The Substantially Similar Weblog

The Hash House Harriers is “an international group of social, non-competitive running and drinking clubs.” I participated many years ago in college (e.g.), although the Princeton Group is probably more tame than most. Via Bruce Schneier, this crazy new items:

Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.

Although I don’t hash anymore, I frequently see the characteristic flour marks while jogging in the woods. I can’t see how the perpetrators here could possibly meet the mens rea requirement for a felony bioterrorism charge.

My itinerant brother, presently in Tucson, Arizona is trying to visit my less-itinerant brother in Tahoe, California. (The latter is an editor and photographer for the Tahoe Daily Tribune, now available online in full print-like layout). Later this week, the itinerant brother flies from Tucson to Sacramento, the least expensive airport closest to Tahoe.

Amtrak has a route from Sacramento to Tahoe (actually nearby Truckee), but it is actually a bus. Having made his plane reservations, my brother waited until today to order his Amtrak tickets online, only to discover the following:

Yes, it’s true, you can’t actually board that bus (the only way to get to Tahoe after my brother’s plane arrives), unless you’ve at least set foot on a train first.

Some research suggests that California State Law prohibits Amtrak from offering bus-only services within the state, apparently so it won’t compete with bus companies.

I did figure out what I hope is a clever workaround: the next closest train stop on one of the lines to Sacramento is Davis. Amtrak allows you to buy a ticket from Davis to Truckee via Sacramento for basically the same price as the bus from Truckee to Sacramento. Hopefully no one will check to make sure he actually traveled from Davis to Sacramento before getting on the bus to Truckee.

There must be some profound lesson here. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the floor debate in the state legislature when this law was enacted.

Dear LazyWeb:

Our kitchen laptop is on its last legs. I’d like to replace it with a standalone LCD and a cheap, quiet, low-power CPU with just one or two gigabytes of storage for the operating system (music and other data are stored on a server in the basement). Can someone point me in the right direction? This is an instance where Google doesn’t provide an obvious leading/consensus solution. Most searches for solid state computers point to laptops, which isn’t what I want. The closest thing I’ve found is the Zonbox, but I’m not interested in their network/subscription storage model. Ideal specs:

• Total cost less than $300 (preferably less than $200)
• High-end Pentium III or lower-end Pentium IV, or equivalent. Should be able to play ogg files and browse today’s overactive websites at the same time without user latency. No need to support graphics-intensive applications like gaming or video editing.
• Built-in wireless networking. Support for a PCMCIA wireless card would also be acceptable. Most data will be accessed via an NFS share on the WAN.
• 1GB or 2GB of Flash memory for storage.
• Standard VGA out, preferably at least 1280×1024 (although 1024×768 would be okay).
• USB ports for keyboard, mouse, possibly external hard drive storage when needed.
• Painless Debian/Ubuntu installation, including out-of-the-box suspend/resume functionality.

Suggestions?

Michael Hirschorn in this month’s Atlantic reduces my generation’s entire cultural zeitgeist to a single word: quirk.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Hirschorn makes a fair point which, I think, can be restated that much of the content I enjoy is really just candy.

The Atlantic seems to have recently figured out its readership (or at least figured out me). Hard to Swallow (by B.R. Myers, who more typically writes about Korean issues) is a pointed moral critique of modern food lovers (chowhounds?) and food writing (including Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, much read by my contemporaries). If I weren’t already a vegetarian, I might take umbrage.

“Insider baseball” pieces on Karl Rove and Michael Gerson are also excellent, and in the case of the former quite timely.

To wrap up this encomium, props to the magazine for its clean new website design, which I believe premiered today, and for including an embedded Youtube video in the online version of the quirk article.

Fascinating and surprising (at least to me) observation on the Netflix Community Blog about user demand for half-star movie ratings:

So here’s what I learned from months of testing this across the country: when we make the ½ star options possible, we get fewer ratings. Significantly fewer ratings. We have argued these results internally for some time, and our best guess is that the complexity of doubling the number of choices from 5 to 10 deters many people from rating, so they just give up. (“3 stars? No, 3 ½ stars.. no… 3 stars… no… oh forget it…”)

Netflix was offline for nearly 24 hours — almost weeks in Internet time for a business whose entire existence is online. It was astonishing, at least to me, that a major Internet service could be disrupted for so long.

According to my people on the ground in San Francisco, a transformer explosion was the cause.

It’s a good reminder that the Net is more fragile than we might think.

UPDATE: the original source in California recants. The Netflix outage remains a mystery. Explanations are welcome.

Occasionally, I update my sidebar to reflect the current contents of my iRiver. Most people read this blog through the RSS feed, however, and never see the sidebar. So I thought I’d provide occasional snapshots here. Lately:

• Fred Frith: Cheap at Half the Price and Rivers and Tides { Working With Time
  Two very different genre-evading albums (file under — alternative?). Rivers and Tides (the film) left an indelible mark on me, but the soundtrack stands alone. Cheap at the Half the Price is a good example of why we can probably get by for another few centuries just on music that’s already been made.
• Petra Haden: The Who Sell Out
  Occasionally too cute, but mostly brilliant one-woman-voice-only remake of The Who album. This one also gets its own Wikipedia article. I’m also a big fan of her album with Bill Frisell. (File under — jazz?)
• G. Love: Lemonade
  Who would have guessed the G. stands for “Good”? I recently went back and listened G. Love and Special Sauce. This one is much better. I’ll post two short clips when I have a minute.
• Paul McCartney: McCartney and Memory Almost Full
  McCartney has been a solo artist for longer than I’ve been around. His first album includes at least two tracks that rival anything from the Beatles (one of which even has its own Wikipedia entry). His newest album is not quite as good, but really, it’s hard for McCartney to really go wrong. (Typically engrossing New Yorker profile.)
• The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan
  Thanks to Steve for reminding me what a great song My Doorbell is.

My nomination for the best use of the phrase “a retarded ponens/tollens showdown”:

Here is what you do not do. You do not start with a mystifying conditional like “If the universe is only physical (or whatever), then there is no free will,” because how do you know that? You don’t. But you may think you do and so you get caught in a retarded ponens/tollens showdown: the universe is physical, ergo no free will, or… free will, so the universe is not physical. But, again, through what method of divination do we validate this conditional? None. Because we already know it is false.

From tonight’s Lantern Festival in Forest Hills Cemetery:

[Tags]Boston, Jamaica Plain, Lantern Festival[/Tags]

As I sit here waiting for my 8:23am train, which actually will never come, I just discovered http://www.wheresthet.com/ (“Where’s The T,” if you need it spelled out). This third-party site serves a no-frills, no tables, no graphics, no flash, sensibly organized list of MBTA interruptions. This is one of the best implementations I’ve seen of this sort of thing — absolute simplicity. I immediately added it to my cell phone bookmarks and Google Reader subscriptions.

More information from the creator.