Friday  27 Jan 2012           1 comment

About me, Google's ads preferences manager says
Your demographics

We infer your age and gender based on the websites you've visited. You can remove or edit these at any time.

Age: 65+

Gender: Male
Well, they got the male part right.


Reminds me of a conversation from a couple months ago:
friend A:Is your bathroom scale accurate?
Tommy:Yes.
friend B:Never say yes when a woman asks if a scale is accurate.
Wednesday  25 Jan 2012           comment?

NYPD officer Owen Hopper is suing to get his job back. He was dismissed last year after a woman said he'd flashed her at the police station. Problem is, so Hopper says, he is circumcised and the woman said he was not. He says the hearing officer unjustly concluded on his own, i.e. without having heard testimony from an expert, "that an erect circumcised penis and erect uncircumcised penis will appear the same and could have had the complainant confused".

You can't make this stuff up.
Sunday  22 Jan 2012           1 comment

The gap in Google Street View coverage of the Whitestone Bridge (at the center of the pic to the right) is right about where I remember seeing a sign like this one:
where MTA is Metropolitan Transportation Authority
mind the gap
But maybe that's just coïncidence. I mean, there are other such signs in New York that Google didn't remove from Street View.

Does anyone here think that someone intent on blowing up a bridge is going to be deterred from taking pics of it because there's a sign saying it's prohibited?  [pause]  I didn't think so.

sign photo from Satan's Laundromat, used by permission under CC BY-NC 1.0 license
Friday  20 Jan 2012           1 comment

The question of whether homosexuality is a choice often comes up in discussions of gay rights. There is a consensus among mental health professionals; e.g., the American Psychological Association's view is that
most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.
I like that phrasing for how it respects and yet avoids the deeply complicated question of whether free will is illusory.

Every so often I hear the argument that homosexuality is obviously not a choice because no one would want to be gay. From a talk show host a few months ago:
I don’t think that anybody in this world wants to be gay considering all of the vilification that is brought upon someone who is gay. Why would you choose that?
The woman who said that is deemed supportive of gay people and as far as I know she wishes us well. But I find it presumptuous and unfair for a straight person to say the experience of being gay is that undesirable.

Would I change being gay if I could? The question is just about meaningless because sexuality is intertwined with and integral to all that is my personality, but I'll answer it anyway: no, I wouldn't.

I was a teenager in a place and time that was far less supportive of being gay than modern-day America is, and it took me a while to come to terms with my sexuality. I had a single, decisive turning point the first time I ever set foot in a gay bar, when I was struck by seeing a crowd of people plainly not unhappy about being who they were. I was at ease with being gay from that point forward.

While I am encouraged at how much progress has been made in US society toward understanding homosexuality, we still have a ways to go.
Monday  16 Jan 2012           comment?

My hat is totally off to Stephen Colbert.

First, a little background. In 2010, the US Supreme Court held (in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) that the First Amendment precludes limits on independent spending for political purposes by corporations and unions. In a lengthy dissent, Justice Stevens said
The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court's disposition of this case.
For better or worse, the current election season is deeply influenced by the Citizens United decision. Seven so-called super PACs--organizations with axes to grind but which are not affiliated with any candidate--are running commercials on TV stations in South Carolina in advance of the state's primary election. As usual, many of the ads are negative.

Enter comedian and political commentator Stephen Colbert, who formed a super PAC alternately called "Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow" or "The Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert Super PAC". With the ability to accept anonymous donations, Colbert likens his PAC to a campaign finance glory hole: "You stick your money in the hole, the other person accepts your donation, and because it's happening anonymously, no one feels dirty!"

Colbert's PAC produced a commercial that parodies attacks on Mitt Romney and is running it on TV stations in South Carolina. In 60 seconds it highlights the style of campaign ads, the consequences of the Citizens United decision, the influence of money on US politics, Republicans' longing for an anyone-but-Mitt-Romney, and more. It is superbly constructed and it is funny as hell.

I don't like to embed Flash video in my blog postings, but I've posted a still image below and you can watch the ad here.

I close with another quote from Justice Stevens' dissent in Citizens United:
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
Attack In B Minor For Strings
Sunday  15 Jan 2012           comment?

Language Log has not one, but two pieces on the bookseller Waterstone's changing their name to Waterstones and various reactions thereto. Waterstones, for their part, have a sense of humour about all this and posted the photo shown to the right.photographer unknown; if I find out I'll give credit
But as this is Tommyjournal and not link to Language Log journal, I would be remiss if I didn't post some Tommy-specific content. This I now do.

Caltrans has been of two minds as to whether Toms Place takes an apostrophe. (They didn't ask me.) Apostrophe-free sign to the right; apostrophe-laden signs here and here. The USGS, the USPS, and Wikipedia deem it to be apostropheless.
September 1997
Saturday  14 Jan 2012           comment?

I'll keep this short. Congress is considering laws, the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, which are thoroughly wrongheaded in their implementations, could limit Internet freedoms and cause technical problems, and should not be passed (as I see it).

Info on the proposed laws here and here.
Resources for contacting representatives here.
Friday  13 Jan 2012           comment?

Most lumber is, to some noticeable degree, not straight. Even wood that's been machined to be straight may hold internal tensions, and once sawn into narrower pieces will be straight no more. The organic patterns of grain that make wood beautiful are the same things that make it a challenge to work with. It's kind of like working with people.

Warped lumber wouldn't matter as much if human vision weren't so awfully good at detecting straightness (or the lack thereof). If that ability evolved before humans made many tools, I think that's wild--because outside of man-made objects there aren't a lot of straight-edged things.
Wednesday  11 Jan 2012           comment?

All men by nature desire to know and an indication of this is the love of the senses; for even, irrespective of their utility, are they loved for their own sakes, and pre-eminently above the rest, the sense of sight.
Thus wrote Aristotle. Could dogs write philosophy, they might go on about a different sense they love above the rest. Sometimes I'm not so sure that vision is my most delightful sense, and I'm not even a dog.

Way back when, my friend Rick asked why dogs go right for your crotch. (A dog had just done so.) Those who have had their nose in a few crotches know the answer, but Rick and I were kids and hadn't gotten to that yet.

I once stopped to say hi to a horse in my neighborhood and he (I'm guessing it was a he) put his nose in my crotch, then in my armpit. I thought to myself, this guy knows where the action is on the humans.

Mirrors are standard equipment in houses; no one questions the value of being able to look at oneself, at least if not done excessively.

Hanging out with a family after we'd done some climbing, I heard the mom ask her teenage son, "are you smelling yourself?" -- in a tone that didn't just say it was the wrong setting to be doing it, but rather that she didn't get why he would want to.

My own scent varies with what I eat, what medications I take, how much rest I get, and so on. Knowing what you smell like is part of being attuned to your condition. To me, it would be more strange to never smell oneself. But I am not totally without a sense of decorum and I can see abstaining while other people are around.

That's not to say that I approve of how screwed up our culture is with respect to smell. What other sense has such negative connotations in our language? To say someone has looks is a compliment, but to say they smell is to say you'd prefer that they didn't.

A friend and I passed by a bookstore in San Francisco; he asked if I wanted to go in; I said OK; he said, "I love the smell of bookstores." Hear, hear. I think that I shall never see / a Kindle that smells as nice as a tree.

Wood products may have some scent, but nothing like what's in the air when you saw. I cut up a bunch of cypress wood recently and the shop smelled awesome for days.

I'm with Aristotle: we love the senses for their own sake.
Thursday  05 Jan 2012           comment?

This latest T-cell count is about like the one from January 2001.
So the rough symmetry,
that I said I wouldn't mind to see continuing,
is continuing, roughly.
CD4 (a.k.a. T4) cells per µL
Wednesday  04 Jan 2012           comment?

As the fourth of last month was about math, today sounds like a good time for some more.

A cute approximation for e as an expression using digits 1 through 9:

       e ≈ (1 + 9-47*6)3285

that is,

       e ≈ (1 + 1 / x)x , where x = 3285.

How close an approximation? It's good for about 18457734525360901453873570 decimal digits. (source here)

In the same vein--a trick made the rounds in the 1970s, for pocket calculators that could take square roots but not transcendental functions: for an approximation of natural logarithm, take the square root ten times in a row, subtract 1, and multiply by 1023. The inverse operations in the opposite order will approximate ex.
Sunday  01 Jan 2012           comment?

Because at least one person would probably ask: except for the T, the letters in this year's logo are from this font. The letterforms have been tweaked--not just because I wanted to change the shapes a bit, but also because free fonts sometimes deviate from established digital font design practice (to put it charitably).

This is as good a time as any to say I'm grateful to have Inkscape available for making such tweaks, and FontForge for various font editing and conversion functions.

Happy New Year, everyone.
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