Avenue Q meets Fiddler on the Roof

I can't believe I haven't already linked to this mashup between Avenue Q and Fiddler on the Roof. (Part of the Broadway Cares / Equity Fight AIDS program from 2006.) Possibly one of the funniest things I've seen in years.

Netflix and Bill Hicks

So Netflix knows I like Bill Hicks. But their explanation why they recommended one of his DVDs is really weird:

Buh.

What Would Wile E. Coyote Order From Here?

Found and photographed in Buffalo, posted with no comment.

Rapturous Bumper Stickers

My sister saw one of these a few days ago (apparently there are actual "Come the rapture, this car will be unmanned" bumperstickers around where she lives): "In case of rapture, can I have your car?". Also "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned. It will then recklessly careen into children at a school crossing -- killing all of them.".

I Am Never the First To Think of Something Part 2

I came up with this a few days ago and lo! the Internet provides proof that someone came up with it at least a month before I did: ICANN has cheezburger.

(See ICANN and lolcats if you didn't get that. But if you didn't get it, you probably won't care.)

Boom

Now this is a summer camp I wish we'd had when I was a teenager.

Reviews 2007-06-16: Non-Fiction Books

I'm way behind on writing up what books I've read. This is non-fiction books.

In this roundup:

• 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies
• Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd
• Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer
• How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman
• Better, by Atul Gawande
• Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

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Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered America is a great companion to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (which I reviewed previously). The book subtitle is "The Year China Discovered the World" for the non-American editions. (<insert snarky comment about stupid Americans here>)

Menzies starts his book with an account of how he found a map dated authoritatively to 1424, which showed islands that he eventually deduced were Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe -- including a notation that there was a volcano on Guadeloupe, which matched geological evidence that there had been an eruption between 1400 and 1440 - and not for a hundred years before or after. He started looking at more and more old charts and maps, and kept finding evidence that the European explorers had accurate charts of diverse parts of the world (including Antarctica!) long before they actually visited them. He came to the conclusion that only China could have done the original charting at that time -- no one else had the technology or the manpower to do it.

Menzies is a retired British submarine commander, and has experience crucial to being able to work with the old charts and maps he was investigating -- hands-on experience navigating by stars (especially in the southern hemisphere) as well as first-hand knowledge of currents and charting from near-sea-level.

After a short introdcution, the book starts off with an account of China in 1421: Emperor Zhu Di, third Ming Emperor, opened the just-completed Forbidden City in Beijing (hosting leaders and potentates from all over southern Asia and eastern Africa), and launched a huge fleet of trade/tribute ships (commanded by eunuchs loyal to the emperor), to first take back all the leaders who had come to Beijing and then to chart the world and bring it into China's tribute system.

While the fleet was away, though, lightning started a fire the destroyed much of the Forbidden City, which led to a revolt amongst the Mandarin class (who had been push aside by Zhu Di). The Mandarins, pointing to the fire as evidence that the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn from Zhu Di, took power, and closed China. When the trade fleets returned, they were burned to the waterline and all documentation that could be found was destroyed.

What became clear to Menzies was that what little documentation -- some charts and maps -- remained, leaked westward until it was picked up by the Portuguese and Spanish, who used it to their advantage when exploring. Magellan claimed to his mutinous crew to have a chart showing that the Straits of Magellan were actually a strait -- narrowly averting the mutiny. Columbus and his brother made a distorted copy of a world map that showed Africa and Malaysia both extending much further south than they actually do, and used that to convince the Spanish Crown that the Portuguese were in for a rough time looking for an eastward route to the Spice Islands -- and thus the westward route was worth trying. Prince Henry the Navigator ordered his fleets to find the islands they'd seen on a chart ("Antilia" and "Satanaze" -- modern-day Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe).

Menzies, details his slow deciphering of old charts (mostly copies of other, even older charts), and his slow realization that some of these are stunningly correct about parts of the world that Europeans had never seen at that point. (One fascinating example of this is a map that shows what we now call Patagonia, which included drawings some of its now-extinct megafauna. Another is a map of Africa which becomes accurate once ocean currents are taken into account -- the chart was most probably drawn with dead-reckoning as the measurement method; factoring in the current that goes up the west side of Africa and then turns west around the bulge, the map is accurate.)

The book has dozens of examples and a huge amount of detail about the four giant fleets that China sent out in 1421 -- they went all across the Indian Ocean, and thence around to the Cape Verde Islands, where they rendezvous'd and then commenced huge charting expeditions. Menzies believes that there were upwards of 800 ships involved, some of which were 400 feet long. (In contrast, the Santa Maria was about as long as my house.) In addition to the charts, there are a large number of pieces of archaeological, linguistic, and sociological evidence which can at least tentatively be explained by Chinese visitation or even colonization around the world.

Some of the examples seem seriously stretching (there's a claim that Navajo elders in the early 1900s could understand Chinese, which seems really weird to me), but if even half -- or even a third -- of the possibilities connected to Chinese voyages of discovery, it would be an amazing discovery.

Fundamentally, there's nothing outlandish (or even surprising) about the idea that Chinese seafarers made it to the Americas or had charted most of the world -- China in the early 15th Century, after all, was decades if not centuries ahead of the rest of the world technologically and scientifically. But the idea that they might have charted the world, and then thrown it all away, is just mindblowing. But the Mandarin closing of China is (ironically) fairly well documented, and any such voyages of discovery could easily have been wiped out of the official historical record. (Far stranger things have happened.)

The documentary evidence in European archives -- letters between the Columbus brothers, Magellan's claims to his sailors, and so on -- are in many ways the most convincing, although a few archaeological sites (like a wreck buried in the sands in the Sacramento river turning out to be a Chinese Junk) would be well-nigh incontrovertible. The drama of this discovery is still unfolding -- a lot of data is still being brought to light. Menzies has a web site, www.1421.tv, which includes recent finds and corroborating data.

Bottom line: fascinating subject and an entertaining book. The book could have been edited a bit better, and I really wish that more diagrams had been included -- like "before" and "after" versions of charts with the currents included. I also wished for more of the actual detective story in addition to the results. But overall, highly recommended.

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Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe was a disappointment. It's hard to tell if it would be disappointing to other people, though, because it's about the physics of the Universe being a computer. Being a former physicist and current computer geek, I figured this would be right up my alley, but it turned out to be far too vague for me on both the physics and the computing. It may be that someone for whom both subjects were relatively unknown would feel more enlightened.

Bottom line: I was bored by it, but you might not be.

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Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex is a collection of essays that Zimmer put together in 2001. It feels more like an interconnected set of essays than a book, which isn't always bad, but this seemed like a rough joining job. That being said, I really like Zimmer's writing (he blogs over at scienceblogs.com too), and there's a lot of fascinating (if potentially disgusting) things in here.

From the life cycle of malaria to liver flukes, there are a lot of weird life forms out there, and Zimmer's central point -- that scientists have neglected parasites -- is well supported. Some of his more speculative ideas (that lack of parasites in first world countries lead to increased allergies and other immune system disorders) are less well supported, but are quite plausible and seem like great areas of further research.

Bottom line: recommended if you have a strong stomach.

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It seems like every other doctor in Boston is writing a book these days, and Jerome Groopman is one of the better ones. I've been reading his articles in The New Yorker and other places for a while now, and almost always enjoy them. How Doctors Think is Groopman's long meditation on the number of ways that doctors can mis-think, mis-diagnose, and otherwise mess up when treating patients.

The book is a good read. It's mostly anecdotal in approach, and while each episode is fascinating, I ultimately wanted some higher-level wrapup or framing for the various cognitive issues that Groopman is addressing.

Bottom line: a good read, but not the best thing in the world.

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Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance is another of the Boston-doctor-written books (he's also a New Yorker writer), and it's a very good book indeed. Gawande is for my money a better writer than Groopman -- better on the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level (he approaches poetry sometimes), and better on the integration of large and small scales of focus. Better is about efforts to make health care, well, better. His critical eye ranges from attempts to make doctors actually wash their hands (a truly scary chapter for anyone who knows someone who's been in the hospital recently) to the effort to eradicate polio in India, taking in along the way doctors involved in capital punishment, what kind of money doctors make, and how army physicians have achieved astounding results saving lives in Iraq.

All through the book, it's clear you're in the hands of someone who is humane and cares deeply about both the systemic, emotional, moral, ethical, and, well, human dimensions of the practice of medicine. It's one of the best nonfiction, non-history books I've read in a long time.

Bottom line: highly recommended.

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Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness is a survey of the current understanding about how humans make -- and fail to make -- themselves happy. It's mostly about how we fail to understand what does make us happy, and how we mis-predict how we'll feel in the future and how we felt in thte past. It's a solid addition to the "wow, this data is totally counterintuitive -- our intuition sucks" genre.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot, but while I read it most recently of all the nonfiction books reviewed here, I really don't remember much about it. The amount of detail was overwhelming. One thing that did stick with me was the study that showed (based on highly granular emotional-state self-reports) that men and women react very similarly emotionally -- but later on, they drastically differ in their memory and categorization, with men de-emphasizing emotional reactions and women over-emphasizing them.

There's a lot of great detail in the book, and I think I'm going to have to re-read it to make it stick. Perhaps, though, I've forgotten most of it because to remember it would destroy my carefully-wrought defense mechanisms that I use to avoid predicting correctly what I've felt in the past and how I'll feel in the future.

Bottom line: recommended.

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To summarize:

Book	Writer	Rating (out of 5 stars)
1421: The Year China Discovered America	Gavin Menzies	4.7
Programming the Universe	Seth Lloyd	3.0
Parasite Rex	Carl Zimmer	4.0
How Doctors Think	Jerome Groopman	4.0
Better	Atul Gawande	4.6
Stumbling on Happiness	Daniel Gilbert	4.3

Home Inspection Nightmares

This Old House has a new gallery of Home Inspection Nightmares. (This is volume 6; there are links to earlier ones.)

I'm literally stunned at the kind of stuff people do to their houses.

Linked in honor of people I know who have just closed or are about to close on houses.

Movie Review Roundup #2

It's time for another installment of Movie Review Roundup!

In this issue:

• The Departed
• The Good Shepherd
• Jarhead

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First up: The Departed, which I saw on the LimoLiner bus to NYC. It's a fantastic cast (Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Jack Nicholson in the various leads, with a bunch of solid backup in the rest of the cast. It's very well-made, enjoyable to watch, and gratifyingly bang-y for the buck at the end. It's not the best movie ever made, and it probably wasn't really the Best Picture of last year (although it sure was better than Crash), but it was darn good. And they actually filmed Boston pretty well.

Bottom line: good, solid mob/cop movie with a stellar cast.

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Apparently this is Matt Damon week, because I also watched The Good Shepherd recently. This is a very well done but awfully depressing movie which should be subtitled "How Skull & Bones Fucked Up the World". It follows Matt Damon's character, Edward Wilson, from 1939 (being inducted into Skull & Bones) as he works in the OSS during World War 2 and then helps set up the CIA, all the way through 1962, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Good news: Robert DeNiro can actually direct.

Bad news: Robert DeNiro can't edit down as far as he should. The movie was about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be, I think. Also, I think casting Angelina Jolie as Wilson's unloved socialite wife was probably a mistake -- it makes it much harder to believe some of what goes on, because she's so damn hot.

Bottom line: good movie, but not one I'd see again.

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Jarhead is one I've been meaning to see for a while, and we finally watched it yesterday. I enjoyed the book a lot, although I found it a little scattered. The move is less scattered; they linearized the plot and (of necessity) removed a bunch of details. I think this actually is a bad thing in a lot of ways. (They got Catch-22 to work as a movie, even with the insane time-jumping, but maybe Mike Nichols is a better director than Sam Mendes, or Buck Henry is a better screenwriter than William Broyles.)

Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor, but I'm not sure he's right to play Swofford in this movie. On the other hand, the supporting cast is great -- Peter Sarsgaard's habitually flat affect actually works well here, and Jamie Foxx is great. The relative unknowns rounding out the rest of the cast do a good job too.

Ultimately, though, the movie seems kind of random and annoying in ways that the book did not, and it was fundamentally unsatisfying.

(It doesn't help that it was a stark reminder of when a President George Bush prosecuted a war in the Middle East with actual planning and multilateral cooperation.)

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To summarize:

Movie	Quality Rating (out of 5 stars)	Enjoyability Rating (out of 5)
The Departed	4.1	4.4
The Good Shepherd	4.0	3.5
Jarhead	3.5	3.8

Irony, thy name is Bork

Robert Bork, spurned Supreme Court nominee and noted supporter of tort "reform" sues the Yale Club of New York City for $1M + punitive damages, because he slipped and fell there when giving a talk.

I really can't add much to that.

Via Making Light.

Way Too Accurate

This will hit close to home for anyone who ever played D&D.

Via Pharyngula.

Today's Moment of Self-Reflexivity

I was reading Michael Bérubé's latest post at Crooked Timber, and he made reference (semi-ironic as is his wont) to a Bourdieu Chart. I wasn't familiar with that term, and went and google'd it -- and the first thing that came up was Michael Bérubé's latest post at Crooked Timber.

Perhaps Google should replace one or both of its "o"s with ourobouroses. (Ouroubouri? Ourobouropodes?)

Kangaroos Self-rooing

I had no idea kangaroos did that.

Movie Review Roundup

I've watched a number of movies (on DVD, mostly) recently, and I figured I'd do some quick writeups. Since most of these movies have been out for months if not years, I figure I don't have to worry about spoilers.

In this roundup:

• X-Men 3: The Last Stand
• Kinky Boots
• Children of Men
• Happy Feet
• Stranger than Fiction
• Armageddon

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First up: X-Men 3: The Last Stand, which I saw last night with Dan. Simply put, this was entertaining and pretty to watch, but ultimately brain candy, because they made the characters act so stupidly.

Case in point: if you're Magneto, and you can actually move the Golden Gate Bridge with your mind, and you want to destroy something on Alcatraz, why not simply drop the bridge on Alcatraz, rather than landing one end of it on the island, and then having your cannon-fodder minions run off of it into the enfilading fire of the US Army?

And poor Famke Janssen. All she gets to do for most of the movie is stand around and look either (a) miserable or (b) dangerous or (c) both. Oh, I guess she gets to kiss Hugh Jackman too, so she got to do something useful.

Bottom line: recommended as a fun DVD watch, but check your brain at the door.

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Kinky Boots is one of those little English movies that no one should ever try to remake as an American movie (but they might try anyway). Based on a true story, it's about a guy (Charlie, played by Joel Edgerton) who can't wait to get out of Northampton and his father's shoe business, and ends up back there running it when his father dies suddenly.

Based on a chance encounter with a transvestite lounge singer named Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor, stealing yet another movie), Charlie decides that the way to save the factory is to retool and make man-sized thigh-hugging kinky boots for transvetites. Hilarity and exquisitely gauged English embarrassment ensues.

Bottom line: a very fun little movie which I enjoyed even more than I'd hoped. Strongly recommended.

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Children of Men is a visually fascinating, subtly acted depressing movie which I actually enjoyed a lot. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón (rapidly becoming one of my favorite directors), the entire movie is played low-key and hyper-realistic, which makes it all the more disturbing.

Basic plot outline is that sometime in our near future (2009 or so) people stop being able to have children (in the book, it's explicitly male infertility, which brings up the obvious "what about sperm banks" question; the movie sidesteps the cause of the infertility). Twenty-odd years later, society is coming apart at seams, and England has turned itself into a fortress to keep out unwanted types (like displaced Germans, in a nice twist).

Clive Owen (one of my favorite actors) plays Theo, a competent but disaffected guy who gets roped into a crazy scheme by his ex-wife Julian (played by Julianne Moore, possibly the only mis-casting in the movie), who heads up a radical group who are harboring a young woman (Kee) who is miraculously pregnant; they want Theo to get her to the coast where she can join up with some shadow organization that can keep her safe.

Betrayals and double-crosses ensue as Julian's group unravels (in part due to her lieutenant Luke -- played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, yet again stealing a movie), and Theo loses ally after ally as he and Kee try to make it to the coast for their rendezvous.

The movie is fairly elliptical, and doesn't actually explain a lot, but it's very well put together, and the picture of 2027 is extremely well done -- just enough change to be odd and interesting, not so much that it's crazy, and everything looks actually used. Also, it's got Michael Caine in a wonderful supporting role.

Bottom line: depressing as hell, but really well made. Recommended but not for people who weep easily.

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Happy Feet was possibly one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. It follows the antics of Mumble, an Emperor Penguin who can't sing (and thus can never get a mate), but who can (and does) tap dance. He's kicked out of the tribe because that makes him, you know, weird. On his adventures he discovers that their food supply is being picked up by weird creatures in big ships.

A lot of noise was made by right-wingers that this was a parable about gay people. I just don't see it. Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) wants a girl penguin -- a particular one voiced by Brittany Murphy. It's all about the boy-girl stuff. All his adventures are aimed at the goal of getting the girl.

Then there's the weird pseudo-environmental stuff: Mumble ends up captured by humans and put in an aquarium, where his tap-dancing convinces humans to stop over-fishing Antarctic waters.

The message seems to be that if you're cute, you can convince humans to stop kicking your ass. Otherwise, get out of the way.

And I wonder how many people, having seen this movie, actually think "Ah, problem solved.".

The only funny thing in the movie is Robin Williams as the leader of a set of Adelie penguins. And even that's diluted by having him also voice a different penguin (who has set himself up as a sort of oracle).

Bottom line: totaly incoherent, unfunny, and boring. Skip it.

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Stranger than Fiction is a cute little movie which shows that Will Ferrell may actually be able to act. Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a numbers-nerdy IRS auditor who starts hearing a voice narrating his life. We the viewer find out that this is the voice of Karen Eiffel (played by Emma Thompson, making a potentially horribly unlikeable role quite sympathetic), a reclusive author, famous for killing off her protagonists, who is in the midst (or even throes) of writing her latest novel, which stars one Harold Crick.

Crick is assigned the task of auditing a baker played by Maggie Gyllenhaal; the least believable thing about the movie is that they fall for each other. Meanwhile, Crick consults psychologists and ends up talking to a professor of literature played by Dustin Hoffman (amiably chewing the scenery).

The movie probably could have been a few minutes shorter, and not every piece of the conceit works, but it was a fun little movie. My biggest complaint is that Queen Latifah (playing an assistant to Emma Thompson's author, sent by the publishers to get her back on track) didn't get enough screen time.

Bottom line: I enjoyed this little movie. A good DVD view.

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Armageddon has been out for nearly ten years, and I finally saw it. This is without a doubt one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen. I feel like every Hollywood blockbuster should be required to have physics major (sophomore or above) vet the script before it goes into production.

Quick rundown: Ben Affleck can't act, Bruce Willis phoned it in, they wasted Jason Isaacs entirely, and the best reason to watch this movie was Steve Buscemi.

Bottom line: feh.

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To summarize:

Movie	Quality Rating (out of 5 stars)	Enjoyability Rating (out of 5)
X-Men 3	3.0	3.8
Kinky Boots	4.2	4.6
Children of Men	4.6	4.3
Happy Feet	1.2	1.2
Stranger Than Fiction	4.0	4.2
Armageddon	2.0	3.0

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An oddity of this set of movies is that Joel Edgerton was in Kinky Boots with Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was in Children of Men (and also Inside Man, though they shared no scenes) with Clive Owen, who was in King Arthur with Joel Edgerton (who played Gawain).

I'm never driving with the windows down again....

I know I keep posting things I see on Scalzi's "By the Way" blog, but this one is amazingly interesting.

How to Drive Like a Cop. Full of fascinating and (to me) non-obvious tips from the people who drive fast. A lot.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of...

FedEx has a higher bandwidth than the Internet. Of course, the latency is terrible.

This isn't surprising, given that the information density of disks has increased way faster than bandwidth speeds.

There's an old sysadmin quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." That's usually attributed to Andy Tanenbaum.

I once drove a pile of full NetApp disk shelves from Boston to NYC and calculated that my bandwidth was around 100Mbps (much faster than our inter-city links at the time).

Via Scalzi.

Why Do We Keep Calling it the Iraq "War"?

Why do we call it the Iraq "War" still?

It's not a war. War is armies fighting armies. This is our Army (and Marines, and National Guard) fighting insurgents in a country whose armed forces we defeated and then disbanded. A country we conquered.

And of course, we know it's not a War because its Mission was Accomplished:

We need to call this what it is: the Iraq Occupation.

Air Conditioners: an underappreciated goad to exercise

It's 80 degrees Fahrenheit at 11:48 am.

I'm lugging my office A/C unit up three flights of stairs. I'm wheezing badly.

I am horribly out of shape.

Leaping ... shampoo?

Best fluid dynamics video ever.

Almost makes me miss physics.

(Via Scalzi's By the Way blog.)

Lee Iacocca Opens a Can of Whup-Ass

Lee Iacocca has a new book, and man is he pissed. Here's a scathing excerpt. Worth reading, to remind you of when Republicans were actually based in reality....

(Via Scalzi.)