Safety Fork, the

These birds took up residence on my balcony shortly before I moved in. They’re not shy about flitting in and out while I’m sitting only two meters away.

Telecommunications executives make me crazy. Take this quotation (from here)as an example:

“Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we’re not compensated for,” said Mr. Cicconi, whose company [AT&T] is also one of the world’s largest providers of Internet-based corporate communications services.

Mr. Cicconi’s argument is fallacious. (And it’s a poorly-worded argument, too; an executive for a communications company ought to have better grammar at his command.) AT&T is 100-percent compensated for some guy running a server in his basement uploading illegal movies. He has hired AT&T’s network to transmit data to, and receive data from, Internet hosts of his choosing. The content of any particular datum is irrelevant. Mr. Cicconi has chosen digital movie piracy as a straw man to hide his real concern: overselling profits.

ISPs sell more bandwidth than they have. People don’t usually notice, because it’s statistically unlikely that everyone will try to fully utilize their connections at the same time—at least as long as they stick to reading their email and looking up stuff on Wikipedia. When enough people start sending around big video files (even legal ones), they use up the ISP’s oversold bandwidth, and the rest of the ISP’s customers start making irate phone calls to complain that they can’t look at that one camel on Google Maps.

In short, if AT&T loses money on customers who actually use the capacity they lease, then AT&T should charge more or find ways to cut costs. Blaming customers just makes the company look like idiots.

One of the three light bulbs in my new kitchen just burnt out. As I was sitting at my computer in the next room I became aware of a high-pitched ringing noise. By process of elimination I ruled out my electronics and most of my kitchen appliances before I realized that the sound was coming from above my head. When I switched off the lights, it stopped. When I switched them back on, one did not light.

I find it to be a curious failure mode. I suspect that part of the filament or its support was warming and cooling in a cycle that caused it to vibrate against the glass of the bulb. I find it surprising, though, that the bulb remained lit until I turned off the power. It is unfortunate that the bulb is frosted; were it clear, I would have been fascinated to have observed the mechanics of a ringing incandescent lamp.

I saw the film Helvetica last night at the Walker Art Center. I bought my ticket six weeks ago when I first heard about the film. It’s a good thing, because the Walker employee who introduced the film’s director said that not only did that first screening sell out, so did the one they added later in the evening, and also the one they added for tonight.

The film was excellent. By my usual line of reasoning, in which I describe the quality of a thing by enumerating how few flaws I observed, I have only one: in one of the interviews, the interviewer’s voice was left in the film for one question, but he wasn’t properly recorded by the microphone. He wasn’t even on-screen, so it doesn’t make sense to me that he didn’t re-record those three seconds.

Yesterday I drove to Decorah, IA (a six-hour round trip) to attend my brother’s college graduation.

Here he is finally standing up to go to the platform. The speakers were much better than the ones at my graduation—even given a couple thousand graduates they couldn’t track down two adequate public speakers—although I wasn’t amazed. While I’m sure it was nice to receive one of the two awards for which they singled out a new and previous graduate, having to stand on the platform while my achievements are blandly enumerated would drive me nuts; if I’m ever to be honored publicly, I hope the presenter can dig up at least one interesting or amusing anecdote.

The band was doing pretty well until they played a medley. I know they can be fun to play, but they just don’t impress me in a concert repertoire. In the end, though, their reputation was saved. While I was reviewing the pictures I took, I discovered this guy playing a soprano clarinet. Any band with a soprano-clarinet guy is fine by me.

Check out the smirk. You’d think he’d just hoodwinked the regents into giving him a master’s.

I made this organ pipe yesterday. As you can see, it isn’t quite finished; the ends and edges still need to be trimmed so that everything is flush. It speaks an A, 440 Hz—plus or minus a few.

I was impressed by a website documenting the author’s construction of his own instrument. It was a video on his site demonstrating how to build a pipe that made me want to try it. In the end it took more time to assemble the table saw I used than it took to fashion the pipe (discounting time spent waiting for glue to dry, which, though necessary, is not really work).

Now I’m left considering whether I want to try to build a whole organ. It seems like it might be a good hobby, in that a few hours work can yield one or more pipes—complete on their own even if intended for something larger. And my parents are turning an old church into a house, which is as good a place for an organ as I could ask, assuming I ever finished one. On the other hand, I would have to drive out of the city to work on it, since I’m not likely to have appropriate space for a wood shop any time soon. Perhaps it will be a project for me to do on my Fridays this summer.

The cafeteria where I work posts its weekly menu on our company intranet website. It lists daily breakfast and lunch specials and the soup of the day. Every week, the Friday section includes “Soup of the Day: Du Jour.” If I ask a waiter in a restaurant what is the soup of the day, he doesn’t tell me it’s du jour. I know it’s du jour. That’s why I’m asking the question. I’m sure they write du jour there because they don’t want to put whatever’s left or who knows. Maybe it seems more sophisticated to whoever writes up the menu, but after two years it strikes me more like Vizzini constantly exclaiming “Inconceivable!” They keep using this word and I do not think it means what they think it means.

I was invited to take part in a protest today. I thought about going. I mean, I make fun of protesters, but I realized that I’ve never before seriously considered protesting something. I was told that people would show up for both sides and I was cordially invited to be on either one. I still didn’t want to be there, but it took until this evening for me to figure out exactly why.

I don’t want people to make decisions based on protests. I don’t want rule by volume; I don’t want victory by bigger banners; I don’t want the catchiest slogan to win. In my mind I imagine a world where people are persuaded by wisdom and reason, by thoughtful essays, by impassioned lecturers in great debates with knowledge and logic and diction and audiences who go home with heads so full of new thoughts that ideas leak out their ears.

It’s probably not realistic, but I didn’t pick a side and paint a slogan on a placard because the only way I’ve figured to make such a world is to act as if it were so and use what knowledge and reason I can muster to persuade you to do the same.

“I don’t like either of you.”

I raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Have you been distilling sheep?”

There’s a John Adams Society debate tomorrow, so I baked my Pi-Day pie tonight. It is made with blueberries for three reasons:

1. I believe that pies should be filled with fruit.
2. Blueberries require less preparation than apples or peaches
3. I was not impressed by the grocer’s strawberries.

There’s a number you’ll want to derive.
Make a square and then measure one side.
Draw a circle in bounds,
take its measure around;
to get Pi: by the square-length divide.