Relevant History

Quote of the day

From a 1986 Life magazine article by Anne Fadiman about Benazir Bhutto:

Cambridge, Mass., 1970. My next-door neighbor in Eliot Hall is named Pinkie Bhutto. She is the daughter of the former Pakistan foreign minister, which impresses no one, since Robert Kennedy's daughter Kathleen lives directly beneath her in a room covered with photographs of her dead father and uncle. Pinkie can't hold a candle to that.

Given recent events, what sounds like a very insider paragraph has a more tragic echo.

Towel bars are up!

Mon 12/31/2007 16:36 12312007557

Just in time for brunch tomorrow!

World's End

Last night I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The kids saw it at Safeway the other day, and having just been allowed to watch the first movie, wanted to make sure we had the complete set.

I really liked the first movie, and thought the second was perfectly entertaining, but this one suffered from the same problem that plagued Spider-Man 3 and Matrix Revolutions: namely, the writers seemed to hope that putting in five plots, gigantic special effects, and endless action would hide the absence of a single good idea and clear story. And the final disposition of the main characters, especially Will Turner, is a total let-down.

You know it's a bad sign when you're watching a movie that features a guy with an octopus face, for goodness sake, and you react to some new plot twist with the thought, "Now that's implausible."

[To the tune of Bombay Dub Orchestra, "The Berber of Seville (The Berber of Suburbia Mix)," from the album "Bombay Dub Orchestra".]

Almost done!

Sun 12/30/2007 13:46 12302007555

The bathroom is almost finished. Seal the grout, put up towel bars and medicine chest, and voila!

Exploratorium

Today we took the kids to the San Francisco Exploratorium. They had cleverly arranged very long lines at the ticket counter, so we bought a membership to avoid having to stand for a long time. (That'll show them!)

via flickr

[To the tune of U2, "The Ground Beneath My Feet," from the album "All That You Can't Leave Behind".]

Technorati Tags: Exploratorium, family, museum, San Francisco, science

More brains!

At the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Stephen Wolfram on entrepreneurship, uncertainty, and postacademic lives

I came upon the Waggle Labs blog today*, and saw a quote by Stephen Wolfram that struck me as touching on postacademic life, and one of the challenges of making the transition from an academic career to another career:

A lot of what goes into starting companies is turning nothing into something. Starting with a blank slate, and just inventing all kinds of stuff.

You’ll never know if it’s ultimately correct. You just have to use your judgement, make decisions, and move on.

To some people, that’s pretty scary. Not to have any answers to look up in the back of the book.

As a brilliant mathematician, entrepreneur, and author, Wolfram is someone well worth listening to on this subject. Having now spent more of my professional life outside of academia than inside-- or rather, since I've still got an academic affiliation, more of my of my life being paid by corporations or nonprofits than educational institutions-- it strikes me that one of the defining characteristics of academic careers is the amazing, and in many ways reassuring, clarity of their career structures.

[To the tune of Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High," from the album "Soul Sisters".]

Technorati Tags: academia, postacademic

How I feel with the end of the holidays

Tags: self-portrait, christmas, palo alto

Goodbye chocolate sleigh!

Wed 12/26/2007 18:39 12262007549

A friend in Germany sent this-- a chocolate sleigh with two little passengers.

The kids report that their beards were made from mint-flavored white chocolate.

I'm definitely going on a serious diet in 2008.

Flat Christmas

Tue 12/25/2007 10:53 12252007453

Lots of flat gifts this year!

Cool present

Tue 12/25/2007 07:02 12252007425

An excellent tripod for my digital camera. I married into a family with frighteningly good taste in gifts.

Merry Christmas

Mon 12/24/2007 23:23 12242007414

Watching Holiday Inn and waiting for midnight. And my finger is feeling better. Merry Christmas!

The Nokia is back

Just in time for Christmas-- my long lost cell phone arrived today, good as new. Now i need a titanium shell, a case made with carbon nanotubes woven into the fiber, or something. I don't want another thing dangling from my belt, but I want to send it back to the repair center even less.

After this most recent mishap, I wonder how long it will be before cell phones are made like watches. How long before designs and especially interfaces are standardized enough so phones can be built for durability

Lifeblog post

Mon 12/24/2007 15:15 12242007390

My phone is back!

"Corporate life and the life of the mind"

In a couple weeks my wife and I are going to the AHA conference, and speaking in a session on careers for historians. We're examples of a once-exotic species, history Ph.D.s who don't work in academia but still do things as historians.

In the course of thinking about my talk, I came across a talk I gave at Princeton in 1999 on the subject, and thought I'd repost it.

9 stitches later

So this afternoon, I slipped in the laundry room, caught my hand on heaven knows what, and tore a gash in one of my fingers. (Not one of the really important ones.) It pretty quickly became clear that this wasn't something I could just put a band-aid on, so I grabbed my iPod and a book, and we went to urgent care.

Long and short is, I've now got nine stitches in my finger. The lidocaine hasn't yet worn off, so I'm not yet uncomfortable, but we'll see how it goes. I'll have a conversation-starting bandage on it for the next few days. At least we'll always be able to tell what year the Christmas pictures were taken....

[To the tune of Tori Amos, "Tear In Your Hand," from the album "Little Earthquakes".]

Quote of the day

Imagine a world in which most of the intelligent and well-educated people are unable to read. When it comes to music, that's the world we live in. (Andrew Ford, writing on Beethoven's late quartets, in the Sydney Morning Herald)

[To the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven, "Strykkwartet no.14 op.131 in cis kl.t., ," from the album "Quartet No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 131".]

Best book review ever?

"Reading this book is like watching a flaming piano fall out of an airplane and land in a puppy farm." (Sadly, No! on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism)

[To the tune of Jimi Hendrix, "House Burning Down," from the album "The Essential Jimi Hendrix (Disc 2)".]

The last surviving blink tag...

...has been found. I remember back in the day these were the stuff of considerable derision by real Web designers-- but that was before pop-ups, little Javascript thingies that followed you around, and many other bits of distraction.

Update: Oops-- I had put the actual blink tag in the title, and so the word "tag" was blinking. Fixed.

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "From A Late Night Train," from the album "Hats".]

Quote of the day

Down with cool. I hate cool. Excitement good; cool bad. (Ophelia Benson)

Brainstorm

I spent a little time tonight reading through Brainstorm, the Chronicle of Higher Education group blog-- or aggregated site, or something. Its tag line is "Lives of the Mind," and naturally I was curious to see who they include as living "lives of the mind."

Four current professors (two English professors, a painter, and an education professor), two professors-turned-administrators, and one policy wonk/journalist.

Are these the only kinds of people who live "lives of the mind?" I don't think so. In a service economy, and in particular an economy whose most aggressive players are fairly obsessed with innovation and creativity, the notion that the life of the mind is something that's lived only in educational institutions is anachronistic.

And for advanced graduate students and young Ph.D.s, it sends the wrong message-- that the life of the mind is lived in here, not out there in the world. It's not nearly as bad as the one sent by a history department in the early days of the Web, when its page of recent alumni listed only graduates who'd gotten tenure-track jobs. My own experience certainly is that I use a lot of my training in my work; and while maintaining an independent intellectual life isn't easy-- I sleep less than I'd like, and my video game skills would be mad keen (or the house would be cleaner, or I'd insist on feeding my family a more balanced diet) if I didn't carve out time for writing-- it is possible.

[To the tune of Percy Sledge, "When A Man Loves A Woman," from the album "The Very Best Of 60's Gold, vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: postacademic

As an historian of astronomy, I may have to get this

It's the best thing I've seen since the "Celebrate Darwin: Eat a Weakling" t-shirt that the BFS once printed:

Available at Cafe Press

An owner of the matching t-shirt is quoted as saying, "Now I'm the center of attention, where I always wanted to be. And it sure makes it easy to spot those awful helio-leftists."

Helio-leftists? Were they so hard to spot before?

[To the tune of U2, "Stay (Faraway, So Close!)," from the album "Zooropa".]

What a way to go

This was crazy dumb:

A man nearly died from alcohol poisoning after quaffing a liter (two pints) of vodka at an airport security check instead of handing it over to comply with new carry-on rules, police said Wednesday.

Technorati Tags: airport, travel

Phone update

$100 to put a new screen on the phone. Of course I said yes.

And today I'm listening to nothing but Zeppelin. The reviews make the concert sound incredible.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Ten Years Gone," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 3)".]

Technorati Tags: N95

Quote of the day

[H]is attitudes to academic life were thereafter always ambivalent. Part of him contrasted his own long working days and sometimes precarious existence as a freelancers with the apparently secure and seemingly less stressful world of his academic friends (though he also noticed the pressures of academic inexorably increasing in recent years). He sought the company and friendship of independent scholars and of dealers and booksellers (some of whom were very big players in the corporate world). But another part of him idealistically longed for the fellowship and community of the republic of letters, and envied those of us who were more centrally part of it than he felt himself to be. (Vincent Gillespie's memorial serious address on Jeremy John Griffiths, in A.S.G. Edwards, Gillespie and Ralph Hanna, eds., The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths (British Library, 2000), p. 3)

[To the tune of Chris Botti featuring Sting, "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?," from the album "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? - Single".]

Technorati Tags: academia, postacademic

Quote of the day

Reading is useless, vain and silly when no writing is involved. (Jeremias Drexel, Aurifodina artium et scientiarum omnium, 1638)

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested. (Francis Bacon in his Essay "Of Studies," 1612).

Technorati Tags: reading

Tom Brokaw's 1968

We're watching Tom Brokaw's documentary about 1968. So far, it's like Mystery Science Theatre 3000 bad: The AFC's winning the Super Bowl is a metaphor for bigger revolutions, 2001 and Planet of the Apes come out, and OJ Simpson's winning the Heisman is... symbolic of something. Contrast footage of love-ins with the Tet Offensive, have ten seconds on Ken Kesey, Janis Joplin, the word "geodesic," add Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," and bam: it's like a slow version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."

Technorati Tags: history, television

MOO cards are here

Got my latest set of MOO (I notice they use all caps) cards today. They look quite nice-- the company does excellent work.

I chose a mix of pictures that have worked well on previous sets, and some new ones from my last trips to England and Budapest. I think that while the picture Anthony took on Raday Utca is pretty amazingly archetypal-- and works really well in the narrow format of the cards-- I'm going to keep mixing up the images.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Reckoner," from the album "In Rainbows".]

Technorati Tags: Moo

The phone is in the mail

I sent my broken Nokia 95 off today to be repaired. One of my colleagues described it as a "Brokia N95."

Sometimes I feel less like a professional and more like a camp counselor, or the cool uncle who lets you stay up late and play Grand Theft Auto.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney, "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey," from the album "All the Best".]

Technorati Tags: N95

Future interface designer

Tue 12/04/2007 19:37 12042007375

My son experimenting with Cover Flow. I figure, so long as he doesn't delete anything

Will just eat the computer

Want to blog

The march of science

Man's relentless desire to-- oh, never mind.

US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday....

Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer... cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere.

Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. "Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version."

Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.

Polar Express in Redwood City

Saturday we took the kids to Redwood City. My daughter was in a Christmas parade, then we stayed for dinner and a movie.

via flickr

They also had fireworks, which the kids enjoyed. They were less spectacular than the Stanford fireworks on the 4th of July, but much closer.

via flickr

Then they showed "The Polar Express" on the town square. It was a bit cold, but with enough hot chocolate and blankets, it was a good time.

via flickr

I'd never seen "The Polar Express," though I've read the book innumerable times, and one thing about the film really impressed me: it's one of the strangest, most surreal movies ever made. If Terry Gilliam were to take a lot of antidepressants, then work with Busby Berkeley and John Hughes, "The Polar Express" would have been the result. It's really pretty brave to make a film that breas almost no relationship whatsoever to the book on which it's based, and to have so completely different a spirit.

Technorati Tags: movies, Redwood City

Craft fair

[Via lifeblog]

A big thank you note!

Moo Hoo

After a couple hours, I finally managed to place an order for more Moo MiniCards. I really like the product: the cards are very nice, they're a great conversation piece, and they fit in an Altoids cinnamon chewing gum tin (which, when you flourish the tin and get out a card, becomes a second conversation-starter).

But ordering the cards is a serious pain.

For the last several days, I tried reordering some cards I'd made before, but always got hung up on the third step in the process (the step where you write the text that goes on the back of the card). Granted, I'm just an unfrozen caveman futurist, but even I know that punishing people for trying to get more of a product they like is not a route to customer satisfaction.

Finally, on the theory that whatever problems the system had with its reordering process might be avoided by creating a completely new order, I gave up and started from scratch. I only lost that order once, on the same step that had been giving me problems before. But tonight, I finally made it work.

However, the discount number they sent me didn't work, so I'm being charged full price for the order. (For now, anyway. I e-mailed customer service to see whether I can still get it.) But at least the order's in.

Presumably these are just growing pains, and they'll get the system working better in the near future. That or they'll go out of business. That would be a real shame. Then I'd have no cards, and a bunch of empty Altoids tins.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Hots On for Nowhere," from the album "Presence".]

Technorati Tags: business, e-commerce, Moo

Bags in the auditorium

From the craft fair, earlier today.

via flickr

The child-size blur on the right is my son. That's about the slowest he was all day.

via flickr

Technorati Tags: menlo park, craft fair, Peninsula School

Peninsula Craft Fair

The Peninsula School Craft Fair was today. Every fall, the school plays host to local crafts, and open up the campus to the community.

via flickr

We spent a good part of yesterday at the school, setting things up. It's one of two big all-school events (the other being the Spring Fair) that involve everyone-- parents, teachers and staff, kids, and neighbors.

via flickr

The front porch, the big building, and much of the parking lot gets turned over to vendors.

via flickr

The tent right in front of the Big Building is mainly Peninsula kids selling crafts and other things. Pokemon cards are a big seller; I think it's mainly older kids deciding to get rid of their collections.

via flickr

The Play Space (what would in other schools be called the gym) is turned into a cafe, and they sell soup (some pretty amazing soup, actually, especially the white bean and sausage) and pastries.

via flickr

A couple of us estimated that maybe 12% of the parents-- one in eight-- shows up for the setup, and an equal proportion work the fair itself. As I understand it, that's a pretty good participation rate. But it's one of those events that reminds you that, in contrast to other kinds of schools, Peninsula depends very heavily on parent involvement to work. That can translate into a lot of work, but it's worth it.

via flickr

Technorati Tags: menlo park, craft fair, Peninsula School

Tree in Palo Alto

Thu 11/29/2007 16:18 11292007334