Tech Rant

I tend to use my email inbox a lot differently than most people I know.  Looking over the shoulders of friends and family and coworkers I see a lot of people with 2000, 3000, 10000 messages in their inbox.  Frankly this gives me the howling fantods.  If I have more than 20 messages in my inbox I start to feel stressed and if the list goes beyond the first page: no good.  No good at all.

My general operating procedure is to read, and then delete or archive most of which comes through my inbox.  What remains sitting there are only important messages that I need to respond to or do something about: a to-do list of sorts.

I am aware that this marks me as more than a little OCD ... but let's leave that aside for the moment!  I was looking for a way to send daily or periodic reminders to my email account as a way of automatically adding things to my de facto to-do list.  I was mostly looking for a daily or weekly reminder to do push-ups, practice Spanish, go for a run, etc.  Seems like a simple problem, right?  Almost simple enough that I might think of coding it myself if I had a server to play with.  Sadly no. 

[On the theory that no topic is too small for a blog post, consider this a mini tech-review for anyone else who has this same sort of problem.  For others who are looking for something a little more entertaining, I recommend this. Or this. Or this.]

• My first idea was that it would be nice to get reminders in my RSS feed.  And it turns out that such a service exists: ReminderFeed.  Unfortunately, the site seems to have been coded back in 2005 and mostly abandoned since then.  Every time I tried to fill out their form to create a feed I got an error message saying I had entered the start date in the wrong format.  Which I hadn't.  After futzing with it a bit, I gave up and figured it might be a browser problem (it didn't work in Safari or FF4/5).  Nice idea, but FAIL.
  
• Second try was an email reminder service called RememberTheMilk.  It seemed like basically the right idea.  You can set up periodically recurring tasks that send reminders to you via email.  The deal-breaker was that each time you "completed" as task you had to log-in to their website to "check it off" your to-do list there.  Otherwise it didn't send you the next reminder.  Sorry. No. Way too much work.  I just want the vanilla reminder, thanks.  FAIL.
  
• Third, a service called MyEmailReminders.  This one was nice.  A clean intuitive interface with lots of clearly described options.  No unnecessary bells-and-whistles.  The only problem was it didn't work.  Or rather, it delivered my daily reminders about half the time.  The rest of the time: nothing.  It was kind of amusing guessing if the daily reminder would come.  Amusing, but not useful: FAIL.
  
• Fourth time's a charm, I guess.  The free service that seems to work is MyMemorizer.  Very similar to #3, with a clean interface and nothing too complicated.  And, you know, it works too.  So that's nice.  SUCCEED!

I should also mention that Google Calendar will do this for you, but I kind of wanted something separate so as to not clutter up my calendar too much.  I guess the moral of the story is that you get what you pay for.

Comparative R.E.M. Studies

Apropos of my last post complaining that there's no good music these days and that those durn kids better get off my lawn, Marty helpfully suggested that perhaps I might find agreeable the new Decemberists album, The King Is Dead.  And she's totally right (thanks Marty!), it's a really great bunch of songs.  Not quite as quirky or showy as some of their earlier stuff, but catchy and well-written and emotionally direct.  For example, here's the first single

So here's the thing: I thought the jangly guitar sounded really familiar, and after a few listens I realized that the song is almost totally identical to R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" -- both the guitar and the vocal melody.  Compare and contrast...Turns out that the guy playing the jangly guitar part is Peter Buck, so I guess he's allowed to swipe some of his earlier riffs.  And if they keep turning out songs this good I'm certainly not going to complain about it.  There's a couple other R.E.M.-y tracks on the album, but a lot of it is roots-ier and more down homey like this one, "Rox in the Box."  They also have Gillian Welch and David Rawlings backing them up on some songs too.  Awesome!

Mixtape 2010

Once Quinn was born my music listening habits changed overnight. There's that first year of parenthood which is just a blur of diapers and sleep-deprivation. You can't really blast stuff out of the speakers because the baby's sleeping. And then there's dishes and laundry and trying to figure out the shape of your new life. Honestly, who has time to sit down and listen (really listen) to a CD anyway -- much less obsess over the lyrics and let the songs sink in they way they did when you were 14 and taping songs off the radio because you had all the time in the world, but no money.

After that first year life relaxed again, but I kind of just... got out of the habit? We'd listen to kids CDs rather than the new new thing, and then Quinn went through a phase where she didn't want anyone else to play music. For a while I listened to music while commuting on the train, but since we've been down in Nicaragua I've barely touched my iPod.

And at the same time, the horizons of available music have become nearly infinite. I've started following a few mp3 blogs like fluxblog or club fonograma (a quite-excellent english-language blog that covers latin american pop music), but it all flows by so fast I feel like I'm only hearing a small fraction of the stuff I might like and really, truly absorbing even less than that.

I hope it's not just a symptom of becoming an old fuddy-duddy. I'd really like to get to know some new music that clicks the way it did back when. So if anyone has any really good recommendations, please let me know. Anyway, to celebrate the shards of good music that have been whizzing by me over the last year, here's a mixtape.

Favorite Movies 2010

Annnnd, here are some of the movies that I saw over the past year that I liked.

1. Fitzcarraldo (dir. Werner Herzog) -- A gorgeous, mesmerizing, problematic and deeply weird story about an opera-fanatic with a bizarre scheme to move a steamship over a mountain. If that sentence doesn't make any sense, well, I guess you have to see it.
   
   
2. Z (dir. Costa-Gavras) -- A tense, old-school political thriller from the '60s about the overthrow of a dictatorship in Greece, now with newly added relevance due to the wave of revolutions in the Middle East.
   
   
3. Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan) -- Loved it, but need to see this one again...
4. Moon (dir. Duncan Jones)
5. Fantastic Mr. Fox (dir. Wes Anderson)
6. Avatar (dir. James Cameron)
7. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (dir. Edgar Wright) -- Fun and cute.
8. Rachel Getting Married (dir. Jonathan Demme)
9. The Devil's Backbone (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
10. The Kids Are Alright (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)

Other: In Bruges, Sherlock Holmes, A Serious Man, Inglorious Basterds, True Grit, Tropic Thunder, Broken Embraces

Favorite Books 2010

Here are some of my favorite books from last year -- click to read my reviews on goodreads!

1. Hands down the best book I read this year was Stephen Kinzer's journalistic history of Nicaragua -- Blood of Brothers. Obviously not everyone is going to nerd out on this topic the way I did, but it really is a terrific book and I definitely recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in Latin America or Cold War history. It's also a story more Americans should know and understand since Nicaragua is Case File #1 in American Interventionism Gone Bad.
   
   
2. The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
3. The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
4. Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest
5. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
6. Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon
7. Little, Big, by Michael John Crowley
8. Kraken, by China Miéville
9. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
10. Halting State, by Charles Stross

Central Valley

Here's a post to keep the lights on here while we're blogging about Nicaragua over here.
This picture was painted on the day I was born in 1976 by Rollin Pickford, a Fresno artist who died earlier this year and who is sometimes referred to as the "painter laureate of the San Joaquin Valley."  My mom found and scanned this painting and sent it to me as a very cool birthday gift.  If you drive around the central valley you'll see dozens of old farms like this one, very often draped in that late-summer yellow -- for me it's a neat vision of home.  And Pickford's luminous water color paintings are definitely worth checking out.

Tech and Travel

So Laura Jean just published a very cool essay in a women's clergy e-zine that you can read here. The topic is (unsurprisingly) our upcoming trip abroad and how we're hoping to use skype and other technology to keep in touch with our family and friends, despite the distance. Take a look!

Nica Blog

So we are off to Managua on Monday morning -- very exciting!  Laura Jean and I will be doing a joint blog during our time in Nicaragua titled On A Journey.  The plan is for that blog to be our main space for posting stories and pictures about our time there.  I'll still be posting here on Goats Reading Books on non-Nicaragua themed stuff, but I expect the volume will be reduced. 

Anyway, if you're reading this, I hope you'll check out the new blog.  (RSS feed here, or you can do the google Follower thing by clicking on the link on the right-hand side.)

Unplugging

After having striped our earthly possessions down to the bare essentials, packed them into a truck, cleaned our house, sold our car and flew to California, we are now decompressing in Fresno. After a very stressful and hectic few weeks it feels great to relax and make time for watching movies, swimming, running, hanging out, playing with Quinn. Next week we are off to the mountains for some serious porch-sitting, beer-drinking and possible hiking. Soon enough we'll be pitched back into the uncertainty of moving and change, but for now life is calm.

Relatedly, I am also taking this opportunity to simplify my inbox, under the assumption that my life over the next few months won't have me chained to a computer screen at all times. Over the years I seem to have accumulated a large number of email listservs and rss feeds and it has been quite liberating to let some (if not all) of them go. The ratio of wheat to chaff in my inbox has gone way up. Part of the issue is that for my previous job I served as a kind of human aggregator for a large number of blogs, news sources, activist groups and other information flows.

I will confess to finding information somewhat addicting, and with the internet there will always be more and more and more interesting and important things to read. But no one yet has invented more hours in the day in which to read it all. So it is nice to step back and simplify a bit, before the inevitable information creep starts back up again.

Eating Animals

No, not the book by Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, over the past six months or so, I've started eating meat again after 15 or so years of being vegetarian.

The impetus, as you might guess, is moving to Nicaragua. The way we figure it, eating a strict vegetarian diet may end up being harder in Nicaragua than it is here. I expect we'll continue to be largely veggie when cooking at home, but if we're eating out there may be a lack of options and if we're guests in someone's house we don't want to be rude. Hence, we are starting to eat a little meat a few times a week ... basically to prep the stomach for the transition.

It's a pragmatic choice, although honestly I've been slowly reassessing my food philosophy for a few years now and I'm not entirely sure what I think these days. Basically, my central reason for being vegetarian has been that meat in the U.S. is often not produced sustainably (e.g. overuse of antibiotics, gigantic lagoons of cow sh*t, etc) and requires a tremendous amount of resources (water, land acreage, fossil fuels) in comparison to other foods. Also, it has probably kept me a little healthier than otherwise.

But the problem is that I've replaced meat in my diet with other things--like fish (not always sustainably fished) or processed foods--that makes me wonder if I'm not really thinking consistently about the big picture. There are other ways of thinking about these issues, such as eating locally or eating less meat or simply enacting smart national policies so we're not all wasting time calculating carbon miles in the grocery store aisle.

So anyway. I expect Central America will give me a different take on this stuff--in addition to a different cuisine. A lot of the first-world problems I mentioned above just aren't as pertinent (or are very different) in a developing country. So we'll see. But for now: meat! At times, it does seem very ... strange, to be eating meat after so long abstaining. But also (more often than not) delicious.

Oil Spill Scenarios

This week NOAA released the results of some modeling (based on historical wind and water currents) that show where the oil is likely to end up. The average of all 500 scenarios looks like this:

Their models show that with some medium-ish probability some of the oil will enter the loop current and head up the east coast. For example, if the oil spill had occurred on April 17, 1997 that would have been the result, as this animation shows. Of course, other scenarios depict different results and NOAA says that currently "the Loop Current does not appear to be a major source of transport of Deepwater Horizon oil to the Florida Straits or Gulf Stream." But of course that could change if the thing keeps gushing.

Anyway, I thought they were interesting, if depressing, results. I also recommend this pretty cool website that lets you visualize the size of the oil spill by moving it to your hometown in Google Maps. Apparently, the oil slick now dwarfs the state of Maryland in size. Totally crazy.

Also, because if you have to cry you might as well also laugh...

New Look

The old blog theme seemed kinda stale, a bit 2005-y, shall we say. Plus, blogger has some fancy new templates and features, so it seemed like time for an upgrade. What do you think?

Nicaragua

So we have one of those big, life change-type announcements - which is that we'll be moving to Nicaragua in August to live and work there for a few years. (Not that its been that much of a secret, but I haven't mentioned it on the blog before.)

Living abroad has been a long-term goal of ours for many years and a great opportunity knocked so we decided to take it. We'll be working down there through the auspices of Global Ministries, which is the joint overseas division of the UCC and the DOC (Laura Jean's denomination).

Our local partner in Nicaragua will be the Christian Mission Church of Nicaragua. Laura Jean will be working with them to set up a kind of traveling seminary for the church's ministers and doing other forms of theological education. I'll be working on whatever environmental/development projects the community has in mind as well as teaching something math/science/environment-y at the Universidad Evangelica Nicaragüense (UENIC).

Or something! The situation may look different once we get down there. At any rate, we're pretty excited and are frantically learning Spanish and figuring out how to move ourselves and toddler down to Managua in just a few months. It is going to be a crazy adjustment so wish us luck, and please do let us know if you know anyone down there we should get in touch with (we've been continually amazed by the number of connections we've made already...)

And -- as this is an imminently blog-worthy topic -- I'm sure we'll have a lot more to say as the day draws near. Stay tuned.

The Mathematics of Music

OK, here's something I've always wondered about: why 12? That is to say, I've played music for many years now and I've never understood why, exactly, our musical scale is composed of twelve semitones. Probably my music teachers explained this to me at some point, but it must have not sunk in.

As any guitar player will tell you, the concept of an octave is intuitive and grounded in physics. An octave is what you get when you shorten the length of a plucked string by half thus doubling the frequency of the sound. But in principle you should be able to divide up the frequency space in an octave into any number of intervals, not just twelve.

(As it happens, there are two recent articles on the math of music that are worth reading: a Physics Today article about Richard Feynman's interest in piano tuning (pdf) and this one from Slate.)

The historical meaning of 12 is that the Greek philosopher Pythagoras had some strong religious beliefs about pure numbers and constructed the early version of our musical scale out of 3/2 intervals (i.e. out of the next simplest whole number fraction after the octave). As the Slate article explains, constructing a twelve-note scale out of 3/2 intervals doesn't quite bring you back round to an octave. The Pythagorean system works because the quantity (3/2)^12 * (1/2)^6 = 2.0273 is approximately equal to two -- a quantity known as the Pythagorean comma.

But this caused some problems for musicians. For example, the octave sounded perceptibly out of tune and you had to re-tune your instrument in order to play songs in different keys. So during the Renaissance, musicians came up with the concept of equal temperament, where the octave was divided into twelve logarithmically equal intervals of 2^(1/12) and each Pythagorean interval was thus re-tuned by a tiny amount. Bach was so psyched by this innovation that he went out and wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier in celebration.

So far, so good, but this still doesn't quite answer the question of why twelve? Clearly you can create equal tempered scales with any number of intervals, but is it possible to create a Pythagorean system with different numbers of intervals?

The algorithm to find out is pretty simple.

1. Start with a base frequency of A=440 Hz.
2. Step upwards by factors of 3/2 ... so 440, 660, 990, etc.
3. If we go above an octave (880) then we need to divide by 2 to bring it back into the same octave range. So 990 becomes 495, and then we step upwards again by 3/2.
4. The goal is to get as close as possible (either high or low) to 880 and then stop.
   

Twelve steps gets us to a frequency of 892.006 Hz, but it is easy to extend the series. Here's a plot out to N=100, with the red line representing 880 Hz.

So for most N, it is not really possible to craft a Pythagorean scale - either you don't land close enough to an octave or else you have oddly spaced intervals - but for a few N, the formula seems to work. N=5 (pentatonic scale) is not too bad and old, familiar N=12 works better.

But the winner is definitely N=53 which falls almost exactly on the red line - much more exactly than the familiar twelve tone scale. This scale, with 53 (barely distinguishable) intervals, is virtually equal tempered to begin with. Apparently this very bizarre musical system was first discovered by the Chinese mathematician Ching Fang thousands of years ago and was later rediscovered by various westerners (including Newton). And people have allegedly written music for it! Go figure.

So: a fairly interesting answer to the question posed. And if you're interested in spending time on wikipedia be warned that there are a truly ridiculous number of baroque music theory articles lurking there.

Disaster Capitalism

This interesting Mother Jones article takes a look at how global warming is already changing the business climate, both by pushing some businesses to the brink and by creating new opportunities for others. The author also praises the 'bracing' clarity that a bottom line tends to bring to political debates:

If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.

The article focuses on three fairly intuitive examples--arctic shipping, the ski industry and disaster insurance--but it seems likely that there will be others in the future.

The obvious corollary to this is that there are big investment opportunities here for climate skeptics. I mean, if you really thought that climate change is a hoax (as does Sen. Inhofe) and that everyone else is simply over-reacting, then there is clearly a lot of money to be made selling things like beachfront property or cheap storm insurance.

Cool Logo

This graphic - apparently designed for the recent May Day immigration rights/anti-SB1070 demonstrations - is a really fantastic design. (Photo from this photoset.)
I'm not entirely sure who designed or distributed the signs, but I saw the image recently on the side of a building while driving and immediately knew what they were conveying. Tells a story, communicates a strong emotion, catches the eye -- nicely done.

Building A Better City

Spring is here in DC and the city has seen fit to build a fantastic new bike path--called the Metropolitan Branch Trail--that runs about 2 miles, virtually from our house to downtown DC. It's lined with spiffy solar-powered street lights and they have grand plans to extend it all the way from Union Station to Silver Spring. The path has made my bike commute immeasurably more pleasant, not just because the trail avoids busy streets and buses and taxis, but also because it seems to have avoided all the steep hills.

I should back up. Our current house is nestled among a clutch of modest sized hills (DC is surprisingly hilly!) meaning that any reasonable path to work inevitably involved a sweaty uphill slog. (Yes, I'm lazy. But in my defense I'm usually biking before having coffee.) I even went so far as to consult topographic maps to find some sort of minimally vertical route to work, but it turned out that the optimal path actually ran right along the train tracks that snake through Northeast DC leading into Union Station. But then, cleverly, the city decided to route the new bike trail right alongside those tracks. Nice job DC!

Bike trails are one of those things that aren't super-expensive but that you can imagine stressed-out budget cutters eying skeptically. So yay for DC deciding to invest in a small thing that makes the city better, greener, safer, healthier, friendlier. (OK, obviously I'm selfishly invested in this one, but little by little the path is getting more and more use. You can see it from the metro tracks and I bet a lot of people crushed into a 9am train are thinking about buying a bike now.)

In that same vein, I should probably say something about the new gay marriage law. DC has now joined 5 states (and one Indian tribe!) in granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Our church scheduled its first such ceremony for the first available Sunday after the law went into effect. The two grooms in question were both pillars of the church community who had been together for three decades, and they chose a Sunday service to make it 'official.'

Church was packed and everyone was extremely psyched for the couple -- the pastor quipped that the turnout was even higher than Easter. In addition to wedding joyfulness I also remember feeling a distinct (and quite spring/Easter-like) sense of possibility. After all the struggle and frustration and gridlock of modern life, it is in fact possible for progress to happen. Usually change is so slow that it seems like it will never happen, but then all of a sudden, it is there. We can do things.

UCS on CSI

In which UCS pops up on an episode of CSI -- here's our nine (awesome) seconds of pop culture fame. You bet I'm concerned!

DC Metro Ads, Cont

I've blogged about the DC Metro's unusual advertising before, but I was still pretty amazed to see this specimen (click for picture) -- spotted by middle-east expert Andrew Exum in the Capitol South Metro stop.

I am, like, 98% sure this is a picture of the southern suburbs of Beirut during or immediately after the July War of 2006. [...] Should the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- civilian housing, civilian businesses, etc. -- really be something we should be slapping each other's backs about, even when the military necessity of such operations is 100% clear? I think you all know the answer is no. [...] But because this is a neighborhood populated by Shia Muslim Arabs it's somehow okay for Northrop Grumman to take pride in its destruction. Gross.

Again, maybe this sort of imagery really appeals to the 0.001% of Metro riders who are their target audience, but it seems pretty remarkably insensitive to me.

Quinn on the Piano

Here's a video of Quinn singing and playing on the piano (split into two parts)... cute! Am I right?