Recent history is weird

It was illegal to sell contraceptives to unmarried women in Massachusetts until 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional (Eisenstadt v. Baird).

Further reading: History of the Pill; Sex-related U.S. court cases.

I get lost

Twice I have printed out directions from Google Maps, and twice it has gotten me off track. I think Google must be using an inferior database of roads to generate their directions.

On the way to Salem, my printed directions omitted the fact that I-95 North is the same road as Mass. Rte. 128 for several miles; completely failed to mention that when they diverge, you want to take the left fork and stay on 128; and got the exit number for Peabody wrong.

It's a shame, because Google Maps is pretty good otherwise. Its user interface puts it way ahead of its competitors.

But all these sites have a long way to go. For example, none of the free map sites show highway exit numbers on their maps. And none show public transit lines. Or pay parking lots. Driving directions could also be improved dramatically without a great deal of technical effort. The most obvious thing is landmarks. Good directions periodically reassure the traveler that he's on the right path. "You'll pass Boston Common on your left." Or, "Pass through Joe Bloggs Tunnel." Or, "Turn right on Walnut St. at a large stone church."

The other thing that sent me astray this weekend was the sign on I-93 South (into Boston) that says, "Commuter lane - no exits until Storrow Drive". Actually, the Storrow Drive exit is one of the ones bypassed. I think this has been the case ever since the new bridge opened almost a year ago. It's crazy that the sign hasn't been changed.

M. plays Blank White

My sister M. was in town a week ago. We did the tourist thing and played 1000 Blank White Cards. I guess we should have used the rejects the gang sent back with us from Florida, but we decided to start from scratch.

Normally this game is something of a free-for-all, but with the card set we ended up with, it was surprisingly stable. For me, this makes the game even more fun. After the last hand, we ended up with:

• six plain point cards
• six point cards that actually do something
• eight action cards
• six counterspells

This is a good mix. I've been thinking about doing the counterspell thing for a long time. My impression is that it really helps the game. It also helped that very few of the cards had you doing something every turn. I think the game works better when it can move along pretty quickly.

Favorites:

Evil Thieving Monkeys - Steal another player's card in play and play it on yourself. (inspiration)

Turn to the Dark Side - Flip any card in play face-down. On the back (if it's blank), draw a cruel, evil version of the front.

Let it all hang out - All new cards must have a PIG theme! +3 pts. (There was a Star Wars theme card, too. Never managed to get both in play at the same time, alas.)

In Triplicate - +3 pts. Whenever you play a non-point card, triple its effects.

I'd better stop here. James wants to look at motorcycles.

I'm caught in the crossfire

I bought Ben Folds's new album, Songs for Silverman, but I had to return it because it wouldn't play on my computers at home or at work, making it mostly worthless to me. It wouldn't play because it doesn't conform to the Compact Disc specifications. It is a DualDisc.

Supposedly DualDiscs exist to add DVD-like bonus features to CDs. Videos, interviews, that kind of thing. In particular, Silverman comes with a copy of the whole album in 5.1 SurroundSound—a phenomenally cool feature, if I had a SurroundSound home theater, which I don't. But really DualDiscs exist to fight music piracy. I know this because Songs for Silverman isn't sold on CD. This really drives me crazy, since I don't pirate music and haven't for years. I can't even buy an album I like and listen to it at home anymore. Technology sucks.

I'm particularly irritated at Sony because the fact that the disc was not a CD appeared in print about 1/8-inch high on the back of the CD. Barnes and Noble graciously gave me store credit when I returned the DualDisc, even though I had already opened it. I hear some record stores don't do that. They all should; it's borderline fraud to put these non-CD things into CD cases and sell them alongside CDs without warning your customers.

James wants to look

James's first four-syllable word was avocado, but only because he long ago started saying “cycle” for motorcycle. Yesterday he said, “momocycle”—a conscious effort on his part.

I showed James some pictures of motorcycles on Google Image Search and it's now one of his favorite things to do. “Look—cycle?” he'll say. Whenever he's in the computer room he demands to see pictures. It's becoming quite difficult.

Some of his favorite searches are purple fish, red motorcycle, and blue bus. (James is into two-word phrases these days.)

I had forgotten—you do find some strange and beautiful things when you spend time aimlessly wandering on the Web.

A rift in the Ross Ice Shelf. “At the narrow end, [these rifts] are covered by a snow-bridge and are nearly invisible. As a result, they can be quite treacherous, as some covered portions of the cracks are large enough to swallow tracked vehicles.” (more)

A child's toy filled with gasoline - Not for sale in the land of the free, for obvious reasons. But what a cool toy. You can take it apart and rearrange the pieces to make this. The same page has a picture of the most beautiful motorcycle I've ever seen. This motorcycle could star in its own movie.

A search for big rock turns up lots of nice pictures, including this one.

James barks

Since the snow melted, James wants to spend every possible moment outdoors. Olivia and I have no problem with this. We go for walks. We regularly hit two, three parks a day.

On Sunday night there was a dog in the second-story window of the house across the street. He barked at us, and James said, “Arf, arf, arf,” and pointed at him.

He woke up at 4:00 Monday morning and crawled around the bed saying, “Arf, arf, arf.” We don't have a dog, but our son wakes us up in the middle of the night barking.

I took him downstairs and carried him around for about half an hour until he went back to sleep. I hope that doesn't become a routine; he woke up early this morning too. While I was carrying him around he barked at the birds chirping outside.

Coffee

Disconcerting day at work.

I woke up at around 4:45, spent about 45 minutes getting James back to sleep, took a shower, and drove in. I got a large cup of black coffee and spent a few hours at my desk squinting. Coffee wakes me up if I'm sleepy, but it also makes me shake and puts a strange edge on the world. Today wasn't the best day to be under the influence, as I had a 10:00 meeting to meet the new VP of Engineering.

The new VP. My boss's new boss, responsible for about 30 people in all. It's his second week, and he's making an effort to sit down and talk with everyone for half an hour or so. He seems like an interesting guy, so I was looking forward to it. I had jotted down a few notes so I would have something to talk about. I got them organized and wandered over to his office.

Then something weird happened. The VP listened very carefully to everything I had to say, took notes, remarked that I had just brought up all the major things he had learned about the situation in Engineering since he'd started, and that he could have saved a week and a half by talking to me on the first day; and added that unless I kicked and screamed, I was inevitably going to end up in management. (I'm sure this was intended as a compliment.) He had other nice things to say, too. It was a strange and very flattering meeting.

Maybe the coffee was making me paranoid, but I spent most of the morning wondering what to make of it.

In the afternoon the VP dropped by my office (God knows how he found it) and mentioned that everybody says I'm brilliant. “You probably don't usually get that kind of feedback,” he said. He's right, I don't. From what I hear, I'm an idiot.

I have to wonder what is going on.

What to do, except make some kind of crazed, doomed effort to live up to a favorable first impression?

Compression and Surrealism

Come to think of it, the thoughts below suggest a fun new compression scheme.

First, some background. JPEG is a common lossy image format. It has a problem: JPEG artifacts, noticeable image distortion as a result of having thrown away some details. All lossy compression schemes lose information, and since a compression scheme never really knows what information is safe to discard and what isn't, they all have artifacts. But it seems that if a compression scheme had an idea of what chaos is, and what it looks like, then chaotic details could be discarded without losing anything a human would ever notice.

It would amount to including a macroscopic charactarization of some parts of the image. JPEG, for example, has a particular problem with tree branches. But if the file format included a way to encode, “ all right, the whole background of this image is tree branches,” and a few parameters such as the colors and thickness of the branches, then JPEG wouldn't even need to bother trying to encode all those sharp lines and angles. The JPEG viewer would fill in the background with exquisitely rendered random branches.

It's fun to consider how this idea could be taken to ridiculous extremes. The brightly colored background of a sports photograph could be filled in with randomly generated fans. As JPEG has trouble rendering corporate logos (too many sharp edges and fields of solid color), you could randomly generate those too. They all look more or less the same anyway. A dias could be filled with randomly generated politicians; a movie poster with explosions; a gallery with randomly generated modern art.

Anyway, this would result in much better compression: either fewer artifacts for a given file size; or much smaller image files; or a combination. But the resulting image would be part authentic and partly fabricated based on a high-level description of the original.

Arguably this is the direction our media culture is going anyway.

Entropy and compression

A computer scientist might observe that entropy is information content. To describe the insides of a hot air balloon exhaustively (setting aside the Uncertainty Principle for a moment) would require notes about the position and velocity of every air molecule. The crystalline structure of ice would save us a lot of writing, as the possible variation in position and velocity of the individual molecules is much less. Pound for pound, steam contains more information than ice. And so it is with digital information. A GIF or PNG file of a highly chaotic image is much larger than an image that consists of just a few colors and shapes.

Yet somehow it doesn't seem that way to us humans. We have one-syllable words for both ice and steam. Steam doesn't seem so much more complex.

This is because we generalize. We throw away low-level variations in favor of high-level order.

In a high-entropy situation, a lot of the details are, almost by definition, unobservable at the macro level. This means we probably don't care much about them. Lossy compression is the computer science equivalent. If we wish to compress a large amount of chaotic data to a manageable size, we can discard information about details we consider irrelevant. This is what lossy compression schemes, like JPEG, attempt to do.

(I'm not very sure of the technical details here. Still reading about it.)

Evolution and chaos

My view of life on Earth is that it is an accumulation of order made possible by the tremendous influx of energy from the sun. What do I mean by order? I'll get to that in a minute.

Poormattie's view is that life is a random development in the rampant chaos that is the universe: an eddy in a river, or bubbles on a stormy sea.

As always it seems to me that poormattie's opinion is more correct. But the two views aren't as opposing as they seem. In part, the distinction has to do with how one defines chaos and order.

In statistical thermodynamics, entropy is a function of the amount of variation that could happen on a microscopic level without really affecting the macroscopic properties of things. To my mind, entropy is chaos; lack of entropy is order. For example, consider steam and ice. Steam is made up of water molecules careening through space at high speeds and colliding into each other. An individual water molecule in steam could basically go off in any direction it wanted, and the difference would be unnoticeable from a macroscopic perspective. But the individual water molecules in ice are locked into position within a crystal. No variation is possible. Steam has greater entropy than ice.

For a very different and probably completely inappropriate example, Utopian fashion is extremely regular. There can be no deviation from the standard on an individual level without changing that society-wide uniformity. So Utopia has low fashion entropy. It is a highly ordered society.

This definition ignores higher-level order. Entropy is only concerned with the variation allowed individuals at the smallest observeable level. So although life certainly appears chaotic from the perspective of poormattie just looking around at the state of the world, it's hard to say whether the presence of life indicates a state of higher or lower entropy.

Evolution and long life

G.D., a coworker, introduced me to a radical new idea today.

I had been under the impression that evolution cares little for individuals who are too old to reproduce. Their survival is irrelevant to the propagation of their genes. So they die before long. That is, a species doesn't evolve for greater longevity, beyond child-rearing years. There's no evolutionary advantage to it.

A consequence of this, or so it seemed, would be that natural selection is not working very hard in the rich world these days. Most people in America and Western Europe live long past child-raising age. Natural selection requires inferior genes to go out of circulation through death. No death, no evolution. (Evolution is still happening all the time, but mainly through other mechanisms: sexual selection, for example.)

But this view makes the longevity of humans, modest though it may be, something of a mystery. Especially for women, who typically reach menopause in their forties. (A healthy 50-year-old American woman still has, on average, 30 years ahead of her.) Nature wastes nothing. It seems implausible that people would continue living for decades after evolution no longer had any use for them.

It turns out that women and men whose mothers are alive and nearby start having kids sooner and have more children on average than people whose mothers aren't there. And their children are more likely to survive to adulthood.

Why we die, why we live

Grandmother's footsteps - A much better article. Expensive subscription required.

Kicker: This means natural selection is hard at work even today. According to studies of 18th- and 19th-century records, women who die at the tender age of 50 have on average four fewer grandchildren than women who survive to 70. Even after your kids grow up and move out, evolution is still watching.

Breakfast

I'm not much for breakfast food. The ideal jorendorff breakfast is a ripe juicy pear accompanied by a slice of raisin spelt bread toasted and topped with Kupel's cream cheese.

Kupel's is a Boston bagelry that makes the world's best cream cheese. I've never been there myself. I buy the cream cheese through a coworker, D.J.L., whose mom goes there every week. For a time I had the name confused. I thought it was “Kegel's Bagels”. A Kegel is actually a pelvic floor exercise. Thanks to D.J.L. for straightening me out on that one.

James is sick

James woke up in the wee hours Friday morning with a temperature of 102.9°F. We called the doctor; the nurse on call said to give him some Tylenol and lots of fluids and call back in three days if the fever didn't go down. So we did nothing and the fever went down on its own. James was pretty miserable for a day or two and couldn't sleep for more than two hours at a stretch. Now the fever is gone. He has a nasty-sounding cough. He's a trooper.

When I was a kid, my parents routinely cured my childhood diseases with Jell-O and fun music tapes. Or so it seems through the lens of memory.

James stomping around in his dad's shoes.

They run for fun

More signs The Economist is going soft: Here's a quote from a light article on the economies of online role-playing games, some of which allow players to sell virtual in-game items to other players for real-world cash, and some of which forbid it.

Normally, this newspaper's devotion to free trade is unwavering. Yet curbing the trade of in-game items is defensible, since game economies are run to maximise fun, not efficiency. While writing his forthcoming book, “Synthetic Worlds”, Mr Castronova has been pondering whether real economies could be run for fun too. “Wouldn't that tip the economics texts on their heads?” he muses.

I'm reminded of the words of the great Dr Seuss (reviews):

From there to here, from here to there

Funny things are everywhere.

Here are some who like to run.

They run for fun in the hot, hot sun.

Oh me! Oh my! Oh me! Oh my!

What a lot of funny things go by.