Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the 'conservative media' consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the 'mainstream press' is considered 'liberal' even as it 'leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right.'

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation."

-- Jamison Foser, "The media's Glenn Beck problem", 2009-10-16

I managed, after multiple tries, to get all the way to Herndon (previous attempts stymied by not feeling well enough to drive that far, and by traffic problems bad enough to make the trip not feasible at the hour I was on the road), and now the Mac boots again. *whew*.

Amazed at traffic that really, really looked like rush hour on I-95, the Capitol Beltway, I-66, and US-50, on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon. Near as I could figure, somebody must have extended the concept of virtual memory to virtual roadway capacity, and all those other cars were either from Friday or today, having overflowed their actual rush-hours and been swapped out to weekend-bandwidth.^[1][2] I'm not sure how the time-travel aspect of this is implemented, or whether other cities are doing this too; just that as a mostly off-peak driver I found being unexpectedly in rush-hour a bit startling.

Today, between muscle pain and headache, I'm not doing so well. But I've got the Mac back, and my Internet connection seems to have recovered from its flakiness last week, and I can hunker down in my bed and try not to move very much.

An LJ entry and subsequent comments that have a rewritten song lyric stuck in my brain:

Until porysski's comment, I was safe. But now it's stuck in my head too.

[ By way of metaquotes, which in turn I was reading thanks to silmaril]

I think there was some interesting stuff on this morning's (or last night's^[3]) Charlie Rose, but alas by the time I got around to trying to watch it, local rush hour had started, and I couldn't really hear the television. I'll try again later, after both my headache and traffic noise recede a bit.

And just so I remember it later, a phrase that came out of a telephone conversation with realinterrobang regarding so-called ergonomic features that aren't adjustable to fit different users: Procrustean ergonomics.

[1] If flextime were more broadly applied, it could be considered a less fanciful application of the virtualization of roadway carrying capacity: one of the trumpeted benefits of flextime when it was being talked about more, was that if enough people shifted their work schedules around, traffic load could be smoothed out and the horrendous peaks of rush hour would be smaller. (And yes, I'm aware of the mix of good and bad reasons flextime doesn't wind up being such a silver bullet.)

[2] While crawling along I-495 at about 20 MPH (about 30 KPH), I had some time to start wondering about the bandwidth of the Beltway. If you measure the capacity in people, then the bandwidth depends on, among other things, the packet size: if you fill the road with single-occupant SUVs you get a lower bandwidth than if each vehicle on the road is a standing-room-only cowded bus. Of course, speed matters as well, in that we can fit more pedestrians onto the road than people in vehicles, at the cost of delivering each person to hir destination much more slowly. When I got to the point of imagining all those pedestrians naked, to squeeze out all the space otherwise taken up by clothing and thus wedge several more people in, and concluded that that might cause an additional complication as additional people got made en route as a side effect, I finally decided I'd reached a point of silliness⁴.

[3] My local PBS station shows it at 09:00 and 12:30, so I think of it as a morning show, but I think the dates on the episodes in the archives and in the schedule of upcoming shows are for the night before the morning when I see it.

[4] Okay, it'd need to be a much longer road than that for gestation to take less time than the travel time, and feeding and watering all those people in transit would have to be worked out. And we'd need a model for estimating the odds that two fertile individuals attracted enough to each other (or bored enough) would wind up pressed against each other, to figure out the magnitude of this effect.