Sea of Noise

Eno & Byrne Return!

Nearly three decades after they blew minds with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Brian Eno & David Byrne have collaborated again on the forthcoming Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (due out August 18).

This groove is out of fashion,
these beats are twenty years old

Not at all, gentlemen. Not at all.

Supreme Court Strikes Down DC Handgun Ban

Today is a good day for the Constitution (though the fight isn't over yet)...

Farewell, George Carlin

Sadly, George Carlin will no longer grace us with his words, dirty or otherwise, having died last night at the curmodgeonly age of 71. As Carlin himself told us, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean life isn't out to get you:

And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about—things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater, or as soon as you turn off your television sets: anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curses, broken glass, snake bites, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse militias, structural defects, race riots, sun spots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous co-workers, root canals, mental fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's Disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever , poor workmanship, absentee landlord, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and paranoia! Thank you all, very much. Thank you very much and good night, y'all. See ya now...

LibraryThing Top 106 Unread Books

I figured it was time for me to play along with this, since a few do, indeed, show up in the pile of books I own but haven't yet read. (Admittedly, I'm fuzzy on a few of them.) I confess that I would have read more of Jane Austen's books if there weren't so many excellent movies made of them. And the ones I haven't finished will probably get finished someday—I didn't finish Atlas Shrugged the first time, either. I like to read fiction straight through and it's tough for me to get started again when I'm interrupted mid-book.

Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged unread on LibraryThing.

The rules:
bold = what you've read
italics = books you started but couldn't finish
~~crossed out~~ = books you hated
*= you've read more than once
underline = books you own but haven't read yourself

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
*The Odyssey by Homer
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Ulysses by James Joyce
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Iliad by Homer
Emma by Jane Austen
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
*Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
*Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Wicked by Gregory Maguire
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
*Dune by Frank Herbert
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
*Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
*The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
*Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Persuasion by Jane Austen
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
*The Once and Future King by T.H. White
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Dubliners by James Joyce
*Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Collapse by Jared Diamond
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Watership Down by Richard Adams
*The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
*Beowulf by Anonymous
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
The Aeneid by Virgil
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
*David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Plague by Albert Camus
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazie

Gmail: Smell the Fail

Gmail has been sucking even more than usual lately. If you don't run a mail server, you might not have noticed; but Gmail has become a cesspool spewing spam onto the rest of the 'net. For the few hundred domains I host, Gmail is now beating out Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, and AT&T as a source of spam among the companies I don't block from my servers outright. (And that's quite an accomplishment, because the aforementioned companies suck more than a little! AOL, BTW, would have been on that list until recently, and they still originate a lot of spam, but they've come a long way.)

For what it's worth, here's a comment I posted tonight to a discussion list where Gmail's suckage and our desire to block their servers has been a topic of conversation among mail server administrators of late:

Quite a few of us seem to think that Google and other "free"mail services have a responsibility to the rest of the 'net to vet their prospective users. The response to any proposed requirements, though, seems to be that the methods aren't impervious to fraud and/or will be too high a barrier for certain kinds of people. But there's no reason that multiple approaches to tying someone to a real world identity can't be used, nor does a decision about trust have to be binary. (Why are new Gmail users able to send a seemingly infinite number of emails, to anyone, on day one?) More importantly, all of these approaches could be enhanced by using reputation information already present in the network.

When Gmail was first rolled out, I was excited about it—not because I wanted to use it, but because I mistakenly thought Google was doing something new to address the spam problem that plagued other freemail services. Remember "invites"? It boggles my mind that Google stopped requiring invites and apparently never used the social network and reputation possibilities they provided!

Am I the only person who is amazed that the company built on PageRank can't figure this out?

Self-Storage Costs for My Book Collection

So, I'm planning to move to some as-yet-unknown city for grad school a year from now, and I'm trying to decide how aggressively to prune my book collection. After some initial pruning, I'm at 2001 books. I can probably find another dozen or two that I won't miss much, but I'm basically at the point where I have to ask myself whether the cost of storing them for five years (either in self-storage or via renting a larger apartment) exceeds their replacement cost minus whatever I can get for them at the local used book store.

400-500 of these books are part of my working library (mostly economics, math, and computing) that will need to be at hand in my home or office. But if I keep the remaining 1500-1600 they could be stored at the cheapest facility available. Climate control probably isn't necessarily, but since I'll also be storing my equally-massive LP collection (another weeding-out problem I'll face!), I'm going to assume that I'll be buying climate-controlled space that is as cheap on the margin at non-climate-controlled space. From some quick research, it looks as though long-term storage is available as cheap as $1/square foot.

Let's say that I buy an extra 25 square feet for my books. Assuming I use standard 12"x15" cardboard boxes and stack them four levels high, that's room for 80 boxes. (That might be a tight fit, but I could adjust by using some shelving to get them stacked higher than 4 boxes.)

Here's the trickiest part: how many books can I fit in each box? I happen to have eight boxes full of books right now and on average they're holding 21.625 books. (The biased nature of this sample probably underestimates the carrying capacity of the boxes for my average book, but let's go with it for now.) So this suggests that I can fit a total of 1730 books in a 5x5 self-storage space without getting into elaborate structural engineering to take full advantage of the 10 foot high ceilings some places advertise.

So, we're assuming 25 square feet at $25/month for the five years it should take to finish a Ph.D. That's $1500. Divide by 1730 books and that's about 87 cents per book. Of course, I may not fill the space completely, and there will eventually be some transportation costs to get the books to wherever I end up (as well as cost of capital). I think I can ignore the integer problem, even though technically it means the cost of storage may be zero at the margin. Let's call it $1/book--maybe half that for small paperbacks and twice or more for stuff like atlases.

From one angle, that's a pretty low number. From another, it seems profligate. I suppose the truth is somewhere in between. Certainly, looking at the lifetime cost of holding onto a book, owning some of those cheap sci-fi paperbacks or Dilbert cartoon collections doesn't seem worthwhile. And, while I do re-read many of my books and tend to have broad and obscure tastes not always well-served by the local library, the existence of a thick market for used books via the Internet makes it seem like a distributed peer-to-peer library. Many books--even some that are out-of-print--can be had for a penny plus $3.99 shipping. And, of course, most of these books would net me at least a token amount if I sold them.

It seems that if I'm not sure I'll still want to own a given book five years from now, or if it's one whose price will continue to fall over the next five years, I might as well sell it or give it away. On the other hand, an obscure and/or rare book is well worth the $1 it will cost to store. In the end, I'm not sure how much this analysis really helps: it makes it easier to let go of some books, but it still leaves hundreds in the grey, fat margin of uncertainty.

I guess the next step is to cull some books and get used to the idea of having less stuff. Maybe the real cost of having so much stuff has nothing to do with the price of self-storage?

Chuck Lorre and the Law of Threes

Chuck Lorre is a mad genius. Chuck who? If, like me, you're a fan of Two and a Half Men or The Big Bang Theory and own a Tivo, you probably know already. He's the guy who writes those awesome vanity cards that appear ever-so-briefly at the end of each show. If not, go to the aforelinked web site and start reading. Didn't I tell ya? A mad genius...

Actually, I feel like a big cheater reading the vanity cards on a web site. But, hey, I didn't have a Tivo (or even a VCR) back when his other shows, like Dharma & Greg, were going concerns. So I'm doing it anyway.

And right there in vanity card #1 he mentions the Law of Three. Awesome. That there Law of Three crops up everywhere, don't it? Apparently even in comedy. (Some call it the Rule of Three instead. Whatever works for you.) This is what I'm talking about. Genius.

This is why Chuck Lorre is on my very short list of Hollywood People I'd Actually Like to Meet. Come to think of it, he probably has a lot of time on his hands right now. Chuck, buddy, you should come to Connecticut and check out the freaky snowwoman in our front yard right now. She'd make a great vanity card, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to take a picture before she melts. The first beer is on me.

Terminator!

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles could suck and I'd still watch it, as long as it featured Summer Glau as an ass-kicking robot!

Fortunately, if the pilot is any guide, it's not going to suck (much). Let's just hope they don't have future storylines featuring time travel as implausible as Seven Days or computer security as badly scripted as 24...

A Sobering Thought for New Hampshire Voters

As our fellow citizens in New Hampshire go to the polls today, Black Box Voting brings us a video demonstrating how easy it is to tamper with election results for 81% of New Hampshire voters. (And, incidentally, all of us Connecticut voters!)

More information and discussion here.

There Ought To Be A Word For...

...the feeling you get when you stub your toe, right before it actually starts to hurt.

I'd say "dread", but somehow that doesn't quite capture the feeling. I suspect that German has the word I'm looking for. Like "sehnsucht", but not.

Place Your 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics Bets!

If I were a betting man, I think I'd go with Bhagwati to show in 2007.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. Wouldn't it be nice if the current crop of US presidential candidates had to stop and pay attention to Bhagwati for a couple of minutes?

Phil Rizzuto, R.I.P.

I'm not a big sports fan, but even I couldn't fail to note the passing of Yankees great Phil Rizzuto. I never saw him play, but his voice was plenty familiar from many afternoons watching baseball on TV with my grandfather--part of the soundtrack of my youth. Not just because of baseball, per se, of course: in my book, Rizzuto's best performance will always be as the announcer on Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"!

Wikipedia provides an appropriate quote for the occasion, attributed to Rizzuto on hearing about Pope Paul VI's death at the end of a game: "Well, that kind of puts the damper on even a Yankee win."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Now that I've had a chance to recover from an intensive re-reading of the series and a marathon reading of the final book, it's time to write down a few thoughts while the details are fresh in my mind. I have the feeling I'll be thinking about this series for a long time, though...

Here's a spoiler-free review (save for the broad outline). (If you like it, please give me a thumbs-up on the LibraryThing page for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.)

Far more than any previous book in the series, Deathly Hallows is not for those who haven't read the preceding books. Indeed, I was happy I had resisted the urge to jump in before finishing my re-reading of the previous six books. For the devoted fan, though, Deathly Hallows wraps up the series quite well: masks are removed and accounts are settled.

Whereas each of the previous six books, especially the first four, had their own mini-arc that was satisfying in itself, the pleasure in Deathly Hallow comes from seeing Rowling weave together the threads of the backstory to bring the tapestry of the entire series into focus.

Having read a fair bit of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces--as well as plenty of fairy stories, legends, and mythology--I felt confident that I knew the broad outlines of the conclusion to the Harry Potter story; and I had guessed the identity of the mysterious R.A.B. and sussed out which team Snape was playing on. My guesses were correct, but that didn't spoil the pleasure of learning the details. Nor did it keep me from being surprised occasionally, e.g. by Dumbledore.

In some ways, I found the story of the "deathly hallows" a bit of a distraction. On the other hand, the presence of a yoni/lingam symbol on the jacket of a children's book (at least in the UK edition) was amusing and got me looking more deeply at the other symbols in the story. Indeed, this was the first book in the series that I felt was solidly more mythical than muggle.

As expected, people (and other creatures) die. I don't fault Rowling for that, but I often felt that their deaths were "wasted"--that they were killed off with little meaning or chance to mourn. I was also disappointed that some characters who played a large role in earlier books were almost unheard from here, though to be fair we do a satisfying bit about other characters. I was pleased, though, that by the end of the story all of the characters were more human (even the ones who weren't, strictly speaking, human).

The final chapter was a shock at first, in that its tone was so different from the rest of the book. (I was reminded of the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange--the one that was left out of the US edition.) But as I lived with the story for a couple of post-Potter days, I realized that it was perfectly appropriate. The Harry Potter story has, at times, been delightfully subversive--even "queer". But, for the most part, the virtues of Harry Potter are bourgeois ones, and the boon he wins is an appropriate one.

Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for an immensely enjoyable seven books!

LibraryThing's New Tagmash Feature

Reason #132 that I love LibraryThing: erotica & zombies tagmash.

Where else would you find such a... useful? feature?

Ode to a Faithful Linux Server

Once upon a time there was a server...

She started out life in the summer of 1997 as a generic Pentium 166 server with 128 MB of RAM and a little IDE drive, but she was quickly named "nancy" (after the character in the Firesign Theatre's Nick Danger sketch).

Soon, nancy sported an installation of Slackware Linux with the spiffy 2.0.30 kernel and, by fall, she was up and running on the 'net, where she handled DNS, RADIUS, SMTP, and POP3 for my ISP. (Of course, nancy was hardly alone. Over the years her "friends" included danger, catherwood, and bradshaw, as well as her alter-egos bettyjo, melanie, and audrey.)

By 1998, nancy was busy handling thousands of email accounts, as well as serving as the primary RADIUS server for over a thousand dial-up customers. That might seem like a lot for a machine in her hardware class, but in fact nancy rarely broke a sweat in those days. For one thing, she ran Linux, with a custom-compiled kernel and no windowing system to slow her down. For another, those were still the halcyon days of the 'net, with spammers only just beginning to make their slimy presence felt.

nancy's name would show up in error messages, of course, with the result that more than one of our customers at first mistook her for a very diligent employee. Even after they learned the truth--that nancy was just a faithful little server, naked and half-exposed in the server room after I was too lazy to replace the side panel of her case one day--customers would occasionally ask after her when we spoke on the phone. Clearly, I wasn't her only admirer. nancy returned our affection, happily staying up and operational for a year or two between being moved to new locations.

Eventually, the burden of continual abuse by spammers and the growing size of email messages meant that nancy could no longer serve so many customers. Yet, she continued to serve in some capacity on our network through three companies, in three offices, over ten years--long after her hardware had been depreciated on the books. Toward the end of her days, nancy was semi-retired, serving as an email, DNS, and shell server on our office LAN, but devoting most of her CPU cycles to cracking RC5.

Which brings us to now. As of today, nancy will be retired. She's still just as reliable as ever (yes, amazingly, she's still running on her original hardware, hard drive included!), but we're working on making our business as "green" as possible, and sadly she no longer does enough work to justify her carbon footprint.

So, farewell nancy, my faithful server! May you dream of penguins as you slumber. And, who knows? Maybe one of your new, fancy brethren will have a bad day and you'll get called out of retirement one day... If so, I know you'll be as ready as ever.

Save Internet Radio

Internet "radio" needs your help!

Many web streams, like my own Swinglover's Lounge, will be silenced unless something is done soon...

A Fun Math Puzzle from Make Magazine

For those with time left over after turning their old toasters into robots, the awesome magazone Make also has a puzzle section. I particularly enjoyed this one from issue #9:

At one point, a tropical island's population of chameleons was divided as follows:

13 red chameleons
15 green chameleons
17 blue chameleons

Each time two different-colored chameleons would meet, they would change their color to the third one. For example, if green meets red, they both change their color to blue. Is it ever possible for all the chameleons to become the same color?

There's an answer posted on the Make web site, but (spoiler alert!) I took a different, inductive approach that appeals to me a bit more:

Consider an island population of n chameleons at time t of P_t = (R_t, G_t, B_t), where R_t, G_t, and B_t are the number of red, green, and blue chameleons at time t, respectively. We show by induction that if the population consists of n red chameleons, then the population must have always contained an equal number of blue and green chameleons.

Let k = 0 and suppose that at time t = t -k , R_t-k = n = n-2k. Then G_t-k = B_t-k = 0 = 2k. That is, P_t-k = (n,0,0) = (n-2k,k,k).

For k>=0, if P_t-k = (n-2k,k,k), then by the statement of the problem P_t-(k+1) = (n-2(k+1),k+1,k+1). That is, if we have n-2k red chameleons, it must be the case that immediately before we had n-2(k+1) red chameleons and then one green chameleon met one blue chameleon and the two of them changed color to blue, reducing the number of green and blue chameleons from k+1 each to k each.

So, to end up with a population of all red chameleons, we must have started with a population containing an equal number of green and blue chameleons; which we didn't, so we can never end up with all red chameleons.

The argument for why we can't end up with all green or all blue chameleons proceeds the same way.

Check Out Girl

Oh, Check Out Girl, you rock my world!

(C.f. the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest website.)

Robert Anton Wilson, RIP

A bit late with the news, but... Robert Anton Wilson's own personal eschaton was immanentized on January 11, 2007. A memorial is planned for February 18 in Santa Cruz.

What can I say about RAW that hasn't already been said more surrealistically by someone else? Perhaps the greatest tribute I can offer is simply that he, in the words of Eric Cartman, "warped my fragile little mind". Praise Eris!

xkcd Rocks My Webcomics World

Some friends turned me on to xkcd last week and it instantly rocketed into my top five webcomics! (Yes, I went back and read the entire archive in one sitting...) It has a geeky yet quirky appeal that I dare say will appeal to my fellow Far Side and Userfriendly fans.

Take today's comic, for example:

If, like me, your reaction was to laugh while computing the first and second derivatives of the two functions, you owe it to yourself to become a regular reader.

The Easy Way: Start by normalizing n to 1, making both a function of a single variable x. From the first derivatives, you'll see that both functions have a critical point at x=1/2. However, for the gay cast, the second derivative is positive on (0,1), implying a minimum; while, for the straight cast, the second derivative is negative on (0,1), implying a maximum. (Of course, x=0 and x=1 are maxima for the gay cast and minima for the straight cast.)