I’ve written before about the problems with CD storage. My approach has been to put all my CDs in binders (which are fairly cheap on a per-CD basis), and rip them all as 192-Kbps MP3s to an external hard drive. So I have all my music accessible on my computer, which is nice.
September, 2003 Monthly archive
Via the always-interesting six different ways, I ran across pollkatz’ pageload of presidential-poll data. The Bush approval-rating graph in particular is interesting. Taken out of context, we see that whenever his rating gets near 50%, something happens to give them a big boost, after which they resume the prevailing trend: steady decline. Of course, context helps: the first boost was 9/11; the second, the invasion of Iraq.
Right now his numbers are perilously close to 50%, making me wonder what he’s got up his sleeve for the immediate future. The military’s already overextended, so I don’t expect he’ll invade anyone. Another terrorist attack would probably give him some altitude, but look at the glide slope he’s on: it would need to be a really serious incident to kick him up high enough to avoid a hard landing before November ’04. Either that, or he’ll need a succession of smaller incidents.
I haven’t been monitoring the amount of spam that gets nailed by spamassassin (it’s a lot), but in the past two weeks, 114 pieces of spam have slipped past it. Of those, I find it amusing that 10 are offering anti-spam software.
Read this. Then try to wash the slimy feeling off.
Corporate interests often establish advocacy groups with names intended to mislead the casual observer into thinking the group’s goals are the opposite of what they actually are–so a coal-mining lobby might set up Concerned Citizens for the Environment or something similarly bogus.
I propose that actual do-gooder organizations should adopt this tactic in reverse. The Rainforest Action Network should rename itself the Tropical Hardwood Exploitation Board, get haircuts and suits, rent a mailbox on K Street, and go on doing what they always do. People will see press releases coming from these guys, think “Gosh, if the Tropical Hardwood Exploitation Board of all people thinks it’s a bad idea to do this, it must be really awful.”
There’s been a lot of death in the news lately. Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash. I recently mentioned Walter Richter. And today I read that Ken Kifer bought the farm, run over by a drunk driver while riding his bike.
I used to hang out on the rec.bicycles.* Usenet hierarchy, and Ken was one of the regulars, and one of the most prolific writers on bike subjects I know of. I never met him in person, but felt that in a small way, I knew him.
Warren Zevon’s impending demise had been public knowledge for over a year; Johnny Cash’s mortality is unmistakable on his last album. My neighbor Walter Richter had been in decline for some time, and had a good run. Reading about Ken this morning was like a punch in the gut.
A discussion on metafilter led me to a Sony robot demo. It’s quite uncanny to watch the robot, winsomely called Qrio, moving around, righting itself from a fall, or waving hello. As nifty as Sony’s Aibo is, this makes it seem like a Furby by comparison. Or perhaps even a Weeble.
But what’s with Japan’s fascination with robots, especially anthropomorphic ones? One might snarkily cite the fact that the guys designing these robots grew up with Tetsuwan Atom and Japan’s other robot-heroes, but what made those characters so popular in the first place? I don’t know.
Japan’s big electronic companies trot out the problem of the country’s rapidly graying society as something that robots can solve–the idea being that robots will do all the scut work for society, especially looking after incontinent oldsters. This seems like the most complex solution possible in search of a problem. Relaxing immigration policies would be the blindingly obvious solution, except for isolationism in Japan even stronger than most countries.
Beyond that, though, the economics of a robotic workforce make my mind reel. Robots wouldn’t be cheap to purchase or maintain. In a society with a high proportion of old people receiving government assistance, those seniors would probably be hard-pressed to pay for these robots out of their own pockets. So would the government: the tax burden would be falling harder on the dwindling (and perhaps resentful) younger population. And if we assume that there are WN man-hours of work to be done by society in general per year, with robots doing some amount WR, and humans doing the rest (WL) such that 0 < WR < WN, then the higher the value of WR, the lower the government’s tax revenues (I assume robots would not be paying taxes). In short, the government would literally need more warm bodies to tax to pay for all those cold bodies.
In a country with full employment, the economics must be different–but with a large fraction of the population on the dole, the economics get all screwy. Ironic that the root of the word “robot” is in the Czech word for drudge-work.
A month or so ago, Gwen discovered, to her amazement, that I had never been to Schlitterbahn. She said that once school was back in session that we should make it a point to go.
Saturday night, I mentioned that we should look into going. It turned out that the next day was their last day of the season before closing for the winter. That seems silly to me–there will probably be three more good weekends before the weather threatens to get too cold. At least according to my standards. But this is Texas. Anyhow, we decided on the spot to go, and bought our tickets online–which they loudly trumpet saves two dollars (they do not trumpet as loudly that they charge a $1 “convenience fee” for online tickets). We also received a “last day of the season” discount.
Sunday, we made a fairly early start, so that we’d have the whole day there. Driving down, we drove through an ominous rainstorm around San Marcos. We also drove past what must be the highest concentration of RV and manufactured-home vendors on the planet, including one selling a model hilariously called the Taj Mahal, another even more hilariously called La Casita Grande. And, to my surprise, a two-story model.
When we arrived at about 10:00 AM, there was no rain, but the sky was very threatening. We waited an inordinately long time to get in (thus negating any supposed convenience of online ticketing)–there wasn’t a long line, but, inexplicably, the clerk was taking about ten minutes to process each party–though he scarcely took a minute to pass us through. Once inside, we got changed and dove in. Although I’m told that lines can be an hour or more for the most popular attractions, we never waited more than a couple minutes, and for the most part, we just got on and went–often several times down the same slide. Clearly, we had picked the right day to come.
Around 1:00 PM it started raining, which made no difference, since we were already wet, but around 1:30 there was thunder, and they closed all the attractions until it stopped, which took half an hour at most. We continued having fun, but it was getting cold, so we warmed up in a hot tub (“warm tub” would be more accurate). Having started in the old part of the park, we then took a shuttle over to the new part. (The old part has a lot more trees, which is nice. The new part has more high-profile rides, which are also nice in a different way.) By the time we got there, the sun was starting to come out again.
We stayed at the park till about 4, hungrily ate a lunch we had packed (all that water-sliding really does sap your energy), and headed home. It was a ball.
For the record:
- Schlitterbahn does allow you to bring in outside food, and you should–the food sold in the park is 4x a fair price
- The storage lockers they rent (for a usurious $4) are tiny–pack accordingly
- It would be a lot of fun to bring a waterproof camera along
- Sunblock sunblock sunblock
Saw And Now…Ladies and Gentlemen on Saturday with Gwen. We missed the first few minutes, which may have been important. The rest of the movie is a time-shifting montage from which, eventually, we were able to extract what seems to be a coherent storyline. It was, all in all, very entertaining. Jeremy Irons was excellent but creepy, as usual (I’ve never seen him do comedy, but something tells me he would kill). Two thumbs up. The story is hard to describe and not so much of interest as the characters.
How is it possible that I have lived all these years without ever having heard of Raymond Scott before? The man was a mad-scientist musician, equal parts Juan Garcia Esquivel and Leon Theremin, who composed whacky cartoon-style music and built giant scary machines with lots of knobs.
He even talked like a mad scientist:
It is not widely known who invented the circuitry concept for the automatic sequential performance of musical pitches – now well known as a sequencer.
I, however, do know who the inventor was – for it was I who first conceived and built the sequencer.
Cue maniacal laughter