Hurricane spotting

It’s that time of year, of course, and the place to go for all your hurricane info needs is Jeff Masters’ blog at Weather Underground, now featuring Hanna, Ike and Josephine(!). Bookmark it, or better yet, use RSS to see the updates.

The National Hurricane Center is another good source.

Use my own interface to NWS Area Forecast Discussions to see forecast discussions from the point of view of the affected areas. At the moment, Hanna figures in the Wilmington NC forecast.

Synopsis. A hurricane watch is in effect for Georgetown… Horry… Brunswick… New Hanover and Pender Counties and for adjacent coastal waters from South Santee River to Surf City. Weak high pressure will persist across the Carolinas through today. Tropical cyclone Hanna will approach from the south and affect the area Friday into Saturday morning. Hanna will quickly depart late Saturday… with a trough of low pressure persisting across the Carolinas Sunday through Tuesday. The next cold front to affect the area will be the middle of next week.

Nazi TV

 

From Barista:

Here is a television schedule for a certain Tuesday, 28 March:

“2000: News
2030: Newsreel clips
2045: “Etiquette for those in Love”: Seasonal tips for those in love, or who want to be
2130-2200: “Spring Showers”: Performance by the White Ravens”

The program started with the words (as translated by some computer on the internet),

“Attention, attention! Paul Nipkow television. We welcome all ethnic comrades and Volksgenossinnen in the large Fernsehstuben Berlin” and ended with this: “This stopped the operation of the television Reich end its current image management program. Were you satisfied? If so, please tell all your friends. Gefiel you can not say it, please contact us. Write to the Fernsehbetrieb reach the end of the line, Berlin, home of broadcasting. For the evening: marching music. Goodbye at the next shipment. Heil Hitler!”

The place is Berlin, and the year is 1939.


…

But in fact the first mass, practical use of television did not occur in English at all – it was developed by the Nazis, who rushed to transmit the first regular broadcast before the BBC, who in turn had arguably already been gazumped by experiments in the US. They switched on for the first time in March 1935, to small 18 x 22cm screens set up in special “television parlours”, sometimes in pairs, run by the Post Office.

About ten years ago, archival footage was cut into a documentary, now available on the net. 


It is a strange experience to watch. Even without our hindsight, it does seem vaguely brutish. The nasty, snappy salute of the blonde hostess is creepy, while the gruesome interview with Robert Ley, the head of Strength Through Joy, just makes him seem stupid. Albert Speer is interviewed, pulling up in his fast open top Merc, and sitting casually at the wheel, the very image of a European playboy, unlike the busy technocrat we expect of the propaganda machine –

The film is full of instructional videos, about items like gardening for the Fatherland, keeping scrapts for pigs and a course on Nazi marriage for brides-to-be. The contempt and intrusion is palpable – the feeling that a small-minded elite was sculpting a vision of proper suburban life for citizens who are simultaneously little more than clay and also the conquerors of the world.

Via Danny Yee.

Of arms and the man I sing

One arm, anyway. I’m the man in question. This collection of hardware came out of my right shoulder yesterday. The plate is about 4 1/2″ long; the longest screw 1 3/4″ (the longer ones went into the ball of the joint).

I broke my right arm in early December 2006 (orchard ladder, tree limb, chainsaw, whoops). The plate needn’t have come out, but it was inhibiting my range of motion, and after procrastinating for a few months, I finally went under the knife and got it over with. An outpatient procedure, by the way, albeit under general anesthesia.

All told, the hardware weighs a couple of ounces. It does not trigger airport metal detectors; it’d make a nasty stiletto. 

RSS readers

Anyone reading an occasional blog like this one, or indeed doing any significant blog-reading, really ought to be using an RSS reader to do it. It’s a little hard to describe just how powerful a good RSS reader can be, but fortunately they’re mostly free, and you can find out painlessly on your own.

Mac users should download a copy of the excellent NetNewsWire (go ahead; I’ll wait for you to come back). Users of other platforms, including iPhone and Windows, have other choices. Here’s a starting point; I don’t have first-hand knowledge here.

Safari, Firefox and I suppose other browsers also have an RSS subscription feature. They work OK for very limited use, and they’re better than nothing. Look for “RSS” in your browser’s help.

The basic idea of RSS (in this context; it has other applications) is that your RSS reader checks a list of blogs or news feeds on your behalf and makes it easy to see what’s new, and easy to read new material when it shows up.

You won’t look back.

Hesperus is Phosphorus

The line is from Gottlob Frege, I gather, though I just now came across it while reading David Chalmers. It’s new to me, though my brief career in academic philosophy centered on Wittgenstein, an admirer of Herr Frege.

Hesperus and Phosphorus are the latinized forms of the Greek personifications of the Evening and Morning Stars, respectively. (Frege’s point was roughly that “Hesperus is Phosphorus” might convey information—the Morning and Evening Stars are in fact the same planet—or might be tautological—Venus is Venus.)

Hesperus is the Roman Vesper, evening (and so vespers). Phosphorus is “bearer of light” (a form of the chemical element phosphorus glows as it reacts with oxygen). The Roman Phosphorus is Lucifer. (And -fer, “bearer” or “bringer”, also shows up in aquifer, conifer, Christopher (St Christopher carried a disguised Christ across a river), and so on.)

And here’s Isaiah 14:12:

When the Lord has given you rest from your pain and turmoil and the hard service with which you were made to serve, you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon: How the oppressor has ceased! How his insolence has ceased! … How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon; I will ascend to the tops of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.” But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: “Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?”

Isaiah is talking about a Babylonian king, but the passage was later applied to Satan. I like the image of Lucifer, the Day Star, appearing as the brightest object in the pre-dawn sky, only to be eclipsed by the overwhelming brilliance of the Sun God.

The Band’s Visit

The Band's Visit
The Band's Visit

I do most of my movie watching via Netflix, tossing random titles into my queue as I come across intriguing reviews or recommendations. Since my queue is longish, compared to my viewing rate, by the time a movie shows up in my mailbox, I’ve generally forgotten what it’s about and why I picked it.

Every so often, I come across a small movie that exceeds my expectations (such as they are), and I suppose that’s one of my favorite movie-watching (or play-going, for that matter; see my Bach at Leipzig post from a few days ago) experiences.

All of which is by way of recommending The Band’s Visit. Here’s the Netflix summary:

When an Egyptian police brass band travels to Israel to play at the opening of an Arab arts center, they wind up abandoned and lost in a remote desert town in this charming cross-cultural comedy. Defying expectations, the tiny Israeli community embraces the musicians, and both the Egyptians and the locals learn a few things about one another — and themselves — in this witty winner of the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard prize.

As I look at the movie’s Netflix page, I realize that my choice must have been driven by reviews. Here’s Roger Ebert:

They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “The Band’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all.

Ebert suckers me into some lousy movies, but he’s right about this one. And here’s Ty Burr (Boston Globe):

The Israel of “The Band’s Visit” is one in which God has pushed the pause button. Set in a small, out-of-the-way desert town called Betah Tikva — a development that appears to have stopped developing from sheer inertia —Eran Kolirin’s debut film is about the comedy and tragedy of the things that separate people: borders, religions, languages, loneliness. It’s a small, profoundly satisfying movie that keeps echoing long after it’s over.

In a sort of cosmic joke, an Egyptian police band has arrived in Betah Tikva, its eight members uniformed in powder blue and utterly at sea. They’re supposed to be in Petah Tikva to play at the opening of a new Arab Cultural Center but they got on the wrong bus. There’s no cultural center in Betah Tikva. There’s no culture or center, either. There’s only an apartment high-rise, a cafe, a public phone, and locals who’ve long since given up trying. The appearance of Arabs bearing tubas and ouds is a welcome dash of the surreal.

Go watch it, and then come back and thank me.

Sucker bets, nontransitivity, and the Marquis de Condorcet

So, this came up yesterday as we were drinking a little bubbly before (or was it after?) a performance of All’s Well That Ends Well at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. It’s an apparent paradox that shows up in some kinds of voting methods as well. I say “apparent” because we’re merely fooled by our assumption that some non-transitive relationships are transitive.

What do we mean by a transitive relationship? Here’s and example. 5 is greater than 4; 4 is greater than 3; by transitivity, 5 is greater than 3.

Here’s the sucker-bet version of the problem in, I think, its simplest form. Suppose I have nine playing cards, A-9, ace low, and arrange them into three piles of three cards each. The game is that you pick a card from one pile, I pick one from a different pile, and high card wins. Our assumption of transitivity leads us to assume that there’s a “best pile”. For example, a pile with the 987 cards would always win. 

We can arrange the cards, though, so that no matter which pile you choose from, I can choose from a pile that gives me a 5/9 chance of winning. I won’t win every time, but in the long run I’ll clean up. Here are the piles:

A68  357  249

The A68 pile beats 357 five times out of nine; likewise 357 beats 249; and 249 beats A68!

(This particular example comes from The Math Factor; recommended.)

For the voting version of this “paradox”, let’s turn to Wikipedia.

The voting paradox (also known as Condorcet’s paradox or the paradox of voting) is a situation noted by the Marquis de Condorcet in the late 18th century, in which collective preferences can be cyclic (i.e. not transitive), even if the preferences of individual voters are not. This is paradoxical, because it means that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals. For example, suppose we have three candidates, A, B and C, and that there are three voters with preferences as follows (candidates being listed in decreasing order of preference):

Voter 1: A B C
Voter 2: B C A
Voter 3: C A B

If C is chosen as the winner, it can be argued that B should win instead, since two voters (1 and 2) prefer B to C and only one voter (3) prefers C to B. However, by the same argument A is preferred to B, and C is preferred to A, by a margin of two to one on each occasion. The requirement of majority rule then provides no clear winner.

Voting methods that use this kind of pairwise counting, sometimes called Condorcet methods, don’t always show these cycles, of course, but when they do the cycle must be broken in order to come up with a winner. In the example above, we have a strong tie; there’s no basis in the voter preferences to choose a winner, so we have to go beyond the ballots to pick the winner; drawing lots is one way. In most cases, though, there’s some other cycle-breaking method that gives us a winner based on some reasonable interpretation of voter preferences as shown by the ballots. Follow the Condorcet methods link to Wikipedia for examples.

Presidential polling

There are any number of polling sites around the net covering the presidential campaign. David Moore lists some of the more popular ones. Who’s David Moore?

David Moore, author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Reveals the Truth Behind the Polls, is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll.

Not in Moore’s list, but mentioned in comments, are two sites that are to my mind the most interesting, FiveThirtyEight.com, run by sabermetrician Nate Silver, and Sam Wang’s Princeton Meta-Analysis.

I won’t go into detail here; there’s plenty of information at the two sites. If you’re a poll-follower, though, check them both out. (There’s something of a rivalry between the two; Robert at Angry Bear has a starting point for the discussion.

This graphic is from the Princeton site.

Current distribution of electoral votes

Orwell’s Diaries

Starting today, George Orwell’s diaries start appearing as a blog, 70 years after they were written (you may recall a similar project some time back blogging the diaries of Samuel Pepys). By way of introduction:

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry— in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

Here’s the first entry, August 9, 1938.

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx1 interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs”2.

Notes by Peter Davison, from the Complete Works:

1The Orwells’ dog.

2It was an ancient belief that a poisonous snake injects its poison by means of a forked tongue and not, as is the case, through two fangs. So Shakespeare in Richard II, 3.20 – 22.

            Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder

            Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch

            Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies.
See also 11.8.38.

Via /.

Bach at Leipzig

Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig is in repertory at Shakespeare Santa Cruz; I saw the matinee performance on Thursday.

The NYT’s Charles Isherwood was not impressed in 2005.

Sitting through Mr. Moses’ reverent attempt to mimic the brainy irreverence of Tom Stoppard is like being forced to consume glass after glass of flat Champagne, with no hope of giddy inebriation in the offing. Inundated with arcana about religious and musical squabbles in 18th-century Germany, besieged by sophomoric jokes, you leave stuffed and queasy but sadly sober.

Two years later, the WaPo’s Celia Wren liked it a little better.

In Moses’s historical riff, six musicians gathered in Germany are competing for a prestigious job: organist for the church known as the Thomaskirche, an audition that really occurred. As war brews between German states and highwaymen go on the rampage, the keyboardists — all named either Georg or Johann — devise byzantine schemes to top each other.

With its wordplay, brainy allusions, bold swipes at history and virtuoso manipulation of artistic forms, “Bach at Leipzig,” astutely directed by Kasi Campbell, has a “look-Ma-no-hands” swagger that seems aimed at out-Stopparding Tom Stoppard.

The entire first act, for instance, adopts the intricate structure of a fugue, a musical form at which Bach excelled. The movements and confrontations of the rival musicians suggest a pattern of contrapuntal voices, from the initial spat between free-thinking Johann Friedrich Fasch (Karl Kippola) and his sour conservative enemy, Georg Balthasar Schott (Bruce Nelson), down to the late arrival of the insecure celebrity Johann Christoph Graupner (David Marks).

Well, I liked it a lot more. This is not Art Manke’s first shot at directing this play, and his experience shows. The cast and acting are terrific; Larry Paulsen’s Schott is especially wonderful. Go see Bach at Leipzig; you won’t regret it. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.

Pet dogs can ‘catch’ human yawns

From the BBC (among others):

Yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too.

Science News has it too:

Dogs watching a person yawn repeatedly will yawn themselves, says Atsushi Senju of Birkbeck, University ofLondon. Just as that big jaw-stretch spreads contagiously from person to person, it spreads from person to dog, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Biology Letters.

There’s a short video (click the photo).

access

More Overnight

Linda Ellerbee reminded me (via comments; don’t you love the net?) that the video piece I posted the other day was from the final Overnight show. I had forgotten that. I have a few more memories, helpfully augmented by Google and Wikipedia.

The music is Lou Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a minor hit for him, his last, in 1974. He was covering, of all people, Jeannette MacDonald, who sang it in the 1930 movie Monte Carlo. I was never a fan of Christie, but he was part of the soundtrack of growing up in the sixties.

Ellerbee’s co-host at the end was Bill Schechner, whom I knew (and by “knew” I mean “saw on TV”) from his work on KQED’s Newsroom, another news show that died before its time (though it lasted somewhat longer than Overnight). KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate, has long since joined the PBS wasteland in programming little but drivel. Odd how the trajectories of public television and radio have been so divergent.

In retrospect, Overnight reminds me of Charles Kuralt’s contemporary Sunday Morning. The obvious connection is the closing video, I suppose, but more than that the two shows shared a kind of humanely intelligent attitude toward us viewers.

And so it goes. Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

Time Machine works

…and I am here to testify.

My (MacBook Pro) disk drive got flaky a week ago, making odd noises and refusing to do its disk-drive things (like read the disk). Last Saturday I carted it down to the Apple Store, where they agreed that It Shouldn’t Do That, and also agreed to fix my crunchy trackpad button, a long-standing annoyance.

I picked it up on Tuesday, restored from my last Time Machine backup that evening, and by Wednesday I was back where I had started. Well, not quite, because I had stupidly turned off the backup of my iTunes library, so I had to do some extra work to restore it. Don’t Do That.

In the olden days, pre-Leopard, I’d have had a backup, but it would likely have been weeks out of date. Time Machine makes it painless to keep current. If you’re running Leopard, but not Time Machine, go buy an external drive (you’ll find suitable ones for less than $100) and get right with the backup gods.

(A feature request: what I’d really like to do with my iTunes library is to keep a current copy backed up, but let deleted files expire from the backup after so many days. I listen to a lot of audio books, ripped from CD, that take quite a bit of space. Once I’m done with them, I really don’t need a backup.)

The human understanding…

The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And although there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises…in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620 (via Drew Westen)

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan is our new Poet Laureate. Here’s her poem “The Niagara River”, from the eponymous collection.

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

Listen to Ryan reading it.

The Wiper is as cruel as death

CLAES OLDENBURG:
I go through the same preparations but now I tend to focus on the type of object that seems possible to construct. The Windshield Wiper for Grant Park is a more architectural shape, for example, than the Teddy Bear. This is also true of the Clothespin.

PAUL CARROLL:
As an example of the genesis of one monument, would you describe how the Windshield Wiper evolved?

OLDENBURG:
The Wiper was partly suggested by the tall tapering shape of the Hancock building. If you stand in Grant Park near the Buckingham Fountain where the Wiper is sited and look at the Hancock building, itʼs as if youʼre seeing one long rectangle in perspective, which is the effect the Wiper itself would have. Hereʼs an example of the coming together of choice of objects with a technology needed to realize it. Another source is: the Wiper defines the structure of Chicago because itʼs located on the Congress Expressway axis, which also happens to be the axis of Daniel Burnhamʼs symmetrical plan for the city. Look at a map of Chicago and youʼll see that the Wiper stands at the center: if you draw a compass line, it defines a semi-circular arc—the lake cuts off the circle.

CARROLL: But why a windshield wiper?

OLDENBURG:
Chicago is a city of the meeting of water and land—a whole circle of the compass would be half water and half land. A windshield wiper occupies a place where water and “dry land” meet. In Chicago, one is always looking at the wet lake from a dry spot. And there is Burnhamʼs concept of a facade, a window. Then thereʼs the sepulchral feeling I get about Chicago, perhaps because itʼs so perpendicular—like tombstones. Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it. I wanted a symbol of that: so the Grim Reaper became the Giant Wiper—a verbal play. The Wiper is as cruel as death because it comes down into the water where kids are playing. Much like the Bowling Balls careening along Park Avenue, the Wiper can kill kids if they donʼt learn how to get out of the way. Chicago seems to raise its children that way: everybodyʼs out to get rid of the other person in this terribly competitive city.

CARROLL:
What would you say to the argument of some city booster whoʼd claim that a monument of a windshield wiper hardly captures Chicago as powerful, vital, masculine builder—”city of the broad shoulders,” as Sandburg wrote? Or if the booster said: “Are you suggesting that we wipe or clean up the city, huh?”

OLDENBURG:
The objections would be a simple-minded explanation of what the Wiper is all about: my intentions are more poetic. For example, the Wiper also makes the sky tangible in that it treats the sky as if it were glass. Making the intangible tangible has always been one of my fascinations. But “wipe out” is slang for kill, isnʼt it? 

Via Public Address

Joy is waiting for me

Remember NBC News Overnight? They used to close out the show, as I recall, with a short video, I assume done by their staff. I had this one on tape for a long time, but it disappeared long since.

Watch it full-screen; the quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. I suppose it’s manipulative; I don’t care.

All that and Linda Ellerbee too.