Tim's Bloglet

Catfood for people...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:49:53 -0600

Catfood for people!

It's like pork pie in a handy spreadable form.

Attempting for a personal best in humorlessness,...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:43:48 -0600

Attempting for a personal best in humorlessness, I'm going to say that the color stereotyping of lolcats is a curious and somewhat creepy example of the mechanism of bigotry.
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Sometimes googling random unlikely phrases,...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:05:24 -0600

Sometimes googling random unlikely phrases, in this case, "potato noises", returns glorious results. Apparently the show was something of a failure.
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It's nearly 2pm...

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:49:12 -0600

It's nearly 2pm. I haven't had the energy to take my coat off yet.
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Neat Google Map layer with congressional...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:12:17 -0600

Neat Google Map layer with congressional districts.
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Could my neighbors in Cambridge, Somerville and...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:17:34 -0600

Could my neighbors in Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown email their congressman and tell him to stop being a twit? He's taking a position very close to Scott Brown: supporting healthcare reform in principle, but opposing it because there's not enough in it for Massachusetts.
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I went back through my budget spreadsheet...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:03:41 -0600

I went back through my budget spreadsheet and found that I bought the bicycle computer on 11/19/2005. That means I've been 1.27 miles a day! That's much higher than I was expecting. 4.6 feet per minute! That's faster than a garden snail! A garden snail could have been dashing about for the entire 4+ years, and still not kept up with me. (I've had the bicycle itself since October 4th 2003, say the blog archives)
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Just in time for my first day cycling to work this...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:43:32 -0600

Just in time for my first day cycling to work this year (and mile 2000 on my bike's odometer): google map cycling directions! Here's google's version of my morning commute. The impressive bit is the diddle at the beginning: that's the least steep route down the hill. Oddly, if I reverse the directions, it suggests a more direct route, that involves excess climbing. It's got it backwards, but I'm at least pleased that it's showing some interest in slope.

As for the controversial junction in the center of Arlington, it appears to be silently endorsing the 'ride on the crowded sidewalk' approach condemned by town law and the official bike path map, but widely adopted by weekend cyclists.
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Given the choice, I'd always rather have an upper...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:01:35 -0600

Given the choice, I'd always rather have an upper respiratory infection. You know where you are with a cold. You talk funny, and you're allowed to lie around and take antihistimines and sleep your life away. Today I just couldn't get going and ended up sleeping until 1pm. I am comfortable with the fact that I sometimes malinger, but I'd at least like to be sure one way or another.

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Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:55:47 -0600

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At this point, I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:31:58 -0600

At this point, I'm pretty sure Wikipedia is as good or better than any of the textbooks I used in school.
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This morning it was demonstrated empirically...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:11:18 -0600

This morning it was demonstrated empirically that I would rather listen to deceptive ads for Lipitor and Linkin Park than Oscar coverage.
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In less grumpy news, this weekend I ate the...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:17:53 -0600

In less grumpy news, this weekend I ate the 50 and 55 degree eggs. Halfway to Spring!
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The Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn't...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:59:01 -0600

The Fantastic Mr. Fox wasn't. I hereby renounce Wes Anderson and transfer my loyalties entirely to Owen Wilson, who co-wrote all his good movies. (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums)

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy moments of it, mostly Ash. It's that it couldn't be bothered to work. There was no craftsmanship at all. It was a fake cardboard movie, poorly assembled. At least Darjeeling Limited was photographs of real people and places. This interfered with the twee but it gave it a sliver of substance-like substance. This was more like a feature length weebl animation.
Also: Wes Anderson's Spiderman.
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I want to work somewhere that they give out...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:03:19 -0600

I want to work somewhere that they give out monthly "justified bitterness" awards to the employee who has put up with the most nonsense.
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I find the Salton Sea incredibly creepy...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:52:56 -0600

I find the Salton Sea incredibly creepy. Also the All-American* Canal, and the fact that the Colorado river never reaches the sea. To quote God, "All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again." Natural Endorheic basins are bad enough, but manmade ones are, are... unnatural.

*All-American here means 'carefully avoiding Mexico', making it the opposite of Pan-American.
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Is there a zippy, elegant phrase for a crooked...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:52:28 -0600

Is there a zippy, elegant phrase for a crooked politician of the pocket-lining kind? I can't put my finger on one.
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While I'm on the subject, at least 50% of...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:17:31 -0600

While I'm on the subject, at least 50% of the people who get on the radio and talk about the public option don't have the vaguest clue what it is. Many of them seem to think public option = subsidy, and so if the bill doesn't contain a public option, it doesn't include subsidies for the poor. The rest seem to think it means single payer.
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Tom Coburn is a twit...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:04:28 -0600

Tom Coburn is a twit. The Healthcare division of the Barons are all excited, because he's waving our studies, but the words coming out of his mouth are low-grade gibberish.

“If you look at what Malcolm Sparrow from Harvard says, he says 20 percent of the cost of federal government health care is fraud,” Coburn said. “That’s his number.

“If you look at Baron Baron, when they look at all of this, they say at least 15 percent of government-run health care is fraud.

“Well, when you look at the total amount of health care that’s government run, you know, you’re talking $150 billion a year.

“So tomorrow, if we got together and fixed fraud, we could cut health care 7.5 percent tomorrow for people in this country.”

Medicare fraud does not increase the cost of care or insurance in the private market. It increases the deficit, and eventually increases taxes and means there's less money floating around to expand healthcare. But abolishing all the Medicare fraud wouldn't cut the cost of health care for anyone. If anything it'd increase it, because the tightened rules on Medicare would increase cost shifting. Also, short of nuclear weapons, there is nothing senators could do tomorrow that would fix fraud. Their are useful things they could do, a good number of which are in the bill he's condemning. But Medicare fraud is not responsible for the failings of the private market. It's like blaming bank robbers for high gas prices, because some people use their debit cards at the pump. Pure apple sauce. If he had a brain, he could make an argument against single-payer or medicare buy-in along these lines, it wouldn't be a good one, but it would at least cohere, but those aren't on the table. But with the plan as it stands, or even if it included an unfunded public option (the only kind that was proposed) this is totally irrelevent. But as I say, corporately, we're very glad to see that all those ads in the WSJ have paid off.
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You can measure my work stress by the life...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:41:06 -0600

You can measure my work stress by the life expectancy of my hair ties.
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They have reached the final stage of...

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:51:19 -0600

They have reached the final stage of demolition: my companies brand is being removed from everything and replaced with what I will henceforth refer to as Baron Baron, since the founders of both companies were granted British peerages for being obscenely wealthy anglophiles.
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Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:47:45 -0600

We have removed the carpet from the stairs. It was coming loose constantly. It turned out this is because the tack strips underneath were all put in backwards. But anyway, carpet gone. The stairs are in good stape. The vertical bits, however, need painting, they're pretty scraped up and have lots of nail holes. The question is, what color should we paint it? SHould we stick with the brown? I quite like it on the trim, but it's a little overwhelming on the stairs. My instincts suggest a sort of celery green, or, if that isn't tacky enough, a slightly different shade of blue on each stair. But this is why I probably shouldn't be trusted with a paintbrush.
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I only just discovered that the Robert Bolt,...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:29:41 -0600

I only just discovered that the Robert Bolt, who wrote A Man For All Seasons also wrote the screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia. That makes rather a lot of sense, and gives me a list of other movies I want to see. I love that after writing it he managed to get imprisoned for refusing to sign something, but let himself be talked out of it.
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Devil's advocacy from A Man For All...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:42:38 -0600

Devil's advocacy from A Man For All Seasons. I adore this movie. And it gets to why I will never consider contrarian an epithet. It isn't possible in this world to be both principled and agreeable.

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modern cat-breeding does not select for sanity. ...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:33:14 -0600

modern cat-breeding does not select for sanity.

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Mickey Kaus is running against Barbara Boxer...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:43:23 -0600

Mickey Kaus is running against Barbara Boxer in the primary. Somebody should, certainly. Fascinatingly, Firedoglake and the like are still after him for being, um, absolutely right about John Edwards, because it shows he doesn't put blind partisan hackery above not electing slimebuckets, or something.
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I had an idea today, but it's already been done.

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:34:01 -0600

I had an idea today, but it's already been done.
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Back in high school, in order to get...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:57:39 -0600

Back in high school, in order to get books that were beyond the reach of the interlibrary loan system, my mother would abuse the enormous powers of the librarian to order books for me through the library. I remember going through the giant ISBN index, Books In Print. (they still sell it!) As a result, I have several books with laminated covers. It's odd to think that these were perfectly in-print books, that could not be otherwise obtained. I also remember making pilgrimages to Harrisburg when Border's first opened. I always used to have a hunger for books, because there always books that I couldn't get. Now I am satiated. Even hopelessly out of print texts like William Cowper are obtainable as reproductions.
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Yay...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:53:28 -0600

Yay! Seeing Apolo Ohno lose was my only actual rooting interest in these olympics. That he was a bad sport to boot is just gravy.
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Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:32:45 -0600

Sponge weighs 8 pounds. Atari weighs 12.
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