I am … unhindered by talent

I recently discovered (sadly, I don’t remember how) WalkScore.com, where you can enter your (or any) address and have a “walkability” score calculated for your neighborhood. They use Google Maps to find out how far it is to a long list of important services and amenities (grocery stores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and the like), and you get points based on how close you are. There are some issues (and they’re very up front about them) with using straight line distance as a proxy for walkability, but it’s not a bad approximation and a good start. There’s also no way they can take into account your preferences for things like schools and restaurants; you’d get points for living next door to a McDonald’s, for example, even if you’d prefer to go a little farther to the nifty local burrito joint.

Our house here in Morris scores a 54 out of a 100, which is probably about as good as you’ll get outside of a dense urban area (the Sears Tower in Chicago scores a whopping 94, for example). Personally, I think Morris is about as walkable/bikable a place as one is likely to ever find: Flat, reasonably compact, and with good roads and (mostly) sidewalks. It’s clear that Google Maps is confused about some of the businesses here in Morris as some of their distances are broken and they don’t know that we have a coffee shop a few blocks away (they list one nearly 25 miles distant!).

In total, it’s a cool idea, and I wish that it was available in the UK as we’re preparing to spend a year in Colchester without a car, and it would be nice to have a similar service while we look at houses and flats.

For amusement check out the scores of Bill Gates’s home and Shrub’s ranch in Crawford. Real environmentalists, these guys :-).

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I’m sad to report that WeatherGirl and I are in the midst of what will probably be our last radio show here at KUMM for the better part of a year! We leave Morris a week from tomorrow for our year in Colchester (UK), and I can’t imagine that next week we’ll have the time to be spending three hours here at the station the day before we have to leave for a year. Sub-Evil Boy may do his 10-noon show next Sunday, though, so there is some consolation.

Doing radio here is one of the things that I’ll most miss next year - I love college radio, and being able to participate in that for over 25 years now has been a great experience. We’ve got a great staff for next year, and I expect big things, and we’ll definitely be listening on-line!

If you catch this before 9pm central time, feel free to tune in or listen on-line. Or you can check out our poorly formatted play lists on-line. Less danceable, but a lot faster and without all that annoying banter.

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Pharyngula has a nice discussion of report looking at the impact of high school math and science classes on performance in university science courses. The short version? Definitely take math, as that improves performance in all the sciences in the study (biology, chemistry, and physics). Taking science in high school tends to help performance in that science in college, but doesn’t help much in the other sciences.

They don’t say anything about computing (but, sadly, most high schools don’t offer much in the way of meaningful computer science courses), but my experience suggests that much the same is true there: A solid math background is a definite win. Have some programming experience can help, but it can also get in the way if you end up needing to unlearn a lot. And any advantage one has from prior programming experience tends to wash out within the first yer (sometimes the first semester), while some solid math background continues to be an advantage all through the major.

The error bars are pretty huge, which isn’t entirely surprising given the variable quality of both instructor and student (both in high school and university). It would be interesting to better understand what role the quality of the high school instruction plays in the correlations. Does, for example, a bad science class actually have the potential to hurt you later on?

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We’re in pretty much full on crazy mode cleaning, sorting, and packing for our year long research sabbatical in Colchester, UK. In the process I ran across two old music lists and felt compelled to share.

The first was a little playbill sheet for bands playing at Karl’s Coffee. Karl’s was the first coffee shop in Morris and had a truly wonderful atmosphere. It arguably wasn’t managed brilliantly from a business standpoint, and this combined with some quite unjustified and obnoxious political machinations in town ultimately doomed them. The coffee shop was purchased and run by another group for a few years, and then changed hands a third time where things seem stable if not nearly as cool as they were in the beginning.

One of the great things about Karl’s was their regular and regularly wonderful hosting of live bands. In their heyday, Karl’s usually had at least one good band play live every week, and we came to love more than a few Minnesota bands through their frequent performances at Karl’s. Sadly, neither of the subsequent incarnations of the coffee shop have been anywhere close to Karl’s either in the quantity or quality of their music bookings. Both of them have been extremely conservative in the bookings they’ll allow, which has moved some concerts up to campus and caused others to just not happen. Sigh.

Thus it was really neat to find this little playbill from those glory days. In April of 1999 Karl’s had:

• Thurs., 1: 3 Minute Hero (also their old label page)
• Sat., 10: Black & White Jazz Project
• Fri., 16: Booty Police
• Sat., 17: Willie Wisely
• Sun., 18: Open Mic
• Fri., 23: Stuart Davis
• Sat. 24: Brenda Weiler
• Thurs., 29: Booty Police
• Fri., 30: John Hermanson

What a great month! Ah, for the days.

The second list is from eight months later, when Sub-Evil Boy did a radio show where he chose all the music himself at the tender age of 6 years (minus two days). For several years he did a birthday show during fall semester finals week where he would choose all the music for an hour, and this was the first (or maybe the second) of those shows. It’s been very cool listening to his shows this summer, the first time he’s ever done completely solo shows on a weekly basis, and it was really nifty to find this list and see how fun and diverse his musical tastes were even in his misspent youth.

• “Werewolves of London” - Warren Zevon
• “99 bats in my car today” - Sesame Street Travel Songs
• “La Vierge” - Al Rapone
• “Marching song” - Bonnie Rideout
• “Drip, drip, drip” - Chumbawmba
• “Geeks on bikes” - 3 Minute Hero
• “Give us room to roar” - Kalevala
• “Istanbul (not Constantinople)” - They Might Be Giants
• “Save the children” - Natty Nation
• A motet by Bach
• “Drive, she said” - Stan Ridgeway
• “Standing at the edge of the earth” - Blessid Union of Souls
• “I love trash” - Steven Tyler from Elmopalooze
• “London city” - Arrow
• “Papa’s got a brand new bag” - James Brown
• “Santa’s got a brand new bag” - The Bobs
• Theme song from “How the Grinch stole Christmas”
• “Prayer for the dying” - Seal
• “Song for Lindy” - Fatboy Slim
• “Under cover, under wraps” - Delgados
• “Hollywood” - Cranberries

Rockin!

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Today’s policy post from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) is an interesting study in contrasts as the slow wheels of democratic justice struggle to come to terms with a pace of change hardly imaginable to the authors of our government.

In two independent rulings, two federal appeals courts reached rather different conclusions regarding questions of right to privacy in the context of e-mail. I’ll let you go to their nice briefing for the details and jump to the final paragraph:

At a broader level, both of these cases highlight the disjointed nature of current law as it relates to electronic privacy and the application of Fourth Amendment protections in the digital world. Put simply, the law has not kept pace with the evolution of Internet technology. Judges and lawmakers must address these concerns and consider approaches to revitalize the Fourth Amendment in the face of technological change.

Here, here, and well said. How in the world would we make that a significant campaign issue in the upcoming election, however?

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Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in a Garden and Art Tour by giving a short talk on photographing gardens. The talk was today, and as part of prepping I went out yesterday to the Vorhees’s beautiful garden (where I would be speaking) and spent about 1.5 hours looking around and shooting. I started at the same time as my scheduled talk (4:30pm), and arguably the sun was still a little high and harsh, but I did have the good fortune of several insect and avian visitors, including this fellow who stayed put for quite a while as I walked towards him, clicking all the way.

It was very hot and humid today, so there weren’t big crowds, but I had a very engaged and enthusiastic audience who sat and watched me sweat talk about photography for about half an hour. Here’s hoping that they got something more out of it than just heat stroke :-).

The perversely curious are welcome to check out my notes for the talk. They’re ragged in places, but usable, although I doubt there’s anything there that’s new for my Flickr friends. Suggestions for additions and improvements, however, are certainly welcome.

Completists can also check out the full, unedited set of 260 photos from yesterday on my events account.

I’ll obviously try to clean and post some of the more interesting ones to my “real” Flickr account as time allows, but with only two weeks before we move to the UK, things are totally nuts here and I suspect very little of this will be attended to anytime soon. Sigh.

Thanks again to all the great photographers here on Flickr! You folks continue to both energize me and push me to raise my game. I’m sure that I wouldn’t have been asked to do this without the opportunities that Flickr has opened for me, and I’m sure my tips list and talk were full of things that I consciously and unconsciously picked up there.

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Those crazy people at Your Daily Awesome have turned up this amazingly depressing essay on koalas which was apparently written by an 8th grader three years ago. The assignment was to write about an endangered species (which was presumably assigned), and this individual (who might be eligible to vote in the 2008 election!) clearly wasn’t having it. Their opening paragraph pretty much says it all (although I assure you that they went on to say more in essentially the same vein):

I shouldn’t do shit. I don’t care about them they all could die and it won’t affect my life. I know a lot about them but I don’t need to think about them. They’re just a waste of time koalas are stupid they don’t help me with shit so why should I help them. If they all die there will be more room for the panthers and all the other hard animals. Koalas are weak a pit will get rid of their whole fucking family. That’s why I don’t like koalas.

Sadly, while this is a pretty extreme (and brutally honest) example, I suspect this is depressingly representative of much of the general public’s attitude to the larger environmental issues that we are desperately struggling with. No one used this sort of language on TV regarding the spotted owl, but you know that in the living rooms and bars it was a whole ‘nother story.

Our budding author is also pretty confused in thinking that we can somehow trade koala-space for panther-space, which suggests a pretty weak grasp of some basic biology, ecology, and geography.

All of which leaves us with the tricky question of how we educate upcoming generations to see themselves as an integral part of our environment instead of some invincible dominant force unaffected by Mother Nature. Sure, at some level koalas don’t matter, but they larger system they’re part of (and representative of) matters enormously.

Thanks to deepwarren for the cool photo.

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PictoBrowser has a nearly nifty alternative Flash slideshow creature that lets you embed slideshows of things like Flickr sets in posts. The idea is cool (I’m suprised there aren’t more like it), although the particular slideshow doesn’t allow for any useful customization and is a bit awkward to navigate if you have a large set of images. The browser is fixed at 500 pixels wide, for example, that that’s just a hair wider than really sits gracefully in this blog layout. I can hack their code to make their Flash thing only 400 pixels wide, but that cuts off the rightmost 100 pixels of my pictures, which isn’t cool. So too big it will be, I guess.

Above is a slideshow of my 50 most “interesting” photos on Flickr, as determined by their mysterious algorithmic special sauce.

What’s potentially really cool about this, though, is their distribution mechanism. If you want to make a slide show of your own, you can just click the “INFO” link on the bottom right of the slide show, and right there you’ll be able to make and preview your own shows, and get the HTML necessary to embed them in your own stuff. You never need to visit their site or Flickr or anything else - it all happens right here.

One could argue that ease of embedding is an increasingly key feature of web toys. I’ll bet, for example, that it certainly hasn’t hurt YouTube that they make it so easy to embed videos in your own stuff instead of requiring people to come to their site. It’s mildly annoying that Flickr only provides you with embedding HTML for you own images, and not for other people’s, even when those people have made the images “bloggable” and/or provided CreativeCommons licenses for them.

Via a del.icio.us link from mitten.

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Those who’ve been foolish enough to follow along over the years (especially my photos on Flickr) have probably noticed a certain fascination for the railroad tracks that run through the middle of town. Sunday, as WeatherGirl and I biked home from Prairie Pioneer Days (the local summer community festival here, where she had been part of a fine dance performance), we were blocked by a train that was shunting right in the middle of town. We headed up to one of the only 5 roads in town that cross the tracks, where we saw that not only was the offending train eventually heading our way, but that there was another train heading the opposite direction that was waiting for all this shunting to be finished as well.

I had my camera gear (I’d been taking photos of the dance), and this was just too cool an opportunity to pass up. So I parked my bike and took way too many train pictures, including a pretty cool panorama.

Here we have the shunting train in the foreground (which was parked), the other trained blurred in the middle distance as it moves to the right, and the crossing guard visible between the cars of both trains.

Now if only there were still a passenger service in Morris. Sigh.

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TechCrunch suggests that 3D Mailbox may be the “Worst. App. Ever.” The promo video is certainly one of the most atrocious and sexist pieces of marketing crap I’ve seen in a while (and given the level of marketing, this is saying something). While the idea of feeding my spam to sharks is mildly amusing, hearing them promise that

Your e-mail pulses with fun and excitement like never before.

was enough to induce serious hurlage.

Good gracious - aren’t there enough real problems that need attention?

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