Live from Austin!

A couple of weeks ago I saw a new Thai place had opened up a few blocks from our house. Today I was bored of my usual lunch fare, and decided to check it out.

It’s called thaifresh and is at 909 West Mary, in the same block as Café Caffeine. One wall is occupied by Thai groceries. Opposite that is the kitchen area, and in front is a cabinet with the dishes on offer. It’s cafeteria style, you can buy a 1- 2- or 3-item plate, or get takeaway. Apparently they also offer cooking classes.

I tried the red curry with summer squash and tofu, with brown rice. It was good–rich and creamy, and just hot enough to give a gentle afterburn.

Last night I dreamed about MIT.

Texas Instruments had finally decided to build an RPN-based calculator, and for obvious reasons had chosen MIT for a major promotional event. I had been browsing the MIT bookstore and had seen a promo kit, so I snuck in to the labs to see the hardware in action.

It was "landscape" format, like the classic HPs (12c, 15c, 16c), but had a wide bitmapped display that could show 20 digits easily. It wasn’t just a calculator–they had taken ideas from the mobile phone world, and added a camera with extra low light sensitivity, a Zeiss lens with macro focus, and high speed motion capture, so you could record your experiments with it too. Oh, and it ran for something like 60 hours on two AA cells.

Pondering whether to buy one, I sat in a nearby cafe. The barista asked why I was so excited, when I could be visiting New York or Harvard or something. I explained that for me, MIT was where it had all happened, but in my excitement the only name I could think of was Marvin Minsky. When I mentioned him, the barista snorted, and said he was a hack.

I think this is quite possibly the geekiest dream I’ve ever had. I think it’s all because I was looking at R6RS yesterday.

Inspired by an awesome FARK thread:

Today I spent three hours tidying my desk and going through paperwork. This included going through the entire filing cabinet, removing obsolete documents. Then I shredded old information until the shredder literally burned out, emitting an unpleasant melting plastic smell. Ah well, I’d been thinking of getting a better shredder anyway, preferably one that can shred CDs.

Now I’ve traveled to the coffee house with rothko and fixed their Internet.

I was lucky enough to get on the beta list for LittleBigPlanet for PS3. I’m probably not meant to reveal too much about it, but I will say that right from the opening credits, it is utterly delightful. The kind of cute yet rich game that I would expect Nintendo to come up with. It’s basically an old-school platformer, with state of the art 3D graphics used to depict a 2D world made up of photorealistic real-world materials. Level editing tools are built in, and you’re encouraged to share your created levels with the community.

The tools seem as though they will allow people to create a wide variety of worlds. You can construct backdrops and objects from various materials (wood, polystyrene, rock, padded fabric); add various canned objects that you collect by playing the game; decorate with paint and stickers; and make everything come alive with switches, generators, string, motors, and so on. The narrator for the tutorials is Stephen Fry, some of the music is pulled straight from cult BBC show "Vision On", and there’s a Green Submarine that bears a remarkable resemblance to a famous submarine of another color. If it were any more up my alley I’d have to move it aside to wheel the trash bin out.

I’m wondering if I can build a LittleBigPlanet that resembles my desk…

I skipped the presidential debate, but I think I might watch the VP debate. If Caribou Barbie really is as bad as rumors say, there could be lulz.

About 7 or 8 years ago I ripped all our CDs to MP3 and stuck all the music on a house media server.

I used what was, at the time, a good MP3 encoder: LAME, with the --r3mix preset that had been tweaked by the members of an online forum for MP3 enthusiasts.

MP3 encoder quality has made some strong progress since then, and disk space has become even less of an issue. Accordingly, I’m re-encoding my favorite stuff using the latest copy of LAME and --preset standard --vbr-new. Even on my office Cambridge Soundworks speakers, the difference is noticeable. I figure this will be the last time I do this, in a couple of years I’ll just rip everything lossless.

iTunes also got much better at encoding with version 7. So if you ripped your favorite album to MP3 some years ago, it might be worth re-doing it and giving yourself a free audio upgrade.

(To my ears, LAME encodings still sound better than iTunes, but iTunes 7 is way better than earlier versions. That said, there’s a free friendly Mac audio ripper/encoder front end called Max that will call LAME for the encoding.)

"The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers." — Ron Paul.

"The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries. [...] The U.S. Constitution established a Republic rooted in Biblical law, administered by representatives who are Constitutionally elected by the citizens." — "Constitution" Party platform.

During the 1990s, UK TV series Spitting Image included a song "Thank You Tory Voters", listing disasters caused by the Conservative government. One memorable line was "Voting Tory’s like a fart, no-one admits they’ve done it".

This was the point at which opinion pollsters noticed something interesting: Conservatives would routinely lose in every opinion poll, and then win the election. Studies were carried out, and it turned out that a surprisingly large number of people were so embarrassed by their support for the Tories that they would routinely tell opinion pollsters one thing, and then vote differently in the privacy of the voting booth.

People are starting to ask whether something similar might be happening in the US Democratic voter base. Here, it’s known as The Bradley Effect. And it’s real:

Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles.

[...]

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one-third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

Emphasis mine.

So a third of Democratic voters are racists. Imagine what the statistics for Republicans must look like.

The survey team also used Implicit Association Testing:

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

From: Joe Biden
To: Barack Obama
Subject: Changes to your positions on key issues

I’ve been taking a look at your web site. There are some changes you need to make if we’re ever going to win this thing.

• Get rid of as many mentions of science as you can. That stuff scares the right-wing Christians.
• Remove the paragraph about surveillance being conducted under the rule of law. It just looks embarrassing after your FISA vote.
• Get rid of the stuff about providing opportunities for minorities to own TV and radio stations, or you’ll never get an interview on FOX.
• Remove the talk of parental controls and filtering tools. Parents don’t want to be responsible for their children’s upbringing.
• Get rid of the stuff about open government. A live feed of our meetings where we make important decisions? Are you nuts?
• Get rid of the stuff about redefining broadband to be over 200kbps. The telecoms industry doesn’t want to roll out the fiber we paid them for.
• Get rid of the paragraph about community use of the wireless spectrum, or the corporate radio stations will bury you.
• Pull all the stuff about immigration reform. Immigrants can’t vote.
• Remove the stuff about better enforcement of antitrust law.

Thanks in advance for your speedy compliance.

Joe

Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.

1. "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by Loeliger. Describes how to build FORTH systems. Published by Byte back when FORTH was mainstream. (Why, yes, I am that old.)
2. A.R.T.H.U.R. by Lawrence Lerner. Poetry from an imaginary AI. Much better than RACTER.
3. "The Third Word War: Apostrophe Theory" by Ian Lee. Starts off as a catalog of grocers’ apostropes, mutates into a collection of photographic meta-references and arch puns.
4. "Fortran 5" by Simon Leonard. Three surreal stories by one of the guys behind the bands I Start Counting, Fortran 5, and Komputer.
5. "RCL20". A celebration of 20 years of the Handheld and Portable Computer Club. Contains the story behind the design of a number of classic HP RPN calculators. Gift of the editor.
6. "Zenarchy" by Kerry W. Thornley. One of the authors of Principia Discordia; neopagan, libertarian, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and allegedly part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. This book is his often-overlooked approach to Zen Buddhism. Copies seem to be going for $95 and up on Amazon, but I’m keeping mine.
7. "Zen Without Zen Masters" by Camden Benares. Continues the non-mainstream Western approach to Zen theme. Apparently the author was a friend of Kip Thornley. Like Zenarchy, this book is frequently hilarious, and shouldn’t a true religion be funny?
8. "Think Tank" by Roger Langley. "The Prisoner" fan fiction.
9. "Nineteen Ninety-Four". Novelization of the radio series. Think "1984 meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy".
10. "Bad Shave: The Story of Baby Bird So Far". Compilation of articles about lo-fi pop god Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird, aka Babybird (the band).

Previous entries, withdrawn because they are insufficiently rare:

1. "Twitching and Shattered" by Frank Key. The gentleman is an acquired taste, and this is a taste I acquired back in 1990 or so. His books for children, such as "Derek the Dust Particle", are truly inspired, and recommended if you want your children to grow up to be like me.
2. "Beat Your Relatives To A Bloody Pulp" by Maxim Décharné. A Narrative Concerning the Proper Chastisement of Personages Without Whom &c &c.
3. "Literary Machines" by Ted Nelson. Describes the design of the Xanadu system. Self-published by Ted.
4. Bob Black, "Friendly Fire". Compilation of articles by everyone’s favorite anarchist.