Friday  25 Feb 2011           3 comments

I like February 25 because I'm reminded of February 25, 1976 which is when I read Bertrand Russell's essay Why I Am Not a Christian which had a huge effect on me.

There was a big photo of Bertrand Russell on the back wall of a classroom in my high school. I asked my math teacher who it was; he told me Russell was his grandfather--a lie, but one told with good intent. The teacher was wont to say strange things if he thought it might spur a student's attention, and in this case it worked. I looked Russell up in a library.

Saturday  19 Feb 2011           comment?

I have an infection in a finger that, although not way bad, isn't like anything I'd seen before and wasn't getting better. From a conversation in the doctor's office yesterday:

Tommy:	This one concerned me because it was unprecedented.
M.D.:	Hosni Mubarak being forced out is unprecedented. What you have is not.
Tommy:	I didn't mean in the annals of medicine. If you have HIV, it's exciting when you have some health problem that you never had before.
M.D.:	It's exciting even if you don't have HIV.

Happy nineteenth, everyone.

Tuesday  15 Feb 2011           4 comments

Some 32 years ago, I worked in a 30‑storey building in Manhattan. A co‑worker and I would leave the office by 4:36 in the afternoon, which always left enough time for the elevator, the walk, and the subway that got us to the station where we'd catch a 4:51 train‑‑except for one day when curiosity got the better of me, leading to the only conversation I've ever had over an elevator intercom:

Tommy:	We're in an elevator that stopped between floors.
guy:	Did you touch the camera?
Tommy:	Yeah.
guy:	It's booby-trapped.

Building staff rode up in an adjacent elevator, stopped it next to ours, opened hinged side panels in the two elevators, and had us step from one car to the other. We missed the 4:51 train.

Two points, neither earth-shaking:

• I'm struck by how detailed memories from youth can be
• something in me finds elevators strangely interesting.

Sunday  06 Feb 2011           comment?

I post this pic not just because I like the lathe (the tool and the word), but also to call your attention to a fine article about Maurice Franklin, who has worked at this location since 1933.

Saturday  05 Feb 2011           comment?

Last night I dreamt that I had triple-booked myself. I had told three different people that I'd meet them, at three different spots in San Francisco, at 10:00 in the morning. I realized my error and set out, on bicycle, to get to all three if possible.

Two of the three people are friends who I miss. One is alive. The other is not; he was the first of four people I knew who died of AIDS in a span of a few months in the mid-1990s. He died on Halloween; the next died on Christmas; the next died on Valentine's Day; the next died on his birthday.

Next time I dream about people I haven't seen in ages, I'll try not to triple-book.

Thursday  03 Feb 2011           2 comments

A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.     [from Wikipedia]

Analogous traps have appeared in phone books, dictionaries, encyclopedias--and now in search engines.

"Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it," said Google. In response yesterday, Microsoft said, "We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop." They go on to accuse Google of click fraud.

Simply put: Microsoft gathers information about (among other things) what search results people click on: "When you turn on Suggested Sites, your web browsing history is automatically and periodically sent to Microsoft..." [from an IE privacy statement]. Microsoft sees which of Google's results get clicked on, and uses that--along with many other pieces of information, to be sure--in formulating Bing's search results.

Yes, Google rigged their search engine and clicked on contrived search results in IE8. That allowed them to lay bare an aspect of Bing's behavior. Click fraud or experimental design?‑‑ you say tomato, I say tomahto. In any event, Google described how they made the experiment after noticing that some of Bing's results were paralleling Google's results in the wild.

The basic facts of the matter are plain enough. How big a deal it is depends on who you ask.