The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Pirates are all over the news this week. The Somali pirates who stole a ship full of Ukranian tanks are, I suspect, about to be unhappily reminded of what happens when you poke the sleeping bear.

However, these other Somali pirates are, I suspect, even less happy about their cargo:
“Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died.”
“The ship is owned and operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, or IRISL, a state-owned company run by the Iranian military. According to the US Treasury Department, the IRISL regularly falsifies shipping documents to hide the identity of end users, uses generic terms to describe shipments and operates under various covers to circumvent United Nations sanctions.
The ship set sail from Nanjing, China, at the end of July. According to its manifest, it was heading for Rotterdam where it would unload 42500 tons of iron ore and “industrial products” purchased by a German client.”

Hrm… ore and “industrial products” that make your hair fall out. Sounds like to me.

I’m glad you’re conflicted over the bailout legislation that failed yesterday. I’m conflicted, too. As a 26-year-old engineer, I know I’m not among the millions of Americans most at risk from a market crash. If I lose everything in my 401k, it really won’t be that bad compared to the losses that my 65-year-old colleague would experience. And I really do care about the retirement investments of all those Boomers that will really suffer if the market crashes.

That said, I still can’t fathom spending $700 billion of my and my fellow Americans’ tax revenues to finance the bailout of the financial industry. Yes, if we allow the big financial companies to fail it will hurt normal Americans who invested in the stock market—but there will be appropriate consequences for the CFOs and traders and slice-and-dice commodity managers who made all these bad financial decisions in the first place. In contrast, a bailout package hands all those investors a “get out of jail free” card for all that bad debt. If we’re bailing out all these banks, what example does that set for the homeowners just barely making their mortgage payments—or who aren’t making them? A bailout package says that we as a society don’t value thrift and caution in finance—if you make bad bets, the government will come bail you out. That’s not the kind of lesson we should be teaching investors, big or small.

The best way to prevent current and future disasters is to incentivize good behavior. Please make sure Congress does so, and makes Wall Street start setting a good example for Main Street.

Update @ 11:34 Apparently the “Write to Your Congressman” website is broken, so this didn’t actually get sent yet. I’ll try again after lunch, I guess.
Update @ 16:43 Still down. screencapture for posterity

I’ve been thinking about how to organize bookshelves in the new place, and I happened upon this picture on flickr:

Flickr user chotda's library, organized by color

This is brilliant–I wonder if I would have so many books of bright colors, or if my books would end up mostly blacks and browns. Maybe we’ll find out.

Plenty of images around the web show paintings of Jesus labeled Community Organizer. Some show the founding fathers labeled Community Organizers. Some show Aung San Suu Kyi. A few show Che Guevara. I’m not sure whose side those are on.

Every Sunday, the highest-ranking officer would cough loudly and say the letter ‘c’ for church, Zuckman writes. The prisoners would then say the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. They used diarrhea pills mixed with cigarette ash—or charcoal or dirt—to write lines of Scripture and share them, Zuckman reports.

“We wanted to actually just have a chance to do what we felt was a fundamental human right … and we got spiritual comfort from being able to worship together,” McCain said.

McCain’s fellow prisoners eventually made him informal chaplain. Zuckman writes:

His first lesson — he doesn’t like to call them sermons — recounted the biblical story of the man who asked Jesus whether he should pay taxes. Jesus replied, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.”

McCain’s point was that the prisoners should not pray for freedom, nor for harm to come to their captors.

“What I was trying to tell my fellow prisoners is that we were doing Caesar’s work when we got into prison, so we should ask for God’s help to do the right thing and for us to get out of prison if it be God’s will for us to do so,” McCain said. “Not everybody agreed with that.”

(From http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctpolitics/2008/08/mccain_raised_h.html citing http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-mccain-faithaug15,0,575244.story.)

My favorite farmstand, Verril Farm (in Concord, MA just off Rt 2) lost their building to a fire last Saturday:

However, the really nice people were still working hard selling pumpkins, corn, and lots of other produce with surprising cheerfulness from a temporary stand:

They still have veggies and scones and other baked goods, and are grateful for people who come by.
I’m disappointed that I couldn’t get one of their awesome sandwiches or some coffee, but my chocolate-chip-cherry scone was very good, and I was glad I stopped.

Consumer Affairs, not the folks who publish Consumer Reports, just published a great article on Pyrex, borosilicate, and soda-lime. It touches on more of the details of tempering than the other popular treatments I’ve seen.

I love my Bodum borosilicate coffee cups. Now I just need a place that’ll sell me borosilicate cookware.

Dixon's Aerial pencil, with text in a font described by H&FJ as "open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts"

Wordsplosion! had a link to Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog entry about grawlix, which was right next to an entry about the cool typefaces used on pencils. Here’s another one from http://www.brandnamepencils.com/ :

Pencil with reverse leading quotes!

Somehow, my current writing implements just aren’t as beautiful to look at. I wish I worked in a fashion that made pencil a reasonable alternative. I even do my crosswords in pen.

On the other hand, though, I do have a lovely new pen—a Pilot Extra Fine RazorPoint in purple to match my new iPod.

The Museum of Science announces that they have a (nearly) complete Triceratops. It will enter display in November.

Many of my papers are written in TeX. These typically use Computer Modern fonts. I want the diagrams to fit well with the running text, so I should use the same font for both. Few fonts other than CM have the right sort of math symbols. The math in these papers must be in CM, so the running text should be in CM, so the diagrams must be in CM. For diagrams created with MetaPost, that’s no problem. About half of my diagrams are created with OmniGraffle.

I’ve just found that an acceptable variant of the CM fonts is available in OpenType (a successor standard to TrueType). Now I can set the diagrams in the same font as the main text. It looks perfect.

Several talks by Prof. Don Knuth are now available for easy viewing. I’m particularly pleased to watch the last, Fun With Binary Decision Diagrams.