Waving at You

Catching up

2007-12-04T15:12:00.000-05:00

I reviewed Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road for the CityPaper a few months ago. I also put together a Ten Track Mind for the Clog (CP's staff blog) and reviewed shows by Rilo Kiley and The Thermals for Critical Mass (CP's A&E blog). And I'm considering posting here more often.

Quotation marks and photographs

2007-12-03T21:27:00.001-05:00

One of my pictures was used in this post on The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks a few days ago, which is neat.

I started putting lots of pictures on Flickr in September. Nearly all of them are pictures of signs, and most fit into one of the following categories: signs with superfluous quotation marks, signs with questionable and/or inconsistent apostrophe usage, signs that would benefit from some copy editing, street signs on buildings, fadings signs painted on brick, bar signs, soda signs, and signs featuring something I've decided to call The Labor Apostrophe. These pictures have also been categorized by neighborhood. I really like signs, apparently.

Falling Man

2007-08-15T16:30:00.000-04:00

I reviewed Don DeLillo's new book Falling Man for the City Paper's Book Quarterly a little while back.

An IM transcript

2007-03-29T16:10:00.000-04:00

I saw this on Tom's blog and IM'd it to Pat. Here's what happened:

PAT: but
SCOOTER: yeah, some further digging makes the % claim seem very doubtful.
SCOOTER: the conclusion about spellign is silly, too.
(editor's note: yes, the misspelling of "spellign" above was deliberate, and yes, i am lame.)
PAT: "fi" does not have its first and last letters in order
PAT: there are two kinds of misspellings on the page, i can't tell why
SCOOTER: what are the two types?
PAT: type one is you basicall typos "fi yuo cna raed"
PAT: type two, deliberate typos scrambling all but first and last letters: taht the frsit and lsat ltteer
PAT: note that 3 letter words are not scrambled in the long passage
PAT: nor are two letter words
PAT: conclusion: line one is by the blogger; everything else is pasted from a smarter source
SCOOTER: good call.
SCOOTER: also, the author's stated rules don't allow words less than 4 characters long to be misspelled.
SCOOTER: first and last have to stay the same.
SCOOTER: so, 2 letter words stay.
SCOOTER: 3 letter words, the first and last have to stay put, which means the middle one stays put, too.
SCOOTER: and there's only one possible permutation of four letter words, 1-3-2-4.
PAT: this isn't quite clog-worthy, but good times
PAT: we could be like psych! but for blogs
SCOOTER: i really really enjoy that show.
PAT: it gre on me, but it turns out it's better than Monk
PAT: grew
SCOOTER: my strange mind was able to read that word without your correction, thank you very much.
PAT: Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can say taht.
SCOOTER: Thanks, Cambridge!
SCOOTER: also, shouldn't there be something in that blog post about filling in words based on the words that came before and the words that came after, not just on the letters in the given word?
SCOOTER: lots of english words that start and end in the same letter share the same middle parts, too, just in different order.
PAT: that's good point, context is unaccounted for.
SCOOTER: i apologize for sending such a dumb link.
PAT: heh. good times
SCOOTER: mind if i turn this into a post of my own?
PAT: sounds good.
SCOOTER: whirred.
SCOOTER: warning: i might edit the IM's a little.
SCOOTER: you know, just to make me look smart and make you look stupid.
PAT: that's fair

Miscellany

2007-02-27T19:41:00.000-05:00

I won the weekly Chinatown poker tournament on Monday. In case you're interested (I know B H won't be), we play no-limit Texas hold 'em, single elimination with no re-buys, and, last night, eleven players. I'm pretty happy about winning, mostly because I hadn't so much as finished in the money before last night in four or five tries.

I haven't posted for a while. Since my last post:

I have done stuff.
Things have happened.
I have had thoughts.

So, here are some items that fall into one or more of the above categories, presented in the popular and accessible Bulleted List form:

I participated in a soup cookoff, finishing third out of six (or was it seven?). My entry was a mushroom, carrot, and leek soup. The base was equal parts chicken and beef broth, both made from scratch right before making the soup. The carrots and leeks were julienned and the mushrooms (shiitake/white ratio = 4/1) were sliced very thinly, giving each spoonful a long, slender profile. Each bowl was garnished with a sprig of Italian parsley and a few shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano. Speaking of, I still have a chunk of the aforementioned cheese in my refrigerator and I don't know when or how I'm going to use it. Free to a good home -- let me know.
I grew a beard.
At the weekly Sunday hockey game, I played goalie two weeks in a row. I had no desire to play goal, but playing any non-goalie position would have been impossible. I tweaked a ligament in my foot the week before my first foray into the crease, leaving me unable to run (thanks for the diagnosis and treatment plan, Bethy). I've been able to play non-goalie for the last couple of weeks, which is good -- I like running around, and goalies don't get to run around much.
I went to a wedding in the Northeast with Ginneh. Pictures. She was the only person at the wedding I had met previously, which was odd, but I had a good time. Ginneh and I spent about 30 minutes playing tabletop Ms. Pac Man on a very slow machine.
Bars I've visited in February (I might be missing one (or more than one)): Dirty Frank's, Royal Tavern, Cantina Los Caballitos, South Philly Tap Room, The Dolphin, Vesuvio's (ugh, not my choice), North Bowl, The Abbaye, Tattooed Mom's, Tritone, Grace Tavern, Locust Bar, Jones.
I still haven't met the courtyard neighbor who moved into Lea's old place five months ago. Weird.
I picked up a couple of heart-shaped soft pretzels for Tom and delivered them to Emily on his behalf for Valentine's Day. Tom got me a bottle of high-end bourbon as a thank-you, which is much more than my meager efforts deserved. Much appreciated, though.
Milton Street entered the Philadelphia mayoral race. Let the comedy flow.
I signed on for another season of soccer, with most of last year's fall team returning.

OK, enough.

Another byline

2007-02-01T17:22:00.000-05:00

I wrote a review of the new Refrigerator album Bottles of Make Up for the current issue of the CityPaper.

Top Ten Albums of 2006

2007-01-04T18:01:00.000-05:00

My list of the top 10 albums released in 2006 as submitted to the CityPaper for their year-end poll:

1. The Hold Steady -- Boys and Girls in America
2. Neko Case -- Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
3. Art Brut -- Bang Bang Rock & Roll
4. Yo La Tengo -- I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
5. The Pernice Brothers -- Live a Little
6. The Thermals -- The Body The Blood The Machine
7. Beirut -- Gulag Orkestar
8. Cat Power -- The Greatest
9. Lilys -- Everything Wrong is Imaginary
10. TV on the Radio -- Return to Cookie Mountain

My picks can also be found here, between Ashlea Halpern's and Brian Howard's. Looking at my list now, I might move some things around, maybe even replace one of the albums entirely, but the ballots have already been submitted, the votes counted, and the results published, so I'll just leave well enough alone.

The Year in Letters

2006-12-22T15:08:00.000-05:00

Books I read in 2006:

Wrecking Crew, John Albert
Ball Four, Jim Bouton
JPod, Douglas Coupland
How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
The Dissident, Nell Freudenberger
Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, Ken Kalfus
Sarah, JT LeRoy
Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
Decoding the Universe, Charles Seife
The Trouble with Physics, Lee Smolin
A Man without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit

Just started:

The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud

Recently purchased, revisiting intermittently:

They Call Me Naughty Lola -- Personal Ads from the London Review of Books, edited by David Rose

Notable:

I wrote up Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe for the CityPaper's Favorite Books of 2006 feature, which should run in the 12/28/2006 issue.

Update:

Here's a link to the aforementioned writeup of Decoding the Universe.

ASIMO over heels

2006-12-11T17:35:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I wrote about an upcoming appearance by Honda's ASIMO robot for the CityPaper. Today, I saw this video of ASIMO falling down a set of stairs and laughed a little. I know I'll pay once the robot overlords take over, but I just couldn't help myself.

Nullity and Nonsense

2006-12-08T17:54:00.000-05:00

Pat found this article on the BBC site and passed it along to me. The story is about a professor of computer science at the University of Reading who thinks that by calling the result of dividing any number by zero "Nullity," he has solved a 1,200 year old math problem and fixed a programming problem that could kill people in one fell swoop. Addressing these claims in reverse order:

(A) Programmers have been using this solution for decades, and it was no big deal when it was developed in the first place -- they just called their solution "NaN" (Not a Number) instead of "Nullity."

(B) The professor's claim and the BBC's tone make it sound like naming "Nullity" is of a kind with building a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. With "Nullity," there was no problem to be solved, and a solution which simply renames an existing solution wouldn't be much of a breakthrough, anyway.

For a better explanation of the numerous problems with the BBC article in question, read this. And check out the comments on the original BBC article -- they go on and on, covering nearly every conceivable reaction: angry, funny, nasty, apologist, etc.

Pat didn't understand why dividing by zero was so problematic, so he IM'd me. I explained why (or tried to), and Pat turned our IM conversation into this post on the Clog.

The most notable part of the post, however, is in the setup preceding the IM transcript, where Pat introduces me as the Clog's Senior Math Nerd. My parents will be so proud.

String theory

2006-11-28T13:50:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I had my first CityPaper byline in about a year. I should write more. Anyway, here's the article. It's a review of two recent books, The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin and Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit, that criticize string theory. I guess I cover the string theory beat for the CityPaper, since I wrote this (it's the fifth one from the top) a few years ago, too.

Writing about books written by people with Ph.D.'s in math and/or physics can be a little intimidating when:

* they're writing about the things they know well
* your math education stopped shortly after advanced calculus and functional analysis

One of the author/scientists, Peter Woit, has a blog which conveniently sports the same name as his book. The site is pretty interesting and lively, although some of the posts and/or comments won't make sense to you unless you've had at least a few years in a doctoral program in physics somewhere, which rules me out. There's a page tracking all of the reviews of his book, including a link to mine.

Lastly, this guy left a thoughtful (and positive!) comment on my article. I owe him a response, although the prospect of entering into a dialogue on string theory with someone who knows way more about it than I do is, like writing the original review, a little intimidating.

I'm an uncle, twice over

2006-11-03T16:50:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I became an uncle for the second time shortly after becoming an uncle for the first time. My little brother and his wife had twins. I went down to see them last week. Amazing.

New digs, two times

2006-01-19T14:45:00.000-05:00

First, I signed a lease on a new apartment last night, effective date 2/1/2006. Second, I've been invited to contribute here by pals Wendy and Dave. I haven't written anything there yet, but I will eventually.

Maybe later

2005-12-08T12:29:00.000-05:00

Mostly, I just set this up so I could post comments on blogs. I might decide to start putting things here eventually, but not quite yet.