So it goes
I’m sure he would have had something to say about this as well.
Thanks for making this world a little more bearable.
Honorable mentions
Several items, all deserving of more than just a quick link:
Pee-Wee makes a comeback
Paul Reubens, AKA Pee-Wee Herman, was on NPR’s Fresh Air today. The interview coincides with the DVD release of the complete Pee-Wee’s Playhouse collection. At the request of Reubens, the interview stayed far away from the unfortunate movie theater incident in 1991 that put an end to the show as well as his questionable art collection that was seized in 2001 (Reubens explains). What was aired was a fun look into the development of the Pee-Wee Herman character, the show, and a better understanding of Reubens himself.
To say I was (am) a Pee-Wee Herman fan is an understatement. My best friend, Buff, and I religiously watched his show every Saturday morning and went through a period in our childhood where we watched the movie about twice a week. We had all of the best lines memorized, could point out all of the production shortcomings in it, and yet laughed our heads off every time we watched it.
By the time of Reuben’s arrest in 1991, we were starting to outgrow our extreme fascination with Pee-Wee, but it was still a disappointment nonetheless. His TV show was a classic and was cut short of the long life it deserved.
Public Radio on the Web
One of the downfalls of living in Pittsburgh is the lack of an all-news Public Radio station, such as KNOW in Minneapolis. WDUQ does a fine job in the morning and early evenings, but the presence of Jazz the rest of the time has forced me to look elsewhere for informational edification. AM radio here is full of sports talk blowhards and right-wing nuts, both of which I do listen to, occasionally, for laughs.
For the past month, I have been enjoying a public radio station out of Boston, WBUR. I first came across it in the dark days of post-election America when I was looking for coverage of Kerry’s concession speech. It offers free, around-the-clock streaming audio in the three major streaming media formats. The quality of the stream is surprisingly good and the shows it broadcasts are top-notch.
I like the station so much that tonight I set up a $5/month pledge for a year. Even though we’re pretty much dirt-poor right now, this is a worthwhile $60. After all, without it, I would have missed out on hearing Pee-Wee Herman today. And that would have just sucked.
Optical illusion weirdness
This do-it-yourself optical illusion is really amazing. Not believing the video, I downloaded the PDF file and assembled it myself. And, amazingly, it works! The effect of slipping into and out of the illusion is somewhat akin to playing Q*Bert for a long time – at some point, your eyes will cross and everything that was concave is now convex and vice-versa. It’s disorienting but also very cool.
Patterns, patterns, everywhere
Although I haven’t read the book, I am familiar with the ideas of Christopher Alexander, as illustrated in his book A Pattern Language. His ideas inspired Design Patterns in the field of software engineering, and helped other disciplines break down their complex ideas into simpler components.
This website recognizes the networked structure of Alexander’s book and presents it as a series of interconnected pages, allowing one to build up a collection of patterns that can be applied to a specific architectural problem. Although it may be of limited direct applicable use to most, if one is creative with metaphors and abstractions, inspiration may result.
Computer Sweatshops
By the looks of this article, working at Electronic Arts is anything but a good time. 80 hour weeks? Some weeks, I can barely make it through 40.
My thoughts exactly
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Mostly I’ve been trying to finish Lewis Mumford’s massive book The City in History. It’s something I started way back in Minneapolis but never had the time to finish. But now that I have a long bus ride to and from work every day, it’s going quite well.
It’s a book that picks up steam as it goes on. Near the end, Mumford really lays into capitalism and its ill effects on society in general and the city, specifically. I can’t say there’s a lot that I disagree with. When I get done with it, I plan on putting up a few of my favorite quotes from the book for posterity.
But I just couldn’t let this one get by. It’s from an article in the New York Times discussing public art in the city’s subway stops. Having just experienced the city for the first time, and being from the underpopulated Midwest myself, I understand her completely.
“I grew up in Kansas and fell in love with the subways on the first day of my adult life in New York. After years of untold subway time — spent watching, listening, reading — I would say that large, active systems of mass transit are the main difference between the red and the blue states of the 2000 electoral map (California excepted). People who travel only by private car — most of America — can too easily stick to their own kind and cling to their prejudices and misconceptions without the threat of contradictory experiences.”
Eerie beauty
The similarity between these two pieces of media is not surprising, but it is striking, nonetheless. One is a satellite composite image of the Earth at night that makes a good case for light pollution restrictions, while the other is a Java applet that geographically plots the US ZIP codes. Although it is obvious that the amount of light pollution will directly correlate to the density of the population (and hence to the density of the ZIP code distribution), it’s still fun to compare the two maps.
I found the distribution of the data to be most interesting in the sparsely populated areas in the west, where it roughly followed the interstate highway system. Contrast it to the densely populated east, where large-scale settlement predated the major interstates. It’s amazing, and sad, how millions of tons of concrete (billions, even) can dictate the direction of a society.
