Category: Uncategorized

I’m listening to some tapes by Robert Greenberg (available from the Teaching Company) on the history of music. They’re very entertaining… I hadn’t realized, for example, how significant opera was in the development of many other musical forms like oratorio and sonata form. Then I remembered that there was somebody else I had heard on the radio who gave talks called “What makes it so great?” But who? Was it Greenberg? One quick visit to Google later, I learned that it’s Robert Kapilow, another clever and inspirational music geek. Listen to him wax rhapsodic about Harold Arlen’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow on NPR’s Performance Today.

PC Forum organizer Esther Dyson has some choice words about blogging during conference talks at the PC Forum. The big idea is that people can use a Wi-Fi network to blog about a talk in real time to the whole world. What does this mean? Esther says: “In some sense, the power of the conference moderator is reduced. Bloggers can add their own value … and they can relay their version from inside the tent to those outside the tent and out of the organizer’s control.” It’s easy to see that A) this will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and B) it can’t be stopped.

The last conference I went to (O’Reilly Bioinformatics in Tucson) people were typing away the whole time all over the audience. But every time I got close enough to peek, they were doing something completely unrelated to the talk: idly surfing the web, writing and compiling code, or playing solitaire. High tech doodling. Tappity-tap tap tap.

From BoingBoing I found this cool pointer to the DOE Photo Library of atmospheric nuclear tests. I find these pictures utterly mesmerizing. I am can’t stop wondering about what it must have been like to witness some of these big boys. The atmospheric H-bomb shots in the Pacific are the creepiest of all. Consider
Castle Bravo, a dry lithium that obliterated Bikini atoll in 1954. It was fully two and a half times more powerful than expected, tipping the scales at 15 megatons. Imagine the consequences of a miscalculation like that… Witnesses on nearby naval vessels said the heat was terrifying in its intensity and persistence. “The cloud top rose and peaked at 130,000 feet (almost 40 km) after only six minutes. Eight minutes after the test the cloud had reached its full dimensions with a diameter of 100 km, a stem 7 km thick, and a cloud bottom rising above 55,000 feet (16.5 km).” Castle Bravo was the largest bomb ever exploded by the United States.

But was it the largest ever? No. That distinction goes to the “Tsar Bomba” (“King of Bombs”) which the Soviet Union exploded over Novaya Zemlya in 1961 for a yield of 50 megatons. Khruschev got the weapon he wanted, but as the FAS site says, “a bomb this size is virtually useless militarily.” Still. Ka-BOOM!

The Atlantic has another good issue this month. Besides the article on complexity and simulation, there’s a great piece by Amy Bloom on the odd plight of heterosexual cross-dressers. Among such men, there is an unusually high proportion of former Marines. Not clear why.

I think I’ve just verified from my monthly stats that the majority of the activity on this site come from search engines and bots of one kind or another. The single biggest visitor, with about 160 visits in March, is the Spyonit.com bot. With luck, those hits are actually bringing a few people in. To everyone, bot and non-bot alike, welcome, and make yourselves at home!

Today’s Easter special: Somebody at Emory Medical School found a free operating room and performed some Marshmallow Peep Surgery. Apparently five of the little guys were joined hip-to-hip and required a sophisticated surgical procedure to separate them. Warning: these pages are quite explicit and not for the faint-of-heart. If you get queasy watching marshmallows bleed, this is not for you. [seen on BoingBoing]

Nice short article in The Scientist on various biological databases and what they do. Want to know about reverse transcriptase, the crowbar that lets pesky retroviruses like HIV jimmy their way into your DNA? Try browsing around PFAM protein database at Washington University in St. Louis.

One of the few good things about Oscar season is the bitchy Oscar show reviews. For a scalding run-down on this year’s antics, don’t miss Cintra Wilson’s piece at Salon… Oscars 2002: Somebody make it stop!. An excerpt:

I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as diamond drill-bits. The new braces on his teeth suggest that he is erasing all that remained of his tiny imperfections, and he is now metamorphosing into Ultra Super Perfection Man 3000.

Cool! I notice that Kevin Kelly has linked to my piece about the Whole Earth Review from last year. You never know who’s going to link to your site.

Speaking of Kevin Kelly, by the way, the Coffee Czar pointed me to this article in the NY Times about how technology is changing how we think about music.

Steven Vogel has written another book, bless his heart: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle. He has written several books that focus on the engineering aspects of biological systems, that is, thinking of organisms in terms of their physical design. This is going to be one of the great themes of the 21st century, and he is a real pioneer in the field. Look for lots more books on this theme. In the meantime, considering buying Cat’s Paws and Catapults.