Tommyjournal  archive    November 2005

Tuesday  11.29.05

Call me a geek, but I think part of the appeal of electrical engineering is the appearance of the apparatus.

And call me a size queen, but is there anything as wild looking as large-scale high voltage equipment?

valve hall

In case you ever wondered what the valve hall of a high voltage DC converter station rated at about 3 billion watts (or, if you prefer, 4 million horsepower) looks like, now you know.



Wednesday  11.23.05

One of my favorite blurbs from the back cover of a book:
I looked through your whole book and was very interested to find that you have in all probability organized every possible succession of tones. This is an admirable feat of mental gymnastics. But as a composer, I must believe in inspiration rather than in mechanics.    Arnold Schoenberg
the book being, of course, Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns by Nicolas Slonimsky.

When a friend first told me about the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, it reminded me of the Thesaurus, and I almost said, "who's it by, Slonimsky?" (close; it's by Sloane)



Tuesday  11.22.05

review(review(review(review(book))))

In today's Language Log, Mark Liberman reviews Q_Pheevr's review of Gale Zoë Garnett's review of Lynne Truss' book Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door.

The book review, and its review, and its review's review all comment on "enjoy" as an imperative.

Garnett quotes Pierre Trudeau: "Why are these people commanding me to "enjoy"? Surely enjoyment is a personal choice, made voluntarily."

Q_Pheevr sees it differently:
Trudeau, who certainly knew a thing or two about rudeness, seems to have mistaken a benediction for a command simply because it was expressed in the imperative mood. But "Enjoy!" cannot reasonably be interpreted as a command, because enjoyment is not something one can decide to do, but rather an involuntary mental state. [...]
Dr. Liberman lets that pass:
Fair enough so far. [...]
At which point Tommy goes, whoa, is it fair enough to say that enjoyment is an involuntary mental state?

My earliest memory of considering this general topic goes back to when I was a little kid, and spilled a drink that my grandmother had given me. She didn't get upset, she didn't even frown, and that took me by surprise. What a concept: that you don't have to habitually get upset when things don't go the way you want.

Whether or not enjoyment (or the lack thereof) is voluntary could be debated ad nauseam; it's like asking whether or not there is free will. Rather than go off on a theoretical tangent, I'll try to be practical and note that the more you exercise your will, the stronger it gets.



Friday  11.18.05

U.S. Representative Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), from a news conference yesterday:
The big picture is that these Islamic insurgents want to destroy us. They don't like us. They don't like us because we're black, we're white, we're Christian, we're Jew, we're educated, we're free, we're not Islamic. We can never be Islamic because we were not born Islamic.
Maybe they don't like us because we're butt-stupid.



Tuesday  11.15.05

Triomune

Now,
I get to see how well my body tolerates this stuff,
and what benefit I get from it.

(red squiggle in pic is from playing with a laser pointer during scanning)



Sunday  11.13.05

When I was a teenager, I used to buy electronic parts from a local store that had lots of surplus parts at good prices. I started going there shortly after they'd opened their store, and I was on a first-name basis with the guys who worked there. They later expanded and moved several times. (A web search tells me that the business still exists, although I don't know if it's under the same ownership.)

Micro Switch One day, I brought a switch (SPST, momentary, normally closed) to the counter and was told it would cost 75¢. I knew I'd bought the same switch from him before for a quarter, and I asked why the price had changed. The guy told me there was no way the price had ever been 25¢.

I think he knew the price had been a quarter, and he knew that I knew he knew. For some reason, he just didn't want to explain that they were no longer giving the great deals that they used to in the early days. (Truth is, 75¢ was still a fair price for the switch.)

I was about 13 years old at the time. The experience took me by surprise; I hadn't known how common it was for businessmen to lie. And this particular technique--a transparent rewriting of history--was also new to me.

Why do I mention all this, you ask. I was reminded of it when I read about the White House's recent request that news services change their transcriptions of an October 31 press briefing. Whitehouse.gov has a transcript and video of the briefing; the part in dispute starts at about 5:30. Or listen to my MP3 excerpt of the portion in dispute.



Tuesday  11.08.05

Voted this morning. The person who checked me in asked how to spell my last name; I told her it would be the first on her list.

The ballot had the 8 California propositions and one local one. No one conducts polls in this county, so you have no advance info about how close any local race is. I like that.



Monday  11.07.05

"Wow! Brazil is big."  -George W. Bush, upon being shown a map of Brazil.



Sunday  11.06.05

PBO GPS receiver It's looking like one of my neighbors will be host to a GPS receiver like the one shown in the pic to the right. Whereas most GPS receivers are portable, this one will be mounted on steel legs sunk six feet into solid rock. Whereas most GPS receivers are only accurate to within a few meters, this receiver and its partners coöperate to measure distances with one millimeter accuracy. (That raised my eyebrow; see this page to see how it's done.)

The point of these installations is to measure movements of the earth's crust. It's a long story why my block has been selected as a receiver site. I chatted with an engineer who was in the area yesterday; his calling card not only gave his address, but also his latitude and longitude. "We're geeks," he said.

photo credit:  EarthScope



Thursday  11.03.05

Google Print (beta) is now available; it lets you search the text of thousands of books, using a familiar Google interface. You may need a Google account (worth having, in my opinion) to use it.

Scanned pages are returned as JPEG images, with your search keywords highlighted in yellow. Google renders a custom JPEG for each page returned; Tommy is impressed.

From the terms and conditions that Google Print wants publishers who participate in their service to read:
Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to ... disable "right-click" cut, copy and paste functions, and printing of Authorized Content; provided, however, that Google does not guarantee that its efforts to prevent or limit the actions stated above will in every instance be effective.
Translation: the techniques at Google's disposal aren't hard to subvert, but will thwart most casual attempts to save or print scanned image files.



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