Science & Medicine

Another Reason to Love NYC

April 15, 2009 by John 6 Comments

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination…

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers.

My favorite bit:

One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

I hope that guy’s having a great day. He earned it with that little bit of altruism. (Ditto Kacie Kinzer, creator of the Tweenbot experiment.)

Programmed Dyspepsia

April 15, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

[This is the second of three brief(ish) posts on the experience of being sick, sorta-kinda-like, for four (sorta) days. (Here‘s part 1.)]

So I was sleeping quite a bit. Going online or otherwise sitting at the computer, almost not at all. Beyond that, pretty much, I was on the living-room floor, with The Pooch. Watching daytime television.

Two highlights, if that’s the word, and disregarding all the low spots (like ’50s-game-show re-runs, infomercials, and talk shows/soap operas whose unintelligibility to me would be helped not at all by closed captions, since everyone (including the captioners) speaks a language other than English): (1) the MD show, and (2) the Food Network (daytime edition).

Disclaimer: Yes, I know, I know: this is television I’m ranting about here. It’s not a rant about the great issues of the day, of which there are many. Give me a break. I was sick(ish). When little Billy has a fever or Susie can’t keep her porridge down, surely you don’t rebuke them for wanting to read comic books all day. (Or do you, you wicked old witch?)

[Read more…]

“Not Quite Jaundice”

April 14, 2009 by John 9 Comments

[This is the first of three brief posts on the experience of being sick, sorta-kinda-like, for four (sorta) days.]

From Catch-22:

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.

A little over a week ago, I first noticed a not common but still familiar sort of weakness of the limbs. Flu, it said to me. You’re getting the flu.

Which I didn’t really want to be hearing: I didn’t want to hear it from the lips of someone knowledgeable, with pursed lips and horned-rim glasses and the overall demeanor, coincidentally, of a pharmaceuticals salesman, and I really didn’t want to hear it from a vague muscular sensation with no medical diplomas at all hanging behind its desk.

[Read more…]

Choose Your Own Poisons

April 3, 2009 by John 14 Comments

From whiskey river:

We’re fools whether we dance or not,
So we might as well dance.

(Japanese proverb)

…and:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

(Richard Feynman [in his 1974 CalTech commencement address])

Not from whiskey river:

Fool’s Money Bags

Outside the long window,
With his head on the stone sill,
The dog is lying,
Gazing at his Beloved.
His eyes are wet and urgent,
And his body is taut and shaking.
It is cold on the terrace;
A pale wind licks along the stone slabs,
But the dog gazes through the glass
And is content.

The Beloved is writing a letter.
Occasionally she speaks to the dog,
But she is thinking of her writing.
Does she, too, give her devotion to one
Not worthy?

(Amy Lowell [source])

Now let’s look back a few years, to the revivification of John Travolta’s career, post-Pulp Fiction. In 1996 he took the title role in Michael: a vacationing archangel. In fact, this is the last vacation Michael may take (according to some rulebook which angels must follow), so he wants to make it a good one. (An angel who wants to vacation on Earth? you’re thinking. He replies, “Whatever they say, you can never have too much of Earth.”) He travels across country with a group of staffers for a gossip/tabloid magazine, and on the way they stop at a roadhouse…

A fun blog post probably awaits me, or somebody, on the subject of “classic scenes from non-classic films.” This scene in the roadhouse is wonderful — I was very surprised I couldn’t find it anywhere online but at an Italian site. In any case, it answers pretty definitively the question an alien might ask: “Why do people dance, anyway?” (Michael is like a flystrip which, when dangled in the air, catches only females.)

It doesn’t hurt that the music (lyrics below) likewise ties into the theme of this week’s Friday post, especially the Japanese proverb.

Lyrics:

Chain of Fools
(words and music by Don Covay;
performance by Aretha Franklin)

Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools
Five long years I thought you were my man
But I found out I’m just a link in your chain
You got me where you want me
I ain’t nothing but your fool
You treated me mean oh you treated me cruel
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools

Every chain has got a weak link
I might be weak child, but I’ll give you strength
You told me to leave you alone
My father said come on home
My doctor said take it easy
Whole bunch of lovin is much too strong
I’m added to your chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain,
Chain, chain of fools

One of these mornings the chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah, I’m gonna take all I can take
Chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain
Chain, chain, chain, chain of fools

A Hrooom of One’s Own

March 10, 2009 by John 15 Comments

I know a fellow I’ll call Guy, although that’s not his real name. (He’s no longer a Boy, but not yet — not consistently– a Man, either, except in the most literal and least important sense.)

Guy recently took a weekend trip with his wife. It was a long six-hour drive in a rented car, of a US make and model which Guy knew of but had never even ridden in, let alone driven. They finally arrived, with relief, at the hotel — a chain which he had never before patronized — and unpacked their stuff in the fourth-floor room before heading out for a bite to eat.

The restaurant to which they’d been directed was farther from the hotel than they’d been led to believe, and the traffic heavier, so he was behind the wheel another half-hour before he and his wife could sit at a table, have a couple of drinks, and relax over dinner with the fellow they were meeting.

Then it was back to the rental car, back to the hotel, back to their room, and time indeed to get ready for bed. Guy’s wife wasn’t tired, and she’d be involved in a conference over the next 24 hours so wanted to prepare some materials and wind down before going to bed. But Guy himself looked forward to it after all the driving. He thought he might read for no more than a half-hour before drifting off.

He was standing in the living area in the room as his wife flipped through the channels on the big flat-panel TV. He was unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves before getting undressed, when he felt the floor vibrate, subtly, beneath his feet:

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

[Read more…]

Saving the Criminal Justice System from Itself

March 9, 2009 by John 6 Comments

The name of the fellow over there at the left is William (Bill) Dillon. At the time this picture was taken, in November, 2008, Dillon was 49 years old.

An unremarkable photo, really. A man in middle age, playing a guitar in what appears to be a kitchen of a suburban house or apartment somewhere.

But the circumstances surrounding that photo: remarkable indeed.

Until earlier on the day when that picture was taken, Bill Dillon had been imprisoned by the State of Florida for 27 years. His sentence, for the crime of murder in the first degree, had been life imprisonment.

Tsk, tsk, you may think. Once again, the bleeding-heart criminal justice system sets a murderer free to kill again. Perhaps you wonder how the people around Dillon could possibly seem so relaxed. They must be accomplices, you imagine.

Er, no.

For it turns out that Dillon did not commit — could not have committed — the crime for which he was convicted and imprisoned.

[Read more…]

The Culprit

January 13, 2009 by John 5 Comments

I couldn’t wait for the plumber to arrive.

Just for him, I’d cleaned out the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and put a bucket under the trap. I’d emptied the (dirty) dishwasher. I’d spread a towel on the floor, thinking that his knees — even more than mine — might appreciate the cushion. I’d left the cabinet door open, and I gestured at it and the sink when I led him into the kitchen. “There they are,” I said, as though he might might have expected more than one sink and drain in the kitchen.

He took in the scene, nodding vaguely at my tale of frustration and woe:

The tale extended back in time hours, days, weeks, to the dawn of time, and it involved gallons of Liquid Plum’r and first a 25-foot and then a 50-foot auger, or “plumber’s snake.” (Perhaps that was the creature which had defeated Adam in the Garden.) The tale involved a dishwasher frothy with gunk-dissolving chemicals, a dishwasher run through multiple (brief) rinses and drain-and-dry cycles. The tale involved mopping and sweeping and more mopping and it merited, by God, a little manly sympathy.

The plumber walked around the kitchen counter and pointed with his thumb to the sliding glass door to the deck.

“All right I use this door?”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure, no problem.” Like, I didn’t know — maybe he and his partner would need to… um… trace the line or something. I pictured the two of them criss-crossing the yard, with GPS units in their hands and pipe-clog-detecting electronic sounding gear strapped to their backs and heads. Plumbing had obviously embraced the 21st-century World of Tomorrow. I opened the door, showed them out, and sat at the kitchen counter to watch.

No plumber(s) for a minute or two. Maybe I’ll just run down the hall to use the bathroom for a few secs, I thought. On my way through the living room, I glanced out the picture window at the driveway. Yes. The two of them were getting their gear. Probably emptying the little van.

As I returned to the kitchen, I heard a metallic clatter and crash out on the deck. What the—?

It was an extension ladder, propped up against the wall outside the kitchen window. The assistant plumber even now was climbing it, in his hands an industrial version of the apparently puny one which I’d spent so much loving, thrashing, cursing time wielding over the last few days.

A pause, the world in suspended animation. From the kitchen ceiling, suddenly, the sound of diamond miners drilling through our roof.

I went out onto the deck. And there I saw the culprit.

[Read more…]

Thought Music

November 26, 2008 by John 7 Comments

What’s the deal with music, anyway?

Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?

I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”

For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).

Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.

[Read more…]

The Sum of All Fears

November 25, 2008 by John 2 Comments

From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:

He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:
[Read more…]

Ear Job (3): Tinnitus

November 18, 2008 by John 3 Comments

[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there’s a link there to the first part.]

While preparing to write this post, I went back and read the previous two on the same topic. Lo and behold, I couldn’t help noticing what was, for me, a classic evasion. To wit:

If you were to write a shorthand transcript of my hearing-aid experiences based on nothing but those two posts — and you knew nothing about shorthand, but maybe just enough about HTML and such to be clever, if not outright dangerous — it might read something like this:

stuff leading up to first hearing aid
FIRST HEARING AID
mumblemumblemumblemumble
FIRST WHIZ-BANG HEARING AID
etc.

I’ve gotta clear up that mumblemumble stuff, if I’m to be honest here (with you and with myself).

[Read more…]