What's with all the cats?

The NY Times' "Dot Earth" blog talks about "The truth about cats and birds", including a quote from Flyaway:

Precautionary measures simply do not work. During an 18-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws.

The Audubon Society recommends bibs. Apparently they are effective, maybe because the cat feels so embarrassed.

The June 2009 Scientific America includes "The evolution of house cats":

Recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cat domestication began in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was getting under way.

Get your mind out of the gutter

Spaceflightnow.com reports as of 16:00 PDT today:

Attachment of shuttle Atlantis atop the modified 747 carrier jet is underway at today at the gantry-like Mate-Demate Device structure. The orbiter has been hoisted up and the aircraft towed underneath Atlantis in preparation for the duo to be bolted together.

This is so Atlantis can be ferried back to KSC after landing at Edwards last week.

In the past there's been some giggling when I've regaled you with stories of the Mate-Demate Device. But it's all true, and here's pictures to prove it. Note that NASA people sometimes have a sense of humor -- see the instructions on this mount point on a 747.

Rarely, a shuttle has to land in New Mexico. Do they have a MDD also? As of the end of 2006, apparently not:

"The concern out at White Sands is not with the runway facility, but with the turnaround," Shannon said. "We don't have the large mate-demate device that we use to lift up the orbiter and put it on the back fo the shuttle carrier aircraft (for transport back to Florida). Also, we don't have as much equipment there to service the vehicle. Basically, you power it down and wait for the calvary to arrive."

Just in case, two C-17 cargo jets were called up to ferry backup equipment from Kennedy to White Sands, including a purge unit to pump nitrogen gas through the shuttle's plumbing and a power system to run various heaters and other systems to defend against expected freezing weather Saturday night. Rocket nozzle covers also are being sent to keep out gypsum dust, which caused major contamination problems after Columbia landed at White Sands in 1982.

Metacognition, Motorcycles, Marmots

Just got back from a quick trip to Huntington Lake, where the thunderstorms were building again by 11am. In addition to the usual deer, we saw a marmot. First one I've seen at Huntington in over 40 years. Not to be confused with the pika, or the water ouzel of Sierra lore.

Not exciting enough for you? Try this: A lot of people are finding truth in "The case for working with your hands", published in the NYT Magazine. It takes a while to get there, but the author compares and contrasts being an electrician, an over-educated abstract writer, and a motorcycle repairer. And even works in metacognition:

Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

It reminds me of Dirty Jobs guy's talk.

Bonus:

• Interesting, short interview with the Nature Conservancy's advisor on freshwater.

  Worldwide, about 70 percent of freshwater goes for agricultural use, 20 percent for industrial use and 10 percent for human use. Other beverages, including beer, require far more water to produce than you would think.

• What do emoticons really do? A Cognitive Daily study.

  For the insulting statements, both the Smile and the Wink led to more complimentary ratings, while the Exclamation Mark's ratings weren't significantly different from statements with no punctuation. For complimentary statements, both the Smile and Exclamation Mark led to more complimentary ratings, while the Wink's ratings weren't significantly different from statements with no ratings.
  
  So adding a wink or a smile can enhance the positive perception of a negative statement, but a wink doesn't change the rating of a positive statement. Smiles and exclamation marks both improve positive statements.

• White paint to fight global warming.

  The Lawrence research he refers to (which we wrote about last fall) says that white roofs and pavements could mean a one-time reduction of 44 billion tons of carbon dioxide. That, Art Rosenfeld said, translates to removing all the cars in the world for 18 years.

  
  

Maynard Dixon

The Fresno Art Museum kicks off a summer exhibition featuring one of Fresno's famous sons, Maynard Dixon, with a documentary and Q&A with the film director and Dixon's son this Saturday.

Besides having a cool sounding name, his paintings of the west are great. The look like Sunset magazine covers :)
I don't think I'll ever own an original :)

Bonus: About the same time, another Fresno son was immortalized in this baseball poem (and now a street near the fairgrounds :)

Victual visuals

A couple of posts ago I linked to pictures of toasted cheese sandwiches.

I didn't realize this was so popular: there is a scanwich.com site and and a scanwiches.com site.

Now go make a sammich.

T-Fried and recess

Tom Friedman is coming to town to talk about his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded at 5:30pm on June 25 at the Warnors. It's a benefit for the Met. I think he's a better speaker than writer, so this is a good opportunity if you don't want to read his latest tome :)

Also, "Does recess really improve classroom behavior?". Pretty interesting.

College majors, interviews

Week 5 of jury duty started today, so this has to be quick.

This is the time of year for college graduates looking for jobs. Fast Company has two relevant items: a "Life Lesson for College: Your Major Doesn't Matter" and "Hold that Interview". The latter talks about how unreliable interviews are for hiring (it reminds me of Bob Sutton's insight about the harm of annual performance evaluations).



Finally, GQ has a slideshow of fashion regrets. I only made it through about half the slideshow :)

We’re not proud of the images you’re about to see. But we’re proud of you, the GQ reader, for taking one look at pictures like these and saying, “You’ve got to be kidding”—and for still looking to us for guidance, even after we told you it was cool to leave the house dressed like a sex-dungeon proprietor, or a Renaissance Faire pimp, or the distinguished ambassador from the Sovereign Nation of Polyestra.

Bonus: Woman's Day explores the ten greatest grilled cheese sandwiches. Great pictures :) You might enjoy Tom Colicchio's "Gruyère with Caramelized Onions", on rye.

Asparagus, and Hanford homeboy

Three unbelievable things:

• Reclusive Hanford native Steve Perry of Journey fame will perform in Honolulu. I'm not sayin' that's good or bad, I'm just sayin'.
• You can induce false memories to get kids to eat asparagus (or adults to do things they don't want to do :), and
• Week Four of jury duty started today.

Traffic, Snow, air travel

Steve RT'ed me about differences in road signage between the UK and the US. That reminded me that I wanted to post more about my current jury duty book Traffic, but there are so many things to mention I think you just have to read it :) It's pretty safe to say that much of what you think you know about driving and traffic isn't true when you look at objective data :) You might also remember a previous rant.

NPR's Science Friday celebrated the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" lecture at Cambridge.

Wouldn't it be great if Southwest Airlines served Fresno? And better yet, if FAT was changed officially to FYI? Why are the answers "not necessarily" and "not going to happen", respectively? At least we were first on this list (click on "Best"); Wichita Kansas was the worst.

Anyway, GPS-based airport navigation could save a bunch of money and BIS time.

Txting and commuting

Why are text messages limited to 160 characters? This LA Times article has the answer, and other tidbits such as:

U.S. mobile users sent an average of 357 texts per month in the second quarter of 2008 versus an average of 204 calls, the report said.

It's illegal in California to text while driving, so what else do we do? According to Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us),

Anonymity in traffic acts as a powerful drug, with several curious effects. ... the inside of the car itself becomes a useful place for self-expression. This may explain why surveys have shown that most people, given the choice, desire a minimum commute of at least twenty minutes. Drivers desire this solitary "me time" - to sing, to feel like a teenager again, to be temporarily free from the constricted roles of work and home. One study found that the car was a favored place for people to cry about something ("grieving while driving").

Goats and jury duty

Besides talking about the Sierra Remote Observatories, some of us were also talking about using goats to get the 100 foot fire clearance in the foothills. Hard to believe, but goats eat poison oak and star thistle, even at its nastiest.

Speaking of nasty, Eric Slye really didn't want to do jury duty and let the court know. Yikes. It's not that bad.

Finally, although it is a self-selected sample, the Wakoopa data on what apps people are using, and when, is pretty interesting. I particularly liked this Tufte-esque diagram showing usage through the day (both work days and weekends).

I'm also still pondering this nugget from the Covert Comic: "There are no passengers on spaceship earth – we’re all sky marshals."

Magic, storm tracking

The most recent Wired is really good, besides an article about the Georgia henge I talked about earlier is one about Penn & Teller. The latter is a coauthor of an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research". It reminds me a little of Tog's classic "Magic and software design" that I've talked about before (he's also recently posted part two of a discussion about inclusive design). Speaking of inclusiveness, we've been emphaizing captioning of videos. Here's a little spoof that was going around today for you Woodstock fans.

Some bonus things:

• Mike Oz at the Fresno Bee continues his "Worst flyer of the week" selections.
• A couple of people asked me recently about the Sierra Remote Observatories in the mountains east of here.
• I was looking at a street-level weather map here.
• and finally, a story via Steve about rebooting.

Face recognition, weed whacking, Sunday comics

Three things:

Interesting demonstration of "face mining" from video. I watched a Star Trek episode ("Where no man has gone before") last night on television and today found that it is one used for the face mining demo. They get Scotty wrong, but pretty impressive anyway.
• Also a Sunday cartoon caught my eye. The cartoonist must not like Charlie Sheen's sitcom much :)
• Finally, is there actual evidence that increasing vegetation clearance around mountain structures from 30 to 100 feet is cost effective? This is a real pain (I was mowing today) since area goes up by the length of the side squared: from 900 ft^2 to 10000 ft^2, eleven times as much to clear! Grrr. Where is evidence-based fire fighting when you need it :) I guess we should be grateful, some insurance companies were requiring more than 100 feet. The law now addresses that in section 51182 item 3 :)

Headlines

I dont' watch Jay Leno much, but occasionally I see the funny headlines that people send to him.

I was reminded of those this morning while I was Googling for something else. I saw this on page 5 of the August 2008 The Territorial Review Monthly (you can read the whole issue here). Anyway, I like this headline: "Healthy Communities Free Movies In the Park Proves Popular" -- from the looks of the picture there must be at least a half dozen people there. I guess it's all relative.

Civic duty

Today was Day Three of jury duty. Big excitement on Wednesday was the lunch cart outside the courthouse was robbed (but the perp was caught).

Note to self: Don't rob lunch carts with zillions of cops around.

While you're at the courthouse, you might as well walk half a block to the mall and find the Renoir. Or, buy the penthouse apartment at the old Security Bank building.

Making vacation plans for the summer?

Can't afford Europe? Take a trip to Georgia and see a henge, well, guidestones. While you're driving around the southeast, don't miss the giant peanut in Plains. That's only one of the many giant peanuts -- and pecans -- to see on your trip.

You could also go to the Coral Castle in Florida. You can prepare yourself by touring the local underground gardens.

Bonus: Lots of strange stuff to think about while you're road tripping: unsolved ciphers, and even some solved ones like the San Jose semaphores that were on top of the Adobe building.

Finally, a big vacation requires big things. This might be the place. They have the perfect hat in case you stop in Iowa on the way back.

Acronyms versus Initialisms

The 10 April Grammar Girl podcast is useful information for tech people since we live with many abbreviations. I am a GG fan from way back, but Strunk & White? Not so much.

Geoffrey Pullum "celebrates" S&W in "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I liked it -- good advice for tech writers about what is or isn't passive language. Pullum was also featured on today's Talk of the Nation.

Bonus: Bertrand Meyer (father of Eiffel, and one of my profs at UCSB) and his co-authors make a good case that computer science and software engineering research is not published in the same way that research in other fields are. In fact, some of the most prestigious and influential venues for CS results are conferences, not archival journals:

In the computer science publication culture, prestigious conferences are a favorite tool for presenting original research—unlike disciplines where the prestige goes to journals and conferences are for raw initial results. Acceptance rates at selective CS conferences hover between 10% and 20%; in 2007–2008:

* ICSE (software engineering): 13%
* OOPSLA (object technology): 19%
* POPL (programming languages): 18%

Journals have their role, often to publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. While many researchers use this opportunity, others have a successful career based largely on conference papers. It is important not to use journals as the only yardsticks for computer scientists.

They also point out idiosyncracies of the academic world that ignore some of the most important venues in our field, and that authorship order in CS publication is generally not significant.

Anyway, I still think that Bertrand's "design by contract" emphasis is one of the best practical software development ideas ever.

Men in (silver and) black

Raiders fans out there -- or folks from So Cal -- probably remember Todd Marinovich. His former NFL dad raised (engineered?) him to be the perfect athlete. He played briefly for the Raiders, but his tale is really one of drugs ruining his life. He might be the only pro quarterback who's thrown ten touchdown passes in a game while going through heroine withdrawal :) Since the article was published this month, he's been arrested yet again. It's a sad but surprisingly interesting story:

For the nine months prior to Todd's birth on July 4, 1969, Trudi used no salt, sugar, alcohol, or tobacco. As a baby, Todd was fed only fresh vegetables, fruits, and raw milk; when he was teething, he was given frozen kidneys to gnaw. As a child, he was allowed no junk food; Trudi sent Todd off to birthday parties with carrot sticks and carob muffins. By age three, Marv had the boy throwing with both hands, kicking with both feet, doing sit-ups and pull-ups, and lifting light hand weights. On his fourth birthday, Todd ran four miles along the ocean's edge in thirty-two minutes, an eight-minute-mile pace. Marv was with him every step of the way.

Well, from Silver & Black to black ops: I was googling for something else tonight and was reminded of a crash in the mountains east of Bakersfield about in 1986. Amazing that after a secret airforce clean-up (it was a F-117 stealth aircraft before they officially existed), adventurous hikers were still finding pieces (scroll down toward the bottom, and try not to let the red text on black background get to you).

There are people whose avocation is finding crash sites of experimental planes. It's amazing the X-15 debris they found years later -- (including a big piece of a horizontal stabilizer, and an information plate) -- after a crash where the X-15 was descending at 166,000 feet per minute!

A man does not wither at the thought of dancing. But it is generally to be avoided.

NPR interviewed a mariner about what it is like for the pirates and kidnapped captain in the lifeboat. It sounds grim. The guy being interviewed is from Morro Bay and has an interesting blog "that brings the tools of Web 2.0 to the Professional Mariner".

Another public radio thing to listen to is a UC Davis professor's proposal to create a cabinet-level agency to foster innovation. It is techier than I thought it would be, and mentions how critical DARPA funding was to establishing Computer Science departments, and Xerox PARC, among other things. Lessig was also a recent guest, talking about an "innovation commons".

From the urban legends department, is this true? This afternoon I was trying to find the differences between the CRJ (used by United Express) and the ERJ (used by American Eagle) and ran across this. A couple of years ago a baby was run through the x-ray machine at LAX, but I can't find anything more about the Vanuatu security screeners.

Speaking of airlines, last week I was on one of the last 767s American from the west coast to Hawaii, booooo. The flight attendants aren't happy either, and it makes American not competitive with United, who is still flying 767s and 777s from LAX to the islands.

The title of this post is from "What is a Man?" Bonus: "31 Things Every Man Should Own".

Proof that airfares make no sense

What's wrong (or right :) with this airfare sale?

Fresno, CA to Kona, HI                $191 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Fresno, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI        $191 4/17/09-05/22/09  
Fresno, CA to Maui Kahului, HI        $185 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Los Angeles, CA to Kona, HI           $207 4/17/09-05/22/09 
Los Angeles, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI    $207 4/17/09-05/22/09  
Los Angeles, CA to Maui Kahului, HI   $202 4/17/09-05/22/09 
San Francisco, CA to Kona, HI         $246 4/17/09-05/22/09 
San Francisco, CA to Lihue/Kauai, HI  $246 4/17/09-05/22/09  
San Francisco, CA to Maui Kahului, HI $244 4/17/09-05/22/09

This happens occasionally, it is cheaper to go to Hawaii from Fresno than from LAX or SFO, even though you have to change planes in either of those two places.

Trivia: back in the day ... must have been before 1987-ish when Delta bought Western Airlines, there was briefly weekly nonstop service from Fresno to Honolulu, I think.

The magic of YouTube

Some creative stuff on YouTube from talented people with too much time on their hands:

• The Star Wars opening in the style of the Dallas TV show.
• The Star Trek opening as Love Boat and as Hawaii Five-O.
  
• 100 names in 100 seconds

Bonus:
Shatner on Richardo Montalban here, and probably the best imitation of Kirk: Kevin Pollak, who played Joe Shay in From the Earth to the Moon.

Don't fail to miss it

Spinal Tap is on tour again, this time Unwigged and Unplugged, NPR's Talk of the Nation interviewed the three surviving (i.e., not drummers) band members yesterday.

Talk of the Nation today had a more serious topic: whether the workplace should be colorblind. Interesting topic, but I couldn't get the link on the Exploring Race blog to the journal article to open. I think this is it: Is Multiculturalism or Color Blindness Better for Minorities? If you're a Fresno State person you should be able to get the PDF here.

What if your genes don't fit anymore?

This column from the NY Times reminded me of a couple of things: studies of identical twins, and a recent author who spoke at Reedley College and the Reedley Peace Center. First a quote from the NY Times column:

In one study, women whose identical twin suffered from depression were significantly more likely to have been assaulted, lost a job, divorced, or had a serious illness or major financial problems than people whose fraternal twin was depressed. ... These bad events did not occur because the women were depressed, as the correlations persisted even when women who were currently depressed were excluded from the study. Thus, genes can act on the same disorder by making people more sensitive to stressful environmental events and by making these events more likely to occur.

And for those of you "getting older", read the penultimate paragraph of the column.

The author I heard talk was promoting her book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. She gave almost the exact talk as she did on BookTV (even where she made a slight mistake in delivery), but if you watch the BookTV talk skip the introductions since the audio is terrible. It cleans up when she starts talking.

One thing that was in her Reedley talk but not on BookTV was a bit of a slam of Zimbardo's prison "experiment". I think that was a little unfair and is probably the result of an engineering professor's (her) definition of "experiment" compared to a social psychologist's view. She did made a good point that Zimbardo's prison experiment suffered from selection bias:

Also, it has been argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. Researchers from Western Kentucky University recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with and without the words "prison life." It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior.

Anyway, after she started talking I realized that years ago I'd read her book about being an observer/translator on Russian fishing boats, as part of a US-Russian joint fishing effort. Interesting book.

Amish furniture

Admit it, when you can't sleep you've been tempted to buy a genuine electric Amish heater. Of course, it's an "'Amish' Heater the Amish Couldn't Use".



This is not to be confused with the Electric Amish band and their hit songs.

What I learned from tonight's Thomas Jefferson Hour

He had a pet mockingbird named Dick (at the end of episode 760 "Felons and ipods") that used to fly around the White House.

From the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia:

The mockingbirds Jefferson purchased in the 1770s came with only a stock of songs from the woods and fields of Charles City County. He must have provided additional musical instruction himself. If he in fact carried a bird to France in 1784, it may have added to its repertoire some sounds common to mockingbirds imported from America. After their month-long transatlantic voyage they interspersed their first European performances with long imitations of the creaking of the ship's timbers.

At least two of the birds in the President's House, however, had already received singing lessons when Jefferson purchased them in 1803 - for ten and fifteen dollars, the usual price of a "singing" mockinbird. Jefferson's butler, Etienne Lemaire, was apparently proud of their serenades, which included popular American, Scottish, and french tunes, as well as imiations of all the birds of the woods.

Age, narcissism, and fish

MacArthur genius Robert Sapolsky is interviewed on NPR about "Does Age Quash our Spirit of Adventure" and how a 20-year-younger assistant's musical listening habits drive him crazy. That prompted him to figure out how radio stations target audiences: the heuristic is that what you listen to when you are about 14 determines what you listen to for the rest of your life, and that by age 35 most people don't care about new music "but you can sell Billy Joel to those people for the rest of their lives". Same kind of results for food and body piercing :)

Hmm, that upcoming Styx, REO Speedwagon, and 38 Special concert is lookin' real good to some of you right now, admit it.

Is this related? A Slashdot article about "Narcissistic College Graduates in the Workplace". Maybe it is all the fault of Mr. Rogers (who actually did live in my neighborhood when I was sabbaticalling at SEI).

What about fish? Yes, Sapolsky talks about Nebraskan sushi-eaters in the interview I mentioned above, but what I am thinking about is an article about the Nature Conservancy teaming up with Morro Bay fisherpeople to figure out how to bring back the fish. Pretty amazing quote:

Things didn’t work out for other Morro Bay fishermen, either. Once an active port with a thriving industry for groundfish — including rockfish and sablefish — by the 1990s the fishery was dying a very public death. Most of the fish processors blew town. The boatyard and boat mechanics left. Between 1990 and 2006, the amount of seafood that annually crossed the docks at Morro Bay and neighboring Port San Luis plummeted from 14 million pounds to 1.2 million.

Trivia: one of Sapolsky's MacArthur award colleagues that year was David Rumelhart, of PDP/neural network/connectionist fame.

Bonus: I still can't figure out if Juan Enriquez's TED talk makes sense. Even if it doesn't make sense it is amusing and some of his visual are funny, especially the one where the people in the swimming pool have a power strip floating in the middle of the water. Yikes.

Brain activity during television commercials

This takes a couple of clicks, but is worth watching. Go to http://www.sandsresearch.com/ and click on "Examples" and then "2009 Super Bowl Ads and Rankings", then click on one of the ads (the Potatoheads were the most popular). You'll see the ad play and six synchonized views of brain activity, as well as graph of overall interest? activity? I"m not quite sure what they are measuring, I think they are calling it "sustained power level"?

By popular demand

I've told a few people about this and it seemed popular, so here it is. IEEE Spectrum has an article about "The death of business-method patents", and the article's illustrations showed ridiculous patented ideas, so I googled, and they are real patents. One is about cats and the other is an astounding way of swinging.

And I found this patent application about jokes too, including self-referential ones :)

Bonus: The Yes We Scan movement is already bringing fascinating things to you, like this short video of the SR-71 :)

Metacognition: Buy the Two Buck Chuck Wine?

Jonah Lehrer talks at the Commonwealth Club about metacognition and neurophysiology. He talks quite a bit about brain functioning and decision making, and cites some of the same studies that Malc does in Blink, but in a more scientific way. Very interesting way to optimally make car-buying decisions about 51 minutes into Lehrer's talk :) He also talks about wine tasting studies (read about it here).

NPR's Radio Lab at the end of 2008 had a show on "Choice" featuring a discussion of "seven plus or minus 2", Jonah Lehrer, and Oliver Sacks (I've posted many times about him, this time he is talking about buying $1 worth of 72% chocolate daily). The "cake or fruit" experiment reminded me of Eddie Izzard's "cake or death?" sketch.

Lehrer also had a recent opinion piece in the LA Times about airline pilots' "deliberate calm" in emergencies.

Another Lehrer to enjoy is Tom (here signing a WW III song, more complete collection here). Good to see the new generation appreciating his songs (and others based on Gilbert and Sullivan, such as this one about Google :).

Doctors, Quakers, and "relationships"

A simple take on using Quaker principles of community and consensus during tough budget times from Insider Higher Ed. "Friend speaks my mind" would shorten a lot of academic meetings :)

Provocative article from Newsweek about "Why doctors hate science". Where is evidence-based medicine (and software engineering) when you need it? Speaking of software engineering, Grady Booch has voiced all his "On Architecture" columns. The seventh one "The Irrelevance of Architecture" should be familiar to my former software engineering students: the users don't care how you built it.

Meterorite-hunters have found a debris field from the recent falling object in Texas. You have to scroll down a little for the pictures and a description of what they found.

Finally, slightly disturbing but not surprising things about how we make decisions. First, dating and poltics:

• Milisecond speed dating
• unconsciously choosing leaders based on looks, and
• men prefer red (maybe the first legitimate research using hotornot.com).

Second, from the academic world

• What do e-portfolios share with Oakland? I'm pretty sure the quote is about Oakland and not Los Angeles. And,
• what really goes on with peer review. Here's a quote from Michele Lamont, from an Inside Higher Ed article:

  One of the key findings was that professors in different disciplines take very different approaches to decision making. The gap between humanities and social sciences scholars is as large as anything C.P. Snow saw between the humanities and the hard sciences.
  
  Many humanities professors, she writes, “rank what promises to be ‘fascinating’ above what may turn out to be ‘true.’ ” She quotes an English professor she observed explaining the value of a particular project: “My thing is, even if it doesn’t work, I think it will provoke really fascinating conversations. So I was really not interested in whether it’s true or not.”

  Yikes. She even mentions C.P. Snow.

Satellite debris or meteor?

Central Texas had a good show this morning: it was either a meteor or space junk (possible from the collided satellites)? A Discover magazine blog is covering it, and you can watch more video here.

You certainly don't want to be hit on the head by this stuff.

And some doomsday scenarios are not supported by science :) Is this related to my previous post?

Bonus: the DVD of the Big Creek/Huntington Lake episode of California's Gold is available. You might be able to catch a rerun on your favorite PBS channel.

A new Nigerian scam

Wow, renting-out other people's houses on craiglst.

The sacred and the secular

First, something cool from Lehman's Hardware: a wooden canteen, lined with paraffin (if you'd prefer a pitch lining, click here, or for plastic-lined, here).

Changing the subject, one of my colleagues sent me a link to "Born believers: How your brain creates God", which references an article about how "loss of control" changes our perception of patterns

Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas in Austin and Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, asked people what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information. Before asking, Whitson and Galinsky made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation.

The results were striking. The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says.

We were already looking at that article to see if we could relate it to how people perceive the veracity of websites, something we've looked at before, most recently described in: "Web site credibility: Why do people believe what they believe? " published in the January 2009 issue of Instructional Science.

Back to the "Born believers" article, here's a statement to ponder: "While many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance."

Debugging your car, and wiretaps

Another provocative IEEE Spectrum article, this time claiming that a modern "premium class" car contains about 100 million LOC. Impressive, but could the decimal point be off, since even the article says that a Boeing 787 has 6.5 million LOC (I previously talked about the software architecture of the Boeing 777). Here's a quote:

John Voelcker, IEEE Spectrum’s automotive editor, wrote in April 2007 about the GMC Yukon hybrid automobile and its Two-Mode Hybrid automatic transmission. Voelcker told me that “of all the staff hours in the entire program to build the Two-Mode Hybrid transmission…some 70 percent…were devoted to developing the control software.”

Other tidbits:

• Does this mean that the realign-your-jaw procedures pushed by dentists is bunk? Bonus: bogus food allergies.
• How we choose candidates: "While gender bias related to a female candidate's attractiveness was consistent across both male and female voters, good looks was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for female candidates. And, true to prevailing stereotypes, competence was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for male candidates."
• Didn't we already know that altitude is bad for your brain, and that you never really "get used to it"? Edmund Hillary et al. studied it over 40 years ago during their "silver hut" expedition.
• Finally, success in graduate school is about gettin' stupid

Finally, we previously talked about how transpacfic cables come ashore near Morro Bay. The recent infuriating PBS Nova about the NSA listening to network traffic talks about the site and asks why the NSA put the supersecret listening equipment in San Francisco (where it was quickly found) instead of a remote building near San Luis Obispo. That part is the last few minutes of the video's Chapter 4.

From serendipitous rocket science to Sakai via 1856

I was googling for something last week and accidentally found a funny anecdote about "kindergarten rocket science".

But I think what I was looking for at the time were the 1856 reports authorized by congress to find railroad routes to the west and in California. That's because I was able to buy two more color engravings on ebay that had been removed from the reports. If I can find them cheap I hang on to them until someone shows a slight bit of interest in local history, then I gift them a print or two :) Volume V (scroll down) includes central California. Another interesting source is "Reconnaissance of the central San Joaquin Valley".

I'll scan them in color sometime, but there are low resolution black and white scans at the University of Michigan of the volumes, The most relevant lithographs to this area are: "plain between San Joaquin and King's rivers", "valley of the Kah-wee-ya river (Four Creeks)", and "plain between Kah-wee-ya and King's river". But there are also wood engravings in the text, such as "Tulare Valley, from the summit of the Tejon Pass".

Bonus: you really should spend some time with the Rumsey map collection.

Additional bonus: whinging and why you shouldn't do it. The talk is supposed to be about open source but is really about doing-not-just-complaining. Speaking of open source, you might want to watch a demo of the new Sakai 3.0 user experience, or watch the infamous Michael Wesch talk about "from Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Experiments in New Media Literacy" (you can skip the first 8 minutes of introductory comments).

Marshmallows as a personality test

The almost always interesting psych professor from Stanford, Philip Zimbardo, has a new book about how we experience time. This is indeed the guy you read about in your intro to psych class about the "Stanford Prison Experiment".

One of the things he talks about is another famous experiment tempting four year olds with marshmallows. You can see the brief video (and pitch for his new book) here. They retested the children 14 years later, and the kids that could delay marshmallow gratification were ... well I won't spoil it for you.

If you want more, there is video of his November 2008 presentation to the Commonwealth Club. Too long, but he also talks about how anti-drug programs like DARE don't work (and about addiction in general), risky driving, Monterey Bay sardines, and predictors of whether patients will complete their physical therapy.

At about 50:30 in the Commonwealth Club talk, Zimbardo talks about Fresno State prof's Bob Levine's book A Geography of Time. It is a different approach to time, and has some interesting culture-clash stories.

Bonus: More famous psych experiments you may have heard of: Elliot Aronson's "jigsaw classroom" technique for cooperative learning, and Stanley Milgram's shocking experiment.

Exercise for the reader: Design an experiment using marshmallows to screen applicants for software engineering jobs :)

Ah, multicast video

Was the inauguration a good case for multicast video? This summary from Merit Network said

Multicast connections, where multiple users are served by a single outgoing connection, provided Merit's members who are mulitcast-enabled with a more consistent rate of traffic, while campus networks that served unicast streaming traffic, with one stream for every single connection, experienced an exponential spike in traffic.

"Our Members who took advantage of multicast to view the Inauguration not only got great service, but didn't contribute to the traffic surge," Welch said.

"The impact of using multicast was significantly less for those Merit Members without a doubt," added Bob Stovall, vice president of network operations and engineering.

The graphs of traffic are interesting.

So is multicast the answer? Maybe not. Check this out: sending traffic from New Zealand to San Francisco and back to New Zealand because of cost.

Note to self: here is the online form to request CENIC to turn on multicast. Here's some of the 'channels" that are out there now.

Cockpit dynamics, undersea cable, national security

Another great post by Bob Sutton, this time about the recent airliner crash in the Hudson River and how no one died. He cites work by one of his mentors about the NASA cockpit studies I've talked about. Some highly excerpted quotes:

Richard [Hackman] is the world's expert on group effectiveness and I am lucky to count him as one of my mentors ... Some people in the groups area are more well-known in business circles, but Richard is the best, especially if you care about evidence rather than faith-based practices.

One of Richard's biggest research projects was on the dynamics of airline cockpit crews, and he devoted many days -- for over a year of his life -- sitting in the jump seat of the cockpit and observing and coding the dynamics if the dyad or triad. One of the main lessons that came from this --and related -- research is that the less time that a crew has been together, the more group dynamics problems they have and the more mistakes they make.

Bottom line: tired crews who've worked together make fewer mistakes than fresh crews who are new to each other.

As Hackman writes, he sometimes has the impulse, when boarding a commercial flight, to stick his head in the cockpit, and ask the crew if it is there first flight together -- the odds against an incident are very low even on first flights, but Hackman points out that your risk as a passenger would be far lower if you avoided first flights together.

Funny/sad bonus topic: AT&T is proposing bringing more transpacific fiber connections from Hawaii and Asia into their facility near Montana de Oro on the central California coast. You can see the environmental study (adverse effects are minimal since the conduit and facilities is already in place). But the funny/sad comments are here. In case they go away, here's the funny one -- "Is this necessary? I talk to Hawaii all day long using VOIP. We really don't need anymore fiber optic cables. Landlines are on the way out" -- and the both at once uninformed (there are already fiber optic cables coming onshore at that location) and corrective comment -- "It certainly doesn't sound good for Montana De Oro and I'm also against that location choice. That being said, fiber optic cables are the necessary 'backbone' that connect wireless and wired voice and data everywhere - how do you think your VOIP gets to Hawaii?"

There's a nice detailed list of Pacific undersea cables here. More information about the Montana de Oro and the Grover Beach cable landings on this guy's blog.

Another bonus topic, this one pretty sad, and something the new administration will need to pay attention to: the security situation in Mexico (see AP story, Reuters column, and WSJ column).

Good enough software

Steve's post about zen and software for some reason reminded me of James Bach, the famous software consultant. Note that the name of Bach's website is satisfice.com. He's known for the idea of good enough testing and software, but "good enough" in a good way -- see the Herb Simon idea of satisficing.

Before you know it, Steve will be posting about the application of Carse's Finite and Infinite Games to software development -- but wait, Peter Denning and Alistair Cockburn beat him to it :)

Bonus Alan Kay quote (from when he was leaving Atari): "'I guess the tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of bean counters.''

Rebooting and security

This week in San Jose the National Science Foundation is bringing together academics and industrialists at the Rebooting Computing: The magic and beauty of computer science symposium. The list of participants is amazing. Here is an example, but you'll have to sign up (free) on the reebootingcomputing.org site for an account, and then login before you can see this -- a forum thread where Alan Kay, Gene Spafford, Grady Booch, and Dennis Frailey talk about open source software, security, and trustworthyness. After you login in, here are links to:

• Frailey on defense contractors and FOSS
• Spafford's response, talking about security
• Alan Kay (and if you scroll down, Booch and Vint Cerf) respond.

One of the better signal to noise ratio discussions I've read in a while.

I've also posted two comments to Steve's post about security. No guarantee about my signal to noise ratio :)

Software engineering, inauguratorial regalia

Was JFK the last president to wear a top hat at inauguration? If you are a little late putting together your wardrobe for the 20th, I recommend this or if you are feeling more patriotic, this.

The IEEE Computer Society is commemorating 25 years of Software magazine. Some of articles are available to nonmembers and some are interesting (feel free to draw your own Venn diagram):

• C's Brian Kernighan on sometimes the old ways are best (he complains about linux breaking wc)
• Niklaus Wirth's (father of Pascal) brief history of software engineering
• and the "top 35" articles published in Software so far. I think I have just found the syllabus for a intro software engineering graduate class :)

Bonus: A free 2009 downloadable calendar from Dr. Dobbs. Believe me, if you are a software developer, you need it for your cubicle.

Bonus bonus: Technology Review created an oral history of space tourism by interviewing five of the six Soyuz passengers to the space station and interleaving their responses. Just like with commercial airlines, Anousheh Ansari's luggage was lost and she ended up with men's shaving cream and cologne instead of her stuff.

Doesn't it seem like microgravity would be good for back pain? But astronauts frequently complain of lower back pain maybe because the spine decompresses.

Methodist Ministers and other topics

Assorted things:

• Bob Sutton uses a study of Methodist ministers to draw conclusions about leadership.
• The Dirty Jobs host talks about peripeteia, anagnorisis, and finding value in your work.
• One of my neighbors has a stinky fireplace, I hope they are consulting this.
• Kathy Sierra from the 2008 O'Reilly emerging technologies conference mentions the Alan Kay video I've talked about previously.
• And Kent Beck from the 2008 O'Reilly Rails conference retrospects about the last 20 years of his work in extreme programming, Smalltalk (there's Alan Kay again), design patterns, and the influence of physical architecture.
• Guy Kawasaki at the November 2008 Commonwealth Club on "No Bull Shiitake". He talks about Steve Jobs, Woz, Obama, the best part of working at Apple in the early days, funding young entrepreneurs.

Unintended user interface consequences

NASA released the report of the Columbia accident. The gruesome stuff was redacted, but there is plenty description of how things ended. But I was interested in the following user interface problem (I've italicized the interface problem, and ACES = Advanced Crew Escape Suit, i.e. pressure suit):

Deorbit burn occurred at GMT 13:15:30 (EI–1719/TIG+0). The burn was nominal, and Columbia began entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Per the checklist, a few tasks remain to be completed after the burn, including stowing the last laptop computer, which requires a crew member to be out of the seat. Crew equipment configuration items on the entry checklist (all crew members seated and strapped in, helmets and gloves donned, and suit pressure checked) were not entirely completed prior to EI. At least one crew member was not wearing the helmet and several were not wearing gloves. The flight deck video shows that conditions on the flight deck were nominal during the entire time of the video recording. The video shows the flight deck crew finishing most checklist tasks close to the planned times. However, one flight deck crew member did not yet have gloves in place in time for the ACES pressure check. One event of note occurred at GMT 13:36:04 (EI–485/TIG+1234) when the CDR bumped the rotational hand controller (RHC) accidentally. Movement of the RHC out of the centered position caused the digital autopilot (DAP) to “downmode” from the “Auto” mode to “Inertial” mode. When this occurred, a “DAP DOWNMODE RHC” caution and warning message was displayed, the INRTL button on the C3 panel was illuminated, and a tone, which can be heard in the recovered flight deck video, was annunciated. An immediate reactivation of the autopilot was performed by the CDR. The capsule communicator (CAPCOM) in the Mission Control Center (MCC) then requested the CDR to enter “another Item 27,” which is a command to fully recover the vehicle attitude from the bumped RHC. Bumping of the RHC is a relatively common occurrence by either the PLT or the CDR because the ACES is bulky and the area near the controls is confined. Such RHC bumps with prompt recovery represent a very low hazard to the crew. The original design specifications of the orbiters were for a shirtsleeve environment (i.e., no special clothing needed to be worn). Although pressure suits have been worn during launch and entry since the Challenger accident, no modifications were made to displays and controls to accommodate the ACES.

So as a result of the previous Challenger accident and the requirement to wear a pressure suit, bumping the controller is "relatively common".

The mention of the Digital Autopilot (DAP) caught my eye since back in the day we looked at reverse engineering formal specifications for a small portion as a demonstration. Also in the Columbia report is a discussion of the reaction control system (RCS) jets, that were firing continuously just before loss of control, trying to correct the flawed flight. That also reminded me that the bigger group we were associated with at NASA JPL was looking at formally specifying the RCS "jet select" system.

Office Space

We've previously talked about office space for knowledge workers, and Joel's post on the new Fog Creek offices (see slideshow) got me thinking about it again. Joel has some funny quotes

And I also knew that if I wasn’t intimately involved in every detail of the construction, we’d end up with the kind of life-sucking dreary cubicle hellhole made popular by the utopian workplace in “Office Space.”

Joel likes his Herman Miller and Arne Jacobsen chairs.

I like an Aeron chair and multiple big monitors as much as the next guy, but is it really worth it to have custom remodeled office in Manhattan? I've asked the same questions about ACM's NYC headquarters. How about puttin' it in Minot and saving us ACM members some money? :)

But seriously, I have no problem with providing a good environment to keep software people productive and satisfied. When I was at the Software Engineering Institute every office had a french door, and either a window or a view to the outside through the french door. The building was designed for the SEI (a description in architect-speak is here). One thing that didn't seem to work was from each office to the outside hall or lobby was a large but short conduit. I think the idea was to keep noise down by putting the computer outside in the hallway. I didn't see anyone actually do that :) Other things I seem to remember is people putting their MBTI diagram outside their office door so that you knew the personality you'd encounter, and a heuristic about office doors: closed and latched means don't bother me, closed but ajar means knock and come in if it's important, and open meant all visitors are welcome :)

Probably the nicest place I hung around was the short-lived Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, famous for its graduate software engineering program. It was a former seminary in the New England woods, and had its own pond. The key to the rowboat could be checked out from the receptionist; the boat was great for thinking. The library was the former chapel. Great place, but while we were there Dr. Wang announced he was closing the Institute.

In contrast, JPL and KSC tended to be DIlbertian cube farms for the most part, and unfortunately that's essentially what we have at Digital Campus now at Fresno State.

Bonus: the sad state of the Open Office (OO.o) project: "it should be clear that OO.o is a profoundly sick project, and worse one that doesn't appear to be improving with age."

Bill-Bill-Bill-Bill-Bill Nye the Science Guy

After his short lived marriage (or non-marriage) to the author of Mozart in the Jungle (a steamy look at the world of classical musicians) Bill Nye is back on the air with Stuff Happens.

I watched the "Where's the Beef" episode where Bill says that cows make more greenhouse gases than planes and cars combined, and that if you eat the US average amount of beef, it's like driving an extra 5000 miles/year. He also had some interesting things to say about organic wines vs wines from organic grapes, and cloth versus disposable diapers. As he points out, the latter question is not easy to answer, sort of like the disposable versus ceramic cup question.

Trivia:

• Blair Tindall, Bill's ex who once put a menacing coffee pot on his porch, interviewed Oliver Sacks for the LA Times about musicophilia.
• While I was at the Pasadena convention center waiting for the Mars Polar Lander to arrive at Mars (it never did), I was able to talk to Andrew Chaikin, Robert Jastrow, and Bill himself (as well as be within spittin' distance of Story Musgrave, and hearing Gary Sinise talk about the disappointing Mission to Mars)

Bob Sutton again

Another good post by Stanford business professor Bob Sutton. This one is "in praise of simple competence", and quotes someone who quotes someone: "Strategy is for amateurs; execution is for professionals".

Other ones you might remember:

• Downsizing
• Car horns
• Perverse incentives
• Medical bullies
• Performance evaluations
• Infant mortality
• Waiting in line
• Indifference

MacHEADS, the next Trekkies?

MacHEADS The Movie: A documentary of Apple users, see the trailer and blog. Reminds me a little of Trekkies (and Trekkies 2).

Is that the one where Shatner tells a convention hall audience to "get a life"? No that was a Saturday Night Live skit. I can't find a legal copy of that, but you can watch John Belusi as Kirk, Chevy Chase as Spock, and Dan Aykroyd as McCoy. You though that was bad? The infamous Congress of Wonders on their 1970 album Revolting did an 11 minute parody infused with drug and sex references. You can listen to it by clicking on the picture of the two CoW guys to pop up a list of audio files (but you've been warned).

Speaking of Shatner, you can now watch episodes of his Biography channel Raw Nerve. So far I've learned that Valerie Bertinelli would be difficult to live with, and that Kelsey Grammer surfs.

Sixty minutes

Interesting 60 Minutes tonight: A story on airport "security theater", with substantial clips of security expert Bruce Schneier (we've talked about him before), another on our governor and his vegetable oil powered Hummer, and a story on orphaned elephants.

Maybe elephants, like octopuses, prefer high def television. I know I do.

A pedestrian scramble

Three short things:

• A funny little column about roadway terminology in Spectrum (we previous talked about traffic calming).
• An article about my Ph.D. advisor's software safety group and what they've found out about electronic voting machines.
• An American Airlines pilot details his last flight before retiring, including what those chimes mean during the flight.

Sugar and poinsettias

The LA Times reviews an end of the year issue of the British Medical Journal summarizing weird things (you can listen to the podcast here). Some things aren't too weird -- I though that poinsettias aren't poisonous is common knowledge. But kids and sugar? This shouldn't be too surprising:

Studies showed that children who consume large amounts of sugar are no more hyperactive than those who don't. But parents who think their kids have eaten sugar, even when they haven't, tend to rate them as being hyperactive.

Another thing in the news lately is a about workplace friendships. Actually, it is about workplace socializing (more about workplace friendships later):

Pentland and Waber found that the badge wearers with more social connections -- and more interactions with coworkers in their social network -- had the highest productivity, whether they were talking about work or, say, basketball. And people who spent the most time "in the groove," moving rhythmically as they went about their work, had higher productivity levels than others.

The badges

kept track of the wearers' location, direction, and voice inflections. When one badge wearer met another, the length and tone of the wearers' conversation was measured. The badges could even track subtle body shifts when wearers were sitting down. Then the researchers compared that data with the wearers' productivity.

You can read their paper from the April 2008 Journal of Information Processing and see data from one conversation among four people in Figure 1.

Does this offer anything to the long debate about workplace friendships?

Is there anything worse than a critic? :)

Michiko Kakutani's review in the NY Times of Malc's new book had one part that really makes me wince. Books like Gladwell's (and T-Fried's) can legitimately be criticized for pushing the stories or research too far, but I don't have too much of a problem with it. Part of being a critical reader would be tracking down the original research if something really bothers you. A lot of the social psych stuff that Gladwell cites is widely known (i.e., not stuff that is sitting off in the academic corner waiting to be discovered) and already debated. Similarly, Friedman has more formal training in middle east politics (B.A. in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis and Masters in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford), and on-the-ground experience, than I do so I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and check out things that don't seem right to me. I have more problems with Carl Sagan than with Malc or T-Fried :)

On the other hand, I've never been comfortable with the "10,000 hour" heuristic that Malc talks about, even if it is at least partially credited to Nobel-winner Herb Simon. [Herb Simon anecdote: When I was on sabbatical at the Software Engineering Institute at CMU I wanted to attend a seminar by Anita Borg (Mary Shaw was there also). There was a group in the room and the time for the seminar was close, so those of us in the hallway were getting antsy. Finally, one of us opened the door and asked if the current occupants were "about done". Eventually they left. Yes, it was Herb Simon and his graduate students. I felt a little bad about being part of that angry hallway mob. Actually we weren't angry, and we weren't a mob, but it is the only time I've seen a Nobel laureate kicked out of a room]

Back to Kakutani's review. This paragraph about the airline accident is frighteningly ignorant of the huge amounts of human factors research that has been done in this area.

Mr. Gladwell similarly raises the notion that cultural traditions may play a role in plane crashes, that the 1990 crash of Avianca Flight 52 over Long Island might have had something to do with the pilots’ being Colombian. He quotes Suren Ratwatte, a veteran pilot involved in “human factors” research, saying that “no American pilot would put up with” being held up by Air Traffic Control several times on its way to New York for more than an hour if he or she were running short of fuel. And drawing on the work of the psychologist Robert Helmreich, Mr. Gladwell argues that the pilots came from a culture with “a deep and abiding respect for authority” — which suggests that the first officer was reluctant to speak up when the exhausted captain failed to do so, and that both men failed to talk forcefully to the air traffic controllers, who were tough New Yorkers, unaccustomed to the pilots’ polite language.

The relatives of the 583 people who died on two 747's at Tenerife and those that died in a frozen Potomac river because of poor communication between first officer and captain might disagree with Kakutani. This phenomenon is so common that NASA Ames has studied the heck out of it.

Let's end this on a good note: A front-seat view of a landing at St. Maarten. Click on "more info" for probably the most informative explanation I've seen on YouTube :)

Malc at Pop!Tech

Another Malc video, this time he is talking at Pop!Tech 2008 about his book about genius, Outliers (there's also a Pop!Tech talk of his from 2004 discussing the Blink material).

In Outliers he talks about the "10,000 hour rule" for becoming an expert in just about anything, made famous in a 1993 article "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" by Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Römer (Fresno State people can click here).

Tokeneer

Tokeneer sounds like a fan of the Lord of the Rings books and movies (OK, that would be Tolkieneer) but it is the latest of a public example of a "fully" formal software development effort. You can read a few paragraphs about it in the most recent Dr. Dobb's here and peruse the official website. Software engineering students will be interested in some of the statistics, particularly about productivity

The Tokeneer ID Station system’s key statistics are:

lines of code: 9939
total effort (days): 260
productivity (lines of code per day, overall): 38
productivity (lines of code per day, coding phase): 203
defects discovered since delivery: 1

In some ways I find this a little depressing since I see some of thee same people who were doing FM when I was doing my PhD in this area in the late 1980s (Tony Hoare, for example) and the number of lines of code that are being verified (my PhD advisor formally specificed and proved a secure UNIX kernel in the late 1970s, now doing voting machines).

That said, this NASA formal methods workshop at Ames sounds encouraging, and I recognize some of the names from people I bumped into when working with the formal specification of the space shuttle jet select group at JPL.

Pinker

I forgot to mention that cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (you remember him) was on BookTV this past weekend for, yes, three hours. He's an interesting guy, and there is at least one caller from Fresno.

Magazines

Two things from the latest MIT Technology Review:

• Simson Garfinkel's "Wikipedia and the meaning of truth"
• Cool pictures of brains in action

and an article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin about using an 800mm lens to take pictures from the stands at a UH football game, and from Scientific American, a sort of ridiculous article about using "malevolent logic to define the dark side of the human psyche". hmm.