Lots of miscellaneous bits today, but no spiritual revelations. Sorry!
To start with: remember the dialect survey from a few weeks ago? A post on Metafilter points to another fascinating survey, What the World Thinks in 2002 (the report itself and the survey data).
This survey of 38,000 people in 44 nations explores attitudes about family life, the domestic situation in each country, the global political climate, and, the point of the survey, attitudes about the United States. It's a fascinating read. (I find the raw survey data more interesting than the summary report.)
I like my morning playlist at work for this past week:
- Yes - Leave It (Radio Edit)
- Paul McCartney - Mull of Kintyre
- U2 - Bad (Diffusion dance mix)
- AC/DC - You Shook Me All Night Long
- Cake - Short Skirt, Long Jacket
- Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Born to Run (vinyl rip w/Mersey)
- Guadalcanal Diary - Litany (Life Goes On)
- ABBA - Chiquitita (Spanish version)
- ABBA - Fernando (Spanish version)
- A-Teens - Mamma Mia (Spanish version)
- Falco - Der Kommisar (English version)
- Dirty Vegas - Days Go By (Acoustic version)
I bought myself a maple bar yesterday and saved it for a breakfast treat this morning, but when I got to work not only had the maple icing glued itself to the side of the plastic bag so that it peeled from the donut itself, but some animal (probably Simon) had gnawed through the bag and chewed great chunks from the pastry.
sigh
This is after I purposefully shared my barbeque ribs with him last night. Ungrateful wretch.
Recently the front page of this weblog has been averaging around 60 hits per day. It received 130 hits during the first two days of December. Over the past two days, however, this page has received 375 hits, about 250 more than I would expect. This seems strange.
The increased activity is likely due solely to the fact that Dana and I are experimenting with RSS news aggregators, which automatically check specified sites for new content at selected intervals.
In fact, now that I examine my site logs more closely, I see that 153 hits have come from straw 0.13, which is the aggregator that Dana is using.
Hmm. That's a major design flaw. If RSS news aggregators flood their target sites with hits, they're sucking up bandwidth. They may be convenient, but in large numbers they're going to cause problems for popular sites; they'll increase the amount of bandwidth consumed, thus driving up expenses and, eventually, costs for the consumer.
Last night Kris and I watched the Warner Brothers Network's preview of The Two Towers. The show's finale featured a two-minute clip from the film. As the clip was about to begin, Randy the Schwans Guy knocked at the door. Argh!
I rushed out to place my order (meatballs, mini pepperoni pizzas, chocolate chip cookie dough), but by the time I was finished, the movie clip was over.
We've been watching all of the bonus features from The Fellowship of the Ring extended DVD, choosing two or three items to watch on the iBook each night before bed. We've also watched the cast commentary and are midway through the writers' commentary.
We're obsessed.
Two years ago the Proffit-Smiths and the Roth-Gates stayed at a yurt in Lincoln City. The yurt was about three-eights of a mile from the ocean, separated from it by the highway and a small bluff. On Sunday morning, when there was little or no traffic on the highway, I could hear the ocean from outside the yurt. Mac, Pam, and Kris could not. For two years, they've sworn there's no way I could have heard the ocean from our yurt site.
Last weekend the Proffit-Smiths and the Miron-Wurtzbergers stayed at a yurt in Lincoln City. Thus, the following e-mail exchange:
Gosh, we're funny! (Though I suspect this exchange would require heavier annotation to be funny to anyone else.) By the way: I still think I heard the ocean.
J.D.
Since you guys were in Lincoln City last weekend, you had a chance to test the range from which one can hear the ocean. Did you? Am I vindicated?Pam
you wouldn't believe how many experiments we did. at one point we almost thought we could hear it in the yurt, but then realized it really was the traffic. we admit that it DID sound A LOT like the ocean,(so i could see how you would be confused), but that there was actually NO WAY WHATSOEVER THAT IT WAS. the test on nonbiased observers (mirons) was also negative for ocean perception. sorry jd, your supersonic ears have deceived you.J.D.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!Okay. I'll be a *little* contrite now, but not much. I still won't believe it until I hear it myself because traffic noise is a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh kind of thing whereas the ocean (and the sound I heard) is more of a constant khkhkhkhkh kind of noise.
It's kind of difficult to type out the noise the ocean makes, you know?
khkkhkhkhkhkh
I wonder how Melville would have put it...
Pam
this was kind of swooshkhkhkhk with a few big rumbling trucks that sounded like some huge breakers every now and then. also the noise sounded different inside the yurt than out. much more obvious there was no ocean when we were outside.i don't know what melville would have said, but i am sure it would involve "the wetness of the water" and i doubt the computer would have enough memory for it all.
Speaking of oceans: I'm re-reading Solaris for the first time in a decade. I'm impressed. I don't remember the book being this good, though in retrospect I must have liked it because I went out and purchased every Stanislaw Lem book I could find.
Solaris appeals to me for a number of reasons:
- The book was written forty years ago, but reads as if it were written yesterday.
- The protagonist is a psychologist. He goes about his work in an orderly, scientific fashion. He's much more rational than the other scientists aboard Solaris station. (My friends are all students of the "real" sciences and like to mock psychology. Of course, we psychologists have ideas about why they might need to do this…)
- The book is well-written. Well-written science-fiction is a rare thing. This is a point on which Dana and I have disagreements, but I think most science fiction is dreck, even the classic stuff, and cannot compare favorably to non-genre literature. Solaris is an exception.
- The book is filled with interesting ideas:
- A planet inhabited by one entity: a sentient ocean.
- Physical manifestations of those things which the characters have loved the most and lost. How do the characters react to these manifestations? It's thoughtful and fun.
- Plasma machines that perform mathematical computations of infinite complexity, uncomprehendible by the human mind.
- The characters are neither good nor bad. They're human.
Next up: read The Orchid Thief and see the film Adaptation, which is based on it.
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — Silence Kris left early this morning for a one-week business trip to Virginia. The worst part of the day was the silence.
2003 — Sweet I had a great evening last night. We had Indian food for the first time in five years, and we made a trip to Powells. Also, I whine about my addiction to sugar.
I think I was the one who was pretty sure it was the ocean from inside the yurt. I kept quiet about it for a few hours for fear of becoming embroiled in such a hot-button nonissue. When it finally came up there was a lot of discussion about whether the traffic would be higher or lower pitched than the ocean. Then I actually woke up at around three in the morning and spent a few moments with my ear sleepily cocked for surf sounds. The result was inconclusive, I'm afraid. The next day we walked around Lincoln city pretty early in the morning and the highway was very busy regardless.