Googlewhack!

A friend sends along this, a poll by the American Family Association (Promoting Traditional Family Values!) on the institution of marriage. My friend suggested I might want to share my views. I herewith pass that suggestion along.

Added David Appell's Quark Soup to my blogroll. He's another science writer, and his blog has become a regular stop, with great regular commentary on climate change news and other science topics that are in the headlines. Sharp guy. He's had some useful stuff last few days about BSE.

Lissa and I just finished putting new lights in the kitchen.

We replaced the old (very old) incandescent fixtures with flourescents. More light. Less electricity. Woot.

Did a year-end climate story to play with some science story-telling techniques patterned after those used by PBS business correspondent Paul Solman. Solman uses a folksy, conversational movement between the general and the particular, using examples of the mundane, along with cheerful characters who play along, to illustrate the complex.

What's the line from Life of Brian? "Consider the lily." I used the rose.

There are moments that matter intrinsically, and there are moments to which we attach the mattering, because it exists and needs to be stuck on a moment so we can get to it.

I was looking back through an old exercise log book this evening and found this, one of those moments that matter intrinsically. It was Feb. 13, 1999:

Tramway loop - 13.1 avs, 2:27:06, 11+ most of hill - died near top - high 160s to 173 on hill

I will never forget that climb. It was a crystalline moment, a moment of compelling physical discomfort, when I lived for the false flat near the top and then ached when the hill kicked up again one final time. Today, we bang up the Tramway hill like it's nothing, on the way to something steeper. But that one perfect day, Feb. 13, 1999, was a special moment I still can't quite explain.

Two summers ago, Jaime and I were regularly doing another climb that hurt, up Rio Bravo out of the valley and onto the west mesa. The hill was not so long, with a steep section and then a long gentle finish. Jaime would invariably drop me on the steep section, and it'd be all me and my handlebars and my heart monitor, flirting with the pain threshhold. It hurt, hurt like that first climb up Tramway.

"What is it," I said, gasping at the top of the hill as we stopped to collect ourselves, "that makes me want to come back and do that, over and over again?"

Today was one of those artificial moments.

By my reckoning, the picture above was taken at the point at which I rode my 4,000th mile of 2003. It was a bit of a cheat. I laid out the ride intentionally, so the milestone would happen at a favorite spot, where the trail sweeps east with a view of mountains in three directions. Click on the picture above and you'll get a panorama, though the itty-bitty web image does it faint justice.

The real cheat is the fact that there is no way my odometer is precise enough to tell when I rode the 4,000th mile. But it's such an artificial milestone anyway that this'll do, and I'll cheaply use it.

Up to the northeast, I could see the Tramway hill. To the southwest, I could see Rio Bravo stretching up the mesa front. To the east, I could see the break in the mountains where Tijeras Canyon cuts through, another tough, great ride.

I ride a lot with other people. There is Jaime, who is really the only person with whom I can share the great good that can come of the pain of banging up a long steady climb. Sometimes we'll be riding side by side and he'll start picking up the pace, and I'll match him as long as I can, then slip in behind him, which is his cue to go even faster, and I'll be locked on his back wheel and we're flying in this mad reckless two-car train. I love those rides.

Lissa is a favorite riding partner too. When I need her to help me sort out something hard, we often save it for the bike, a leisurely trek along the river. I love those rides.

But most, I ride by myself. On the easy rides, I ride to write, working out ideas. On the hard rides - and my favorites are the hard rides - it is the exquisite meditation of kicking the pedals over at 90 rpm, feeling the chatter of the road and the pounding of my heart, the music that is labored breathing. I love those rides.

Observing and thinking about the somewhat chilly reception Ali Akcaagac's concerns have received on the GNOME foundation list got me thinking about the Darwinism inherent in a big free software project.

It has been said, I believe with some accuracy, that free software is a meritocracy based one's ability to write code (or do other work - Lord knows the actual code I've written has no merit). But looking at the patterns of the evolution of GNOME as a group of individuals, and thinking about Ali's problems, leaves me wondering if there is also some sort of selection pressure that favors people who are nice.

There's a whole scientific literature on the evolution of cooperation, and how cooperative behaviors can be seen to endure in populations when there is such a strong selective pressure for the individual who defects and eats all the group's food. Cooperation obviously did evolve as a human behavior, but it's poised on a narrow ridgeline with the abyss of defection always nearby. (Oh, gawd, did I write "abyss of defection"? Somebody confiscate that guy's thesaurus!)

But in a project like GNOME there is very little defection benefit, so the selection pressure would naturally favor people who are cheerful, cooperative and good at working together. Is it therefore inevitable that people who are gruff and abrasive would get nowhere in the heirarchy, and a community of nice people would emerge?

Spurred on by my own noir musings the other day, I swung by the library Tuesday and picked up The Long Goodbye. Slumming angel and all.

Pretty remarkable evidence of the power of Googlebombing and subversion that a Google search on fair and balanced gives a full page of people dissing Fox News without a single Fox page in the mix.

Buddy at work came in today with his new Christmas toy, a Garmin GPS/palm pilot gizmo. It's fully cool.

So we got to talking, and I shared with him my fantasy techno gizmo, a small pocket-sized GPS that I could slip in the pocket of my riding shirt. After a ride, I'd download my track to overlay on a digital map, and over time I'd have all these route maps built up. It'd be so cool.

Charlie said most GPS you buy today can do that, so I started my on line fantasy shopping spree, and found a bunch of cool devices that would do the trick. But then it occurred to me that a wall map and a felt pen would also suffice.

The wall map and pen, in fact, have several advantages. No batteries to run out. If the wall map is a topo, more accurate vertical elevation. Less time. (Boot computer, plug in peripheral, start software vs. pick up pen, draw.) Paper maps are pretty easy to look at at large scales. Not so a computer map.

Lord knows I'm no Luddite, but this may be one of those problems, like the book, for which the pre-electronic technology is still the best solution. But man, those little GPS gadgets look cool.

So if Glynn's description of his Christmas is to be believed, we here in New Mexico have inadvertently participated in some sort of antipodal tradition. Liissa cooked up an enormous pan of prawns for Christmas dinner yesterday, along with rice and roast beets. Lots left. Momentarily I'm off to the kitchen to sculpt some sort of prawns-and-beets omelette. (Trust me, I know it sounds weird, it'll be delightful.)

Mum and Dad joined us for the day, in which Nora's best present seemed to be her paid LIveJournal account and ours seemed to be the leisurely opportunity to just hang out. Mum and Dad made me an embroidered Tour de France T-shirt, Dad got some special beer, Mum got earrings and I gave Lissa one of those little kit bags to hang under your bike seat to hold your driver's license and a spare tube. She seemed briefly mortified until I assured her this did not mean she would have to learn to change a flat.

I took a Christmas ride, and took advantage of the temporary lull in the shopping season map out a route I'd always wanted - a high-speed spin along the loop roads that circumnavigate our two shopping malls. They are fine little roads, twisty, a perfect route for a criterium, but the blasted shoppers are normally in the way. Not on Christmas Day! I flew.

One of my gifts, from Nora and Lissa, was a DVD of Life of Brian, turns out Mum and Dad had never seen it (horrors!) so our after-dinner involved filling that gap in their cultural education. ("Blessed are the cheesemakers....")

Then, in a great horror, I dropped Dad's Christmas six-pack of Fat Tire in the street in front of their home as we were schlepping in the Christmas presents. We were good, and cleaned up the broken glass. One bottle survived.

Luis: You've gotta have compartments in your life, and it's OK - in fact it's important - to balance between them. If one of the compartments becomes all-consuming, no matter how wonderful and rewarding it is, it'll eventually eat you alive. Have a nice vacation.

Realized a concordance today between two of my dreams.

I've always wanted to be a cheesy lounge pianist, the guy in the corner of the bar at the Holiday Inn out by the airport playing "As Time Goes By" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", with dark talent and a brooding sense of the inevitable permeating my music, using those familiar melodies to tell a story both dark and redemptive.

I've also always wanted to write noir detective fiction, sending my Philip Marlowe into the Hollywood Hills (LA, it's always old LA) on behalf of a good not quite good enough, but it'll have to do, ten bucks a day plus expenses and no questions asked, a brooding sense of the inevitable permeating my stories, using those familiar cadences to tell a story both dark and redemptive.

I realized today they're the same.

("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.")

Shaun McCance has launched a great discussion of KDE/GNOME/etc. docs interoperability over at freedesktop.org. An excellent discussion, and the sort of thing I was never hackerly enough to think through well.

Shaun's clearly turning out to be the right guy for the GNOME docs job.

Note to self: read this:

Francisco Varela's concept of intelligence is crucial for the understanding of CI. Varela argues that intelligence, is inter-subjective, embodied and the result of the circulation of ideas, language and thought between people (Varela, 1991; see also Vygotsky, 1978). That is, it is social intelligence, or group intelligence, rather than individual intelligence that is the norm. In such a framework Connected Intelligence, especially in its face-to-face version, is the best tool to enhance what is, per se, a natural process. By creating social environments which are favourable to the circulation and discussion of ideas CI enhances and connects the bodies, and knowledge of the participants. As Derrick de Kerckhove suggested (private communication): "It isn't thought that is interior language, it is language that is externalized thought shared by many minds".

Had lunch with friend Al yesterday, a smart guy who I'd called up because I wanted to have him explain some things about the threat of bioterrorism versus the threat of ordinary infectious diseases (an area in which he has some noteworthy expertise).

But Al's one of those peripatetic intellects I so enjoy, so we didn't get to bio stuff right away. Before we met, he emailed me some graphs of data he's been collecting on how much energy he and his wife consume at their house, with statistical comparisons to temperature, history over time, etc. And before I know it, Al's got his laptop out and he's explaining to me the statistical tests he uses and the different variables considered and the risks of data mining versus using statsitics to test the hypothesis with which you started.

Statistics has always been a weakness of mine, and Al loves to teach. Al pointed to one of the graphs, a line graph of month-by-month energy consumption over time for the average Albuquerque household, and pointed out that you can kinda see with your eye the generally upward trend amid the monthly ups and downs. I told him a favorite story of mine, about a smart scientist of my acquaintence who I'd asked to look at some climate data I was using for a story. The first thing the scientist did was hold up a printout of the graph at arms length and sort of squint at it. The eye, he explained, can perform some very useful first-order statistical tests.

Al told the story of the typical blood test your GP gives you. Normal for blood work is defined as 95 percent confidence interval, meaning in a random distribution of results, just by chance one in 20 will come back "abnormal". So if the doc's typical blood work on you measure 40 variables, just by chance in a normal person two will likely come back "abnormal". This is why it's important for at least your doctor to understand statistics, if not you. Better you.

Then I got onto the story I'm working on about the diurnal temperature variation and the signature of global warming, and Al in his usual penetrating way asked me a series of questions that drilled down right to the heart of the issue.

And when we finally got to bioterror and infectious diseases, it was almost an afterthought. I was ready for a bit of a donnybrook over my theme - that infectious diseases are far more threatening than bioterror, and we're therefore spending our energy on the wrong thing. Al, who I expected to disagree, granted my point up front, wtih the caveat that money spent on the bioterror threat yields equivalent gains on the infectious disease front, so it's a wash in terms of the overall research effort, and a net benefit if the bioterror threat means more total money is spent.

Luis: With guidance from people who were obviously smart about this stuff, we were pretty cautious in our own billing of GNOME 2.4's accessibility:

Support for people with disabilities has been a key goal and focus of the GNOME 2 desktop platform, and successive releases have included increasing support for accessibility. With 2.4, users will be able to evaluate GNOME with assistive technolgies.

Riding across the Rio Grande this morning on the old Alameda bridge, Jaime and I stopped to look at a big bird sitting in the middle of the river.

It was hunkered down against the morning chill, standing in shallow water, when I saw it reach down and snag a fish - big white breakfast, maybe a foot long. It was a great blue heron. It spread its wings and took flight north up the river, looking for a place to land and have breakfast.

Later in the ride, a coyote darted across the trail in front of us, dropping down into the drainage ditch and up the other side, on a loping radial away from us, casual but attentive, headed into the neighborhood no doubt to eat someone's chicken. Or cat.

I'm a little bit envious of, and extremely happy for, DCM, who's in Little Rock as we speak working on the Clark presidential campaign. This is always an exciting time in politics, fresh with passion and promise. But when I became a journalist a lifetime ago I signed away my rights to get personally involved in campaigns. It's a good bargain - I pretty much always get to write about the campaigns, and the journalist's ringside seat is a great one. But it's a tradeoff for sure.

Here's how Lissa is great.

Too much stress in the week over this, big opus that had me wound tight. I woke up this morning with a bad headache, stumbled into the kitchen, and there was no coffee. I stood and stared at the empty filter in our mister coffee, dumbstruck, unable to move.

Lissa: "Are you OK?"

Me: "We're out of coffee."

Lissa: "I'll go get you some." And she dressed in a flash and was out the door to Einsteins, and back with two cups of coffee.

I sat in the comfy chair reading a magazine. I couldn't bear to crack open the morning paper on the step stool by my feet. Lissa grasped what I needed and picked up the paper, going straight to my story. She read it, and pronounced it a success. I felt quite loved.

This is sweet, Thomas:

For every mail you send with Evolution, God gives Ettore an extra rice grain in his pudding. So never stop sending mail.

Stop and smell the roses, and all.

I almost missed it this morning, but when I took the mental pause and realized what lay before me it was a picture postcard moment.

Sharp cold, a thick white layer of frost and day-old snow on the pastures along the river, three colorful hot air balloons between me and the early morning sun. If it was a postcard it would have been a cliche, but cliches are what they are for a reason.

Sadly, no camera.

My dog, Sadie, amuses me as follows:

She spends a great deal of her energy looking out the front window. To enable this, we've put a stool by the window for her to sit on. When the curtain's closed, she'll stick her nose under and push it up. It drapes over her head, and from the front yard she looks like a Nun. We call her Nun Dog when she does it.

She seems to like this. Now when the curtain is pushed to one side, she'll still slip her nose under it so it's draped over her head. And lately, as in the snap above, she'll slip her nose under it, then turn and look into the house toward us, Nun Dog in reverse. This amuses me.

I saw this from a distance a few weeks ago, but I didn't want to stare directly at it.

It's the possibility of riding 4,000 miles this year. I log every ride, and thanks to the beauty of software I can tell you that as of today, Dec. 8, I've ridden 3,763.4 miles in 2003. (Don't be fooled by those last couple of significant digits, there's undoubtedly an error bar on that number, but it's a reasonable approximation and it's the best number I've got.)

So after glancing sidelong at the number, then staring when I was pretty sure it wasn't looking, I've walked up and poked it with a stick. I'm going for it. It's doable if I don't get the flu.

Got Htdig set up last evening to manage a bunch of my writings. (I'd had it set up once before, but lost it during a reinstall.) Fine tool. I recommend it highly. I'd been playing with Zope, to do the same job, but it's way more than I need. Htdig with a little xslt/python/perl glue to hold stuff together is quite sufficient.

I"m also playing with Jonathan and Zana's Bookworm, but while fun it's turning out to be orthogonal to what I need.

Had to go to work for a while on a Saturday, listening to Zappa on the drive in as recompense, I noticed Bobby Martin's odd turn on the final lyric of Gregg Allman's "Whipping Post":

You know sometimes I try to believe
That there ain't no such thing
As dyin'

In another of those rare but entertaining convergences between two of my lives, I spent a while yesterday afternoon with Steve the Systems Guy at the office explaining how he could use libxml's python bindings to solve a problem on which he's working. This was not a hard sell. He already had python and xml in mind, and he's completely committed to switching to free software wherever possible. He's a smart guy. He just needed to bounce questions off of someone familiar with the technologies.

A century later, it still looks pretty much like this.

That's what is apparently the only remaining Van Cleve in existence, the bicycles built by Wilbur and Orville Wright before they famously went on to other things. What's amazing is that the bicycle I'll hop on this morning for the ride to work is basically the same. Lots of minor technical innovations, but the basic shape of the thing hasn't changed.

(I like it that the reverse threading so the pedal won't unscrew while you're riding was a Wright Bros. invention. I'll be riding a Wright Bros. technology today.)

Ok, that part about where they announced nex year's Tour de France route and I said "Armstrong will win his sixth Tour in a row next summer". That was a typo. What I meant to say was "With three mountain finishes and a time trial up L'Alpe d'Huez, the one man who might be able to beat Lance Armstrong is Roberto Heras."

The cycling world's been all abuzz the last couple of days over the story that Heras will be bailing out of the last year of his contract with US Postal and jumping to the new Liberty team (formerly Once).

Ullrich vs. Armstrong vs. Heras. Woo-hoo. This could be special.

Saw a funny little episode Monday while at the blood bank donating. I was laying on the comfy chaise with a needle in my arm reading, so I didn't have my glasses on. But I thought I recognized one of the people over in the waiting area as a Minor Local Television Celebrity who shall remain nameless. This being a small pond, Minor Celebrity and I are vaguely acquainted, but I wasn't sure it was her in my blurry glassless vision, so I let it slide without a nod of recognition.

As I was finishing up, the blood bank person called Minor Celebrity's name and gave her a polite "How are you this morning?" Her response. "I'm pissed. I've been waiting 20 minutes."

This, gentle readers, is an opportunity missed. Giving blood is a complete pain in the ass. It can be moreso at our local blood bank, which has something of a reputation for being a bit, uh. slow. But hey, you're doing something good for a fellow human, giving them some of your blood. That is nothing if not an opportunity to feel good about your relationship with the common weal. Don't waste the opportunity by getting pissed off because you had to wait. Bring a book! Enjoy the commons!

I've mentioned this before, so I won't go into detail about this whole blood/commons thing, except to say to the free/open software developers in the audience who are motivated by the moral aspects of making a contributions to the commons - go give blood! This is one of those systems that works best if a whole bunch of individuals each make a tiny contribution. Sound familiar?

But remember to take a book.

Thanks to Daniel's revamped libxml2 API docs build system, I've been able to start picking my way through fixing a bunch of nagging little things that needed fixing - missing documentation for macro definitions, mostly. Not particularly stimulating work, but it's been needed for a while, and it's pretty mindless, a more productive use of brain-dead time than pulling down the "games" menu and saying, "Hey, wonder what this one does?"

Interested to discover that India and Pakistan have the same patron saint, St. Francis Xavier, the "apostle of the east". Somehow I doubt that link is sufficient to calm the world's newest nuclear powers. Can't we all just get along?

Ooh. This is nice. I love industrial architecture, and the nature thing can be intriguing.

And the serpent said, Ye shall not surely die, you probably won't even fall off. For God doth know that on the day you go downhill, you will not need to pedal for a long time. Go on, give it a try.