mattm

The body exhibits that seem to be all over now came up in conversation at Thanksgiving dinner last night. My uncle claimed that the bodies at "BODIES... The Exhibition" in Seattle were obtained in a shady manner and that it shouldn't be supported. He recommending going to see "Body Worlds 3" in Vancouver instead. A bit of reading tonight confirmed that this is indeed the case. While "Body Worlds" may not be getting all of their body parts from donation, at least they aren't using whole unclaimed cadivers from China.

As a side note, Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of the preserving process (called plastination) employed in these exhibits and the person behind "Body Worlds", is totally a mad scientist, as can be seen in his interview with the times and his short mini series on channel 4 in the UK. He apparently has offered to pay the worlds tallest man a one-time payment and a life-long pension if he agreed to have his body plastinated after death, he danced while costumed as a plastinate in Berlin's Love Parade, and, in 2002, he performed the first public autopsy in the UK in the last 170 years.

A birthday present from my brother. I need to figure out how to explain this to people who don't know me. It was hard enough explaining it to my parents.

Challenges (a.k.a. prizes) seem like a great idea to me. If you have a problem but have no idea how to solve it yourself, you get some money together, do some PR and wait for entries to come in. The money part doesn't even seem to be very important if you really nail the PR part. People naturally like to compete.


Some of my favorite challenges of the last few years include

• DARPA grand challenge
  
• Ansari X-Prize
  
• Netflix movie recommendation challenge
  
• Unbuntu bounties
  

I saw a book talk recently by Joseph Stiglitz. During the talk he mentioned using prizes as a way to eliminate drug patents. For example, all the countries of the world could pool their funds for a cure to AIDS and if one is found, the winning group is given the prize money and the drug goes into the public domain.

I'd like to see this idea taken a step farther and use it as a method for donating money. You have some trustworthy non-profit build a website which allows people to submit descriptions of world problems. Others can read the descriptions and donate money to a prize funds they deem important. What is nice about being a donor in this system is that you don’t need to figure out which specific non-profit you want to support, you instead just need to decide which of the worlds problems you want to see solved.

If enough money was raised in these prize funds, this could change the non-profit sector in some interesting way. For instance, if there were huge prizes for cures to diseases only found in Africa, drug companies may actually start doing research on these diseases. The biggest issue I can see is that donations in this system would not be tax deductible.

It is a developed country that enjoyed faster economic growth than the US over the past decade. Yet it also offers universal healthcare and other social welfare benefits that the US does not. Unemployment is similar to America’s, but without the glaring income disparities that characterize US growth. It is a country that seems to have achieved a sweet spot, combining the vigor of American capitalism with the humanity of European welfare, yet suffering the drawbacks of neither. And it manages this while keeping a consistent budget surplus. That country, rolling into its 16th year of uninterrupted growth, is...

Click for Answer

While watching "From the Earth to the Moon" tonight, I noticed Kennedy saying something during his famous "We choose to go to the moon" speech that I had never picked up before (in bold below).

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Source

What were these other things that Kennedy was referring to? Missions to Mars? A space station? It turns out he was referring to the statements he had just made previously.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
Source

Not quite as exciting as I thought but it is still a great speech. Thanks to Chuck in the comment section of this article for setting the record straight.

I just finished watching 'Why We Fight', a documentary made last year on history of war involving the US, focusing on Iraq. Perhaps I have been living under a rock but today was the first time I heard of the film despite the fact that it won Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize in 2005. I can't do the film justice in a short summary but I strongly urge you to take a look. This is what Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 should have been. Leave it to the BBC to get it right.

The overwhelming question in my mind right now is not "why we fight?" but "why do I still live in a country that operates this way?".

Update: I have had almost a week to process this film. I still think it is a very well done documentary, despite some of the user comments on IMDB. Is it biased? Perhaps. However, I think more than anything we need to start having a national dialog addressing some of the issues raised in this film.

I realized today that the lack of traditional media in our house could be very bad in an emergency. We lack both a TV and a radio, so something like the emergency alert system is useless. I discovered that a few companies make NOAA radios that act like fire alarms and start beeping if an alert is issued in your area. NOAA's site has details of their system but for some reason these radios are lacking from the recommended items for a survival kit on ready.org.

I am also in the process of building a survival kit. These bars are crazy: 3 days worth of food with a 5 year shelf life for $3.95.

This is a great idea. It would teach children many important values outside of the subject matter in question, including

• the need to always question the source of one's information


• how a community of people, each making small contributions, can achieve monumental results (like the worlds largest encyclopedia)

I've been playing around with yelp (a great source of fresh restaurant reviews for san francisco) over the weekend. While I was jumping between amazon's street level photos and google maps, I was reminded of a greasemonkey script I started to write awhile ago to merge the two. Since my javascript skills are weak and I really don't want to invest the time needed to change that, I went to the greasemonkey script page to add a script request. There, I was greeted instead by A9Gmap, which actually adds the amazon street level photo to the info bubble on maps.google.com. Badass. Additionally, I spotted GreaseMap, which uses the new google maps API to add maps to any page in which it detects an address.

Now I get embedded google maps while surfing yelp (example), however, there are no embedded amazon photos within the embedded google maps. If only A9Gmap and GreaseMap would merge...

I am sick of physical spam. At least 3/4 of all mail I receive is from credit card companies trying to give me a new card. What I never understood is why they didn't actually learn over time and stop sending me crap. I have not once responded to one of these. For instance here is a snippet from a recent credit report which lists every time capital one requested a credit background check:



Who knows how many times they actually sent me something. I randomly met someone who works at Captial One a few weeks back at a party. I pulled a Christophe "How can you sleep at night?" on him and he explained that he actually was working on systems that would send out more targeted mailings but it is very hard to convince the higher ups in the company because they only need a 0.4% reply rate to make money. 0.4%!?!? At first I though raising the bulk rate for mailings would help, but it appears that it is not a significant savings (24 cents instead of 37 cents). Any ideas?

I am about half way through Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating. My thoughts so far:

• Positive:
• Introduces you to new food from all over the world. Did you know honey can be made from rosemary blossoms? Have you ever tried a breakfast recipe with wild rice, butter and maple syrup?
• Gives very simple recipes that highlight the food. It is a lot more fun to start with good ingredients and let them do the work. Also, unless I am baking, I like to spend no more than 45 minutes in the kitchen. Almost all of the recipes fall into this category.
• Negative:
• Not very scientific. While "I'm just here for the food" and "Cookwise" take a scientific approach to things (form a hypothesis and then test with recipes or by seeing what the experts in the area do), he is more interested in just eating the type of rice that an Italian rice farmer eats with his family.
• Not an unbiased view of foods. He makes it pretty obvious what he does and doesn't like.

Reading cooking related materials on the weekends is quite enjoyable. It is so much different from what I do during the week and it gets me in the mood for cooking. Just last night I made tomato sauce from scratch served over pasta from Benedetto Cavalieris. Draeger's, being the awesome grocery that they are, carried more than 3 types of pasta from Benedetto Cavalieris.

Finally, I noticed that one of my favorite sources for resturant reviews in San Francisco has organized her blog posts so that you can browse the posts by city and cuisine type. She is very straight forward in her reviews, she knows her food well and she is quite funny to boot. I find myself laughing at almost every rant err review. Here is a good example:

If you are on the South Beach Diet, PLEASE do not got to Zuni and order the chicken.

A couple behind us the other night did so, and then proceeded to leave the ENTIRE Tuscan bread salad (with which the delectable bird is stuffed) on their plate. I mean, really, that's just stupidity right there. Anyone who has had the chicken knows that the bread salad is a reason in and of itself for ordering Clucky. The man in the couple also left all of the croutons from his Caesar salad. I really think they should be psychiatrically evaluated. Yes, eat what you like. But don't order something when you know that 50% of it is comprised of something you can't, or won't, eat. Not only does it make work for you (by having to pick around it), it's insanely wasteful.

Jon pretty much had to hold me down to prevent me from walking over and forcing them to eat it. EAT, BITCHES, EAT!

Her husband works at google. I am going to attempt to find out who she is and see if she can start an rss feed. It could be fun to go out to dinner with her sometime as well. I can't imagine what she is like in person.

It will be nice to have many of these restaurants a muni ride away...

We all hear about it. The earth is warmer and the percentage of greenhouse gases is higher than it has ever been ... and then you start to glaze over. I'm as guilty as the next person. However, something about this series in the new yoker caught my attention and I can't stop thinking about it. The author does a fine job balancing stories of people already encountering the effects directly, those in academia that have been researching the problem and just explaining the science behind the problem in basic terms.

One example of these basic explanations is her summary of the ice-albedo feedback. Snow a very good reflector and water is a very good absorber of light (with albedo measures of around 0.9 and 0.1 respectively). When the earth warms up, the snow and ice on top of the water melts which causes the earth to warm up and the cycle continues. This process is not easily reversible and because of the feedback, it grows rapidly over time.

I just noticed they have the entire series, including a Q&A with the author online without subscription: Part I, Part II, Part III, Q & A.

This is one of the nicest hacks I have seen in a long time.

Since starting at work in June, I have been regularly going to the gym in the morning. My routine consisted of some form of cardio (elliptical inside or running outside) and exercises that involved lifting my own body weight (pull ups, push ups, etc). However, I never had any formal training so I was always meaning to read about workout routines.

A few weeks ago, I finally set out on amazon to find a book that combined several different forms of exercise (weight training, yoga, palates, swiss ball exercises, etc), to help develop overall health. My goal is to get to the point where I can play tennis, soccer or ultimate on a whim, have a good time (not be out of breath and not injure anything), and not be sore the next day.

The best book I have been able to find is Core Performance. It has a cheesy cover that I have already removed and equally cheesy, self-help guide sort of statements sprinkled throughout the book. Also, he isn't very scientific in his explanations, preferring analogies to cars and rubber bands. However, it appears that he has a lot of experience training professional athletes with very good results.

Last week, I started by going through the movement prep section, which is like a combination of stretching while lightly exercising. I thought I was in reasonable shape but I was quite sore for a few days after. I am going to start on the workout routine in the back of the book once I return from Seattle.

Unless you have been living in a cave the past week, you probably heard about the SHA-1 attack that can find collisions in 2⁶⁹ calculations. Bruce Schneier has an excellent summary of the background of SHA-1 and what this recent finding really means to the world of security.

In one part of his article, he states:

On the software side, the main comparable is a 2⁶⁴ keysearch done by distributed.net that finished in 2002. One article put it this way: "Over the course of the competition, some 331,252 users participated by allowing their unused processor cycles to be used for key discovery. After 1,757 days (4.81 years), a participant in Japan discovered the winning key." Moore's Law means that today the calculation would have taken one quarter the time -- or have required one quarter the number of computers -- so today a 269 computation would take eight times as long, or require eight times the computers.

However, the figure that he uses (1,757 days) appears to be the number of days to find the key (which is random chance) not the number of days to exhaust the key space. The distributed.net stats page is quite horrid at explaining what is going on. Both the RC5-64 and RC5-64 (all) projects are marked as completed, though for the latter the graphs shows only 89% complete. What am I missing?

What would you do to prevent people in the next 10,000 years from visiting the WIPP facility, a site for nuclear waste disposal? How would your signs convey meaning without language? How would you prevent theft of markers? How would they wear over 10,000 years?

Two teams consisting of anthropologists, astronomers, archaeologists, environmental designers and material scientists were charged with this task by Sandia National Labs in 1993. The full report is over 350 pages in length, but the summary is quite readable.

I slept through my alarm yet again today. This always happens when I am home (in Washington) and the only thing I can attribute it to is the darkness. I am averaging 10 hours of sleep this week and yet I feel more tired than I did last summer (in California) where I was averaging 7. What is worse is that before I left California for break I was averaging more than 8 hours of sleep. I want that hour back.

I have read about seasonal affective disorder (SAD) before but a lot of the literature out there is a bunch of naturopathic junk. I was able to find via google scholar an abstract of a study done at the University of Washington. They compared bright light treatment and dawn simulation against a control and found that dawn simulation was an effective remission method for SAD. The questions they used to gauge remission showed positive correlation with periods of sunlight so the study seems somewhat well founded.

Now I need to figure out if I am willing to spend 100+ dollars on a glorified dimmer switch to test this out myself.

I finished lolita last weekend while I was in Bellingham for Thanksgiving. I enjoyed Nabokov's writing style quite a bit but I feel as though I was never able to stitch the entire story together into one meaningful thread. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Nabokov notes in his afterward:

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm."

On Evan and Daisy's advice, I read only the annotations for the french. I would recommend the same. However, I hope to reread lolita sometime in 2005, this time reading all of the annotations and spending more time enjoying the portions of "aesthetic bliss".

One of my favorite quotes:

"I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen."

So I finally broke down a opened a lj account. I foresee this being a landing place for thoughts on whatever I am reading but not much else. I still don't believe anything in my life besides what I read is interesting enough to record for others to see. Perhaps that will change in the future.