Crawling a Red Light:

Our town is choked with road construction projects, a maze of detours and pitted roads. My wife says the general effect is that “You can’t get here from there.” This morning around 6 a.m. I turned onto one of the worst roads, where the surface has been stripped away before resurfacing. There’s a bumpy sublayer plus humps that were not removed, pits, raised manhole covers and traps. The driver just ahead of me went verrry slowly, trying to concentrate (I'm sure) on the surface and not wipe out his handsome vehicle.

We approached a place where there are two lights, synchronized, about 200 feet apart. He went carefully through the first one as it turned yellow. I hot-pinked it to stay with him. Then I looked up at the next light (now red of course), and I had a thought: the guy in front of me was concentrating on the road so carefully that he was going to go right through that light!

And he did. This is not what you call “Running a red light”; he was only going ten miles per hour. He went through this T intersection, oblivious to the cars that had the right of way on his left. There was no mishap, and I’m sure he took very good care of his car.

I'm getting the wrong message?

I try to post six times a week. While on vacation I hardly posted at all, yet I got almost the usual number of hits per day. Readers, what kind of message are you sending me?

Read (Heard) any good books lately?

Seth Godin is fascinated by audio books. (You can hear a book he wrote at Audible.com.) He calls audible books "So linear, so multi-taskable. Precisely the opposite of a book." I've heard a lot of books myself, and the differences between reading and hearing a book fascinate me. (There are even a few books I've done both ways, and each way had its advantages.) I think Godin's "opposite" is too extreme. The word “complementary” comes to mind, because - as with foreign movies - these two ways of enjoying a book are often good for each other.

Here are some of the contrasts:

1. When listening, you really have to concentrate. If you're not concentrating, you may never know if you miss a few key words. If you fall asleep while reading, it's much easier to back up.
   
2. When listening, you proceed at the author's pace. When reading, you can slow down and speed up (or even page-turn when the suspense gets too great). I hate the way Dick Frances drives me with suspense and would always rather read his books. But for some books, going with the author's dawdle or rush is a great experience. When I read Richard Ford's Independence Day, I enjoyed it, but I really didn't 'get' it. Hearing it, and concentrating on the whole thing at the author's pace, I "read" it much better.
   
3. When you read, you get to do all the imagining yourself. When you listen, the narrator is an actor - sometimes a great actor who gives you a lot you would never have thought of yourself. For example, Barbara Rosenblatt gives a superb reading of the Bridget Jones Diary books. If you liked reading them, you may still love hearing them; these might be the greatest two performances ever of an audio book. Another audio book where the reader adds a great deal to the experience is All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki, read spectacularly by Anna Fields.
   
4. Audio fiction is usually "voiced" even if the narrator does nothing special. That is, every speaking character gets a separate sounding voice and a bit of appropriate personality. In a book with a lot of characters, or with characters that are hard to keep straight, this can be a boon. If you're good at imagining voices and characters on your own when you read, I congratulate you; I'm not very good at that, and I appreciate the narrator's assistance. Anthony Powell's twelve volume novel, Dance to the Music of Time has around a hundred main characters that flit in and out of the books; the reader of the unabridged tapes keeps them amazingly distinct.
   
5. When you read, it's much easier to jump back and forth in the book. You often have to do that for nonfiction, but in a mystery you might keep going back to page thirty where something important obviously happened that gradually makes sense later.
   
6. Our audio and reading memories work differently, so what we recall from these two methods will differ.
   
7. You can mark up a book while reading, for all sorts of reasons. It's a lot harder to mark up an audio book.
   
8. I said you have to concentrate on audio; Seth Godin says you can multi-task. We're both right up to a point. You can sit and read, or you can wash dishes, walk, drive, rake, clean and listen. But your other task needs to be a lightweight task.
   
9. I almost always read a book just the way the author wrote it, but it's a very special pleasure to hear the author narrate his or her own work. A great example is Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Listening to him read it, I realized I would have no idea how to get to the essence of it on my own. You also get something special listening to Richard Ford narrate his work. You can hear him here.
   

If I've just whetted your appetite for audio books, check out your local library; they may have lots of good choices.

A good way to enjoy a good foreign movie:

I think the right way to see a good foreign movie (in a language you don't understand) is to see it three times:

1. With subtitles, to hear the real actor's voices and emotions.
   
2. Dubbed, to figure out what's really going on.
   
3. With subtitles, to hear the real actor's voices and emotions while knowing what's really going on.
   

"Dreamt"

Perhaps it would be best not to click on this link to AskOxford.com, where Oxford English Dictionary experts have answered fun questions about language. It's a lot easier to stop eating peanuts than to stop browsing their website.

You'll learn what's special about 'dreamt' here. And here are eleven English words borrowed from other languages that have 'q' not followed by 'u'. And here's the female equivalent of misogynist. And ... go away don't bother me, I'm reading about "bimonthly".

Things for looking up:

During my vacation I walked past a U.S. Consulate office. A car was just parking at the curb in front. I noticed two odd objects leaning against a wall. Each consisted of a large mirror (about a foot square) attached to a broom handle at a wide angle. A man picked one up, and I was curious to see what he would do with it. He held the mirror near the ground at the back of the car that had just parked, obviously checking for any suspicious object that might be attached to its underside. Suddenly I had a great urge to walk quickly away.

On my way back I again passed the U.S. Consulate office. An insert in my right shoe had gotten painfully out of position and I needed a place to sit down, take the shoe off and adjust the insert. Large circular planters outside the consulate looked like a good place to sit, but I think if I had removed my shoe there, I would have been tackled.

The painful future of movies:

I recently realized that movies - both the comedy and drama varieties - are now doomed to become less and less realistic. How many movies are you willing to watch in which the actors talk into their cellphones most of the time?

A familiar story:

This will be a familiar story to anyone who has worked with large American companies in the last 25 years.

We stayed many times before at the Hyatt Regency in Jerusalem. We are here again, but now it is just "The Regency." We were curious how the loss of the "Hyatt" designation would affect the quality of the hotel. I have only noticed subtle differences.

I asked a regular (who stays at the hotel often on business) what changes he had noticed. "The biggest change," he said, "is that they fired all the middle managers."

Well we know how flattening the hierarchy can have very little in the way of bad effects on a large organization...

You are here, on an unnamed street:

So we're using driving instructions that a friend helpfully extracted for us from Israel's map-directions website. Part of the instructions look like this:
Turn sharp left onto khaniti, 1.09 km.
Turn right onto unnamed street, 40 meters
Turn right onto khaniti, 500 meters
Turn right onto unnamed street, 40 meters ...

Someone, looking at these instructions, said "Still a few holes in the data base." But it turns out something almost sensible is going on. Some segments of traffic circles are "unnamed streets".

Decency in reading:

Rep. Jonsemil Barkentof of Arkantexas introduced a bill today to apply
sensible standards of decency to all printed material. "Let's get this
law passed," he says, "and then let's see what we can do about all those
books!"

The new law would require all printed matter to avoid prurient and
indecent words according to local community standards. Authors,
book-owners and publishers would be fined $500,000 for a first offense,
and also forced to erase all the offending words from every available
copy. Asked whether digital words should be counted as printed material,
Rep. Barkentof said "We'll get to that next.!" Experts estimate that a
typical local library might have be fined upwards of $680 million as
soon as the law passes.

This reporter asked the Rep. for a list of words likely to be ruled
offensive. Remarkably almost all of them have appeared in this newspaper
regularly. We would list those words here, but the newspaper seems to
have adopted a new policy today...

I'm being ridiculous of course, but not as ridiculous as I'd like.

Newbies burning calories from exercise:

Suppose you've just taken up a new form of moderate exercise, and you're dismayed at how few calories your exercise seems to burn. Perhaps you looked up the calorie count on the internet, or perhaps your exercycle or treadmill is giving you the bad news. Well, think about this:

1. Calculate how many calories your exercise will burn in an entire year and divide by (I think the magic number is) 3,500. That's how many extra pounds you might weigh in a year without the exercise.
   
2. Common sense says that when you take up a new form of exercise, you burn more than the charts say. You're not used to it; your whole body is struggling to do the new thing; you're moving inefficiently in a hundred subtle ways. And in addition, you may be kick-starting your general metabolism to run a little faster.
   

I will be posting sporadically for awhile. Please check out my blogroll links!

Just an ordinary bathroom scale:

I've been programming computers that an indirect customer buys from a nearby vendor. Recently the vendor sent a maintenance guy here with a bathroom scale. I escorted him to our lab, where he placed one of their machines on the scale and weighed it. Then he drove back to his office. I've never seen a computer weighed on a bathroom scale before! I was puzzled. After all, they could have asked me (or anyone who works here) to bring a scale from home, weigh the computer, and email the results.

It turns out that another prospective customer had asked the vendor, “How much does that model computer of yours weigh, anyhow?” Sending someone to our place with a scale was the easiest way for the vendor to answer the question. The vendor couldn't ask us to help because it was HIS problem, not ours. It's real interesting that the vendor didn't have the answer in the first place...

Quotes collected by somebody named Alex:

Somebody named Alex made a page of quotes, mostly quoting people we've never heard of. Lots of nice offbeat stuff there, somewhat geeky; such as:

• "You cannnot prove anything by example. You cannot prove anything by example. Let me repeat myself a third time: nothing can be proven by example. Let me give you an example..."
  
• "The only way to do numerical analysis is to get a calculator and sit in a corner."
  
• "Particles are what particle detectors detect."
  
• "How can you be hungry? I just ate an hour ago!"
  

Hollywood Death Spiral:

A "hollywood economist" article in Slate discusses real financial figures driving the current movie business. The writer has seen financial figures normally kept secret by the big studios that in some ways contradict "common knowledge" about the industry. The whole article is worth a read. But I'd like to repeat its most stunning point:
In 1948, the studios earned all their revenue from the movie-going audience.
In 1980, the studios earned 55% of their revenue from the movie-going audience.
Today, the studios earn 15% all their revenue from the movie-going audience. Almost all the rest is from DVDs. Obviously, the delay between a movie release in the theaters and on DVD will shorten, hence the author's use of the phrase, "Hollywood Death Spiral."

Quality Learning Time: During an Emergency!

During my radio broadcasts I read ads and public announcements aloud. The syntax and grammar tend to be poor. That's more important than you might think, because bad grammar and punctuation trap the announcer into making mistakes on the air. Occasionally there are bigger errors, like telling the listeners to come to 95 Smith Road for an event in an unnamed town. Most of these ads come from agents who write them for the companies that are actually advertising. I suspect the writers haven't majored in English, but I wish they would; I'd be happy if they majored in proofreading.

I corrected five run-on sentences in an ad I read today, but that's not important now. The ad contained this fascinating sentence:
"Remember, even in emergencies, young children can learn to dial 911."

As I see it, the writer envisioned a scenario like this. The house is on fire and a beam has fallen on my arm pinning me to the floor, so I call out, "Little Jimmy, at last it's time to teach you how to use the telephone!"

Or perhaps the writer meant, "Remember, a young child can learn to dial 911 and be prepared for emergencies."

[Please read aloud now:] Maybe I'm nitpicking and in August you can check out our website for further instructions but all, that trappy writing is getting to me and remember that only you can start forest fires. By a concerned company on the air.

I don’t like Mahler, he Bangs!

Around 1960 Gustav Mahler became more widely accepted as a great composer, but most people still didn’t like his music because it was too loud, too noisy. They would say, "I don’t like Mahler, he bangs!"

Well.

Music: the world: even classical music: it's all gotten a LOT louder since then. Hardly anyone complains that Mahler’s too loud today.


In the world of classical music, Bill McGlaughlin has a wonderful new daily program, “Exploring Music”. If you listen to a station that plays (or used to play) Carl Haas’s program, they may now have McGlaughlin. His comments on the music are interesting and informative, and he makes good choices about what to play. See this page at WFMT for more details.


Bonus link: the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results are out for 2005, and there are some fine winners.

Thank goodness we don’t live in a police state!

A woman tried to board a plane at Logan International Airport in February with $46,950 stuffed inside her bra. That’s a bit peculiar, but if you decide to carry a lot of cash, you have to decide the best way to keep it safe. And it IS legal to carry this amount of undeclared cash on a domestic flight. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent decided that this was drug money and he took it away from her. Now she’s guilty unless she can prove her innocence to get it back. You can read about it here. The agent figured out, all by himself, that she didn't need cosmetic surgery. Perhaps there’s yet more to the story.

Steamed Everything:

On my last business trip I intended to buy a plastic microwave-safe bowl at the adjacent supermarket, to microwave vegetables. I found some nice broccoli, but the only microwave-safe containers were too large to fit in my motel appliance. But I had an idea.


Currently I cook an ear of corn by wrapping it, unhusked, in hot wet paper toweling and microwaving it. The corn steams in its package and the result is delicious. Why not do other vegetables the same way?
I wrapped the broccoli in wet paper toweling, zapped it, and enjoyed the result. I suspect a number of other vegetables (and combinations of vegetables) will repay the same treatment.

Lots of recent comment about "RealID":

The term "RealID" refers to a remarkable bit of legislation that might force every state to spend over $100 million (estimates are vague right now) to develop a much more inconvenient way of issuing driver's licenses. There's been a flurry of recent comment on realID following a recent governor's conference. If you're interested, search for RealID or "Real ID", or check out my other blog.

I packed much against my will:

The plan last week was for me to take a business trip from Tuesday through Sunday. I would be leaving from work for the airport about noon, so I started to pack Monday night at ten. Packing would be complex, owing to the duration of the trip and various special requirements.
It was sooo haaard to start packing. I knew that my software was just not ready. It seemed likely we would decide in the morning to postpone one day. How do you pack for a trip you don't expect to take yet? I hate to pack anyway. I kept telling myself, you don't have to do this, you can do it tomorrow. But by midnight I was ready to go.
And we did postpone for one day. And my cellphone just about ran out of juice when I most needed it, because I had packed my rechargers a day too soon.

Pilotcentric view of an Airport:

I view an airport as a sort of AD&D dungeon, with helpful vehicles that can carry you around instead of monsters. Getting from one useful place to another means moving through long corridors while being careful to take all the correct turns and not get lost. So I had a minor culture shock when I asked a pilot (who was buying coffee) how to get to my gate.
He pointed out a big glass window at a cluster of planes near another building. "That's where your gate is," he said. "To get there you'll need to walk up that way and around."
Of course!

People in High Places:

I recently took a relatively exciting business trip, but that's not important now. The most memorable part of my trip was a story my limo driver told me. He explained that he's a methodical person. Coming out of school he decided that the way to make a life for himself was to spend twenty years in the military. He enlisted in the army. After seven years when he tried to re-enlist, they told him he was a trouble-maker and prevented him. So he “went across the street” to enlist in the navy. They gave him his seniority and the same rank, and he stayed in until the Gulf war began in 1991, leaving the military after 22 years. I think things worked out pretty well for him; he and his wife own their house and have five grown children. He's been a limousine driver since 1991, he loves to drive, and occasionally he gets enormous tips.

But why did the army decide he was a trouble-maker? Here's the story:

Early during his army stint, he spent time in Germany and really liked it. About the time he married, he filled out a form in which he was asked to specify the three places he would really like the army to send him to. He listed three cities in Germany. Instead he was transferred to Kansas. When his wife was eight and a half months pregnant, his transfer to Germany came through. She would not be allowed to fly, and he would not leave her alone with hardly any friends in Kansas. So he applied for a delay of transfer.

His application was passed up to his base commander, who called him to his office. “You're in the army, Sergeant; you do what the army tells you to do. You're going to Germany now.” My driver tried to plead his case, but the commander said, “Leave my office.” He turned to leave. When he reached the door, he said, a light went on in his mind. He turned and said, “I know people in high places.” “Leave my office!” the commander repeated.

He told me that when he got back to his place, he called President Nixon. “I voted for him,” he said, “and my wife voted for him.” I figured it was time to ask him for help.” He reached the White House switchboard, where an operator convinced him to talk to one of General Westmoreland's assistants. The assistant told him he should just refuse to go. “I told him, I have a military mind. I know how the army works. Without something in writing, I could not just refuse.” The upshot of their conversation was that he hand-wrote a six page letter to the general. The assistant brought it to the general's attention. Later our hero called the assistant, who told him the general had read the entire letter and signed it. “And only one person can countermand his signature,” the assistant said.

A week later he was called back to his commander's office. “Who do you know in Washington?” the commander asked. He got his delay, and his family flew to Germany when his first son was six weeks old.

"XXXster Eggs"

The comany selling Grand Theft Auto is recovering from the embarrassment of finding that a programmer sneaked genuine porn onto the GTA DVDs. Game companies routinely try to check every Easter Egg the programmers slip in, but they don't catch them all, and this is one of the worst slip-ups. (In the original Donkey Kong arcade game, if, at the very last moment, having brought your hero to the top of the screen where you could step left to meet the heroine, you instead stepped to the right, she promptly took off her clothes. But there was not much detail to see in those good old days.)

The GTA porn was exposed by a "mod". Computer games get a lot of their sales from people who enjoy making mods or playing them, and in many cases companies will release the tools for modifying games right along with the game disks. People are wondering if game companies will react to this mess by making mods impossible, but that would be like shooting the messenger when you didn't like his message.

I don't think we've seen the last porn surreptitiously delivered with a game. I'd like to suggest the term "XXXster Egg" to refer to this sort of unwelcome surprise.

Picking up the pieces ...

I'm the kind of guy who likes to throw things across the room into wastebaskets, so when I changed a light bulb in the bathroom, the empty wastebasket beckoned. Not that I would do anything so crazy as try to score two points across the room; I just stood next to the basket and dropped the bulb into it.

The wastebasket was made of plastic. What could go wrong?

Well I'll tell you what could go wrong.

The bulb landed on the bottom of the basket, bounced gracefully up and over the side, and smashed to bits on the tile floor. That's what could go wrong.

Our Refrigerator Wasn't quite so infinite today.

Our very full fridge contained an enormous package of strawberries perched on a carton of 18 eggs. I took out the egg carton, used the last two eggs, threw the carton away, and tried to put the strawberries back in the fridge. They would not fit!
The problem: When perched on top of the eggs, the strawberries hovered over a number of other food containers. Now, when I tried to set them directly on a shelf, those other containers blocked the way. Eventually, reorganizing just about everything, I made room.
But If I'd had any sense, I would have put the empty egg carton back in the fridge and put the strawberries back on top of that carton.

The World's Shortest Personality Test:

Someone pointed me to The World's Shortest Personality Test. I picked the Saguaro Cactus picture and discovered that I am "funky, outdoorsy, and down to earth. ..." I was amused at being called outdoorsy from my fascination with Saguaros. Yes, I make a lot of effort to go see them. I'm fascinated by the hidden mathematics of the forms they assume. A few environmental nudges or perhaps finicky genes control their apparently arbitrary decisions to branch or not branch, where, when and how high. How I would love to write a computer program that convincingly models their shapes! It's pretty much irrelevant to me that they have to be outdoors.

For the next five or six days I expect to blog very little. More next week...

When the mosquitoes bite ...

When you're outside on these hot and steamy evenings, here's a way to avoid most of the mosquitoes: keep your entire body constantly in motion. Slowly sway, swivel, step, shrug, move everything! You'll quickly notice that far fewer of the critters managE to land on you.

Big Battles in the Potter Books:

I assume the new Harry Potter book, and the last one, will - as usual - have a big magical pitched battle near the end. These battles are what I like least about the books, because every bit of them seems arbtrary: who hits, who misses, whose spells and attacks have the greater power. In general, for me, a fantasy book beguiles by creating an enjoyable sense of consistency in a made-up world. Such consistency invites what J. R. R. Tolkien called "a willing suspension of disbelief." But my willing suspension fails during these Potter wizard battles.
The trouble however is that the Potter movies have GOT to have these battles, so they better be in the books too, or else the faithful readers will complain.

Playing between the keys ...

In the early 1990's, Chevrolet leased a Corolla design from Toyota and used it to build a Chevy Nova. I drove that car, and the only remarkable thing about it was that the radio had four preset buttons. That meant I could quickly tune four FM and four AM stations, a pretty small set.
Driving to work one day I accidentally pressed two buttons at once, my finger falling between them. The radio responded by tuning a frequency I was unfamiliar with. Later that day I tried to figure out what had happened and made an amazing discovery: I had SEVEN presets for each of AM and FM! Holding down any pair of contiguous buttons acted like a separate button. I happily made presets for my seven most favorite FM stations.

Now at that time I was managing a group of psychologists at a computer company who did Ergonomics to help plan new products, and wrote user documentation to try to explain to the customers what the developers had insisted on developing anyway. The psychologists and programmers had a rather contentious relationship. So I could just imagine the radio programmer talking to the person writing the car manual:
"I implemented this neat thing! There are only four buttons, but there are seven presets because you can press two buttons at once."
"What?"
"Like, you press buttons one and two together, that's a separate preset. It's terrific!"
"Okay I get it. I'm not going to write it up in the manual, it'll only confuse the car owners."
"But I ADDED VALUE!"
"Car owners like a car manual to be very simple. Trust me, most people who buy a Chevy Nova wouldn't understand anyway."

The Efficacy of Exposition:

While we all try to figure out why so many people write blogs, one possible explanation is: it might be good for us. For example, it's generally accepted that there's a large group of homemakers – mostly young, single parents – for whom email and blogs are the primary opportunity to be a thoughtful grownup and have serious discussions.

And here's another way blogging can be good – taking the time to express something carefully can help us to understand our own lives better. I'm thinking, for example, of an entry I wrote in this blog over a year ago. I was expressing an idea I'd had for awhile, but I gave it a clear description and a handy name, and now, when life's minutia start to drown me, I'm often able to relax and remind myself, “It's just a Pipeline.”

A wonderful day of chamber music and its backstory:

I was once invited to travel deep into Long Island for a day of playing Beethoven's Septet and Schubert's Octet. We spent a few hours rehearsing and then reading through each piece, with a nice break for lunch and schmoozing in between. Beethoven's Septet is a fine piece. When Schubert wrote his Octet, he intended to one-up Beethoven's Septet, and in fact he produced one of the most sublime accomplishments of classical music.

We were hosted by a violist and her family. Her father had called to ask me to play the bassoon parts, and he picked me up at the train station. We were all teenage performers or in our early twenties, decent amateurs, good well enough to immerse outselves in a wonderful musical experience.

Since I knew the violist - definitely a moody young woman - a little better than the other musicians, I discovered during the day what was going on. At that moment, she had an incredible crush on a french horn player. She wanted an opportunity to be near him, perhaps even, dare she dare it? To speak to him. Being frank with her father, she prevailed upon him to create this musicaliad to lure the horn player. And so there we were.

In fact she was tongue-tied in his presence. She did not sit particularly near him while we were playing, and when we were chatting she tended to absent herself rather than face him, to the annoyance and frustration of her parents, who had put a lot of effort into organizing, chauffering, providing the food, and so on.

That's how I got to play these two pieces in one day, a marvelous experience no matter how bizarrely it came about.