A Curious Little Blog

Sign of the day: "cafẽ." Yes, that's an e with a tilda. I didn't even know they had such a thing. I guess they couldn't find an acute accent, but there was a tilda just lying around? In my post on church music , I called organ music "grave." That works for most church music, but I also discovered that it can sound dangerously close to carnival music depending on the song. One should definitely consider that when choosing whether to accompany a hymn with the organ. I heard the following quotation from Obama on NPR tonight (this citation from Fox News : "If private insurers say that the market place provides the best quality healthcare, then why is it that the government is suddenly going to drive them out?" Obama said. He went on to say that government can't run anything efficiently, according to the health insurance companies, and "that's not logic" (quoting from memory here) to say that government will drive them out. W...

Here is an account of my experience trying to buy a watch battery at Target today (inner dialogue in italics): Sales clerk: "Can I help you?" Me: "I need to get this battery." Clerk: "I don't think we have that one." Me: You have all the watch battery types memorized? Clerk, after a pause of about 5 seconds to check in the cabinet: "No, we don't have that one. You can check in electronics." Me: "That's strange, you had it the last time I was here." Me: Which was only two weeks ago, but I don't want to admit that I was stupid and lost the battery I got then. Clerk: "Sorry, we don't have it." At about that time, an older clerk, whom I had seen during my previous visit, came over. I asked her, "You don't have this battery?" She and the other clerk looked in the cabinet and found it in about the same 5 seconds it took the first clerk to determine that they didn't have it the first ...

A group of animals announced today the formation of a new organization, Animals for People's Ethical Treatment (APET). A spokesbear read the following prepared statement: "We animals are grateful for everything PETA has done to demonstrate that there is no moral difference between humans and animals. Their efforts have finally begun to bear fruit in legal recognition. In 2004, Austria banned the use of wild animals in circuses and made it illegal to restrain dogs with chains. The Italian city of Reggio Emilia prohibited the live boiling of lobsters and required that humans guarantee all of their pets an equal share of food (which, regrettably, we often don't share with each other). Switzerland then passed sweeping legislation in support, not just of animal protection, but of animal dignity. Animals have not been this well protected since the Nazis took power. Those laws were merely the forerunners, however. The great victory in animal rights was the Spanish gov...

You would think that the creators of Bakugan could have done better, given all the previous collectible games -- Magic, Pokemon, Yugioh, and many others. Of course, Bakugan has been enormously successful so far, but most of that has to do with the core idea of monsters that open up from tiny balls. (One wonders if they were inspired by Pokemon and pokeballs.) I'm talking about the game of Bakugan, the actual (purported) purpose behind collecting the figures. The game is lousy. The whole principle is flawed, really. The idea of collectible card games is that you get cards that work well in combination, and build the ideal deck with them. This is totally irrelevant in Bakugan, because you never fight with more than one Bakugan at a time. Each monster is given a single power rating, the higher, the better; there is no subtlety in figuring out which monsters you would rather have. Monsters also have an "attribute" along the same lines as the other collectible games --...

I get bored easily, especially when I have to do something that occupies my hands but not my mind -- washing dishes, folding laundry, driving, and mowing the lawn are all common cases. Sometimes I just want to reflect, or even just vegetate, but usually I want some kind of input to keep my mind occupied. Therefore, it was a great boon to me when I discovered books on tape. Not only did it give me something to think about while performing manual tasks, it also gave me a chance to catch up on all the classics that I had shirked reading in college. Libraries usually have a good collection of classics, especially literature, so I got to read a lot of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and other famous novels. After 20 years, however, I'm starting to run out of material. There are plenty more books on tape, but they tend to be recent novels, mostly mysteries, that I don't care that much for. If I wanted to read the classics, there are plenty of places where I could download them for...

Some people must be way more interested in the Air France crash than I am. It makes the news every day. Two days ago, it was because they recovered the tail. Okay, that was a big section and had some bodies in it. Yesterday it was the vertical stabilizer. Is this exciting? I fully expect to read that they have recovered the right aileron any day now. They'll probably also find some luggage -- most of it belonging to people from another flight. Americans and French are noteworthy for their antipathies. The French view Americans as provincial and uncouth; Americans view the French as limp-wristed, quiche-eating pansies. Although Americans don't share France's negative view of themselves, I'll bet many Americans would admit that they're not as cultured as Europeans -- and they wouldn't care. It's not something we prize that much. We are more interested in being honest, brave, and direct than in pursuing high culture and art. I have to say that I sh...

Most cars these days come with a decent stereo, with at least a cd player and a radio; but not everyone drives a recent car. My current vehicle happens to be a pickup truck over 10 years old, so it only has a radio. I was disappointed when I first discovered that there was no input jack on the stereo, and I couldn't afford to put in a new one. Fortunately, I found a way around the problem that allows you to play cd's, audio cassettes, and even your iPod over your radio, without having to buy any expensive equipment. The secret is a little device that transmits sound from an audio device -- cd player, iPod, etc. -- to your radio. It's like having a radio station in your car. You simply plug it into the headphone jack of your audio player, turn it on, and tune your radio to the appropriate channel. The most popular of these devices is probably the iRiver , but there are plenty of competing brands. I have an iRock, similar to the one seen here (mine looks less flashy, ...

Concerning my post on cap and trade , I read in the "Economist" what the plans were for divvying up carbon credits: they were originally to be auctioned off. That at least makes sense and is fair to all parties. It still doesn't answer the problem of how to cope with industry growth, because I think everyone agrees that we will be expanding as we get more people. But the existing bill does not adopt this expedient: as I feared, the government will allocate most of the certificates for free, with only a small portion (around 15%, I believe) to be auctioned. Therefore, all the problems that I mentioned are likely to be real. Even an auction system, however, fails because it attempts to set a fixed amount of allowable emissions. Since the technology of clean emissions is not infinitely flexible -- even if we wanted to produce only clean energy and were willing to pay for it, it is doubtful if we could meet our current demands with it -- any hard cap is arbitrary. As ...

I have always been puzzled when people talk about "3 o'clock in the morning." Is that really morning, or is it night? I admit that the sections of the day -- morning, afternoon, evening, and night -- are not well defined. Only the distinction between morning and afternoon is marked clearly by the noon boundary. I draw the line between afternoon and evening at 5 p.m., but I doubt everyone does, and I'm sure I violate the distinction occasionally. Still, there is general agreement that 3 p.m. is not evening, and 7 p.m. is not afternoon. The difference between evening and night is even less clear. You might say that night begins when the sun goes down, although most people seem to use evening to mean the entire time between getting off from work and going to bed. Ten or eleven p.m. would seem to be a reasonable dividing point. When it comes to the division between night and morning, however, confusion dominates. When does the morning begin? For most people, it ...

So many things I don't understand...Can anyone explain Janis Joplin to me? I heard her singing on the radio yesterday, so I was inspired to listen to several more of her songs on YouTube. There were moments when she displayed a beautiful singing voice -- but mostly all I heard was screeching. It is common in rock music for singers to express more angst than beauty in their voice, but most of them either can't sing or don't have a nice voice to begin with. I like "The Who," for instance, and Roger Daltrey couldn't sing in a church choir, but he can sing loudly and gruffly with the best of them. Mick Jagger has one of the worst "singing" voices I have ever heard. I'm not excluding country singers, either: Waylon Jennings is terrible, and neither Hank Williams, Jr. nor Tim McGraw would win any prizes. And there are plenty of good singers in rock music: although I've never understood the adulation of the Beatles, at least I appreciate th...

My work computer refused to boot one day, complaining of a corrupt dll. I replaced the dll from two different sources, but it still wouldn't boot. I had to re-install Windows, which was already a pain, because it meant I'd have to re-install all the programs as well -- that, or figure out a way to save the registry. (This is not normally an issue in Linux, although occasionally problems do get to the point that you need a "clean install.") My boss suggested reformatting the hard drive, so I had to re-install everything. But that brought up a new issue: what about my files? I had quite a few programs that I had been working on. I hadn't checked in the source code into Subversion, and there were other files besides source code. I actually have two hard drives on my computer, so it would be trivial to copy the files off of the c: drive before I reformatted it. It would be trivial, that is, if only I could boot my computer. The Windows install cd gives an op...

I'm beginning to wonder about living in Chesapeake. I've liked it so far, but the newspaper now carries ominous stories about the arrival of hurricane season. How serious could it be, right? Serious enough that the government declared a sales tax holiday last week for people to buy batteries, canned goods, and other emergency items. I'm not too sure I want to live in a place that is so concerned about hurricanes that people regularly stock up on emergency supplies every summer. I heard " Taking Care of Business " on the radio yesterday. What a great song -- and I don't even mind that they repeat the refrain so frequently. I was inspired to look up the words, and, what do you know, the song isn't about working at all: it's about a guy who doesn't work, just lays around and plays the guitar. I wonder how many people know that? I certainly don't think Office Depot would use the song in their commercials if they thought it gave that impres...