Martin Schafer

Classical texts recovered

2005-04-17T22:54:26Z

From this article in The Independent

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=630165

A horde of 400,000 scraps of papyrus found in the rubbish heaps of the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrynchus during the nineteenth century and preserved at Oxford, have suddenly gone from illegible to legible. Scholars are recovering at least fragments of lost works by Sophocles, Euripedes, Hesiod, and other great classical authors. They estimate that this may increase the known body of Greek and Roman literature by 20%.

Minneapolis infrastructure milestone

2005-03-19T12:48:43Z

This is actually about six weeks late, but ...

When my family moved back to Minneapolis in January of 1968, I was 10 going on 11. My father worked as a physiologist at the old VA hospital, a little east and north of the current one. Since we lived at 6827 3rd Ave S in Richfield, he took the Crosstown to Hiawatha every morning. Residents objecting to the Hiawatha upgrade had stopped it cold at that point, so the Crosstown did a little jig through concrete barriers and orange cones and freeway traffic was halted by the light at the Hiawatha interchange.

Many moons passed. Various roads were improved. Even Hiawatha was finally upgraded. But that intersection between the crosstown an Hiawatha stubbornly remained a mess of bypasses, orange cones, missing lanes, concrete barriers, etc, year after year after year.

Sometime during this February on one of my airport runs I suddenly realized that there was no light, there were no weird zigs and zags, no cones, no barriers (bar the central one between ongoing traffic streams). A mere 37 years after my first experience with it, they had finally finished the interchange.

Framing, and reality based community

2004-11-06T12:54:39Z

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with Lakoff and his book Don't Think of an Elephant. His ideas about "frames", basically catch phrases (like "war on terror", or "bigger is better") that are part of how humans naturally chunk information about the world, are important if we are going to overcome the republican message.

This link (from kos) is a good article discussing of some of the ideas.

http://www.mollyivins.com/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=1790

Anyway, the thing I'm wondering about is the frame "reality based community". It's a powerful catch phrase that sums up a lot of the disparate groups that have come together to oppose the Bush administration. It's one of those, "of course, any right thinking person wants to be part of the reality based community", kinds of notions. Unfortunately, it potentially plays into the "effete liberal snob, who doesn't understand what it's like to do a hard days labor" image, which is a big turn off to ordinary people that we are trying to convince to be on our side.

So, it's a phrase that I've been using heavily and I'm wondering whether I'm doing more good than harm or vice versa.

Further Thoughts on the election

2004-11-05T03:28:40Z

I'm still struggling with the mismatch between my perceptions of where we were and the outcome of the election. First, we need to keep in mind that though we lost, we didn't lose by much. An extra hundred thousand or so in Ohio and we'd be inaugurating president Kerry.

However, I think I got caught by something similar to what happened to Dean supporters in Iowa. The degree to which the activists were fired up, and the number of activist should give you a sense of the size of the mountain of support that your candidate has in the larger populace. I think the internet has changed the characteristic shape of that mountain. It is much more steep sided now. In any previous election, the energy I saw out there would have meant Kerry over Bush by 60 to 40 or more. But that's not how it worked.

(Update)

This explains the missing youth vote also. Young people are heavier users of the internet, so the ones who were going to vote anyway were more like to be fired up enough to get out and volunteer. People looked at how many young volunteers there were and expected a wave of new voters.

Election reaction

2004-11-04T00:29:18Z

Some of you may see this in a comment thread on Making Light but I'm posting it here too.

I am still breaking down and crying every hour or so. My initial reaction was simply despair, but I am trying to move beyond it. To see the biggest progressive movement of my lifetime, simply brushed aside is shattering.

As a member of the reality based community, I believe in the science of polling. Historically the way you detect election fraud is that the results don't match the exit polls *. Ohio and Florida have a particularly bad match between results and the exit polls. Unfortunately I don't believe that there is any way to use this data to actually overturn the election.

So, the first step is to put more energy into the electronic voting groups. I had thought that the Kerry campaign didn't make any big mistakes, one of the reasons I'm especially horrified by the loss. But, they didn't take this threat seriously enough (or maybe simply didn't see how they could combat it except by winning big enough). We need to work with the state Secretary of State's offices and the county offices to replace the fraud enabling machines. Until we can verify that we have an accurate election system this will keep happening to us.

Second (not temporally, all of these need to be worked on at the same time) we need to keep the pressure on the media to do a more honest job of reporting reality. The last year has seen real (though frustratingly slow) movement in the mainstream media towards doing a better job. The only way that we will reach the non activist center is if the news they see reflects what is actually going on. Part of this effort is to build a think tank/media outlet network similar to the one that operates for the right. Part of it is to be more proactive about sending letters to the major outlets.

Third we need to pressure our representatives to do the right thing. Even Republicans will respond to sufficient constituent pressure.

Fourth we need to take back at least one house in two years. If we can pour money and bodies into house races we will be able to unseat incumbents.

I really thought that today would be the beginning of our recovery from the current low point. But I guess we have lower to sink. Doesn't mean we won't rise again eventually.

*This is the same way casinos catch card counters, and other types of cheaters. Once the results diverge enough from the statistical expectation, you know they are doing something, even if you don't know what.

Voting

2004-11-02T14:21:01Z

I just got back from voting (Minneapolis, Ward 6 precinct 4). Aliera, Carolyn, Corwin and I walked up to the line just as they opened the doors at 7:00 . I was number 125 according the guy handing out the receipts. We got back out to the parking lot at 8:10. I tried to do a count of the line, but it was too folded, so I had to estimate. I'd say there were about 250 waiting to vote. Reen and Eileen will be voting this evening after work. While I'm sure there were some startup effects, it seemed like things were moving at the pace they would all day, so it there's three or fou hundred in line at 8, people will be voting till nearly midnight. They were using much more of the building this time than they have before so the whole 250 in line were in out of the rain, but only just. I'm going to sleep for a while and then go over to the Zurah Shrine Center for the local GOTV.

A Proud Membor of the Reality-Based Community

2004-10-17T06:57:25Z

The Sunday New York Times has an amazing profile of Bush by Ron Suskind at

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?oref=login&oref=login

The quote that once again gives me that "everytime I think I know how bad this administration is, I find out it's worse feeling" is this ....

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Recent info on Electronic Voting problems

2004-09-09T00:59:47Z

Everyone with an interest in their vote actually being accurately counted ought to read this article.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78

The problem isn't just the paperless touch screen machines. It's the county accumulators that are designed to allow easy falsification of the results. Anyone with physical access, or who knows the number of the modem bank, can quickly disable log tracing, examine and freely change the vote totals. It's just flabbergasting.

Weigh in

2004-06-23T15:06:27Z

Reen and I went down to city hall this morning to renew our cab licenses. Since neither of us have any outstanding warrants and our DOT health cards haven't expired this was fairly painless. However, this is the occasion of my annual weigh in.

When you weigh more than 350 lbs there are not a lot of places to weigh yourself. Theoretically there are attachments for the normal doctor's scale, but the nurse never bothers to get them out. I could put a fifty pound bag of dog food on the scale and try to set that to zero, but I never have. Anyway, the only scale I run into in the course of my normal life that goes up high enough is a cargo scale, going up to 500 lbs, in the hallway of cityhall, leading to the taxi license window. Why is this scale there? I have no idea.

Anyway, two years ago I was 420 (that's my highest recorded weight, though I had already lost a couple of belt notches so I'm guessing my high point was 450). A year ago, I don't remember exactly around 370. This year 375. Which is actually reassuring since my back problems have detroyed my exercise regime. The last few days I have sort of restarted using the machine I got from Geri during her move. Maybe I can get down into weighable range this year.

New Computer

2004-06-23T00:12:07Z

Not for me, for Eileen. Her old one broke. I sounded like it was booting, but nothing came up on the monitor, which worked on another system, and putting a known working video card in didn't help, and moving it to another slot didn't help, and besides it was a crufty thing that Corwin put together years ago without a working CD drive that had to have the pnp flag reset in the CMOS about once a month, so we declared it broken.

The cheapest attractive configuration from the local assembler, where I got my computer last year was a bit over $400 sans monitor (while the old one worked it was a not very good ancient one). Best Buy had a computer, monitor, printer combination in the same range after rebates (with last year's chip and motherboard, but twice the memory and hard drive, and better peripherals), so we got that.

I spent the weekend, data mining. This took much longer than it should since I am really not a hardware guy, but I copied stuff off both Eileen's drives, gave Corwin the corpse to use in the system he's trying to put together for Aliera, and even finally got around to copying the system disc from my old dead system, and determined that the newer data drive from it was dead.

I have kind of a phobia about mucking about inside my computers. I tend to think that the more I handle stuff the more likely it is to break (I think this has been born out over the years as I seem to have less down time than my more hands on friends). Given what I had to do to the poor ribbon cable in Eileen's new system to get the Quantum bigfoot drive (built on a 5 and a quarter rather than a 3 and a half inch form factor) temporarily plugged in, I was enormously relieved when her new system came through the experience without showing any ill effects.

Radio bits

2004-06-16T03:20:09Z

I keep meaning to mention odd bits I heard the during the night, when I get home, but I haven't yet.

The one that has particularly stuck with me was about a week ago As It Happens, the CBC news show, interviewed a man who had built a clock from a decaying prawn sandwich.

Not a very good clock it turns out. It gained or lost about three hours a day. He had sensors seperately measuring the decay of the bread, the prawns, and the mayo feeding into a model that then estimated the passage of time.

He preferred to use the Marks and Spencer, prawn sandwiches.

That was the same night a BBC reporter visited a Japanese man who claimed to have built a cloak of invisibility. It used flexible display technology to show the view behind the person on his front. The reporter felt it was pretty effective.

That week the noon hour repeats

Ambassador Joseph Wilson's speech to the Commonwealth club "The Politics of Truth"

Minnesota author Patricia Hampl presentation, "Life on the Upper Mississippi"

Link to that week in the Midday archive here

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/programs/midday/listings/md20040607.shtml

were both excellent in very different ways.

Reagan

2004-06-08T00:03:21Z

I hated Reagan. Having seen Alzheimers up close (Bill, Reen's father) I wouldn't wish it on anyone, so I'm glad that his and his family's nightmare is over. But I really hated Reagan.

He was my first real experience with politcal cognitive dissonance. You know the experiments where there are two lines on the board. The upper one is clearly longer than the lower one. Three confederates wrongly identify the lower as the longer and then the subject is asked, "which one is longer?" A surprisingly large percentage of people will give the obviously false answer some even convincing themselves that it is not obviously false. And a large group will report great psycological pain, whichever answer they give. The Reagan administration was like that for me.

Here was a man who was obviously an idiot, who told blatant falsehoods and seemed to believe them, and the majority seemed to think he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

With clear, I believe, evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors staring them in the face the Democratic congress blinked. They apparently felt that the country would be too damaged by going through Watergate all over again. Iran-Contra slipped away and Reagan was never impeached as he should have been.

I believe that we are paying for that lack of will today. About Bush I say, I truly never believed that I would live to see a worse president than Ronald Reagan, but I'm afraid I have. I think that this current administration's contempt for the rule of law partly stems from what Reagan did, and got away with. Lots of today's key players go back to Iran-contra.

I can't help but wonder about the contract torturers used in Abu Graib. Do they have roots in Casey's private, off-the-shelf, covert operations capability?

More on Gore speech

2004-05-27T15:09:10Z

My God! I thought reading the speech was moving. Actually watching him give it was amazing. I cried repeatedly.

http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp

for streaming video. You'll have to try repeatedly as their streaming server is overwhelmed by requests. This is apparently extremely unusual, as they are a massive sight.

Eric Idle's FCC song

2004-05-26T23:39:08Z

I saw this link on Eschaton a few days ago. Not worksafe.

http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3

Al Gore Remarks

2004-05-26T23:33:41Z

I just finished reading this, and I found it very cathartic

http://www.moveonpac.org/goreremarks052604.html/

There's nothing here that I didn't already know, but to hear a mainstream politician put it all together and lay it out and to have exactly my take on the malfeasance of the current administration was wonderful.

I'd personally like to see Kerry give a similar speech. I'm given to understand that it's smarter to let stand-ins make this kind of raw attack. So, I'll bow to expertise about what are the best tactics for beating Bush, but it would do my heart good.

Light rail problems

2004-05-25T21:06:47Z

While I like public transportation, I've been dubious about the light rail project in the Hiawatha corridor since its inception. Without major changes in land use planning in the area immediately around each station (of which I've seen no sign) I don't believe its ridership will ever be large enough to be viable. But anyway, I think the MTC is making things worse during the testing phase.

The problem is that they are screwing up the traffic flow on Hiawatha. The thing that affects me especially is that during the barriers down flashing lights period that lasts for more than a minute both before and after the train passes (and sometimes just happens at random, obviously some sensors on the tracks are too sensitive) not only is the green arrow for a left turn that would cross the tracks disabled, but the green arrow for the left turn going the other way is disabled.

Also for the crossing streets the passing of the train doesn't just extend the Hiawatha green, it loses them their whole green cycle if the train overlaps any of it. The Hiawatha light cycle is slow. I've sat for more than five minutes trying to get through an intersection legally, when the train interferes.

It seems to me that this is likely to engender an intense dislike of the LRT in the people who live along Hiawatha, who are the people most likely to take the damn thing, especially since this testing period with empty trains sailing by, creating chaos, has been going on for six months.

Fun with random shuffle

2004-05-25T20:50:13Z

My wmp playlist on random shuffle just jumped from the spoken introduction to Everything Possible being done by the Flirtations, which is part of the previous track, which says (paraphrase) "we wish all parents would tell their children this", to Frank Zappa Don't Eat the Yellow Snow.

I almost snorted my diet coke.

Dark Thoughts

2004-05-22T12:19:07Z

I was reading yet another of the depressing/infuriating articles about prisoner abuse at Abu Graib and elsewhere when I was struck with a thought that made me even sicker. I've always wondered why the Bush administration was so insistent on allowing no one access to Jose Padilla (the dirty bomber). I think, now we know. Can you think of another person better fits this administration warped notion of when it is appropriate to use torture? Someone that they think is part of a plot to detonate a radiological weapon in an American city?

I will start posting occasionally, no matter how much it seems like drivel

2004-05-22T12:09:07Z

So, Thursday night driving the cab was pretty special. Apparently Jimmy Buffet fans drink more than anyone. He was at the Target center and there were 18,000 fans downtown. I am told that the term for them is parrothead. I saw lots of people with elaborate parrot headgear. There were also a lot of sharks, but I have no idea what that was about.

A friend who works at the Hard Rock said she didn't believe the distributor when he told her to rent a truck cooler and order an extra hundred cases of Corona. She did order fifty, so the seventy cases they had on hand lasted about 2 hours. She also said she did $3000 of business with a tap out on the patio. The manager at Bella Notte said it was "like Kiss and Motorhead combined". It was like a Friday, not a Thursday. I don't remember a single concert every making as big a difference to the feel of downtown all night long.

LotR taxi

2003-12-17T13:30:17Z

The late night Return of the King provided an unexpected benefit. By 3:30 AM on a weeknight us cab drivers have generally given up on looking for wavers and settled down on a hotel stand to wait for a radio order or an airport run to come out. But suddenly there were crowds of people looking for cabs at block E. I even picked up someone at 4:30 who had given up on being able to get his car out of the ramp before he had to be at work at 5:00. Apparently they had neglected to put any extra attendants on.

Btvs/Rocky Horror

2003-12-16T10:58:23Z

One of the odder mental games that's given me hours of satisfaction is to cast the Buffy characters into a production of Rocky Horror. I don't worry about the justification for this, but it's important that it's the characters not the actors that I'm putting into the roles. Sometimes I'm more picky about it everyone being from a particular moment in Buffy than others, but I always consider the contemporaneous Angel characters to be available. Otherwise, since Buffy is heavily female and Rocky Horror is heavily male, you have to gender bend more than I want to, or reach out to awfully minor characters.

I think my favorite cast is set in season four. Buffy plays Columbia. Spike is Frankenfurter. Angel is Eddie. Willow is Magenta. Xander is Riff-Raff. Tara is Janet. Wesley is Brad. Riley is Rocky. Giles is the Moderator. Professor Walsh is the Professor.

The resonance with the Buffy/Spike/Angel triangle amuses me to no end, and we get the nice Willow/Buffy scene during Touch a Touch a Touch Me (and I like Buffy tap dancing in that outfit). Willow's only solo singing is in the one verse of Time Warp so she can realistically manage the role and she and Xander can certainly do the creepy incestual vibe of Riff-Raff and Magenta. I love the image of them bursting in in the silver costumes at the climax. Wesly of that era practicly is Brad Majors and the whole sexual dynamo under a shy exterior is right up Tara's alley. The vision of Riley tenderly draping Spike's dead body on his back, to climb the eiffel tower always gives me the giggles. And so on and so on.

Actually the perfect narrator (Eileen's suggestion) is Mayor Wilkins. But that would move us back into 3rd season losing Tara and Riley. Sometimes I move Willow to Brad's role, to get the couple interactions with Tara (and honestly the awakening sexuality of Brad, rather than Magenta's old in sin vibe is more in 4th season Willow's range, however much I like visualizing the other).

lost post

2003-12-16T10:07:38Z

I had a post I was having trouble making and so I left the update window with it up for a week. I finally finished and tried to update my journal and got an error saying I wasn't logged in. In the past when that's happened I used Window's back to return to the post in error, logged in and reposted. This time I couldn't do it. Sigh.

Exercise

2003-12-02T14:50:57Z

About fourteen months ago I started exercising regularly for the first time since I was in Karate about twenty years ago. I had worked my way up from the three minutes a day I could do at first (I was using a Vitamaster ski machine that we'd gotten through the employed want ads at Eileen's work) to twenty minutes a day. And I was happy.

Unfortunately, about five months ago, I wore the machine out. We got another machine through Eileen's work, this time a Nordic crosstrainer. Unfortunately I hated it. After a month I began to develope a set of ways to use it that I could stand to do regularly, but after another month or so I broke the welds on the front post, leaving me with the tread mill function or nothing.

I've been trying to develop a way I can stand to use it but I haven't yet. Meanwhile, I've gained back about a belt notch and a half (even after losing what I estimate to be about 100 pounds I was only getting down to 350 the top weight of a home scale (oddly enough the only scale going up higher I've seen is a cargo scale in the hallway leading to the taxi license office in Minneapolis city hall (I weighed 420 on that June of 2002 after losing a noticeable amount of weight thus the 100lb estimate))) and I'm starting to get scared that I'll slip all the way back to the terrible state I was in.

I looked in a 2nd Wind and was generally appalled at the prices and couldn't find anything I was sure I could get used to using, that was liable to last for more than a couple of months. I've tried a couple of people's Nordic ski machines and hated them. They need an entirely different technique from the Vitamaster.

Oh well, I'm going to get back on the treadmill for a second ten minute session now. While this is mostly whining if anyone happens to stumble across that particular off brand out of business exercise machine that worked for me (Vitamaster Northern Trails) let me know.

First Post: Weird Al

2003-11-20T01:45:25Z

I've always liked the fact that weird is the exception to "i before e ... sounded as a ...". But anyway, I'm here. I been opening up this window for two or three weeks and trying to start saying something, and then closing it again. So I'll just spit something out and then the ice will be broken.

I've always been fond of Weird Al. My first exposure was the "Like a Surgeon" video. But it was always a kind of mild fondness. This summer at the state fair we went to the grandstand show for the first time I can remember. It was Weird Al. We bought the "Poodle Hat" CD and now I've become mildly obsessed. I have the advantage of three teenage daughters (particularly Toni, who really like rap and hip hop) to tell me what the heck he's parodying in a lot of songs.

I'm sure I could look this stuff up, but the game I'm currently playing is to assume that the songs that are credited only to Weird Al, instead of him and the original artist, are still parodies (or possibly pastiches or homages), and then to try to figure out what artist he had in mind when he wrote the song. I started doing this when I realized that he was definitely doing Frank Zappa in the song "Genius in France". I'm also sure that he had They Might Be Giants in mind when he wrote "Everything you know is Wrong".