The lead front page headline in last week’s issue of our (weekly) local newspaper?

Stalled train tangles traffic on Thursday

Yup. That’s what passes for news in our happy little world. The train had brake problems and ended up parked for two hours, initially blocking all 5 crossings in town; at some point they split the train and opened up the southernmost crossing rejoining the sundered halves of town. This was the day (10 Oct) that I brought WeatherGrrrl home from the hospital after her knee replacement surgery, and as part of borrowing a friend’s van to collect WeatherGrrrl in (thanks KK!), I ended up crossing those tracks three times while all this was going on. Thus I can attest that the Morris Police peeps were out directing traffic and being genuinely useful as I was moving back and forth, so big thanks to them for helping manage what passes for a big deal out here in the rural wilderness.

My favorite line from the article (emphasis mine):

For the next two hours, officers from the MPD helped keep traffic moving along Highway 28 and Pacific Avenue, two busy thoroughfares during the morning commute.

Well, I guess Highway 28 does have the only two traffic lights in town. That makes it a busy thoroughfare, right? Right???

Now I’m going to go back to watching construction vehicles push dirt around as part of the road construction in our neighborhood.

Or maybe I’ll check on the squirrels collecting food for the winter. They’ve been enjoying gathering up half-eaten apples from our trees, and tucking them in all sorts of interesting places.

Included in this mêlée of activity is the crazy news that PeeZed got expelled from Expelled. This is (by numerous accounts) a fairly dreadful film about how hard done by those poor ID folks are, and how mean and nasty those icky evolutionists are. Waa. Both PeeZed and Richard Dawkins were interviewed for the film under false pretenses, and get non-trivial screen time. There was a free pre-screening of the film in the Cities last night, which conveniently (and I think accidentally?) coincided with a major atheist meeting in the Cities. So PeeZed and various of his family and friends including Dawkins(!) all trouped off to check it out.

The wonderful kicker is that one of the producers

• Recognized PeeZed in line,
• Had PeeZed expelled,
• Failed to recognize Dawkins (or any others in his group)

Saw Dawkins got to see the movie, but Paul had to hang out in the mall waiting for them to get out! The Mall of America (where all this happened) is big, but I’m not sure it’s big enough to hold that much irony.

There’s loads o’ blogging on the subject; PeeZed is collecting and sharing links (here, there, and elsewhere, plus his post from the Apple Store during the film). Quite happily, it’s also being reported for the fiasco that it is in the mainstream press (e.g., Pioneer Press and the NY Times).

Thanks to Dan Flies for sending me an e-mail about all this. I really had missed it all, so having the direct pointer was a Good Thing.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while I waited for EuroGP to get their web site updated; they have, freeing me up to do a little unabashed chest-thumping, leavened with some praise for UMM‘s excellent students.

A few weeks from now the Eleventh European conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP) will happen in Naples Italy. The only other time I’ve been to EuroGP was in 2001 when we were here on sabbatical the first time. I really love the conference, and it’s small and intimate and tends to have a really high signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, it’s also an expensive flight from Minnesota for a three day event, and the timing tends to be really awkward in my teaching schedule, so I’ve never made it back. One of my many fond memories of that conference was winning the best paper award with Riccardo Poli for a pair of papers we’d written together as part of that sabbatical visit. (Oddly, both times I’ve attended have happened to be the only two times it’s been in Italy. The little photo is from the 2001 event at Lake Como.)

The best paper nominations for this year’s event have been released, and I’m quite excited that both of the papers that I submitted this year are on the list. One is another join project with Riccardo, and the other is a paper with two UMM undergrads: Brian Ohs and Tyler Hutchison.

That’s Tyler in the photo up top, presenting some work he did with Andy Korth and I that won the best student paper award at MICS a year ago; Tyler also did the cover illustration for the forthcoming book Riccardo, Bill Langdon, and I are just wrapping up. In a big happy, Tyler was able to pull together the funds to fly out for the conference, so we’ll be able to do a joint presentation enlivened by his presence and cool drawings. Unfortunately Brian can’t make it, but it’s cool that Tyler can; this will be the first of my students co-authors that’s made it to a European conference with me.

The competition is gonna be tough for the best paper award, including a very nice paper by one of Riccardo’s students (Stephen Dignum). Fingers crossed!

The full program is also now on-line (as a PDF) — it looks like some cool material. I’m quite looking forward to the conference, although I must say I’m a bit nervous about the ongoing trash crisis in Naples (here and there).

From yesterday in Portfolio.com:

How big are the stakes in the so-called network neutrality debate now raging before Congress and federal regulators?

Consider this: One side in the debate actually went to the trouble of hiring people off the street to pack a Federal Communications Commission meeting yesterday—and effectively keep some of its opponents out of the room.

Broadband giant Comcast—the subject of the F.C.C. hearing on network neutrality at the Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—acknowledged that it did exactly that.

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Feel free to stomp around and tear your hair a bit. I know I did.

Thanks to Jim Long for the pointer.

This is what Naples has become through a combination of mismanagement and a complete lack of any sort of recycling system. (Apparently GreenPeace came in and set up a demonstration recycling system in one neighborhood had showed that over 70% of the trash there could be recycled if people would just get it together.)

And I’m going there in a month for EuroGP.

Here’s hoping that the situation gets resolved and/or the weather doesn’t get too warm…

Thanks to Roger Taylor for the very cool poster shot of the situation on the ground. It was interesting that when I search for “real news articles” on news.google.com I got some useful stories, but very few decent images. A search for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, however, turned up a bunch of excellent images (including this one).

After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

Great minds (which clearly leaves mine out of the running) continue to be annoyed by the same cultural artifacts here and there.

Yesterday at lunch one of the locals asked whether I found it awkward being away from the U.S. election coverage during all this primary action. As was the case when we were here in the UK during the 2000 election, we generally find the coverage here to be better than what we’d get back home. It tends to be more focussed on issues and have more depth (less oriented towards sound bites), so no tears shed here. And, with most news outlets on-line now, you can really choose to read/watch/listen to pretty much whatever news sources you want to, regardless of your physical location.

During the 2000 election several well-meaning people independently offered to send us U.S. newspapers so we could keep up with things. Given that it’s damn difficult to get good international news in the States, it’s not entirely surprising that people assume that it’s hard to get U.S. news when abroad. Given that the U.S. election was front page news over here, however, we declined :-).

Thanks to James Good for the cool image.