Herding Bats

This Thanksgiving, let's talk about the economy

2011-11-21T09:48:00.000-08:00

My fellow Americans [that's how one is supposed to begin these things, no?],

This Thanksgiving, we will gather with our families and give thanks for the many good things that we have. The first thing we always put, with varying (and not necessarily related) levels of piety and sincerity, is each other. Then we enumerate, or mention, or ponder, our stuff. But while we're all here, let's have a talk. There are some folks missing Thanksgiving because they're camped out in public parks and various other public places across the country.

I don't know what to make of them. But I do know that they want us to think. And they want us to act. It's probably fair to say that they don't exactly know what action they want. But if we're to have high-quality action, we've gotta talk. You'll be sitting down at the table with those who love you, despite the fact that you each think that each others' politics are absurd. Now's the time to have a few drinks (we're tipping back the pinot noir with our turkey. Probably some white wine before, and bourbon after) and open up a conversation.

Resolve to bring up the economy. Because it sucks; we can all agree on that. And we can't vote in a new government (regardless of our politics, I'm sure we can all find someone representing us that we'd rather not), so let's start getting out of the gridlock at the grassroots level. Bring up the economy with someone you know disagrees with you.

Get past the frustration, and ponder that the person you're talking to has some rational or emotional reason for the opinions you're hearing. The explanation is not just "they're frickin' nuts." "They want to end the economy as we know it." "They're just jealous." "They're just defending the status quo."

Lefties: recall that it took the modern economy for "dignity of the individual" to have any meaning. Read Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues.

Righties: recall that it takes respect for the dignity of others to make the modern economy work. Read Matt Taibbi's ongoing reportage series. Here's a good spot to begin.

Everyone, be thankful for the things that make this country great. Here's my favorite from the past couple of weeks: a bagel shop in New York, about to go out of business and getting white-knight investorship--from a pair of Pakistani cab drivers..

We come together at Thanksgiving--putting aside our differences is great and all, but how about resolving some of them?

On growing up...or not

2011-11-16T21:17:00.000-08:00

A friend invited me to a bike race today. It's a big bike rice, a mountain bike relay race out west. Right off the bat, let me tell you, I am STOKED. This is going to be a little mini-vacation, or maybe an extra-large weekend. What's a little funny about it is that it simultaneously has me feeling like a little kid, too excited to sleep. And a Big Important Adult: I have the grown-up freedom to take a weekend off.

So you grow up, in order to be a kid again.

Peasant Riding: An Invitation

2011-10-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”

--Alexis de Tocqueville

This is the way I ride my bike: like a peasant. I aim for simplicity, and even rusticity--the fresh air of the country (to be found, for sure, in the city) and the rustle of trees over the road, the society of acquaintances associated with the village. The virtues I seek an acquaintance with? Self-reliance, hardiness, strength, bricolage, to name a few. The necessarily attendant vices? Miserliness, impatience, mistrust of the new(fangled)... I'm sure I'm missing many others. Coarse habits we have aplenty: Excess drinking, public urination, the stench of sweat. The simple graces, which I confess I'm still aiming for: An easy pedal stroke at high RPMs; a consistent line and pace in a group ride; a demure changing from sweaty and skin-tight clothing after a ride; a welcoming attitude toward strangers.

The early stage of civilization we aim for? England or continental Europe in the middle of the 20th century. An idealized version, to be sure, with no world wars or polio, no intra-club discord, flat tyres, rolled tubulars, or concussions. But a culture where commuting and training and riding-to-the-race ran together into riding somewhere. Where winter was the season not for boredom on the trainer inside, but for sloggingly spinning (or spinningly slogging?) a fendered fixed-gear in the snow. Where your racing bike + fenders and racks = your bike.

So I ride like a peasant, in the city, in the Information Age. I commute. Resistance on my training ride comes from hauling the kid-trailer. Or the kid. Or both kids. Or the dog. I sneak out in the morning or late at night, so as to have clear roads, clear mind, and a clear moment in the hectic schedule. I ride with friends; if they're faster, I struggle; if they're slower, I ride on the dirt or grass and let them ride on the pavement. Or I spin like mad. I do training rides to a bar (and recovery rides home?). I change out of my lycra (or at least pull on some warmup pants) when I get there. I get dirty with glee on a cyclocross course. I fiddle with my equipment constantly--but with secondhand parts. I have little patience for "data" (but it's so tempting for the going faster). I race, to challenge myself. I commute, for fun, thrift, and exercise. I ride like a peasant. Join me.

Run (!?!?) report

2011-09-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a lunchtime run, with a few observations.

The park is overrun with adolescent ducks, about ready to head south for their first winter, the squirrels are all quite fat. The birds are slower than usual, too; I think they're putting on weight (insofar as creatures made mostly of feather and air are able to).

Discovery of the day: You can run under the Clarence Darrow Bridge (on the west side of the lagoon). Odd to realize that you've been in a place for years before finding something like this.

I've been running as a second (or sometimes only) workout for the past week and a half, as it's a quick way to get the heart rate up; more cardio fitness in less time than biking. (At least, that's the idea.) Did my "speedwork" on one of the bird trails, so as not to subject myself to embarrassment at how slow I am (instead, I'll talk about it on the internet so the whole world can laugh at me, with the exception of those--Hi, Mom!--who think I'm being charmingly self-deprecating). Realized this may have backfired when I was doing my recoveries at an even slower pace, with all the gasping and wheezing of maximum effort, in front of the golfers and fishermen.

Photo by Urbanrules, used, with thanks, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license

Race Report/oddball chain-drop issue

2011-09-23T07:39:00.000-07:00

Here's the situation: Cyclocross season started up yesterday* (How do you say, "Whoo hooo!" in Belgian?) and so I, being the larkity fool that I am, built up my bike on Saturday night for racin'. The frame is a vertically dropped-out Lemond Poprad--yer basic CX frame. I (in my usual spirit of cussed bricolage) decided (rather a long time ago) that I'd build it up (and race it) fixed if at all possible. I tried out a pile of chainring and cog combinations with a length of chain and found that 41 x 17 was the sweet spot: no fiddlin' needed and perfect shain tension. I procured a new chain (and a needed half-link), and a 17t cog (I'd been testing gearing on multi-speed freewheel), and went to assemble the whole thing.

No dice; chain too short. Okay, not a hard problem; it's the difference between a new chain-and-cog and an old one; I'll just grind a flat onto the axle so that I get the 1 or 2mm of adjustability I need to get into the dropout. Piece of cake; I didn't even need to grind past the threads to get it into the dropout.

And all was well; I raced in the Masters 30+; with a bit of rain sprinkling the course and for just a taste of mud and wet leaves, and performed embarrassingly as expected (hey, I was just getting my bearings back; I'd not ridden fixed in a year or two, not raced in two years and, oh, yeah, not trained either). All was well, my focus was on the 4's (beginner) race in the afternoon.

By the start of the 4's, it was really raining. Ahh, a mudfest! I remember I used to do well in these! (And my chain felt a bit loose. But how loose could it be? It was brand new, cog was, too, and I knew that the whole thing was pretty tight to go together. Besides, I was in the staging, and I damn sure wasn't going to lose my starting position in the race I had a chance of finishing in the points in.)

But I started almost as tentatively as the Masters race; where was the aggression? Then, maybe 500m in, it all clicked again: Not winning? GO FASTER! Not passing someone? GO FASTER! Braking? STOP BRAKING! I was really feelin' it; the virtue of riding fixed in the mud---rather than front-braking in the corners, skidding the front wheel (at worst), understeering, and scrubbing a ton of speed, I started challenging myself to take all the turns with no handbrake; slow as needed with the rear wheel to feel the slip in the mud, to carry more speed, to slip for oversteer rather than understeer…. It was going great.

Something had to go wrong. And it did: Chain drop, coming out of corner (I'd been resistance-slowing into the corner). I knew it was a bad sign; I could crank the chain back onto the chainring like a derailleured (derailleurisé?) bike. It was bound to happen again. And while it was fun to pass the same fifteen people, drop the chain, and repeat (twice more), when my rear wheel started falling off (and falling off again), I knew it was time to DNF.

But a blast was had by me--anytime you have to come straight in the basement door, undress next to the washing machine, and rinse your legs in the utility sink before entering the house, you've had fun.

QUESTION.
How did my brand-new fixed drivetrain go from sweet-spot tight to chain-droppingly loose in the course of 10K on roads (on the way to the race) and maybe 10K of racing on dirt, grass, and mud?

My first theory was initial chain stretch, maybe wear-in (it's a KMC chain, IIRC); my second theory is that the cog (a black Eighth-inch brand cog) was powdercoated all over, and I've worn the powdercoat off the teeth. I've since readjusted the wheel back in the dropouts, maybe 1 mm back, and it seemed nicely snug again--but it reared its ugly head on Wednesday morning again.

New theory, suggested by an iBOB: unround chainring and unround cog combining to give loose spots. Maybe a slightly bent chainring, too, with a tooth coming up outside the sideplates all on its own.

Other new theory (also via iBOB) is that the powdercoat on the sides--the clamping surface--of the dropouts is letting the axle slip forward.

Last new theory (home-grown) is that the axle is slipping up as I go over the bouncy ground, and into the middle of the dropout, no matter where in the dropout I start it out.

(New datapoint is that the chain is pristinely new-length (12" per 24 links).

Thoughts?

*wrote this a-Monday; late posting to the blog since this is my last venue for readership.

Fun with English.

2011-08-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

-ee	eak/each	ight	ought/aught…	Notes
	wreak		wrought	Thinking about this is what started this whole table.
see	seek	sight	sought	Here’s a nice complete version.
	teach	[tight???]	taught	Variation of -ch and -k. All would have been like a Scottish or German ch back in the day (where BITD means late medieval period mas o menos).
may	[meek???]	might		(I’ll note here that “ought” seems like avoir in the French to have become merely an “ending” as a modal verb.)
buy		bight	bought	(Is this why Microsoft picked “Bing™” as their search engine name? Get that subliminal “Buy! buy! buy!” message in there.) I’m having trouble envisioning a semantic connection between “bight” and buying. Anyone?
vie (fie?)		fight	fought
	catch		caught
	think		thought	I suspect that an original -in- shifted to an -ee- , lengthening in compensation for dropping the n, but I may have it backwards.
	drink		draught	Aha! Why draught is spelt as it is!
	sink		shaft	Mining on the brain?
	bring	[bright???]	brought	Here, the -ink has softened into an -ing.
		light	laughter	I would love for these to be connected. Too good to be true?
plea		plight
flee		flight
knee		knight		Knights kneel to be knighted. “Kinn-nigget” isn’t a bad approximation of the BITD pronunciation.
[free???] fray	freak	fright	fraught	“Freak” is speculative because it’s awfully nouny, and everything in its column so far is solidly in the verb camp.

Blue indicates speculations. Red things that on semantic grounds don't seem to belong. I came up with this before (while?) falling asleep the other night. Its sense may be naught.

2011-05-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

This post was going to be a two-line pointer to Godin's and Anderson's posts, referenced below. It became too long for a tweet, then too long for a Facebook post, and most likely, too long to read. If you survive it, thanks.

Seth Godin has written an interesting and provocative post on the future of the library, and more particularly on the future of the librarian. In brief, he argues that librarians, who should be the Vergils for future Dantes, are now seen not as expert guides in a sea of overabundant information, but rather as the people who manage that place where all the books are at. Libraries, he avers, are keeping librarians back. Excellent piece, and thought-provoking, and I thank Kent Anderson at the Scholarly Kitchen for bringing it to my attention.

One question (and one comment below): What about Europe, where the relationship between librarians and patrons--and, indeed, between readers and library books--is very different? I can't even try to fathom the different political processes by which European universities, university libraries, and other public libraries are funded, but I have heard many many accounts* of the use of a university library or archive, and the theme that comes up again and again is that the librarian or archivist figure is more of a Kerberos than anything else---not with respect to patrons but with respect to books: Kerberos would happily take you in, but he wouldn't let you out! When you use a library in Europe, your relationship to the books is much more heavily mediated than here (where the librarians are like bloodhounds snoozing by the fireplace; no interaction with them is needed unless or until you ask them to help track something down). The big distinction is whether the stacks are open for browsing or not, of course: may the patron wander among the books, or do you have to request something specific and await it? (This leads to my thought, but let me continue the query.)

I could see this relationship working out in several possible ways as more and more direct access to more and more information becomes more and more normal. Either the habit of putting requests to people continues, and librarians "hard power" by means of exclusive access becomes "soft power" by means of higher-quality access. OR the difficulty and cost (in time and effort) to use libraries (because of that mediation) makes a shift to electronic direct access all the more appealing.

A lot depends on politics and funding, of course, but more, I suppose, on whether the mediated relationship brings more or less value to the access. When you ask a librarian for, oh, G.E.M. de Ste. Croix's The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, does the librarian raise the issue of its Marxist slant, its flaws and its virtues, and suggest some important interlocutors one would do well to read as well? Or do you have to deal with a grumpy librarian to read something that some fusty old professor (we have only young and attractive professors here in the U.S.) told oyu you should. (See Sandy Thatcher's comments on the Scholarly Kitchen post; we in the publishing industry, must perforce think in economic terms of "Where can I add value?" and "How can I get paid for it?")

Now, the thought: One of the great virtues of libraries as "book warehouses," is browsing. Andy Abbott theorizes browsing thusly (starting in the last lines of p. 17):
random inspection of a local knowledge vicinity for items with a high probability of payoff, particularly in terms of taking one to productive new localities. It is crucial to recognize that this happens at many different levels in library research, not just at one: within books as one turns pages, on shelves as one searches for a book, in the stacks as one walks by unknown call numbers, in bibliographic indexes and other research tools as one glances through topics, and so on. In all these cases, the power of browsing is great.

Andy goes on, and I have to quote him at length:
Browsing has two requirements. First, the materials being browsed must already themselves be highly ordered either by virtue of their internal structure or by their places in an indexing or cataloguing or classification system. Otherwise, adjacency has no meaning and browsing can't work. Second, the browsers must have broad knowledge that primes them to recognize likely connections. This is the rationale for general exams, for example. (Note that by this argument, one can even think of conversation with other scholars as a form of mutual browsing.)

This insight provides us with a first reason why much of library technologization doesn't work very well. The assumption is that give "the right indexing system," you can replace the expert browser, and any college freshman will be able to write good scholarship. But this can't be true because such an indexing system would only work if it encoded the expertise of all the possible expert users. But in that case it would reproduce the confusion (of all the different possible associations to a given item) within itself, giving the novice no more guidance than the old tools. What technology usually offers, in fact, is the expertise of only one user - a hard-coded set of hyperlinks - which is obviously vastly impoverished from a computational point of view unless you can assume that there is one (or a few) right expert(s), which is seldom true in the areas that employ library research.

I emphasize browsing because such random search in pre-organized localities, although important in the natural sciences (it is after all Pasteur who said that chance favors only the prepared mind), is by no means as important as it is in library research. Library research as currently practiced is unthinkable without browsing. It is quite often the case that library researchers do not know exactly what they want ahead of time; indeed one might define skill at library research as the ability to recognize, when we have found something, that it is in fact something that we ought to have wanted to find. To be sure, library researchers are sometimes quite focused in their needs. But even during tasks like coding and focused retrieval, browsing goes on in the background. It is for this reason that artisanal researchers do not often subdivide their work and give brute force tasks to others; they worry about the loss of browsing.

Browsing in this extremely broad sense and at all these many levels is thus one thing that absolutely must be protected in the research libraries of the future. It means keeping materials ordered and in a setting where they can be effectively scanned in the random fashion that browsing demands. Since, as we have noted, browsing involves many levels of organization, all of these levels need to be preserved, not just the order of books on shelves.

The question, now in 2011, is not just "What is to become of librarians?" given the changing role of libraries, but "What is to become of browsing?" --- Is browsing in this precise sense, possible on the internet? Is anything else possible? (Or are we fooled by terminology--"web browser"?) I've complained before about some of the vices of Google books, for example, but Google actually does attempt to look at the organically-developed relationships amongst sources, and then present a list of possibilities--is that a (precisely) browsable list? But Google Books also assiduously ignores meta-data; the self-organizing instructions of scholarship--and I'm not sure it's started to parse things as simple and structured as footnotes.

Ah well. I've overstayed my mental welcome, and I've got work to do before the weekend.

-----
*I think immediately of Umberto Eco's opening essay in Candida Höfer's luscious book of photos, Libraries, as well as an account, source long forgotten but perhaps in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, of an American scholar's experience using Interlibrary Loan while on research sabbatical at Trinity College, Dublin. I may be generalizing over-much from tales of the Vatican Library, whose staff and policies are legendarily, erm, protective.

What makes a good e-book

2011-05-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

David Pogue reviews Al Gore's latest here.

The key point: "Thanks to all of the smoothly integrated multimedia, the book engages more parts of your brain than just the one that reads prose. As a result, Mr. Gore goes much farther in his mission — persuasion — than he could on the printed page alone." Abraham Lincoln, when he wanted to study a text, would read it aloud as he copied it, on the logic that he would not merely read it that way, but write, speak, and hear it as well. It sounds time-consuming--but, then again, so is immersing yourself in a multi-media project with "over an hour" of narration.

What hath Google wrought?

2011-05-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

Oh, Google book search, you could have been so good. But instead we have:

and

Threat Gap

2010-09-28T14:30:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I complained about the Homeland Security Advisory System, but I just learned today that it is basically copied from the French Vigipirate system.

Now, that doesn't bother me. You never caught me ordering "Freedom Fries," or pouring Champagne into anything but a glass bound for a table. What bothers me is that the French have more threat than we do! Yes, ladies and gentleman, there is a Threat Gap, and the French are winning! As you can see from the helpful graphic here, the French have dispensed with the useless peacenik levels of Green and Blue, but have developed a greater Threat Capacity through the deployment of the the color scarlet. (It's not pink, it's scarlet, y'hear?) "Menace certaine," they say. What threat can we possibly field against such a menace?

In fact, I fear that the epistemological sophistication of the French system (or, as they say, "systeme") allows for development even beyond what our system is capable of deploying without radical readjustment. Our system, as you can observe, while having a significant hue element, is, in fact, based on altitude. Low, general, elevated…The problem is that if we develop another threat level, the only place we can get any higher is in orbit. And, quite frankly, if we put the terrorists in orbit, I'm quite happy to leave them there.

A brief aside: I don’t have the stomach today to confront the appalling knowledge that while we have "threats", the French are armed with "menaces." When I think on such a prima facie difference in fear, I feel like a cop in a blue uniform, when the criminals get to wear black.

The French, on the other hand, have merely to develop NEW COLORS, because their system is based on ACTUAL METHOD. Yes, six years ago, it seemed that political expedience was a serious threat to our freedoms (I recall that right, right?), but, as Donald Rumsfeld knew quite well, the upper limit to what you can know is the facts at hand; the French acknowledge this with their first level, "No indications of threat." When they get to yellow, it is an "imprecise threat"--the dawning knowledge that we're not sure what we know. Red is a "probable threat"--the point at which, scarily, we know what we don't know. And red is "Certain threat"--when we know what we know, and it ain't pretty.

What you may not realize is that this leaves French Threat Engineers only at the mercy of their painters in developing at least two more threat levels: The point at which a threat is being actualized for one, and the point at which an actualized thread is being analyzed. And, I'm realizing with horror that the French academy has already been enlisted as a skunkworks for yet another level: the point at which discourse analyzing an actualized menace is in turn analyzed! It is possible that certain scientists from institutions such as The University of Chicago may be ready to confront this future level of Threat, but who knows if we can close the Threat Gap by that point?

Call your congressman today! We demand a Scarlet Menace, and won't feel properly unsafe until we have it!

Sale or license? (with a dash of California vs. New York!)

2010-09-16T12:00:00.001-07:00

That nice boy from the midwest, Marshall Mathers, just won his case, F.B.T. Productions v. Aftermath Records in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is, for lack of a better term, a pretty Big Effing Deal for electronic publishing in any medium. Here's why.

When authors or musicians (and other kinds of talented and creative individuals) sign a contract with a publisher, it's usually structured in the following way. Every time the publisher sells a copy of the work, the author (I'm going to say author, though the artist here is a musician) gets a cut, anywhere from, oh, four percent up to maybe twenty or twenty-five percent. (The more copies that the publisher thinks will sell, the bigger a percentage they'll pay to the author, since fixed costs for the work—editing, design, mastering, preparation of "plates" [digital or metal], and the like—become a smaller percentage over a bigger print run.)

However, if the publisher licenses subsidiary rights in the work to someone else, then the author and publisher usually split the proceeds fifty-fifty. This is because the publisher is doing work to negotiate these deals—they wouldn't happen without the publisher making them happen in most cases—but not, usually, investing much, if anything, in these subsidiary-rights ventures. What sorts of things are we talking about? Translations, abridged editions, adaptations into another medium (movie versions of books! comic book versions of movies!), licensed merchandise and apparel, coursepacks, magazine excerpts... you get the idea.

Now, here's why I think that the Ninth Circuit made a good decision: The [music] publishers were trying to have it both ways. They were claiming, when it came to their talent, that they were selling copies of the works to distributors, who were in turn selling copies to their customers. They were therefore accounting for any money that came in on these deals as Sales, and paying the authors a Royalty on these sales, as their authors were due in their contracts, maybe 5, 10, 15, 20 percent. However, the publishers were turning around and treating their "distributors" on these deals very much as licensees: the publishers made them all sign license agreements, which were only in force for limited times; the publishers retained the right—and the material/electronic capacity—to withdraw access to the work; the publishers only allowed very specific in short, they called it a license, they structured it like a license, and it quacked like a license.

The court said, "Nuh uh uh! You want this to be a license because you want to keep lots of control over the work itself. You can't go paying the author like you've sold copies of the work and don't have any control over where they go from here." Calling BS on any entity trying to own both sides of an argument is a good thing in my book.

Where will things go from here? Well, the article I kicked off with does a pretty good job of summarizing things: Fretting and complaining from publishers of all stripes, then someone will take a position "for the author" and "against the industry" and bang, higher royalties for authors on electronic editions (succumbing to what will surely be an increasingly loud plaint from authors and agents for such a raise). The ways that these institutions respond is quite familiar.

To give a little background for what's going on in the last paragraphs of the article: First, there is a broad sense that the Ninth Circuit is "more liberal" than the Supreme Court (see Newdow), but that may be more of an image than the substance warrants (I do have a day job, or I'd check stats for Supreme Court reversals of 9th Circuit decisions), and this isn't a straightforward liberal/conservative issue anyhow. Within the realm of publishing, things get even more complicated; while the Ninth circuit encompasses California, and, within it, a whole squadron of film and music companies, the biggest players in the publishing of words are located in New York, in the Second Circuit, and the Second Circuit has never felt the need to bow to Ninth Circuit precedent (I suspect that the Second and Ninth Circuits might even take a tiny breath of pleasure in taking a contrary position to what the other has staked out).

Third, no one wants to take this to the Supremes, since a broad decision is an awful big gamble and this court isn't knee-jerk predictable on these issues. So we're unlikely to get a firm, nation-wide binding system to establish the lines between sales and licenses, but we are likely to see more clarity about such things in contracts.

And last, the prospect of more direct-from-publisher-to-consumer sales of electronic editions is growing. In selling such editions, publishers can maintain the control they would have to use a license to maintain in an environment of distributors and retailers.

“Justice?—you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.”—Wm. Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

An open letter to Google

2010-08-13T14:32:00.001-07:00

Please, feel free to cut, paste, and send this message to the Googleplex from as many directions as you see fit.--Dingbat

Dear Google,

Please cease and desist from claiming "Map Data (c) 2010 Google" in the lower edge of the maps you present at your lovely and helpful web page, http://maps.google.com. As any legal hack can tell you, data cannot be copyrighted. You are, at best, embarrassing yourself, and, at worst, stealing from the public, by claiming ownership over something that is our common property, the public domain. That's pretty evil, in my book, and I think your corporate charter says something about that.

With thanks,

Dingbat

PS: When you give transit directions to MDW airport (e.g.), you don't need to send folks to the MDW transit center, and then back out again on the 63W bus so that they can go in the "front door" on 63rd Street. It's probably a good guess that they want to go to the terminal, and probably a good guess, too, that the Transit Center is there so people can get from PT to the terminal. Cheers!

A forward, four-word Foreword

2010-08-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

Read this book, jerk!

A dryly humorous intro to Josephus

2010-07-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

Written in 1852, this review of the (then-new) Traill translation of Josephus highlights the virtues of Josephus' work (and the flaws of the Whiston translation!).

Repair

2010-07-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

The pathologically frugal meets the ecologically correct. (split straw
+moistened straw wrapper)

An open letter to Victoria Espinel

2010-07-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

Victoria Espinel is the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator--unofficially, the "copyright czar" of the U.S.A. She was appointed to that position by Barack Obama last September, and confirmed by the Senate in December. She's the first holder of this position, a job which was created by the PRO-IP Act, a bill that passed through Congress in 2008 and increased civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark violation. The job of the "copyright czar" is to "formulate a Joint Strategic Plan for combating counterfeiting and piracy of intellectual property and for coordinating national and international enforcement efforts to protect intellectual property rights.(According to the Bill Summary). The document referred and linked to in the first sentence below is the first major product of her office; it was released a few weeks ago.

Dear Ms. Espinel,

I have recently received a copy of the 2010 Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement, and there is much in the document to be commended. In particular, its awareness of the benefits of fair use (p. 4) and its call for research into the actual effects of infringement (pp. 18-19) are highly laudable.

However, I was dismayed to find not a single mention of the public domain, much less any protection for it. The entire report focuses on governmental protection of private property holders, a necessary goal, to be sure, but who speaks for the public? It is the responsibility of the government to protect the public against those who would steal our common property away through false copyright claims.

If we are to use the analogy of theft, then the false claim of copyright on material in the public domain is akin to allowing individuals and corporations to enter our National Parks and take, not pictures, but trees. No, worse, it is to allow them to build vacation homes on the land, fence it off, and shoot trespassers.

Such activity is piracy and intellectual property theft of the most naked sort, and it robs every one of us. If the Executive Branch of the US Government does not speak for public property, who will?

With thanks for your consideration,

{Dingbat}

Projection

2010-07-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Scholars are always in danger of projecting their own images onto their research subjects. Erich Gruen, for example, is a great scholar; I have learned a ton from every one of his books and articles that I've read, and enjoyed them, too. His The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome is my go-to book for the expansion of Roman power in the Mediterranean, and his Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition was intensely influential in getting me to study what I'm writing a dissertation on: Hellenistic and Roman Judaism.

However, this latter book in particular may suffer from the fault of projection. Gruen deals with all the major Jewish writers, and the minor ones, too: from Josephus and Philo to Demetrius the Chronographer and Ezekiel the Tragedian. And, almost to a man, they come off startlingly like Gruen: Witty, intelligent, cosmopolitan, faithful without being dogmatic, even funny.

I've got two problems with this. First, I claim false advertising! I went to grad school expecting, on Gruen's analyses, to be reading the ancient equivalent of Noel Coward, and I'm stuck with…Andrew Lloyd Webber. I find these guys pedantic without learning, melodramatic without sympathy, and heavy-handed without relief. Josephus, I'm finding, has all the flaws of an absolutely terrible scholar: he fudges when he can't ascertain a fact, he relies too heavily on a few weak primary sources, he seems blissfully unaware of the secondary literature, and he's unclear even on his own methods, not to mention the methodologies of his peers and predecessors.

Which brings me to the second problem: what does this analysis say about me?

It's Complicated

2010-07-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

I recently posted on a popular social networking web site a link to this blog post by Randall Munroe, the funny and smart author of xkcd, pulling out as the money quote, "The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics." One commenter asked, "What's so complex?" and it's a good question. It's something that (working in the job I do) I've been steeped in long enough, and has come as a series of small discoveries or realizations, that it's good to step back and take a look at it and say what is so complicated about gender, since it does seem pretty straightforward in everyday life. Here's an attempt:

Gender (or sex; I'll use gender) has been a pretty useful concept for a long time. What it (and its subsets male, female, etc.) actually describes are a bunch of attributes that we (as a society) are slowly realizing aren't necessarily bundled together. "Maleness" has meant (in various times and places), the package (as it were) consisting of: a Y chromosome, a certain appearance of external genitalia, increased facial and body hair, deep voice, large size, increased risk of heart attack, capacity for logic, capacity for moral reason, capacity to own property, capacity to own slaves, closer connection to God, right to wear pants, right to kill, right to vote, right to drink fermented beverages, control over emotions, control over passions, privilege of wearing comfortable shoes, ability to run more than 800 meters, right to walk on the street unaccompanied, freedom from inherent pollution (whether every day or only sometimes), right (and/or obligation) to perform sexual penetration, right to be paid for work, right to have multiple sexual partners, right to have multiple spouses, ability to legislate, ability to ride a horse with a leg on either side, ability to drive a car, high-quality spatial reasoning, mathematical acuity, physical aggression, muted colors of clothing, bright colors of clothing, belts, short hair, long hair, large jaws, large noses, large ears, refusal to wear perfume or makeup, exclusive right to wear perfume or makeup, ability to inherit property, ability to pass on family name, right to wear no shirt at the beach, head hair that doesn't scare God or man, a lack of interest in shopping for clothing, a keen interest in automobiles,

Is this boring yet? Or has it turned into a fun party game?

The long and the short of it is that while some of these things are social, and some are biological, and some are legal, and some are stereotypical, none of these things has to come along with any other. Yes, it's often useful to have a tick box for 'male' or 'female' (though I'm told that in England 'male' and 'female' refer to non-human animals; we are 'men' and 'women.') but that doesn't quite sum it up.

The last fifty years (in the US), saw at first the slow realization that women are people, and only recently has it dawned on the academic class (and the knowledge is slowly spreading) that all people, in fact, are people, and insisting on dividing everyone into the categories of 'male' and 'female' does some of us a disservice, an injustice, or even an act of violence.

I'll draw a final analogy and then get off the pedagogical horse: The concept of "race" is now widely acknowledged to be far less useful than it used to be. We don't (legally) use racial demarcations to determine fitness for all sorts of things that we used to, just as we don't (legally) use sex to do so. And it is useful, for example when doing medical research, to keep track of race and sex. To plug another book I worked on, Stephen Epstein's Inclusion tells the story of how in the mid-20th century medical research was basically conducted on white guys--be they white guys in their fifties admitted to hospitals, or white young adults in college and graduate school--and this really screwed up some results because of how these white guys were and were not representative of everyone. There's a new model in medical research, which now particularizes (and monetizes!) difference, developing (and patenting and getting FDA approval for) heart disease drugs in African Americans.

So race, like gender, can be a useful, even a helpful concept. It can also be a frickin' disaster!

Wasting time

2010-06-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Good Dr. Fledermaus and I have been considering What To Do With The Books. We are, after all, Bats of Very Little Means (well, of means not enough to construct a handsome two-story library addition onto the time-honored halls of our current residence), and so we ponder: continue the overshelving of the hallway as library? How to have stacks (that don't call to the dust like a magnet to an iron filing)?

And how do our electronic resources fit into all this? What To Do With All The Learning is, after all, a professional consideration of mine--ours--and so it was with interest that I read Alex Halavais' piece, "The New University Press." This is a pre-release version of a talk Halavais gave at last week's American Association of University Presses annual meeting, and it's a good set of insights into what academic publishers actually do, and do well. And it's good and provocative advice about how to do it better.

But I'm going to leave aside Halavais' main points and focus on some of the more homey aspects of what he says, since he talks a good deal about his own relationship to books. I sympathize with his desire to keep the library after the birth of his child, and stash the kid in a closet (Bat Jr.'s bed, I hasten to add, is only half in the closet. And it is a very nice closet, I assure you). And there's a certain intellectual satisfaction to be had, I'm sure, in destructively scanning one's books, and taking responsibility for fairly using the electronic versions he's created.

But the most significant passage, I think, is this: "I would suggest if you want to remain undistracted, a traditional library is perhaps the worst place to be. I’ve wasted hours at libraries and bookstores—wasted them enjoyably, but wasted them nonetheless." This is the mark of literacy and, I think, a turning point--or a demarcation--between book culture, TV culture, and internet culture. Leaving aside the questions of what any of these are doing to our brains our attention spans, , our political sensibilities, which are all questions about the results of "media use," let's pause and think about the non-results, the time wasted.

This may sound obvious, since most of us (in the U.S.) stopped wasting time in books a generation or two ago, and started wasting it on TV, but it's not what you use for work, whether you're in an academic or other research-based job, it's what you do for fun. And not just fun, but lose-track-of-time, holy-mackerel-I'm-late-and-Mom's-gonna-be-pissed-of time wasted.

Now that we've gotten here (and I've wasted a half-hour of my lunch, in some sense, writing this), what's the upshot? Clearly I think books and libraries are worthwhile. The ability to lose oneself in a book for three hours will certainly serve a kid well, when it comes time for him to analyze The time has definitely come for a Slow Information Movement. Perhaps I'll just wrap up by pointing the educators and the policy-makers and the pundits to worry a little less about how we and our kids are spending time, and think rather about wasting our time well.

Weather.com needs an editor.

2010-06-18T13:54:00.001-07:00

See that big blob of rain, bearing down on my softball game? No problem, I'll just click "TURN OFF WEATHER." And just to make sure things clear up in time, "RIGHT NOW."

Oh, and unless I'm sorely mistaken, the Future is either always or never new; in either case, the labeling of it as such can be stricken.

(If there's a larger point to this post, it's that editors are responsible for looking out the window. And seeing obvious metaphysical irregularities.)

Babies, Worms, and Other People

2010-06-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

It is with some small guilt that I post to an almost-abandoned blog. BikeSnobNYC missed merely a week for the birth of his child, so I can't legitimately use the birth of Batboy as an excuse, since the blessed event eventuated itself blessedly more than two months ago and almost four months since the previous last substantive post (gifts on his natal anniversary will be accepted in his Cayman bank account any time during the temporal window thus described, though he shares a birthday with Theobald Böhm
[a childhood hero of mine]).

Given the fact that even BSNYC's doing it, I'm tempted to suggest that the childbearing scene is now full, and babies are no longer hip. My opinions on popular culture, however, are about as widely interesting as in-depth discussions of the nature of historiography in Hellenistic Judaism.

Anyhow, the big surprise of duogeny is the interaction between Bat Jr. (now 4 and a half, by her reckoning) and Batboy. The other day Bat Jr. was talking about how a friend of hers was showing off a worm he'd found. "I held it!" she said proudly "It was wiggly." "Much like Batboy," I thought.

And as so often, when I think ridiculous things, my second thought is how ridiculous they're not: worms and babies are both wild animals; they don't do--because they haven't yet learned--the range of social behavior that we expect from others. And yeah, a lot of funny things that kids do are funny because they don't yet know about social norms ("Mommy, mommy, I lit a candle in the bathroom because I pooped and…"--"Sweetie, you really just have to say, 'I lit a candle in the bathroom,' Mommy will know why."), what makes worms and babies interesting is that they do socially unexpected things while you're holding them in your hands.

It's really a strangely intimate thing: this ability to surprise someone with physical contact. Most of our physical interactions are highly socially structured, even ritualized: shaking hands, hugging, high fives. Even our pets get trained to certain types of contact (or at least we get used to their untrained behavior). But babies and worms wiggle on.

April Fool's!

2010-04-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

I'm making a blog post today.

Oh, THAT'S where my keys were!

2010-01-16T19:13:00.001-08:00

Seen upon arrival--oh, a mile and a half or so after unlocking the
bike and trailer.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

The Dingbat is alive, and perhaps posting more this year. Several other 2010 resolutions may outweigh the "post daily to the blog" commitment.

Incongruity

2009-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

Looking for a bibliographic reference recently, I searched for "Saint Paul Jewish tax" in a popular search engine. And wound up with a bunch of non-profits based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

"The Jewish Community Council of Greater Saint Paul" has a very odd ring to it, doesn't it? (Two odd rings if you listen to the juxtaposition of "greater" and "Paul")

How do you do this again?

2009-10-02T06:29:00.000-07:00

R. Levi son of Rabbi says: A pure menorah came down from heaven. For the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, "And you will make a menorah of pure gold" (Ex 25:31).
Moses said to Him, "How shall we make it?"
He said to him, "Of beaten work [shall the menorah be made]" (ibid.)
Nevertheless, Moses still found difficulty with it, and when he came down he forgot its construction.
He went up and said, "Master of the Univers, I have forgotten how to make it!"
The Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses again, but he still had difficulty.
He [God] said to him, "Look and make it," and finally He took a coin of gold and showed him its construction.
Still he [Moses] found its construction difficult.
So He said to him, "See and make it" (Ex 25:40) and finally He took a menorah of fire and showed him its construction.

Yet in spite of all this, it still caused Moses difficulty.
Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to him, "Go to Bezalel, and he will make it."
He went down to Bezalel, and the latter immediately constructed it.

Midrash Tanhuma, be-Ha'alotkha 6, quote in Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, p. 101

Style

2009-09-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a CD of the soundtrack to That Thing You Do!, a movie I didn't see when it came out in 1996 or now. I vaguely recall having seen previews for it, and thinking, "oh, another cute Tom Hanks movie." (Is it at all interesting that looking at the release date, it came out the weekend before I met Dr. Fledermaus? Two weeks later and it could have been our first date!)

The premise of the movie is that it's about a (fictional) US rock band in 1964--the rise and fall of a one-hit wonder. And, of course, there's a bunch of music--the title track, of course, is the one hit.

Now, this is where it gets interesting: By vague recollection (again), I think that the music, when it was made, wasn't a bad facsimile of pre-British-Invasion pop, but now, my God! it is straight out of 1995 and couldn't possibly have been made any other time. Not that it's bad, it's just 1995 pop through and through, with a bit of a nod to the early sixties.

Stylistic dating. It works. (Whoa, wait, that sounds like an internet dating service ad.)

A Proposal

2009-09-28T12:27:00.001-07:00

I had the rare pleasure of teaching two classes last week, one-shot deals during orientation to discuss the themes of democracy, inequality, and education. It was a great experience—reading three excellent texts (not that I didn’t have my quibbles with them), and spending a couple of hours preparing for a good discussion, and then having a good discussion—two of them in fact.

The thrill of closely reading arguments about the place of education in society, filled with hope—and, yes, criticism (though Martha Nussbaum’s critique of education outside of her model of the liberal arts is misplaced, and Geoffrey Stone’s fears about political correctness have been revealed to be somewhat overstated)—was overwhelming! I could have taught a three-quarter sequence based on these essays.

The most striking thing about these essays was they way in which they each recalled Robert Maynard Hutchins’ belief that education was for freedom. The forces restricting freedom which worried Hutchins were Fascism and Communism, but any of these writers would have to agree that Hutchins arguments stand equally strong when the enemy is ineducation—unequal education, that is—in the form of unequal opportunity and the violence it breeds, as well as the anti-intellectualism rampant even on college campuses.

Both the experience and the material—Danielle Allen’s piece in particular—inspired a revolutionary thought. As an institution, the College should require undergraduates and graduate students to teach or assist teachers in either the University’s Charter Schools or through the Neighborhood Schools program. “A university seeks to advance the reach of knowledge through open intellectual inquiry and exchange,” Allen writes, “but presently this university presents itself to its neighbors armed and in uniform rather than carrying books and ideas.”

We believe, as a University, that teaching and research are complementary. We require faculty to teach, and specifically to teach in the Core. Why not require teaching of our students?

I can imagine some of the objections: The students might say: “Oh, that would interfere with my own studies!” I’d suggest that they start by talking to their own professors and see whether they view teaching as an unalloyed betterment to their own research. A betterment, yes, but truly a suck of one’s mental energy. No, it’s an investment with hard-to define returns.

The admissions office may say, “But this will scare off high school seniors!” I have two responses. First, do we want more applicants or better applicants? Yes, this will discourage the selfish and the cowardly. It is the job of the admissions office to make students (and their parents) aware of the fact that this is a feature, not a bug. Second, the programs I’m proposing expanding are not a matter of throwing a 19-year-old into a room with a bunch of fourth (eighth/first/tenth) graders. There is (and must continue to be) training and support for student teachers. Yes, this will cost money.

We’re well-positioned to revolutionize higher education. It’s a great leap from complimenting ourselves on 19 graduates earning spots in Teach for America (out of 1,200) to requiring a few years of part-time teaching in the classroom, but this is a University known for having, and acting on, important ideas about education in the past. As Hutchins himself wrote:

The attitude of the University is experimental because it is willing to try some things when success is not guaranteed. It is willing to change if change seems, on reflection, to be desirable. But it is not striking out blindly in the effort to do something new merely because it is new. I might say in passing that almost everything in education is experimental, for we can seldom prove that anything we do is conclusively better than something else we might do, or indeed, than nothing at all.

Urban Homesteading, a Marxist take....

2009-09-04T14:04:00.000-07:00

We're in the outer reaches of the Urban Homesteading movement--growing herbs, letting our kid eat dirt, making and keeping good friends in the neighborhood, sharing our stuff with them, fixing what we own and owning less, etc. etc. etc. It comes with liking bikes and good food. Today's reading turned up this bit from Louis Althusser:

In short, the final historical totality, which marks the end of alienation, is nothing but the reconquered unity of the labourer and his product. This end is simply the restoration of the origin, the reconquest of the original harmony after a tragic adventure. . . .
Yet it is only in a formal sense that the final unity is the restoration of the original unity. The worker who reappropriates what he himself produces is no longer the primitive worker, and the product he reappropriates is no longer the primitive product. Men do not return to the solitude of the domestic economy, and what they produce does not revert to being what it once was, the simple object of their needs. This natural unity is destroyed the unity that replaces it is human.*

If that doesn't describe what's going on in the Urban Homestead movement, I don't know what does. On what level folks are trying to return to the natural unity (the italics are Althusser's), as opposed to realizing that they are postlapsarian (or merely postmodern) I don't know. I suspect that self-awareness is pretty high amongst the urban chicken-farmers and tomato-growers. Idealism is, too.

*Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. Francois Matheron and trans. G.M. Gosharian, (London:Verso, 1997) 137, cited in Robert S. Kawashima, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004) 207.

More study

2009-09-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

Whilst reading great gobs of ancient history, one's mind can, believe it or not, wander on occasion. The chapter I read at lunchtime today (Mario Liverani's "Telipinu, or: on solidarity," in Myth and Politics in Ancient Near Eastern Historiography, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004, pp 27-52) had an epigraph from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams:
The dream discharges the unconscious excitation, serves it as a safety valve and at the same time preserves the sleep of the preconscious in retern for a small expenditure of waking activity.

And so, when, in the middle of the chapter (I'd just finished off a warm bowl of soup), and I drifted into the half-awake state known technically as "seated drool," I thought it would be appropriate to remember the things that went through my brain as I drifted into the book, especially as they seemed appropriately historiographic.

I was entering a cave with Telepinu, a Hittite king of the sixteenth century, and author of an Edict, whose contents have provided the backbone for much scholarly reconstruction of the prior century or so of Hittite history. The goal was to enter the cave and come out with Hattushili (first?), king of the Hittites, and his mother the Tawanna (queen, and one of the plausible, though almost certainly insufficient, links to and reasons for Hattushili to claim, the Hittite throne). We had no success; our quarry kept disappearing around corners, and quite frankly, I got rather closer to Telepinu (imagined second-millennium Hittite hygiene is what you might expect) than entirely comfortable.

That's ancient history for you.

Study

2009-08-31T06:32:00.001-07:00

I've been reading like a student (200+ pages/day, not counting work) recently, in preparation for exams, and, like a student, I'm brimming with idealism. It may not simply be youth that leads students to idealistic thoughts, but rather the confrontation with radical historical change over time. You can observe how much society changed--let's say in the Levant from the Chalcolithic (late fifth-most of the fourth Millennium B.C.*) to the Early Bronze Age (let's say 3300-2300 B.C.), with the development of early city-states, and then the thoroughgoing collapse of that social structure and a widespread return to seminomadic pastoralism for a few hundred years, followed by a rejuvenated "urbanism" (politism?) in the Middle Bronze Age. Even changing burial practices (to give a classic archaeological example) are evocative: The Early Bronze periods are marked by multiple graves, where a family would inter its members together--indicating at the very least a strong social connection and attachment to a place over generations, and I suspect rather more: a desire to remain with one's loved one in the afterlife. At the beginning of the Middle Bronze, the dead are buried alone--sometimes in graveyards, yes, but no longer sharing quarters with a spouse or parents or children (or all, and more) for all eternity.

So what does this all have to do with scholastic idealism? In short, seeing such radical change makes one realize that radical change is possible. Seeing radical change fall short, and sputter, collapse, and reverse itself--as at the EB/MB transition--but then burst forth again--in the great Canaanite city-states a few hundred years later--makes one realize that the path to change is never a smooth arc (either upward or downward!). Yes, it can be another way that smart people can be so stupid. But it's also another way that they can be so hopeful.

*Current academic habit is to indicate dates in "B.C.E." and "C.E." standing, it is said, for "Before the Common Era" and "Common Era." The old habit of "Before Christ" and "Anno Domini" ('in the year of the Lord') is felt to be exclusive (not to mention, well, wrong by about four years). Slapping a new name on something and calling it the "common era," in my opinion, both denies its origins, and implies that it's a commonly agreed upon era, when it's really one that was imposed by the military might of the Holy Roman Empire, and, more importantly, the administrative and educational capacity of the Catholic Church. The Republic of China, from 1912 to 1949 used the term "Western Era" for the Gregorian Calendar (thanks, Wikipedia!) a happy usage indicating both origins, foreignness, and (perhaps grudging?) acceptance on the basis of utility.

Physicists and geologists can use the more felicitous abbreviations MYA and BYA (millions and billions of years ago, respectively)--does that indicate a lower (more realistic?) opinion of how long their work will remain in circulation? C'mon, people, Thucydides thought he was creating "a possession for all time" and you can't write a Science article that will last five hundred thousand years? Well, maybe MYA and BYA are just CYA.

One last digression. Obviously, "anno domini" is a theological statement, and "before Christ" can be taken as a historical one. Thankfully, I'm in the happy position where I can focus my research on the 'negatively-numbered' years. Perhaps it would be an amusing challenge to write a dissertation on Hellenistic Judaism without using any AD/CE numbers. One could "go native" and use Seleucid dating, or the Livian standby, AUC, or perhaps merely reckon from the Creation of the World.

"Astronautical soap opera that suffers from interminable flight drag"

2009-07-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

That's from Jack Gould's review in the NY Times of Star Trek (the TV series) upon its first appearance, Sept. 16, 1966 (p. 56). The oddest things get cult followings.

Follow-up rant: Patent 7, 041,042

2009-07-24T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm calling B.S.

So the reason that I posted the picture of the bottom of the airsickness bag was...what the hell are they patenting? Like no one's made an airsickness bag before?

Having read the patent I'm calling B.S. again, and doubly. As mentioned, no one's made an airsickness bag before? No one's made a plastic seamless-sided bag before? It's not blindingly obvious to use the latter as the former?

Secondly, the very bag I held in my hands and which you see a picture of below, was imprinted with no "indicia" or "graphics comprising instructions for using said tubular member in the event of nausea." That imprinting is one of seven claims of the patent.

There's a patent examiner out there who needs to look me in the eye and tell me that this will "promote the progress of science and useful arts." As someone who makes a living from intellectual property, I'm keenly aware that invention, discovery, and creation need to be made profitable. I'm also keenly aware of when something stinks. And this one smells as bad as its intended contents.

OK, rant over. Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I feel much better. Hey, maybe it does work, after all!

I have this awesome idea

2009-07-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

A collapsible container for relief (or at least catchment) in the
event of airsickness. Oh, wait, someone's thought of it already.

Careers in Writing, Editing, and Publishing (I)

2009-04-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've been doing a lot of panels for students recently (grads, undergrads, and, most desperately, soon-to-be grads) on the ever-popular topic of "Careers in Writing, Editing, and Publishing," and I've been saying some of the same things often enough that distilling them into a blog post makes for a worthwhile pursuit. In order to keep my day job (in publishing) I'll lay this out in a few posts, tentatively to be:

Why "writing, editing, and publishing"?
What jobs are there in writing, editing, and publishing?
How to get the skills I need for writing, editing, and publishing jobs?

If anyone has any suggestions or questions for topics to explore, leave 'em in the comments and I'll try to answer them.

Why would I want to work in writing, editing, and/or publishing?

You like words.
You like ideas.
You like people.
You like to tinker.
You like books.

I've put these in the order in which they occur to me, but I think that's a pretty good indicator of their importance. Do you like to play with words, making puns, anagrams, or spoonerisms? That's a plus; it shows an appreciation for language and a sense of precision about word usage. You have to know the proper meaning of a word, after all, to be able to make a joke on it. You'll be dealing with words all day long, in one context or another. You'll be writing emails, reading manuscripts, editing on a line-by-line basis, or on a more global level. You'll be explaining how things work to authors; you'll be explaining the content of a book to others.

Liking ideas ("content" in the argot of the businessmen of the Information Age) is equally important. Do you get excited about your classes? Have you ever said, "This book changed my life!"? If your heart gets sped up by novels, history books, or biochem--or, better, yet, all of the above--then you can take a genuine interest in a field, or an approach to a field. Any job in publishing requires, to one level or another, an investment in the content of a book, and the more naturally you get invested in ideas, the easier your job will be.

Creating books (and magazines, and web sites, and anything else that one might read) is a social activity. Yes, sure, there have been some recluse fiction writers, but before you set your heart on a cabin in the woods with a typewriter and a cocker spaniel for company, note that J.D. Salinger hasn't published since 1965, and his biography is parallelled by others' (Djuna Barnes, for example, or, from another realm of artistic pursuit, Terrence Malick). Writing requires human contact; you bounce ideas off others, you say things aloud to see how they sound, you observe others' emotions and try to capture the rhythms of their speech. I'm reminded of the scene in Norman MacLean's story, "Logging and Pimping" (if I recall correctly), where the narrator realizes that the couple in the next thin-walled room (hooker and john) are enjoying each others' company in iambic pentameter. A true event? More or less, probably--but a probable one, one which was based on being in the company of others. I needn't even start in on scholarly or non-fiction writing as a social pursuit. Any ideas you're going to publish need to be battered into shape in a group of smart people who know the topic and the evidence before they're anywhere close to being ready for print.

Tinkering, bricolage, improvement--the process of editing, in particular, is one of taking a good thing and making it better. But so is book design, for example--you're taking something and making it presentable, giving it a handsome, useful, and also socially meaningful form. Writing just as much so--and it's even harder, since you have to be able to see the flaws in your own work, and flex your imagination to find patches for them.

I've put books last on the list of things you enjoy because, while books are pleasurable things, items of great utility and beauty, with virtues too numerous to list, they are historically contingent, and if what you're interested in is writing, editing, and publishing (and you're at the beginning of a thirty or forty year career) then you'll do well to think of formats other than the 100-1,000 page bound book. If you're passionate about books, then you can think strictly in terms of bookmaking (if you're passionate about anything, then go for it!). You can follow the model of Crumpled Press and make beautiful books by hand and for the love of it. Be aware, though, that you will be in the artist-to-artisan pay scale. You will work your tale (I meant that) off for the love of it, and the rewards will not necessarily be exchangeable for many goods and services. Ponder whether you love books...or reading. Look at your shelf of books: is it a collection...or a library? And decide whether you're interested in a career in books...or in words.

I knew I wouldn't be able to resist adding one more thing. Do you like systems and rules? Did you read the drivers' manual for fun when you were in high school? How about the Rules of Baseball? When you eat ice cream out of the carton, do you take careful scrapes off the top so that it stays level as you eat? OK, that last one may be a personal thing. But the sort of mindset that you need in order to take pleasure in many of the tasks of W, E, and P, is one that is aware of (and takes pleasure in) rules and consistency and the like. Yes, you can take pleasure in breaking those rules, but ignorance of them is by no means bliss. What is more, you can take pleasure in the creating of those rules, whether it's in the form of rewriting The Manual of Style or in creating a house style for an animal-behavior blog.

Tomorrow: What in the hell do you people do all day?

In order to keep my bike-blogging credentials intact

2009-04-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

You ain't part of the blogosphere unless you posted this video:

Seriously, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The opening is great, with just a hint of the failures and falls on the way to doing such awesome stuff. This type of bike riding is called "Trials" riding, and there's a circuit, with competitions--you have a course that you either have to complete in a certain time, with time penalties for "dabbing" (putting a foot down) or maybe there's a subjective judging element; I forget. The point is, if you ever see a poster up for "Bicycle Trials" at your local minor-league hockey arena (or similar venue), go! It will be awesome. I saw a TV segment on this once as a kid, and ever since, it's been something I've aspired to.

So far, all I've succeeded in doing is learning how to bike really slowly.

Cross-training

2009-04-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

I was thinking last week, as I got dressed in the dark--wait, I should explain. I was dressing in the dark, in the locker room at work. It's not as weird as it sounds, well, not as publicly weird: we have a single-shower locker room, one user at a time, so no one knows that I take off my coat, gloves, and sweater(s), and change my shoes in the dark (until now). I thought to myself, "I do this for the energy savings, but it's great preparation for sailing and camping and the like." And it's true; I can dress very efficiently in the dark, now.

That sort of thought--A (what I'm doing now) is excellent preparation for B (what I'd like to do)--is one that comes easily to me. And it helps get through a boring task, like changing one's shoes, if one can think of it in terms of future adventues. And, yes, there's a downside: you can fall into the habit of thinking of things in the future and missind the present.

But I'm writing now about the upside. The habits I form (keeping the lights off, for example) create not just skills but an approach to life: efficiency with energy and materials (not so much efficiency with time, as all who know me well will attest), for example. Camping, biking, sailing, working, living: it's all the same thing. What's the most efficient way to get from here to there? What's the best habit to be in to use the least energy, in as many circumstances as possible?

In the vivid past tense, as opposed to the generalizing present, here' a quick summary of the weekend's camping expedition (Full details, with pics, may be forthcoming. I won't promise, however). In short, it was fantastic. Fifteen of us (Bat Jr., Dr. Fledermaus, twelve students, and I) piled into cars and headed off to the Dunes for some hiking, beach football, hanging out around the campfire, and general relaxation. Oh, and wrestling (I won, if I may brag just a wee bit).

To continue the philosophizing, actions form habits, and habits form character, as Aristotle teaches in the Ethics. But you also have to remember the Poetics and that character and action must fit together. And sometimes you find yourself in situations for which you're unprepared. And if you're me, as I sometimes find that I am, those situations for which you feel completely unprepared often involve your interaction with automobiles.

It's not that I'm entirely opposed to them; it's just that I've become less and less comfortable with cars.

And, they are probably uncomfortable around me. Or they should be, if they know what's good for them. As we were packing up to head home, I needed to give the clamshell trunk of the Element a hip-bump to shut it. There was only one problem: the top half of the Element's trunk is at belly-button height, not hip height. So, I did what any normal red-blooded American male would do. Actually, I didn't. Rather that shoving it with the hands, I stood behind the car, jumped up and bumped it with my butt. And shattered the back window.

Let me repeat that, because I hardly believed it with my own eyes when I did it. I put my own ass through the back window of our car. Brilliant. Oh, and did I mention it was raining?

Anyhow, after we drove back to town (I was sensibly banished to riding shotgun in a student's car), I had to drive to Logan Square to have the window replaced (by the good people at Fernandez Used Auto Glass). It was terrifying, like a scary movie where bad things keep happening but they're never quite bad enough that you know that's what the movie's been bulding up to. A car accident happened in front of me, for example. I saw two bikers riding down the same street as me and wanted to offer them a ride, just to protect them from my karma--when I changed my route to get away from one of them and he turned up in front of me three blocks later, I thought to myself, "God damn it, man! You're doomed! Get away!" I felt like a self-aware Oedipus, and accepted our joint fate.

It turned out that fate had other things in store for me. I got the window repaired, and, under strict admonition to avoid highway speeds until the glue set--I visited the new REI store in town (I was very impressed by the huge bike selection, and hugely lucky that today was the quarterly garage sale, so I came away with a big ol' bag of goodies--shoes, gloves, a random set of kayak deck bungee hardware, and a 16" BMX wheel--for about twelve bucks), as well as Sam's Wine (getting a thank-you gift for BatDog's weekend walkers), and Zaleski and Horvath, a place I'd been desiring to visit since it opened.

The delivery of a fresh hot latte to Dr. F, and the delivery of a thank-you note within hours of the incurrence of the debt of gratitude, have, I think, set karma aright in the Dingbat household. An evening of hockey certainly helped, too.

Weekend plans

2009-04-17T13:39:00.001-07:00

We're (along with 15 of our closest friends) going camping this weekend. Just a quick little jaunt to the dunes, more than an S24O (that's "sub-24 hour overnight"), less than an expedition. It's fun to exercise the camping skills and knowledge--left maturing for some years. True, we've had two- and three-person trips, even a two-family campout in Michigan last summer. But nothing so, well, Boy-Scoutly: a mix of experienced and inexperienced campers, all very eager (and honestly I've very little confidence in my ideas of what they're eager for).

It will be fun. And we will so our best to prepare and then forget that we are in charge; that is, to release the responsibility for each person's having a good time to the campers themselves.

In other news, our camera tells us that we are about to shoot its ten thousandth picture. A sunset on the beach, perhaps?

A Brief Introduction to Carbon Fiber, with a brief excursus on metal, and butter.

2009-03-06T08:58:00.000-08:00

This topic came up on an email list I'm on, so I thought I'd write up this little reliving of high-school organic chemistry as a blog post.

The virtue of carbon in particular is that stretch and bend can be very carefully controlled. Carbon atoms have four very strong bonding sites, which enable it to bond together into very controllable structures. You can make strings, sheets, or three-dimensional solids. You may have heard of these three-dimensional highly pure carbon lattices; they're called diamonds. That should give a sense of how strong carbon bonds are.

But for things like bicycle building, you can get your carbon atoms to bond together into a flat surface, and then you layer a bunch of these flat surfaces together, and it works like a truck's leaf spring: You have a very strong material and you can control the way that it will flex and bend by the way that you orient the fibers. (Laterally stiff yet vertically compliant, yes!)

And if you get more-or-less randomly oriented fibers, then they'll be in microscopic sheets bonded together by occasional cross-sheet single bonds--and the sheets will easily slide off. A great example of this is the graphite in pencils; it easily sheers off under friction into a grey powder--and the sticks of graphite break easily, where a piece of metal of the same thickness would bend.

If you look at the periodic table of the elements, you'll note that Silicon lies right under carbon. It has the same orientation of four bonding sites but for various reasons, those four bonds are less flexible than carbon's--you basically can't make silicon fibers like you can with carbon. But the properties of high-purity solid silicon--better known as glass--are familiar to us. Solid glass has a pretty random assortment of bonds, like pencil graphite, but most of them will be three-dimensional bonds (when you increase the number of three-d bonds, you make crystal glass), making glass a very strong material (stronger than wood, in fact). That's why you can build very tough things like boat hulls from glass fibers embedded in a flexible matrix.

That's the usual failure mode of carbon fiber as well; once it goes beyond (or in a different direction from) its designed flex, the whole thing can just explode (in a better scenario, some of the layers go and you have enough warning to stop the use before the whole object gives way.

But when it breaks, it breaks catastrophically: if some atom-to-atom bonds start breaking, the rest of the material isn't flexible enough to bend; the whole thing just gives way. Similarly, when you look at broken metal pieces, they're either twisted and stretched or they've parted suddenly and you can see the crystalline structures inside them, due to either bad metallurgy, or (if I understand correctly) in the case of alloys, flexing.

If you want to understand metallurgy, get your hands on a stick of butter. First, break it in half and note how it crumbles at the breaking point. Then knead it for a minute: you can use a knife in a dish, or you can do what pastry chefs do and work it under cold water (there's a reason you use ice water and butter to make pie crusts!). You'll find that the material becomes much more flexible and stretchy, much less likely to break and crumble. This is what you want if you're making puff pastry (very thin layers of butter and flour) and also what you want your metal to be like if you're making something like wire, that you want to be flexible and strong, or a bike frame. The real genius of metallurgy is making things that will be strong and tough and springy--something that butyrology has yet to master!

The Other Big Problem with composites, in my book, is their irrecyclability. The epoxy matrix in which they're embedded is very tough stuff, but it can't be melted down because it's made of big complex molecules; they have to break down chemically, and it's not practically feasible at this point to reverse the chemical reactions that it took to make epoxy. (If you've dealt with epoxy, you know hoe much heat it gives off as it cures; all that energy would have to go back into the epoxy in order to break it down, and heat alone doesn't do it.)

Once composites start getting soft; they can't be melted down and re-used but they also can't be trusted with your life and safety. That's the reason why many (most?) dumps have an express prohibition on boat hulls of any kind.

The Chicago way

2009-03-05T13:13:00.000-08:00

I've told people before about Chicago's method of "fixing" potholes:
1) put barrier over pothole.
2) wait for car to smash barrier.
3) repeat 1 & 2 until pothole is filled with broken barriers.

Here's the method in practice.

Juxtaposition: University of Chicago Alumni opportunities

2009-03-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

Today there came in the mail an offer for "Around the World by Private Jet: An exploration of the world's greatest treasures & legendary places"--a trip sponsored by the University of Chicago Alumni Association (I didn't get invited. They must target their advertising by graduation year).

Cusco & Machu Picchu! Easter Island! Samoa! Great Barrier Reef!...you get the idea. Oh, and at each leg of the journey, there are alternate options, seeing Xi'an, China, instead of Tibet, for example, in case you've BTDT. All this for the mere pittance of $56,950 per person.

Are you free November 1-24, 2009?

It was the dates that caught my eye, and made me immediately think of the email that I'd received from a graduating (class of '09, having finished his physics major and also learnt a fistful of languages in three years) student the previous day:
Yesterday I received my official nomination to serve in the
Peace Corps in the republic of Turkmenistan as a teacher,
from September 29, 2009 to December 11, 2011. Tomorrow I
will accept this invitation, which is a binding commitment.

Bravo, MSK!

Someone should write an opera...

2009-02-06T09:00:00.001-08:00

In brief: the Fausto Coppi-Gino Bartali rivalry of the pre- and post-WWII years was defining for a generation of Italians, probably for a generation of Europeans, and certainly for a generation of racing bicyclists. You were a coppiano or a bartaliano, and it was as much an urban/rural or class division as a sporting one. The fact that those two were so often so much better than others, and so often only challenged by each other, reflected and provided an opportunity to sublimate serious social differences.

Jeff MacGregor said it well: "So in a time when the very words have been debased by overuse, a truly great sporting rivalry -- an "epic rivalry" -- is a rare and precious thing. One made possible only by athletes or teams who define and then expand not just each others' limits, but the limits of the age in which they compete. Opponents at the very peak of their powers, equals, who transform one another. Always at great cost. Which is why "Ali/Frazier" remains the standard measure of a modern American epic, and speaks to the needs of our culture as fully as "Gilgamesh" or "Beowulf" spoke to the needs of theirs." (Hat tip to LC for the quote.)

Coppi didn't stop cycling until his death at the age of 41; Bartali, the conservative and (relatively) clean-living of the duo, lived to be 85. But, and here is my service to you, readers (are there any librettists and composers amongst you?), shortly after Coppi's death, Bartali wrote a brief memoir, "Coppi and me," for the French Magazine Le Miroir des sports. Belgium Knee Warmers has now published the article in four parts: Here is a link to the first.

It's heartbreaking to read, and so easy to translate Bartali into a mirror of Peter Shaffer's Salieri, knowing greatness--and trying so hard to best it, to destroy it, even. And to be sentenced to live long enough to see greatness achieve immortality, and one's own near-greatness forgotten.

Wildlife is God's way of getting rid of drunken tourists

2009-01-28T11:44:00.000-08:00

This just in. Well, only three weeks ago.

But can't you picture the pandas sitting around talking: "You know, dude, I'm a vegetarian. Even if they come in, I'm not biting 'em. . . . I mean, look at them, so helpless, and almost intelligent." "No way, I'm chowing down. If God didn't intend for us to eat them, then why would he marinate them in beer before sending them?"

Worlks for grades 13-16, too.

2008-12-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

Cartoon by xkcd.com

Oh, one other ingredient: Wool

2008-12-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am an enthusiastic person, willing to try lotsa things, and say "yes" to many many requests. Like, for example: "Sure, I'll bike 100 miles for Susan Nelson's fight against cancer." But I do believe in a certain level of preparedness for things, and like a well-trained mom, 90% of the preparation involves wearing wool.

Why was I so joyous on Sunday? I was wearing my three, no, four favorite garments: an incredibly soft and warm lambswool sweater (turtle-ish neck, 1/4 zip, from Brooks Brothers, believe it or not), my 1952 (manufacture date is on the label!) Australian Army wool pants (5-pocket; I often roll them into knickers for bike riding), and Smartwool knee socks.

Also knicker tights under the pants, an Under Armor undershirt under the sweater, my team jersey over it, glove liners and fleece mittens, and, what the smart people do: plastic bags twixt my socks and shoes, adding warmth without cutting off circulation. All the people who snickered beforehand were the ones seeking out a warm engine block to put their toes on afterwards.

Snow + Lunch + Overexuberance = Racing Joy

2008-12-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

Apropos of the Illinois State Cyclocross Championship race, I'd like to share a cartoon with you:

marriedtothesea.com

What a slip-slidey blast! The course was a whole lot of oxygen-sucking fun. The terrain was a a lovely mix of frozen mud, deep and rutted snow, hard-packed sand, some short steep hills with right angle turns into and out of them, and one long hill (composed of aforementioned frozen mud). Oh, and did I mention it was like 17 degrees?

Here's what I remember (this may seem like a long list, but when you consider that it's absolutely exhaustive, and that most of the observations come from the first lap), you'll come to the conclusion that a great portion of the limited athletic success that I've had has been due to the fact that my body is able to shut off oxygen to my brain, enabling better muscle performance):

Eating lunch (ahh, yes, don't say I've learned nothing this 'cross season).

Forgetting to bring a check for registration, so a nice warmup ride to an ATM and back (OK, so I haven't learned everything. But it was a great warmup).

A lousy start-line position, third row back (More not-learning things: I realized before the start that I still had my phone in my pocket and dithered about looking for someone near the line to give it to before I found teammates--thanks, guys!--watching the start).

Thankfully, most people are really slow off the line so I was able to position myself somewhere around 20th by the time of the first crash--50 yards in. Everybody in places, oh, 5-18 went down, and so I squeezed up a bit solidly into the first group of slow people.

'Round some more turns, careening downhill and left into a tunnel, and hearing as I came out, "there's a big crash on the hill! a big crash!"--whoa! no kidding. You could easily get halfway up, lose momentum, start cranking hard and spinning your rear wheel, and ploop! out goes your bike from under you. Thankfully, I stuck to the snowy unpacked side and passed another couple of folks.

Then a long slog up the sled hill--and upwind--and down, then, what's this? a fast place? on a sand path? that isn't slippery? what a joy! And, even better, a pair of barriers on flat ground? Oh, I don't mind the right turn to the barriers and the left turn out, flatland barriers are my forte, my bread and butter, my opportunity to blow by, well, a couple of people. Not enough.

My next thought was, "Why the heck is everyone going so slow? don't they know this is a race?" It turns out six-inch deep rutted snow slows some people down. Go figure. I charged a new path around them on the right, and established myself in more or less the position I'd hold for most of the race.

At this point, my memories start getting blurrier and blurrier.

I remember passing one guy only to endo fifteen seconds later coming from a concrete flat (along the lake) onto grass. Whoops, got to lift the front wheel more to get up that lip at speed.

I remember looking back and seeing a string of 2 or 3 Tatitos and thinking, "Isn't that nice? all us neighborhood guys sticking together."

I remember (fatefully) coming into the start/finish line and seeing a "2" on the laps to go sign.

I remember thinking, "do I have one or two laps to go?"

I remember getting passed by somebody in an orange jersey and thinking, "Shoot, that guy's got a broken wrist! can't let him beat me!"

And, "can I stick with him for this last lap so I can sprint with him?"

And, "poor guy, his wrist must be killing him, why's he pulling out of the race?"

And, "no, I won't take a doughnut handup thanks I'm racing! If it was beer..." and then crashing.

(are you getting the picture? I wasn't)

And, "dang, the field is really spread out; I can't see any of my competition ahead of me."

And, "oh, the crowd must have all gone to see the finish."

And, "god, what will the lap count say now? do I have one more to do or is this it?"

And a very firm voice outside of my head saying as I crossed the line, "You're done."

And then a cool-down ride, and a couple of people asking, "Why'd you do an extra lap?"

Now I just need to equip my fans with a big "STOP, FORREST, STOP!" sign. Or better, "Sprint, Forrest, sprint!" Clearly my IQ drops to about 23 over the course of a race.

Nice fenders...

2008-12-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

Here's a little project for y'all. Get your hands on some SKS fenders (the P45s are good if you're running wider tires, up to about 35 mm; the P35s if you're going a little smaller). They come in boring black or a pretty spiffy silver, with black and clear stripes.

The SKSs have nice mounting hardware: double struts and a pop-out mounting so that if road detritus gets stuck between your fender and tire you don't come to a screeching, ass-over-teakettle halt.

But you want your fenders to be a little different; you want to add some color to a black and silver bike. So you get your hands on a can of Krylon plastic spray paint and some masking tape, et voila. Oh, note that we masked the inside of the fenders when we sprayed so that the clear stayed clear. Come to think of it, it's possible that if you didn't mask the inside you'd get a very subtle stripe of color through the clear stripes, and if you wanted to be really really subtle you could leave the outside silver and just paint the inside

They're going on my Dad's black Raleigh and I think they'll look sharp.

I'm just sayin'

2008-12-08T07:53:00.000-08:00

Amazon.com has a "Universal Wish List Button" you can add to your browser; it will allow you to add items from non-Amazon sites to your wish list.

Pretty cool.

Concessive-impulsive disorder

2008-12-08T07:50:00.000-08:00

n. phrase: The habit, nay, reflex, of always saying "yes," even when you really shouldn't. May result in unexpected delights.

Or extreme exhaustion.

Team Fat Cyclist: Win Susan!

2008-12-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

Does the full-zip jersey make me look fat? I hope so.

I've mentioned Elden Nelson, the Fat Cyclist before, but now's the time to talk a little more about what he's done for me and the rest of the world, and what I'm trying to give back to him, by giving back to the rest of the world. And what you can do to help.

The Fat Cyclist is one of the best blogs on the internet, hands down. Yes, it's a little more personal if you like bicycling, or if you have some sort of capacity for human emotion, but even if not, you'll laugh your coffee out your nose at "An Open Letter to Assos" and its follow-up, "The Wit and Wisdom of Dr. Michael Lämmler". If the screamingly funny posts don't get you, then he gives away some really cool bike stuff in contests and drawings every now and then and you're hooked. And if you follow the posts, you'll cry as I did when you read that Susan, Elden's wife, has had a relapse of her breast cancer, and it has metastasized to her brain, with thousands of tiny tumors like dandelion seeds in her brain.

I've commented occasionally that TV shows are for people who don't have interesting, or attractive, or funny friends, but the thing about the internet is that you can actually get to be friends with interesting, funny, smart, attractive, hard working, wonderful people. And I consider Elden to be my friend (it says we are, right there on Facebook!). He's the sort of friend you want to be more like; not perfect (we all have our moments. And jeez, he serves brats with no beer.) but when I read his writing, he makes me want to be a better person, a better dad, a better husband. Like another big brother. Because, after all, it doesn't really matter what kind of a cyclist you are.

So we (the internet) try to 'be there' for Susan and Elden and the kids, and those of us who are in Utah can come over with dinner, and help clean the house and the like. But when Elden says, "This is helpful," and it's something we can do--we jump. Seriously, he could say, "I really need you all to send me your toenail clippings," and he'd be able to open a glue factory in a week. And so he's put together a fundraising team for the Lance Armstrong Foundation (did I mention Elden's a bicyclist?), and he asked for team members to create the largest, most successful fundraising team in the history of the event. I jumped. And jumped in for the Seattle ride, on June 21--it seemed only appropriate, in that the other person I look up to like him is my brother, that I go ride in his town. (By the way, brother Wombat, can I sleep on your sofa?)

In our family we know something about cancer from a couple of different sides: Dr. Fledermaus's family tree has a terrifying streak running through it (thankfully, late-arriving, slow-moving, and excisable), and Dr. Fledermaus herself has a Ph.D. studying the disease. One thing I'm learning too well is that I'm now at the age when my cohort of friends is starting to develop cancer. Three good friends, all with kids, have been diagnosed in the past two years, with varying prognoses. But one thing I didn't know was the range of things that the Armstrong Foundation does. Yes, they support research (amen!) and treatment, but they also provide a huge range of services to cancer patients and their families. They provide personal guidance, counseling, really, in a way that all the books and brochures and even doctors can't.

All of which is to say, I'm asking now, and I'll probably ask again sometime before June, for you to chip in a few bucks by clicking here. In return, I'll ride a hundred miles with your names on my back, and if any of you can come to Seattle, too, I'll grill brats for you according to Elden's recipe (ok, I use the same recipe). We'll have a send-off grill in Chicago, too (where we know a thing or two about bratwurst).

And if I win anything, I'll share like Bat Jr., and try to gloat humorously.

The Co-op is dead. Long live the Co-op.

2008-11-26T16:51:00.000-08:00

12 kinds of soy milk
No buttermilk

And then...

"Our card machines are down: no credit or debit cards, no checks, cash
only."

As so often over the past thirteen years, I went to Walgreen's.

Reports of enlightment greatly exaggerated

2008-11-26T08:31:00.000-08:00

I'm flabbergasted that in our day and age, someone can (try to) use the color of a kid's diapers and the painting of his toenails as reasons not to allow a parent to see his kid. The kid clearly likes his diapers: '"(Kennedy) pulls down his pants and says, 'Mommy, look how pretty they are,'" she said of the diapers.' Likewise the nail polish: '"He'd say, 'Mommy, I don't want to get my nails wet. I don't want to mess them up,'" she said. "It took two hours to get him in the bath."'

Props to Urlacher. I think he knows something about masculinity, and I hope his example of openmindedness is heeded. Now if only I could get my kid to be a little less overwhelmingly gender-stereotypical in her dress!

CBF=>ATA

2008-11-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

There's significantbuzz in our local corner of the bike geekery blogosphere about the recent name change of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation; it's now the Active Transportation Alliance. Reaction seems to range from the "what a colossally stupid idea," to the "what a colossally stupid idea and if you're not pissed about it you should be." I'm somewhere between these two responses, myself. SFBikeBlog's post covers most of the objections I have (and then some), but I feel more betrayed as a Chicagoan than as a biker. For the record, I don't think I'll be renewing my membership: an organization that treats its members this way is not one that I want to be a part of (though I seem to find myself in more and more such situations). The way that they made this (locally) momentous decision smarts personally, while picking a goofy name that doesn't say anything about what you stand for only offends me intellectually.

But I'm doubly disappointed that they're adopting the nickname "Active Trans." Have they no members in Lakeview? Anyhow, here's the first thing that occurred to me on hearing the term:

(Yes, that is a mixte frame.)

Cyclocross update.....

2008-11-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

I know what you're thinking--"why no race reports? You have been racing, right, Dingbat?"

Well, I missed two weeks, one due to travel and one due to ill-health but the other reason is simpler. I've been terrible. Slow. Feeling like someone's adding glue to my tires when I'm not looking. Looking back a lap or two in to make sure I didn't somehow forget to unhitch the trailer. That is, when I'm not looking back to see who's blowing by me this time.

And extra-frustrated when Nemesis (the quy who outsprinted me in JP, and whom I beat in Hawthorne Woods) is third place overall in the series.

I think, though, I can boil it down to two factors: One, umm, cardio fitness. I'm just not riding enough. Two: I'm not eating enough on race day. Breakfast followed by fruit and fruit juices is not enough fuel in the tank, which is why I'm able to go go go for a lap and a half and then--bonk. On the grass, it's not as dramatic as on pavement, so it took me a little while to figure out.

Anyhow, I had fun in Lansing yesterday; there was a sandpit and I had a blast sprinting to catch a guy at the finish line. I wasn't until I'd gasped my way around the course that I realized that I hadn't caught him so much as lapped him at the line. But I held off the guy who was on my lap, which is a satisfaction. The important thing is that I got excited to train again after putting my finger on the big factors in declining performance.

Read Joe's race report for something a little more inspiring. Or Michael Barry's fun (if perhaps occasionally overwrought) recent article in the Times.

Rank-ordered list of priorities

2008-10-29T06:44:00.000-07:00

...
n. Knees
n + 1. Dignity
...

Update: I'm in the money!

2008-10-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

Just found out that prizes for Hawthorn Park ran 10 deep; I won something!

Race Report: Hawthorn Woods "Psychocross" 10/12/08

2008-10-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

If you're able to write a detailed and accurate race report, you weren't racing hard enough. Unless you do what I do and collate the hazy memories of the race with known factors like the course itself into something that seems to make sense. But memories from the heat of exertion are terribly unreliable and even impartial observations are notoriously slippery (to wit: my calculation that I'd come in 6th, the immediately-posted result of 7th and the later, "official" result of 8th).
Be that as it may, here's my impressions of Sunday's race: It was hot, not beastly, but enough to sap some energy, and truly make one grateful for shade. In retrospect, arriving two and a half hours before the race, usually a very good idea, may have been a little, well, excessive. The course was the sort of thing that singlespeeders are supposed to dread: lots of asphalt and long runs on grass. One big big hill (a man-made tobogganing hill for the kids), which you hit 200 yards after the start, rode up and flew down, and then, just for kicks, you took a U-turn and dismounted for a barrier before heading back up to the top. I saw some people in earlier races try to ride the hill the second time up, but didn't see anyone try that in my race, but then again, I only myself and the three or four guys around me at any given point. Then you bombed down the hill again, trying to get clipped in before a whole bunch of grass and asphalt, probably a half-mile's worth, with a false flat and some very bumpy dry drainage thrown in for good measure. Then you (well, I at least) passed by your wife and daughter in the kids' playground, getting a much-needed boost in energy. An off-camber turn to the right led to a mud puddle and the only other barrier of the course, which then took you right through the center of the spectation and past the registration gazebo in an almost-terrifyingly narrow paved path with only yellow caution tape separating you from the...teeming hordes?, well, friends and families. A couple more turns took you into a mostly-dry drainage ditch around a reedy swamp. The mostly-dry came to an end when you crossed a nice sloppy mud pit and emerged onto another grassy field, which you circumnavigated for another half-mile, before a hairpin turn took you onto an asphalt path for 150 meters, a short (10m) patch of grass and a right turn onto the last 40m of asphalt leading to the finish.

My goals for this week were to start in the front row, stay in the top ten for the whole race, and not get used as a rabbit in any big flats and a lead-out man in the sprint. I fulfilled all of them.

I was first to gather for the start, and though the top ten series riders got call-ups to the line, only about five of them were racing this week so there was plenty or--well, enough-- space for me to start in the front row, all the way at the left wall. I got off the line reasonably well; there were no sharp (crashy) turns at the start, just the lead-in to and the climbing of the hill, which did wonders to string out the pack. I passed three or four people the first time up the hill (yes, that was the only time I passed anyone on the hill!), with my left crank creaking horribly. Note to self: tighten that sucker up, if it's still got any shape to the spindle holes. Then down, and back up, on foot this time, and I realized that my body really should be prepared for such cardiopulmonary abuse by regular training. Ah well. I'm in no way proud of my top of hill re-mounts. They were ugly hopping, hesitant affairs, but letting a heartbeat or two push some blood to my brain before bombing downhill and trying to get clipped back into the pedals before bouncing around the turn to the right (O God, let me not bounce around too much before my feet are equipped to absorb those impacts). And then...You mean I have to start pedalling again? Dude, I'm gonna hurl! This was the slowest part of the race for me. Lap 1 I worked it ok, getting passed and dropped by one guy (I think), Lap 2 I sat back and said Jeez, I need to let someone pass me and sit in behind him--and that worked, sort of--I got passed by an Illinois State rider whom I did later pass. Lap 3, I started to think the same thing and then realized, "wait, everybody else feels the same way I do." so I put the hammer down with all the vigor of an elderly sloth until the nausea subsided. For the first stretch of grass I managed to find someone to hang with on three of the four laps; on the last lap I'd been dropped by a group of three, and I'd just about given up on catching them when I heard, "Go Daddy! Go faster Daddy!" from Bat Junior and a firm "Head up! Back in the race!" from Dr. Fledermaus (have I mentioned that Dr. Fledermaus was a D-I varsity coxswain in college? When you're working to hard to think, she knows what to put in your head to make you tap that little bit more). On all the laps, I had good-to-stellar dismounts and remounts at the "spectators'" barrier (Thanks for the "Wow!" to whoever said that on Lap 4--I was especially proud of that one!). It helped me reel in the distance I'd lost on the asphalt. Same too with the mud puddle--three of four laps I passed someone in the mud (Ahh, the lessons of winter--snow--bike commuting: shift your weight back and never stop pedalling!).
Lap four had its own highlights: the family gave me the energy to think I could catch the group of three ahead of me, and the barrier and the mud put me in striking distance. I hammered across the grass and blew past the third of them, who'd bonked and sat up (or did we all lap him?). He apologized as I went by (we must have lapped him). Then onto the tail of that rider in the blue jersey. Why was that jersey so familiar? With a half mile (plus or minus), two doglegs and a hairpin to go, I caught him. I sat in for a second or two, but what's this? The other guy was getting away! The xXx rider who'd been in front of him by only a few bike lengths had thirty meters in the bag, and gaining! I passed blue-jersey and said, "Let's catch this guy!" There was some sort of affirmative noise--was its incoherence due to my ears' or his mouth's lack of oxygen?--and we took the hairpin together. But wait, was this too late to catch xXx, and worse, was I just leading out Blue? No time to think, just sprint sprint sprint!!! and finish, a length or two ahead of Blue.
We didn't catch xXx, but the bonus of the day? Blue was the fella who outsprinted me in Jackson Park. After I'd ridden out the finish, lain on the grass for a minute or two, and staggered to my feet, we had a smile and a handshake. This is a good rivalry!

Lessons learned? More air in the tires when there are such sharp turns on pavement. Some of them were pretty darn sketchy. Oh, yeah, and learn to turn sharply on pavement, period! Work on getting used to freewheeling again--I still don't feel as connected to the ride as I did on fixed. And I've got to be more aggressive in the corners like I was on fixed.

Photo Credit: Jeff Kao (thanks, Jeff!)

Public Service Announcement: Anti-dooring.org

2008-10-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody (yes, all six of you).

Doorings (that's what cyclists call it when someone inside a car opens a door in front of you) can be fatal. After Clint Micelli was killed this summer leaving work (in downtown Chicago), the Chicago cycling community got together and designed stickers, which we're aiming to place on all 31,000 parking meters in the city of Chicago, and as many light posts as possible. The stickers are a reminder; there's a web site at www.anti-dooring.org which offers more information and the chance to sign a "I'll look before opening" pledge.

If you'd like to help, we're looking to make another print run of 10,000 stickers, and need to raise money to do so. Chip in here.

Edit/a note on the stickers. This design with the blue and red and white picks up the colors of the Chicago city flag. If you're elsewhere, there's another design, too. Both are free to use under a creative commons license.

Race Report: Dekalb, Oct 5

2008-10-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

I came, I rocked the run-up in the first lap, I crashed (whoops; a little too much front brake!), I had a blowout.

And there, half a lap in, was my race. I was sitting about where I wanted to be (8th-12th-ish) when the whole thing went down.

Funniest thing (in retrospect): a pair of Andre Dugast tubular tires on a bike in the Men's 4B's. That's $300/pair tires in a beginner race. Ah, eagerness!

Lessons learned: I'm fast enough that I should start in the front row. Remember to bleed speed when it's muddy with the rear brake (or legs, as the case may be).

I'm sure that the postmortem on the front tube will tell me something too.

South Side History Bike Tour

2008-09-30T14:04:00.001-07:00

This one for local readers:

Come explore the South Side of Chicago on the ideal exploratory vehicle. If you're a newcomer to the city and want to learn more, or an old hand at this Chicagoan thing (Eric and Jennifer!) and want to get a deeper bite of it, you'll have fun. And though Dean Boyer's been giving a bike tour for a few years now, this year we'll also benefit from Terry Nichols Clark's and Mark Hansen's good wisdom and knowledge.

This is one of the kickoff events for the new Chicago Studies program (academic and 'experiential learning').
Here's the blurb from the Chicago Studies web site. Sign up info is at the bottom--you can also sign up on facebook here.

Whether biking for recreation or transportation, sticking to the same tried and true route can become a force of habit. But on Saturday, October 4, participants in the South Side History Bike Tour will take the “road less traveled” through historic neighborhoods.

Even long-time South Siders are likely to discover something new about events and people that shaped Chicago-both the city and the University. Tour guides include John W. Boyer, Dean of the College; Terry Nichols Clark, Professor in Sociology; and J. Mark Hansen, Dean of the Social Sciences Division.

Bikers will get a first-hand look at historic Bronzeville, sneak a peek at the residence of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, admire the rugged limestone Union Stock Yard Gate, and learn about the Settlement House movement at the Jane Addams Hull House.

“We want our students to be in touch with the city, to learn from it and enjoy it. This cultural and architectural bike tour is a good way to kick off the 2008-09 academic year for the Chicago Studies Program,” Boyer said.

Participants, who must have their own bike and helmet, will meet at the Quad between Bartlett Dining Commons and the Regenstein Library at 10 a.m.

Register for the Bike Tour: Email dhays@uchicago.edu or call 773.753.GIVE (4483).

Cyclocross!

2008-09-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

OK, here's a race report. Unstructured and incoherent, perhaps, but a race report nonetheless. It betrays its origins as a personal email, cut and pasted for the benefit of other personal persons.

I was not the only one to go down, and that was not the only time I went down! In fact, in the spot that that photo was taken I went down on three or four of the six laps. It was downhill to a 180-degree turn to the right and then back up the hill. Short and steep.

On the first lap, the field hadn't yet spread out a lot and I made the 180-degree turn--taking it quite wide and was charging up the hill faster than my competition (heh heh heh) around one particular fellow who lost momentum and was waggling around quite a bit trying to stay upright. He swung left as I came around him; we hooked handlebars and we both went down.

The second lap was my fastest, through that bit at least--I took it fast and wide and didn't go down. After that, each time, I hit the dirt with my right (uphill, inside of the turn) pedal on the dirt, knocking my rear wheel out from under me. Perhaps proper cyclocross tires would have caught the ground again--but I think that more knobby tires would have slowed me down on the non-technincal half of the course. At any rate, the whole bike went out from under me. And there was a great fan there, shouting "Go singlespeed" (and later, "Go fixed!") which was a great boost (though I felt like I was letting him down as I crashed!).

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The course was pretty easily divided into the technical half--with lots of twists and turns, and several barriers--and the non-technical half, racing around big grassy fields, with some fairly tight but not extreme turns. The race started in the middle of the non-technical half, with a short straightaway on grass, crossing an asphalt path and doglegging right, then circling a softball field, then going down a shallow hill to a slight basin--meaning softer wetter ground---and then some slightly muddy ("peanut butter," not splattery wet stuff) hairpins and squiggles (this is where the 'technical stuff' begins) up, then down a hill. The second time back up the hill (we're talking 50 foot hills) was on foot: there were barriers to clear at the bottom and the top. Remount, then downhill across the soft 'basin' and up, then down the aformentioned crashing hill.

Then a few more loops on dirt and some more paved path riding, this with a 150-degree dogleg in it. My first two laps I hit my inside pedal on that turn, but with the pavement, the only result was a skip of the rear wheel and a skip in my heartbeat (the laps I didn't have pedal strike I cursed myself for not taking the turn fast enough, though, truth be told, halfway through the race I probably wouldn't have had the reaction . Downhill on the paved into where most of the spectators were, and some more turns and a barrier. I think I crashed at this dismount once. Then back through the spectators to a double corkscrew (turn left left left left and then right right right right) and a straightway on grass, slightly downhill, to another barrier. Then out into the fields.

So that's the field of battle. Here's what played out, at least what I did well and what I did poorly.

I started middle of the pack (of forty), and spent the first lap passing people who slowed down too much for turns. On a fixed gear, you know just how expensive acceleration is, so the important racing lesson of "Don't slow down!!!" is at the forefront of your mind. Many people were riding their brakes into fairly shallow turns and I blew by them. I didn't wipe out on any turns and I considered my most successful ones the ones where I had enough speed to stretch the course-marking tape on my shoulder coming out of the turns and even brush the tape stanchions with my handlebars (wheels never went outside any course markers!).

The one thing I kept in mind through all this was what one of my favorite bloggers, Kent Peterson (http://kentsbike.blogspot.com) said a few weeks ago: Having multiple gears doesn't make you go faster, it makes it easier for you to go slower. So I figured I had to keep the speed up.

And so I attacked, attacked, attacked.
One thought occurred to me several times during the race: "Why are all these people going so slow?" On the first lap it was their bad, for sure--too much timidity going into corners, too little fitness on the straightaways. I realize now that one fellow in particular whom I passed on each of the last three laps going into the grassy half was just using me. As a rank amateur I wasn't even thinking about the fact that he was just drafting in the fast bits and would blow by me at the finish--as he did. Very much the beginner's mistake. There was some consolation in the fact that the guy who outsprinted me for the finish made something of a goof of himself by crashing into the guy who'd finished ahead of him after the line.... (

More on Oct. 5.

Friday grab-bag (2 items)

2008-08-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

Ari Davidow, Hebrew Typesetter Extraordinaire and someone who blogs less regularly than I do. But the links there could waste two or three days of my life.

Tandems aren't just political props. See what they can do for your
marriage!

Now that's a cheese dog

2008-08-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

All-beef dog (pre-heat in micro or broiler).
Solid bun.
Slender slab of bleu cheese.
Handful of minced onions.
A large pinch of mustard powder.

Assemble and broil until the bun's toasty and the cheese melting.

Top with cold cole slaw.

Ah, I'll just eat whatever's in the fridge

2008-08-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

Lunch: open faced smoked mozzarella and zucchini sandwich with pesto.

Whoops

2008-08-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

Bungees on the rear rack seem like a good idea.

The remains of dinner

2008-08-11T22:30:00.000-07:00

BatDog enjoys the bones from the evening's lamb chops.

Bakfiets in Chicago!

2008-08-07T13:58:00.000-07:00

Soon

Best airport safety equipment evarrrr

2008-08-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

2008-08-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

Argyle is hot

2008-08-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

Not hah-h-h-h-ht, but hot.

And Montana thinks they've got big skies

2008-08-04T15:28:00.000-07:00

Shoot, Boston's sky even has lights!

Uh oh

2008-08-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

Did I mention big blue bags are heavy?

2008-07-31T19:31:00.000-07:00

Ridin' the bus

2008-07-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

The journey of the big blue bag I

2008-07-31T13:23:00.001-07:00

Waiting for the bus. In the rain.

What's the backstory?

2008-07-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

This is our life...

The world's largest pierogi

2008-07-26T15:04:00.001-07:00

Pierogifest, Whiting, IN

At La Iglesia Providencia de Dios

2008-07-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

We made it!

2008-07-22T06:37:00.000-07:00

It was a long, painful (at times) and wet, wet ride but we're here.
Details to follow.

Don't look down!

2008-07-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

Some handrails aren't designed to keep you in

2008-07-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

Taken inside the sidewalk canopy out front of our building. They've
been doing a lot of crane lifting this week.

Blogging the future: Race to Mackinac

2008-07-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

The sailboat race to Mackinac begins this Saturday (July 19, 2008). If you want to follow our progress, here's how:


		14-Jul-08 - 12:18pm Dear Sailors and Friends: For the first time in the history of the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac, all boats in the fleet will carry position transponders, which will allow spectators around the world to follow the Race. This state-of-the-art tracking system allows anyone following the race receive hourly updates on individual boats, entire sections, or even the entire 439 boat fleet as the race moves up Lake Michigan. Race tracking services are being provided by iBoattrack, a division of Horizon Marine. There are two methods to access the tracking site maintained by iBoattrack. The first way is to go to the Race to Mackinac web site CLICK HERE) then click on multimedia and race tracking. You can also bookmark the site directly at http://charthorizon.com/races/2008_chicago_mackinac/htdocs/ (the site will become active shortly before the race begins). In order to familiarize yourself with how the tracking works, we urge you to take a moment to look at iBoattrack's last race tracked—the Newport Bermuda race—CLICK HERE . Though the race is now complete, you can see how the system worked. You can easily select individual sections to track (the 'class' drop down box). You can also use the movie mode to animate the race. Note that you can mouse over any boat’s current position (except when in movie mode) and get the vessel’s boat speed and other information. If you would like more detailed data on any boat, select either the 'Boat Mapper' or the 'Google Mapper' from the links at the top of the page. These will take you to a separate page that allows you to focus on an individual boat or boats. It allows you to animate the race too. In addition, there are a couple of extras for users of the site to explore. First, iBoattrack will maintain and monitor discussion boards. We encourage you to visit the boards and discuss the race with other friends, family and fans of the Race. Should you have questions about the tracking system, how to use it, or how it works, iBoatrack will do their best to answer you on the boards. Second, in order to learn about the weather than the sailors are experiencing on the Race course, you may visit AccuWeather.com, which will provide regularly updated weather information during the race. A link to the AccuWeather.com site will be available on the tracking home page. In case you encounter difficulties with the website, there is a 'help' button in the top right of each page of the tracker. Please forward this e-mail to anyone who may be interested in following the Race, and encourage them to track your progress as you race north. We hope that this project will make the Race more exciting for your family and friends. Regards, Greg J. Miarecki Chair 2008 ChicagoYacht Club Race to Mackinac Greg Freeman Vice-Chair 2008 Chicago Yacht ClubRace to Mackinac Winn Soldani Technology Chair 2008 ChicagoYacht Club Race to Mackinac

I seem to have started something

2008-06-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Last night, I think I started a dissertation. The problem was (is?) that I don't really know exactly what I'm writing about, and so rather than get through this exam with a whole bunch of post-it flags sticking out of books that I've read (and an extreme inability to recall what each color stood for), I'm going back to the basics: index cards. Yup, index cards.

I've done this before--not with index cards precisely, but with the same idea. The most successful papers I've written have been the result of recording in a word processing document all of my observations and important points of fact and interpretation--anything that interests me, really--and then printing it all out, cutting the individual notes, facts, pieces of evidence, ideas, clever turns of phrase, anything that occurred to me as I was reading, and laying them all out on the living room floor in logical hierarchy:

Main Point.
Subpoint
piece of evidence one
pieces of evidence two and three, which need to be understood together
Subpoint two
----uh oh! I have no evidence for this; better reconsider!----

You get the idea: it's a very concrete way of determining whether or not you've proved what you set out to. And to get an idea of what is provable within the scope of your paper.

This time, it's a little bigger, but I'm organizing the index cards as I go. Category cards get written up in portrait rather than landscape format so that they can act as dividers--but if the category proves unuseful, then that card gets set behind the 'no longer useful' category card.

It's flexible, and it allows me to take all the things that I find interesting and see what I can make of them. And it will, I hope, mean that at the end of taking this exam, I'll be well on the way to proposing rather than just knowing more but having no idea what I'm going to write on.

(Wish me luck.)

I've always liked Kool-Aid. Really.

2008-06-05T07:55:00.001-07:00

We're getting new phones--Dr. Fledermaus should have an email-capable one for work (they'll pay) and so I'll be piggybacking on her acquisition, likely, with a family plan.

And so it's a good excuse to finally cave into my brother's recommendations and get a picture/email/web capable phone. (Photos he sent from the Mariners game last week, and the announcement of the CTA Bus Tracking web site, were the other two things that put me over the edge.)

So I've been doing a bunch of research, and come to the pleasant surprise that the reason the iPhone is selling so damn well is because it's cheaper than its competition.

For comparably-capable phones (no other has the music capacity of the iPhone, but all of these have qwerty keyboards) and plans (including email and web access, about the same number of minutes), here's the two-year cost of ownership (equipment purchase, activation fees, monthly charges including an estimated 25% taxes and fees).

8Gb iPhone: $2080
US Cellular HTC PPC6800: $2142
T-Mobile Wing: $2327
Verizon LG Voyager: $2480 (actually, it's probably higher; this doesn't include activation since we're currently VZW customers)
AT&T Tilt: $2558

The iPhone doesn't include insurance, but look at it this way: over two years, I could drop one in Lake Michigan and replace it at retail, and it still comes out to the same cost as the Voyager and the Tilt, which are the other two that come anywhere close to iPhone is slickness (yes, that's slightly different from coolness).

Now the only problem is that the web is vibrating with anticipation of a new iPhone release sometime in the next month or two. What's a consumer to do?

Two kinds of sex

2008-06-03T07:26:00.001-07:00

We went to an elementary-school graduation party for a friend of ours on Friday. He's a methodical kid, loves assembling things from Legos, loves Star Wars (has since the age of one!), loves order and pattern and words and numbers, and really doesn't understand instinctively the social cues that most of us take for granted. It's been a struggle for him to get as far as he has, and so the celebration was well-merited. But that's all a little beside the point--there's wisdom to be shared here.

A couple of weeks ago, C. and his mom were in the car, and C. said, "There are two kinds of sex." His mom (from whom he inherits this trait of speaking his mind!) said, "Oh, really? Tell me more." So he explained, "Well, there's the biological kind, where you have kids. And then there's the other kind, which involves alcohol."

Why I love Jennifer's bike that she hates so much....

2008-05-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

General Carlessness has a rant on her bike. I offer this counterpoint.

Jennifer's bike is awesome: it screams, "My rider is a hard-core commuter. She takes an off-the-shelf medium-cheap bike and rides the hell out of it. She's added the sensible accessories (fenders, rack, lights), and had the good sense to pick one of the few bike models off the shelf that will accommodate them. Check out these wide smooth tires, which everyone with any sense--and even the highest aesthetes in all of bicycledom--knows are the way to roll. Sure, I've got a suspension fork, but wer're too busy riding to spend hours agonizing over what to spend money on--and everyone knows that habit is just an ulcer on the world of cycling, caused by an infection of Consumer Culture. I take a little, and make it go a long long way.

"Besides, look at me: I'm a testament to engineering solidity--in thirty years, I'll have the bombproof reputation of a Chicago Schwinn, only I'm about a stone lighter and my brakes actually work in the rain. Shoot, she's trying to ride me into the ground so she buy something fancy, but I just keep on trucking.

"You, with the trucker hat--eff you, man! If you want to identify with the plebeian masses then you'd do well to recycle that PBR can (and the ends that you so stupidly cut off of your riser bars) into some mass-produced hybrid that will still be ridden after your knees scream for mercy and your fashion sense dictates that you leave your IRO in the garage.

"I'm keeping it real."

Why my CD drive won't open

2008-05-15T09:39:00.001-07:00

Short answer: It's a POS, and it's started breaking after 3 years of pretty easy use.

Long answer (which is kind of neat, and also lets me know how to solve it): There's either crud on the lens of the CD, or it's scratched or otherwise failing, so it's having trouble reading the disc that's in there. The thing is, it keeps trying, spinning up the disc either every minute or continuously to see if it can get a read on it. Because it's 'active' it won't eject the disc, even when you ask it to through Windows. Windows used to time out when it failed to read a disc, but not any more.

The trick to getting the disc out is to do it while the computer's on but before Windows gets ahold of the hardware. Reboot, and while the "Dell" screen is still up, i.e., the hardware is powered but Windows hasn't fired up, hit the manual eject button.

Never too early

2008-05-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

The alarm went off this morning, and Dr. Fledermaus said, "One snooze!" As I fumbled for the button, I said, "Not much; one snooze with you?"

Cool thing of the day

2008-05-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

Illusion Sciences. "This aspect of the effect can be quite mesmerizing, so be careful."

Regularly scheduled programming....

2008-04-22T14:31:00.001-07:00

Tuesnight bike ride is still on, 9:30 at Powell's.

Shirking...

2008-04-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

Though the weather's beautiful and I'll be longing to go, I'm going to have to skip the 9:30 ride this evening. Please, go and enjoy yourselves for me!

The state of the stacks (first in a series)

2008-04-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Fat Cyclist keeps us informed as to his weight, a public self-shaming into positive progress. I hereby tell you, with the same goal, the total height of all the stacks of ~~crap~~ paper on my desk.

147 cm

Draw a Picture of a Bird Day

2008-04-08T12:03:00.001-07:00

This is time sensitive, so I'm not going to rewrite; I'm just going to quote an email I received this morning.

Today, I would like to share something important with you. Several months ago it came to my attention that this day, April 8th, is none other than Draw a Picture of a Bird Day. Please join me in embracing this ridiculous holiday by (you guessed it) taking some time out of your day to draw a picture of a bird. I encourage you to do this whenever you please... over breakfast, in class, while walking across the Midway, during naptime, really your options are as wide open as the soon-to-be bird-filled sky!

Continuity and change

2008-04-07T19:54:00.001-07:00

I've recently had the opportunity to sit on a committee meeting with two candidates for a senior student life position at the university. One seemed to fit right in here, to take immediately to the intellectual climate here of analysis and discussion. The other candidate brought an entirely different level of energy, and the discussion we had was exciting, spinning off ideas for activities, about how to make connections and draw students together, multiply energies and channel disparate groups toward common goals. Part of what was so appealing about candidate 2 was the fact that this campus already has plenty of what C1 brings to the table--detached, careful, intellectual practice.

The quesion is, when does this desire for something different transform the place into something different? Do we have a responsibility to preserve the uniquely, um, contemplative nature of this institution?

Reading Material

2008-04-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

I'm too busy to read stuff (let alone write), so you'll have to. New additions to the "Chicago Links" there on the right:
I Hate My Developer--required reading for anyone thinking about buying into a condo conversion, and really sharp observations about life on the South Side.

General Carlessness--bike riding and editing; sound familiar? But with more content of public interest than I usually muster. (I've been utterly remiss in not linking here sooner!)

Those two are both excellent and full of stories of life in the neighborhoods I straddle (I claim Woodlawn, living and working south of the midway, but I'm in University-occupied territory, which makes for overlapping geographical identities).

Chicagoist--news, events, and observations about the city. Chicagoist's borealic focus may lead to its removal from my blogroll, but the writing's good and the topics interesting. Whether a few weeks of things I'll not see around town gets to me or not is to be determined.

The following may or may not make the blogroll; after I have some time to devote to reading them, they'll appear there or not. But you may find them interesting now.
District 299 blog. about Chicago Public Schools ChiKat and Swim and Glitter are the personal blogs of a couple of (white) south siders. Interesting observations and all, but they might prove too personal. Yochicago is another recent discovery, and seems to focus entirely on real estate.

Observations on the legal system.

2008-04-03T07:30:00.001-07:00

1) I always thought subpoenas would come on nicer paper.

2) The hearsay rule is really really strict. I had no idea.

Small revelations, then, rather than simple observations.

If you haven't heard: Good News!

2008-04-01T07:52:00.000-07:00

We're having triplets! Two more girls and a boy, due in July, but the doctor says that they'll probably come early.

Accuracy through typographical error

2008-03-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

"We can get much mire done over a couple of beers."

Lost, Season 31

2008-03-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

Where in the Sam Hill are my other black shoes?
And that extra bicycle we had around in the fall?

And what else have I lost without yet realizing it?

Spoilers in the comments are welcome.

Wednesday catch-all

2008-03-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

All the news that fits in a 5-minute post (warning--all bike content):
Tuesday night ride report: good fun, but 'urban singletrack' (that's the rut in the park full of mud, grass, chunks of asphalt, and sand) would be more fun with company. Yes, I'll advertise again for next time. (We don't quite have the momentum for going without, yet, I guess.)

Read this. It will give you goosebumps. Hat tip to Surlyblog whose Ms. Bloggins it made cry.

My old rear wheel died last week. Time to build up that new set of wheels for next winter, a bit ahead of the planned schedule. Owen at Blackstone Bikes set me up with a SRAM three-speed internally geared hub, and it's sitting on a shelf in the living room where I can gaze fondly at it until I pick up my rims and start making a wheel. Further updates on this adventure in wheelbuilding as events warrant.

Since the demise of the geared rear, I put my fixed wheel on the Surly. The only gearing that worked without shortening my only 1/8" chain is 36x18. There's a coffee out there called 53x11; they're bikers, of course, and they, inter alia, support a cycling team. I'm thinking the coffee must be really strong. After riding 7 miles on Monday with a 25 mph tailwind, I'm thinking that they should make a supercaffeinated blend called "36x18." I was spinning like mad to keep up with myself. But I could pull the trailer without feeling like my knees would fall off.