The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Earthrise from Kaguya

This is apparently not as high-resolution as Kaguya actually records, but it’s all that is released so far.
Man, is it beautiful.

Thanks to Emily at the Planetary Society Blog!

Edit: Apparently I forgot to post this. Weird. Here you go!

Apple’s online store claims a week or more of delay before they ship an iPhone—like they’re making phones in small batches, just to meet demand. None of their stores in Massachusetts have iPhones in stock, and don’t expect any soon. This could be a sign that demand is surging above production capacity… but it wasn’t like this a few months ago.

Perhaps there’ll be something new in June to go with the SDK. Almost makes me want to buy a WWDC ticket.

What a fun article:

iPod sales sales have slowed considerably. They were up only 8% in the quarter. to 10,644,000.

This use of statistics serves as a wonderful idiot detector. The idea seems to be that if any derivative of a function is negative at any time, the entire function will soon be zero. In other words, any function that grows more slowly than e^x is doomed. But, as I know I’ve seen somewhere, probably applied to the housing market:

Anyone who believes in continued exponential growth in a closed system does not understand the problem.

Document is my favorite album of music. This may be from its connections to my summer camp from the early 90s. This may be because it’s one of the first albums I owned, and I can’t hear Lightning Hopkins without remembering the smell of October air over the Charles. REM’s new album, Accelerate, feels like a Document from an alternate universe. I haven’t quite figured out why. The lyrics are different, and some of the songs are in different places—and there’s no equivalent to Oddfellows Local 151.

But I’d been pretty sure that this music wasn’t in the world, and couldn’t enter the world save through he year 1987. But here it is.

This year’s Passover Haggadah was pretty well received. The host said it was “polished,” and others commented that it “had nice flow.” I’m now comfortable making it generally available. The Mercurial repository is at http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/. You can probably check out a copy to look at with hg clone http://evenmere.org/hg/Haggadot/.

This year I experimented with direct representation of Hebrew. In the past I’ve used embedded graphics, but they never look quite right. Now I’ve found a good source of properly-spelled Hebrew like the following:

?מַה נִּשְּׁתַּנָה הַלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה מִכָּל הַלֵּילוֹת

I had a few complaints about the placement of vowel points under narrow characters, but nobody seemed to have actual trouble reading it. I borrowed and copied and learned from many sources in assembling this document. I hope others benefit from this document in the same way

This case will hold exactly $1,000,000 in $100 bills.

Just in case you ever need to carry around $1,000,000, and have $500 or $600 extra for the case.

Thanks to How Much is Inside? for a well-wasted lunchbreak.

I went shopping last night at 10:30. I was thrilled that my local supermarket was still open, because I really wanted a nice cup of black tea with milk before bedtime. (I had tea, but we’d been out of milk for a couple days and been too busy to go shopping.)

I got the milk, and a few other things that I walked past which looked good: spaghetti, apples, a frozen pot-pie for lunch today (Amy’s Kitchen is the best!) and some black tea to take to work, because my stash there had run out. They didn’t have my favorite tea, but they had a nice looking Twinings English Breakfast, and an Irish Breakfast. I took the English, and was pretty happy.

This afternoon, I pulled the tea out of my bag in the office and discovered, to my horror, that I actually bought DECAFFINATED English Breakfast tea. Woe! Misery! Weak tea!
It’s not actually terrible—it just tastes more like a second infusion than a first.

I already knew not to shop when hungry, or when craving sweets. Now I also know not to shop when sleepy…

My employer uses Lotus Sametime as our internal IM service. This is great—instant messaging is a great enabler for various low-bandwidth work conversations. Until today, I could also use it for occasional personal conversations over AIM—coordinating dinner plans with my husband, or saying hello to a former colleague who has left. Today, I got an email asking me to update to Sametime 7.5.1. Since it also said that the current version was going to stop working in a couple weeks, I downloaded it and upgraded. It’s fine—but the AIM functionality is disabled. IBM’s documentation says Sametime supports AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk, but it’s disabled by default. Therefore, I can’t tell whether this is a policy change on the part of my employer (possible) or poor configuration management

Either way, I’m annoyed. It would be one thing to have functionality removed (I went through that before, when the firewall started blocking SSH), but advertising an upgrade without mentioning that it removes a feature is poor practice.

This is the funniest thing I’ve read today. A space geek and a skeptic attended a conspiracy-theorist’s press conference, and wrote about it.

That’s not the funny part. (Though it is funny.)
The funny part is him talking about the hate-mail he got afterward from *other* conspiracy theorists.

Another writer speculated that because I referred to movies and videogames in my article, I must be under 40 years old. Well, you see, I used to refer to vaudeville stars and Victrola artists in all my writings, but then I realized that this did not make me, you know, groovy, as the Generation Y kids say these days. So I started adopting references to contemporary movies and video games to seem more “with it” and “hip,” by jiminy.

and

Some of the messages accused me of being pompous and assuming that I’m superior to them. To which my response is: I do feel superior… to them. I mean, there are lots of people I don’t feel superior to: my mom, Stephen Hawking, my parents’ dog (smart dog—she just knows stuff), and, well, a whole bunch of people. But if you believe that Nazis and Freemasons run the space program and have been covering up extraterrestrial structures on the Moon, or if you believe vastly complicated conspiracy theories that are based upon no evidence that would pass peer review by a panel of fifth-graders, then, yes, I have my doubts about your intelligence, or at least your reasoning abilities. And I wouldn’t trust you with my car keys.

Anyway, rather than me reposting large chunks of his article here, or sending them to a friend in IM while trying not to laugh out loud in my office and upset my officemate, y’all should just go read his article. Have fun, and don’t give the monkey your car keys.

I’d never read anything by Scott Sigler before—I found the link to the pre-release PDF of his new novel, Infected, from BoingBoing. However, I’m a sucker for epidemiology and techy thrillers, so I read the whole thing in PDF while on several very boring telecons.

Despite really enjoying the premise, the writing style, the humor(2) and the neat typography(1), I don’t think I’m going to buy the book, because I wouldn’t read it again. Why? Because it cut off without the whole story.
Maybe the author had a word limit, or a page count, or got bored, because the story wraps up with a whirlwind of action that lacks the exquisite technical, political and interpersonal detail of the early chapters. (Also, two page chapters? Weird.)

For example, the reader gets a few chapters from the PoV of the parasites, explaining in very enjoyably (and slightly creepy) technical detail how the infection begins and proceeds in its early stages. This part is awesome. Once the parasites are noticed by their host, however, we never hear from them directly—all the chapters are from the host’s perspective. This is actually still okay, and lends to the creepyness factor since the reader gets to suffer through the host’s lack of knowledge. When the uninfected humans get directly involved, though, the action kicks into high gear but all the plot threads are left dangling. The uninfected investigators find and stop the BigPlotGoal almost by accident, and they never discover the infection mechanism, source, life cycle, or purpose of the infection (which had all been goals of several of the PoV characters). One of the PoV characters is left in a hospital, maybe-or-maybe-not-still-infected. We never see any of the political fallout—in fact, the political character is ignored after about the halfway point. Practically everything is left in a “To Be Continued” state, which drives me crazy.

Anyway, its a good quick read, but be prepared to be disappointed by the ending.

(1)The font used for the parasites when they start communicating with their host is awesome—a little hard to read, crooked and varying sizes shades of grey across the page. It makes it a little difficult to understand, which accentuates the confusion that both the host and the parasites are feeling while they are communicating.

(2)As an example, the host who appears most as a PoV character is watching television at one point, trying to calm down and figure out what to do. He finds “Columbo”, which totally freaks the parasites out. After that, any time they are afraid of someone coming they are convinced it will be Columbo, coming to hurt them.