caught in the crossfire, you could be killed.” Crossfire. Military planning is filled with ways to get your enemy in crossfire.

Though maybe it’s a good name. Maybe the Chrysler Crossfire is a car that’s pretty exciting — unless you’re in it.

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Rocket Scientists Should Know Better

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A while back I posted a little rant about false precision in measurements (though it turns out a chose a poor specific example). Today I was perusing the list of exoplanets discovered to date (how cool is that?), and I noticed another source of ridiculous artificial precision. For instance, according to the table planet tau Gem b is 299.8125 light-years away — which is simply ridiculous. They are claiming to know the distance to the planet to a precision of less than one light-hour, which could well be less than the orbital radius of the planet. (It has a mass eighteen times that of Jupiter.) So even if the distance were exactly 299.8125 light years when tau Gem b was found, that’s not the distance now.

I looked a little more at the table, and saw a pattern. Many of the ridiculously precise numbers were conversions of fractions. 13/16 (itself suspect in my book) becomes 0.8125; a measurement rounded to the nearest sixteenth of a light year is suddenly represented as being accurate to 0.0001 light years.

Way to set an example, Jet Propulsion Laboratory! I hope the guys in charge of this table aren’t expected to do any actual science over there — although surely the guys who discovered the planets drop by to check the list now and then. Someone should have said something by now, you’d think.

The public-facing aspect of the scientific community needs to be careful what example they set. If the rocket scientists at JPL don’t care enough to get it right, no wonder the public accepts advertising claims with ridiculous precision. (51% of your fiber for the day!)

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Memo to Bay Area Radio Stations

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Apparently at some time Monday afternoon a rumor began that it was no longer acceptable for a radio station to rock. (I suspect the Chinese and that Internet they have are somehow to blame.) Since that time there has been little but Enya and Yanni in slightly more electrified renditions. There has been no rocking of the airwaves.

Rest assured, Radio World, it is still acceptable to rock. Any assertion that rocking is unacceptable is the work of terrorists or at the very least individuals who wish ill for our nation.

Give me something to listen to on my commute this morning. DO IT FOR AMERICA!

Thanks!