Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I've been accumulating a stack of URLs and an even larger stack of open browser windows (taking up valuable RAM) while not feeling well enough to really concentrate on anything. So now I'm digging out, a little.

• Of possible use to my SCAdian and Marklander friends: "Medieval Marketplace is an online trading venue that provides the service of connecting purchasers with sellers of goods related to Renaissance and Medieval re-enactment and re-creation." Not a whole lot there yet, but if it catches on, it might provide an alternative to waiting until Pennsic to pick up some hard-to-find item.
• Thanks to vvalkyri, a story from the New York Times about a lesson for police recruits in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Duct Tape Wallet "Made from Super Duct Tape (specifically engineered so that your wallet won't lift, peel, or get sticky)" I got extra bonus amusement value from seeing a friend of mine quoted at the bottom of the page.
• Rent-a-Negro.com, a reaction by an artist, to feeling like folks around her were treating her as some sort of cross-cultural emissary. "Supporting multiculturalism is an important part of building social clout. These days, it's on everyone's agenda. But how to start? Where do you find the people to diversify your life? What if you don't know any black people? You want to appear up to date, but just don't have the human resources. One public lunch with rent-a-negro and you'll be on your way to being seen as the most cutting edge member of your circle." Salon article about the site. Thanks to browngirl for the link, which she mentioned in her journal
• Tree That Gives Meat Instead Of Fruit (Weekly World News, 16 May). "'We take the genes from cattle that produce key proteins and splice them into the reproductive cells of grapefruit trees,' he says. 'When the seeds mature into trees, instead of producing ordinary citrus fruit, the pulp contains meat. You get the flavor, texture -- even the smell.'" The article is most amusing for its lumping together of vegetarians as though we've all got the same tastes and motives (gee, of course we're all pining for the meat we gave up, uh huh, sure) and the way it blithely ignores the different cell structure of plant and animal cells, but hey, it's been a long time since I've indulged in a peek at the WWN. (And for anyone unfamiliar with that publication, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. It's on Mars, and it leads to a volcano shaped like the face of Elvis.)
• I loved ST:TOS and I've been faithfully watching Enterprise (I kind of skimped on TNG and DS9), but I got a kick out of Happy Fun Pundit's Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek. And an even bigger giggle out of some of the followup comments.
• And then there are the Answering Machine Messages of the Star Trek Crew. "True warriors do not leave messages, but call back later. For it is a good day to dial."
• "The best way to think of the job of Release Engineer is to imagine a team of Mad Scientists, who are working together to build a better Monster. [...] The task of the Release Engineer is to put an entire Monster together, and try to shove it out the door to scare the townspeople." jducoeur weaves an entertaining metaphor. Go read the rest of it. cellio commented, "Wondeful! This is the best description of the release engineer's job that I have ever seen."
• Here's a traffic-signal I've never seen before, a U-turn light. Backtracking through the directories in the URL led me to this page which reveals its exact location (in Baltimore), so I'll have to drive around and look at it sometime.
• Adding an 18-cent coin to US currency would optimize change-making. Two people have sent me this URL and I've seen it cited elsewhere as well, so it seems to be a popular page. "In finding coin denominations that minimize the average cost of making change, Shallit assumed that every amount of change between 0 and 99 cents is equally likely. For the current four- denomination system, he found that, on average, a change- maker must return 4.70 coins with every transaction.
  He discovered two sets of four denominations that minimize the transaction cost. The combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 25 cents requires only 3.89 coins in change per transaction, as does the combination of 1 cent, 5 cents, 18 cents, and 29 cents." Adding a 32-cent coin and keeping the dime gives an even better result. It'd be interesting to verify whether all values between 0 and 99 cents are equally frequent in real-life transactions.
• Tiffany's Indie Music Reviews -- one-paragraph reviews of CDs by non-major-label bands at irregular intervals. (Supposedly one per month, but it's more sporadic than that.) Another place to learn about interesting music I can't afford to buy right now.
• This Ananova story about a ferret on a train left me wondering whether ferrets are supposed to pay full-fare or a reduced rate.
• Cracking smart-cards with a light bulb (Security Wire Digest, 19 May): "Using a light bulb to heat smart cards is part of a new attack that shows how physical errors in memory can be leveraged into a serious exploit."

theferrett wrote: "People who have severe social dysfunctions put you in a bind. You can either agree with their world view and sympathize with them, which reinforces their perception that whatever twisted, neurotic thing they're doing is right... Or you can tell them what they're doing wrong and become their enemy."

Hmm. Timing. A couple days ago I posted my little rant about how spam was destroying the usefulness of email as a tool. Just now I stumbled across a Utopia With Cheese item from yesterday, quoting an article in The Register about how "The Internet is dying" (yeah, yeah, I know, "Death of the net predicted, film at 11, old news before the Internet was the Internet, but bear with me -- they don't literally mean the whole net) because "for most people, many of whom are your friends and relatives [...] [the Internet] represents a perfect tragedy of the commons. Email is all but unusable because of spam." And: "Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements." (There's more to the Register article...)

The point the Register article reaches is, "What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that 'freedom' in itself is a justification for this information pollution. It's probably reached a tipping point: the signal to noise ratio is now too low." [Emphasis added by me.] Note that for it to be "universal", it does have to work effectively for people not sufficiently tech-savvy to install their own pop-up-stoppers (and just turning off JavaScript brings its own problems -- I'm writing more and more "you lost a reader because I can't navigate your site" letters to webmasters who rely on JavaScript for basic navigation), not just us folks who can write or download new tools in the arms race against spammers.

Personally, I'm mostly still at the bitching and whining stage more than the announcing-the-end stage, but I must say, I'm discouraged. The question is, is there anything we can do at this point?

... At least I hope it's all the excitement for the day.

I'd been taking care of some photography-related record-keeping, printing out next month's DayRunner pages, assembling the next chunk of link sausage, and checking email, and getting slower and slower at everything I was doing, so I figured it was time to crawl into bed. Then I heard a loud thumpy noise, loud voices, and lots of loud footsteps. I thought someone was running up the fire escape next door, so I went for my phone and a window. (Just as anniemal was calling me, so I hit "ignore" and made a mental note to call her back when the fuss was over.) Didn't see anyone but did hear voices; couldn't get an accurate direction on the voices, so I figured I'd poke my head out the back door, and if the voices still sounded like they were coming from the boarded-up house, I'd call 911. Grabbed a camera because there was a loaded one between me and the kitchen. Heard the helicopter go overhead while I walked through the dining room.

Opened the door, phone in hand, to find two uniformed cops, two or three plainclothes cops, and a guy being handcuffed, in the middle of my back yard.

After they hauled the guy off, they spent a while kicking at the weeds and trying to see the ground. I offered them my weed-cutter ("blade on a stick") if it'd help their search, for whatever the suspect had thrown/dropped, and they did swipe at an area before dropping the tool on the porch and leaving. I went out to see whether the gate (which had been locked) was damaged. To get there, I had to hack at the weeds covering the steps. The tongue of the latch is severely bent -- I can get it to sort of latch, but not securely, and it's too stiff to straighten by hand, so I'll take a hammer to it later.

On the way back in, I noticed that one of the weeds had a curious, bright purple pattern on its leaves. I looked closer and realized it was blood. The parts that were still red made such an interesting colour composition with the green, that I had to go get the camera again, and a macro lens, and shoot several frames. Is that morbid? The big round droplets that still had volume and shinyness were so pretty, despite the cultural-voice repeating, "Dude, that's blood, you're not supposed to think it's cool," in my skull. The way the surface tension molded a side of a drop to the curl of the edge of a leaf was cool. Too bad I didn't have any right in a bright sunbeam.

Now I need to try that "going to bed" trick again. May or may not show up at 3LF rehearsal tonight, depending on whether or not I sleep.

The "not right here" excitement in Baltimore this morning is a) a major chain-reaction accident involving a dump druck, a semi, and at least one car, closing three lanes of the beltway at Catonsville (three people taken to hospitals, two to shock/trauma, "none life threatening" according to the telly); and b) a bus full of school kids on their way from Martinsburg to DC for a field trip overturned on I-70 after the bus swerved to avoid a car that had swerved to avoid a gas can that had fallen off the back of a pickup truck (driver and one student treated and released; nobody else hurt; probably a whole lot of parents absolutely scared shitless when they first heard about it). They're talking about what to charge the driver of the pickup truck with if they find him.

Right. Sleep.

"I laughed, I cried, I fell down. It changed my life."

*Wow*