I'm a lasagna boy!

I've been living in a downtime world

This is the longest uptime the MBP has enjoyed in months:

(salim@bar\M-C\M-'a) ~ % uptime

10:58  up 11 days, 15:56, 6 users, load averages: 0.60 0.59 0.58

Sadly, the Finder decided to quit early for the long weekend. Reboot time.

rasorial

From the illustrious A-Word-A-Day mailing list, I learned rasorial, a rarely-used (a mere 742 occurrences in the Google index!) word meaning "Characteristically scratching the ground for food. Used of chickens and similar birds." From the Indo-European root rd-, whence also the thing I see scurrying along the quiet rails of the subway, and the thing I scrape across my face each morning.

rasorial (ruh-SOR-ee-uhl) adjective

Given to scratching the ground to look for food.

[From Latin radere (to scrape), ultimately from the Indo-European root
red- (to scrape or scratch) that's also the source of raze, razor, erase,
corrode, rascal, rat, and rodent.]

In which we go exploring

Illicit Ohio and The Vanishing Point explore abandoned or unexplored pieces of our massive urban infrastructure, in Cincinnati and Toronto respectively.. Many of the sites result from intrepid explorers lifting up manholes, sliding down drains, and inveigling themselves into unusual physical situations; the resulting photographs are dramatic and useful. A pragmatic example of why understanding this infrastructure proves useful comes via Pittsburgh:

Pittsburgh's water mains have a seven-year itch or something, as the same water main has ruptured twice now.

Plenty of exploration and publication about urban infrastructure concerns New York: photographer Stanley Greenberg published a volume, entitled Invisible New York, with beautiful images of substations, utility passages, and tunnels from around the city. From photographic evidence to anecdotal accounts, we arrive at people living in old rail tunnels; I discount these stories of "Mole People" as a sort of folklore, due to lack of substantiation: they seem more a romantic idea, or wishful thinking, that communities of social outcasts live on the physical and cultural fringe of New York City, underneath is massive parks and in its abandoned subway tunnels.

In which we go insane

From http://sane.nl/:

After the glorious early years, starting in '98, the SANE conferences over the years have shown a slow decrease in the number of attendees, approaching a level where organizing a next SANE conference might become more a financial challenge rather than a nice conference with the rock solid content that you were used to find at SANE.

The bad news is: there will not be a SANE 2008 conference. The SANE organizers will take some time off to analyze the possible causes of the decrease in interest for the SANE conferences and are looking for fresh opportunities and novel ways to reverse the negative spiral. If you think you can help us in any way, please don't hesitate to contact the SANE organization by email to:

To be honest, we'd love to be able to continue the successful series of SANE conferences. We're hoping and aiming to be back with a SANE event in 2009.

You can see me looking attentively (during Walter Belgers's Black Hat session) at the most recent SANE get-together.

In which we find something to do on Staten Island

Public transit innovation, Staten Island is thy name: priority signal lights, free ferry rides, and a fareless railway (as long as you leave the island after an hour or so).

In which the subway sizzles

A helpful explanation of why the subway is so damn hot.

This explains some of the difference between the cool tunnel air, pushed massively about when the long trains move, and the stale platform air, breezeless and humid.

In which we fight fires

The New York Times has a nice piece explaining the purpose of the Siamese outside many buildings in Manhattan: the standpipe system. "At many buildings, parts of the Siamese and the plates covering the opening where it goes through the facade are brass, and it appears to be a point of pride among building managers or maintenance workers to keep that brass polished to a high shine."
More photographs of and the law concerning standpipes.

enswell

An enswell is a piece of metal -- lately, "a screw-top steel jar packed with that is applied directly to the injurymore closely resemble an iron than a medical device.

Ghosts / Willow St. and Orange St.

View Larger Map

Ghosts is the second novella in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and the most accomplished. With a remarkable narrator and a deft plot (once you accept the premise, that is), Ghosts follows a pair of young men in late '40s Brooklyn as one, a private investigator, shadows the other from across Orange St in Brooklyn Heights. The history of the neighbourhood dances through the plot: Walt Whitman , Henry Ward Beecher (including an apt description of the statue commemorating his abolitionism), and the buildings themselves.

In which Crack is Wack!

Reading about Keith Haring's "Crack is Wack" mural led me to an article on protecting graffiti from graffiti, and to the current patent-holders of this mysterious formula, who mention nowt the natural ingredients.

I like graf in its many forms, and many others celebrate it. Why do some people deface murals and other public works of art?

How to stay clean while cycling

&A bicycle enthusiast and entrepreneur makes all-natural soap by pedalling: "The bicycle helps us to make larger batches of handmade soap while keeping our commitment to human scale eco-friendly production."

In which we look to the stars

I am never getting work done again: Google Sky, an interactive browser of celestial photography, plus a massive flat-panel display and a fast processor have been making my entertainment heavenly.

In which we riff on the old, familiar, and uncomfortable

The Nietszche Family Circus, The Perry Bible Fellowship, Dysfunctional Family Circus, the end of parody?, and, of course, Ivan Brunetti (no longer available online, alas).

City of Glass / Our Man in Havana

Two books about protagonists who step uncertainly into worlds of their own creation. Both become caught up in the horrible side-effects of their actions, just as time travellers invariably are.

Paul Auster's City of Glass has a few clumsy portions, including the jarring insertion of the author as a character and scapegoat — I feel as though I am missing a joke somewhere. Elements of the plot, aspects of the characters, and the ongoing indirection of stories-within-the-story and oratio obliqua serve as the hallmarks of Auster's style. A protagonist makes an abrupt decision to do something lifestyle-changing; characters are suddenly intimate, intellectually or physically, with each other; and at least one instance of a rediscovered but marginal manuscript crops up.

Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is masterful, with witty, clear dialogue and subtle scenes of action. His characters dance through the pages, sometimes literally.

In which our joy for jamón ibérico knows no reserve

One of the iconic sights in a Catalunyan bar is the haunch of pork, either suspended above the bar and being further smoked by the devout patrons, or on a special wood-and-steel rack. "Ham provides us with life", says one of the premiere producers of the reknowned Iberian ham. His 2006 Reserve effort, of which some 80 to 100 legs will be available next year, is all the rage in the circles of those wanting the pure and acorn-fed.

Plus ça change

Damon Schreiber has snapped a hypnotic series of photographs revisiting Toronto, thirty years after Shige Sakamoto captured the city during a weeklong visit. I don't know either of these people or their other work, but the juxtaposition of photographs is fascinating. My favourite: Elizabeth and College. Plus ça même chose.

In which we read a tale of two cities, or, Gimme Shelter

Both New York and San Francisco are updating their bus shelters. San Francisco had a design contest, and New York had a commercial firm install commercials. Both cities are struggling with next-bus notifications, whether by satellite for San Francisco, or the three-year-old proposal for real-time information by radio in New York (the only link I had for this is now stale -- !). I'm not holding my breath, but I do like the L-train arrival information.

St Mark's and Avenue A

On Sunday mornings, one can find really tasty local produce here. "Local" means from roughly a 90-mile radius, which includes parts of several states; the same radius in the Bay Area gets one out to the Central Valley, where something like 90% of America's fruit and vegetables (varieties or quantity, or both, I don't know) grow. Last week-end Anna and I picked up some ridiculously sweet tomatoes, still covered in flowers and suitably covered in grime. They have a subtly caramel taste, with lots of fantastic, earthy sweetness. A good accompaniment is Yo La Tengo's Fakebook, which happened to be playing while we made dinner this evening.
I must emphasize how awesomely tasty the tomatoes are. They were on a side-table at the produce stand — the one with the brash bushels of basil, not the demure bunches — and I had no idea what they were, so I asked one of the guys working at the stand. He responded by peeling one and offering it to me. I had never tasted anything like it.

Max Roach

Max Roach died today. Read Peter Keepnews's obituary in The New York Times.

In which we have a spade and an umbrella

Can you see the code in the tracks? The rain on the umbrella? The skeleton with a spade? (Props to Vesalius)

eremitical

"Of or pertaining to an eremite; hermitical; living in solitude." eremitical has a connotation of religion about the reclusivity.

In which we wish we could go on a bender

Metafilter led me to Simon Janson's homemade Bender Brewer. Hot damn! I recently watched a few Futurama episodes, for the first time since they initially aired, and was happily entertained.

(last image and reference stolen from first commenter on MeFi. I'm at a loss!)

In which we are ignoring the supercomputer in the room

My father sent along two articles on the Chudnovsky Mathematician from The New Yorker magazine: on the reconstruction of the Unicorn Tapestry at The Cloisters; and on the search for π with a home-made supercomputer. Richard Preston's articles are fun, lucid, and breath-taking: the sheer inventiveness of the science that the Mathematician (for they are an entity comprised of two individual bodies) tackles, and the delirious interaction with the physical world — a computer built of parts from Home Depot, tucked into a two-bedroom apartment — a discovery of the warp and weft of one of the world's most intricate tapestries — make the articles all the more delightful.

Blue Point and Smuttynose

An American Pale Ale, the Blue Point Summer Ale is a tasty, lightly malty beer that really went down easy. Too easily, so I picked up a hoppier but still summery Smuttynose Summer Weizen. The latter had some deliciousness that really suited the burger I ate along with it. Hurrah for barbecues!

In which we experience better living through typography

Joshua Yaffe has an intriguing article in the The New York Times Magazine about highway signs, typography, halation, and all sorts of exciting stuff.

In which we go back to the future

To file under "Recent outrages in American politics", we have North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry railing at the "naïve ... ridiculous" idea of others' suggesting that a bicycle might provide a solution to the fuel crisis. Never mind that the infernal combustion engine was itself developed in the 19th century, as was the bicycle he ridicules.

In which we litter by the billions

Great. Another plastic bag. Somewhere I have a photograph of a carrier bag fluttering high up on a tree growing from a crevice in The Siq.
Some numbers, since statistics ne'er lie: "There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre."

I read once that 1% of the pellets used to extrude the plastic "t-shirt" bags are lost in transit, and many wind up in the sewage system in San Pedro.

In which we make a bad request: 400.

If I have not made my admiration for Adam Koford's artwork clear: the guy is a genius.
And he uses aCreative Commons licence to distribute some of his work (like the set illustrating HTTP response codes).

In which we take this world by storm and we don't look back

This totally burly video is Nature in Action. This video is the reason that YouTube rocks. This video is absolutely enthralling. You know: "lions always hit the heights /
'cause to kill it's always been an easy way out"

In which we can't pump fast enough

Just stay home, commuters. So sayeth the MTA (whose web site be down).

update The New York Times has a revealing article on sewers, storms, and subways.

In which I'm on fire

As scientists identified the region of the brain responsible for fever, I had a rapidly-increasing reading on the thermometer.

“But in fact,” [Dr Clifford Saper] said, “they are part of an adaptive response, coordinated by the hypothalamus, to help you survive an infection.

“If you raise the body’s temperature a few degrees, white blood cells become more active; they actually fight harder. But most bacteria don’t grow as well.” For that reason, he said, fever can help the body quash bacterial infection.

Similarly, loss of appetite may help deprive bacteria of needed glucose. The aches and pains may make a sick person lie down and conserve energy.

In which even land-locked lovers yearn

Same type of bridge, different type of lock. The venerable Ponte Milvio now has official sanction and
a web site for the symbolic, age-old practice of locking one's love to the bridge.

In which I am unsuccessful at procuring books

All of the nearby branch libraries close on Sunday, so I went — as an expedient! — to the local outpost of a particularly noxious chain bookstore to pick up some reading material. I picked up an omnibus of Dorothy Sayers's stories (including her most famous creation, Lord Peter Wimsey; the redoubtable Montague Egg; and a handful of other previously-uncollected works) but was unhappy to later discover numerous errors. Some I noticed because I know the originals; some I noticed because they crept in as errors in transcription (in railway time-tables, for instance, or in an illustration involving a misspelling which a subsequent editor, probably a computer, corrected so as to make the illustration nonsensical); others happened in the translation from The Queen's to the American English, and are jarring but not outright wrong.

I also bought a paperback edition of Graham Greene's fantastic Our Man in Havana, which I have been aching to re-read, especially since I have learned that Carol Reed's excellent screen adaptation is not available on DVD in the United States (but is in Region 2: perhaps another reason to move to Spain?).

update I returned the book, realised that the book-seller did not ask why I was returning it, and borrowed a copy from the library in order to note the especially offensive passages. I will badger the US publisher, HaperPerennial.

Sic transit gloria mundi

Today I saw the mis-spelling "break" for "brake" in The New York Times and received an email from a company I have long respected, suggesting that I consider working there as a "Sr. Software Engineer or Principle Engineer". As I have principles, I will not consider it. &mdash I am saddened to see increasing and careless errors caused by homonyms (as I learned the term; today they are often referred to as homophones). I am pedantic about spelling and usage, but seeing two such prominent examples startled me.

A tale of two bridges

One bridge that traverses a forbidding boundary, and another bridge that joins two cities so close they are known as the Twin Cities.

About the latter, failed bridge, the National Bridge Inventory reports: "Superstructure Condition: Poor." and "Bridge Sufficiency Rating: 50%". And the Minnesota Department of Transportation says, "... this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. ... A key factor is that there are only four pylons holding up the arch. Any damage to any one pylon would be catastropic." Compare to the Silver Bridge across the Ohio, which failed spectacularly as a result of its single point of failure.

In which we investigate worn-out sayings

Another of the books I have long intended to write: a work on the etymology of phrases. Many of the hackneyed, trite, and worn-out formulae of speech come from a specific event. Some of the more recent, such as "Elvis has left the building" are well-documented catchphrases; others, such as "Getting on like a house on fire" are more obscure, and require much research.

Somewhere in the vast boxes of stuff I have several — not many! &mdash index cards with notations on the etymology of phrases; some cards derive from other reference works, some from my encounters with phrases. As more of our printed material becomes available electronically, searching for the first written occurrence of a phrase might be come an exercise in technology; however, many phrases made a subtle transition from oral to written, and identifying the actual origin might be much more difficult.