I like being busy, but it does take time away from lower-priority pursuits like blogging. If I had more time, I'd pontificate on the following:

• Paul Krugman wonders why Paul Ryan is taken seriously, as do I;
• Chris Mooney and Kevin Drum wonder what about the Republican brain makes them so opposed to facts;
• The Atlantic Cities has a fun gallery of world subway platforms; and
• The Times examines the ridiculousness of taking laptops out at airport checkpoints.

For now, though, it's back to the mines.

Some items that have gotten my attention:

• Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court's divisions, and how they may throw the health-care law into chaos
• Laura Miller on Game of Thrones' real-life inspirations and Charli Carpenter writing in Foreign Affairs on Game of Thrones as Realpolitik
• The Daily with more about craft brewing's increasing market share
• On Friday, schlock artist Thomas Kinkade died, joining a pantheon of artists we wish the world would forget but probably won't, a group that includes Johannes Pachelbel, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Le Corbusier.

More, I'm sure, later.

I found out, after too many failed download attempts for no reason I could ascertain (come on, Amazon), the 1940 Census data is also available on Ancestry.com. Their servers actually served the data correctly. And so, I found this:

The apartment numbers aren't listed, and the building added an apartment to my entrance sometime in the last 70 years, but I think I can work it out. The first column shows the rent for each apartment. The three higher-rent apartments have to be the larger ones to the west. That means mine is either one of the two $65 apartments on the table or was vacant on 1 April 1940.

So the best I can do is that the three apartments on my side of the stairs that existed in 1940 contained a 35-year-old divorcée from Illinois who worked as an office manager in a brokerage, and a 64-year-old broker/solicitor from Nebraska who lived with his 84-year-old mother. My neighbors included a 51-year-old mother who lived with her 29- and 23-year-old sons, both of whom worked as wholesale salesmen; the 57-year-old treasurer of a wholesale varnish company and his 53-year-old wife; the 46-year-old head of the complaints department at Illinois Bell and his 39-year-old wife; and the building engineer and his wife, both of whom were 49.

All of these people were white, professional, and at least high-school educated. Six of eleven had college educations, a significantly higher proportion than the general public at the time. There were no children in the tier. All but two were U.S.-born. (The varnish-company treasurer came from the Republic of Ireland; his wife was English-Canadian.) All but the divorcée had lived in the same apartment for at least 5 years. Seven of eleven worked at least 40 hours during the previous week, including the poor janitor who worked 70. Salaries ranged from $600 (the 29-year-old son who sold furniture wholesale) to $5000+ (the Irish varnish company treasurer). Mrs. G.R. Walker, the most likely candidate for my predecessor in this apartment, made $2000, somewhat higher than the U.S. average salary in 1940 and approximately eqivalent to $32,000 today.

Today we're entirely professional (including three attorneys and two professional musicians), with a handful of young children, all of us college-educated or better. There is one foreign-born person; our average age, not counting the children, is about 38; and none of us worked 70 hours last week. Two of the seven apartments are rentals, the rest are owned. Adjusting for inflation, they cost almost exactly the same as in 1940.

In other words, the people who lived in my apartment building 70 years ago looked a lot like the people who live here today. And I wish I could meet them.

The Census and the National Archives have released the entire 1940 enumeration quasi-digitally. I think the data drop is great. I am going to download a few specific documents based on what I know about my own family, and about some of the places I've lived that were around in April 1940.

But as a software developer who works mainly with Cloud-based, large-data apps, I am puzzled by some of the National Archives' choices.

I say "quasi-digitally" because the National Archives didn't enter all the tabulated data per se; instead they scanned all the documents and put them out as massive JPEG images. I'm now downloading the data for one census tract, and the 29 MB ZIP file is taking forever to finish. The actual data I'm looking would take maybe 1-2 kB. That said, I understand it's a massive undertaking. There are hundreds of thousands of pages; obviously entering all the data would cost too much.

But this goes to the deeper problem: The Archives knew or should have known that they'd get millions of page views and thousands of download requests. So I need to ask, why did they make the following boneheaded technical decisions?

• They used classic ASP, an obsolete technology I haven't even used since 2001. The current Microsoft offering, ASP.NET MVC 3, is to classic ASP what a Boeing 787 is to a DC-3. It's an illuminated manuscript in the era of steam-driven presses.
• They organized the data by state and city, which makes sense, until you get to something the size of Chicago. Northfield Township, where I grew up, takes up one map and about 125 individual documents. Chicago has over 100 maps, which you have to navigate from map #1 to the end, and a ridiculous number of individual documents. You can search for the census tract you want by cross streets, but you can't search for the part of the city map you want by any visible means.
• I'm still waiting for my 32-page document after 22 minutes. Clearly the Archives don't have the bandwidth to handle this problem. Is this a budget issue? Perhaps Microsoft or Google could help here by donating some capacity until the rush is over?

In any event, once I get my documents, I'm going to spend some time going over them. I really want to find out what kind of people lived in my current apartment 70 years ago.

Update: The first download failed at 1.9 MB. The second attempt is at 6.6...and slowing down...

Update: The second and third attempts failed as well. I have, however, discovered that they've at least put the data out on Amazon Web Services. So...why are the downloads pooping out?

Via Sullivan, an awesome TV ad from The Guardian:

If you're driving in San Francisco, don't block the MUNI:

By early next year the city's entire fleet of 819 buses will be equipped with forward-facing cameras that take pictures of cars traveling or parked in the bus and transit-only lanes. A city employee then reviews the video to determine whether or not a violation has occurred — there are, of course, legitimate reasons a car might have to occupy a bus lane for a moment — and if so the fines range from $60 for moving vehicles to more than $100 for parked cars.

City officials consider the pilot program a success. "Schedule adherence" has improved, according to that update, as has general safety, since access to proper bus-stop curbs is impeded less often. In addition, the number of citations issued has risen over the past three years — from 1,311 in 2009 to 2,102 in 2010 and 3,052 last year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

At the root of the problem is a disconnect between the automobile and transit worldviews, transit planner Jarrett Walker explains in his excellent new book, Human Transit. (More on this in the coming days.) While an empty bus lane is actually a functional bus lane, an empty car lane is a wasted car lane, so drivers are quick to capitalize on what they view as a transportation inefficiency.

That's pretty cool. In principle, I approve of automated parking enforcement, such as Chicago's street sweeper cameras, even though I've had to pay fines as a result. Fair enforcement is all right with me. (But don't get me started on how Chicago puts up street-sweeping signs the day before...)

Earlier I mentioned how technology makes aviation easier. Now here's how it makes aviation cooler: For the first time in Daily Parker history, I'm writing about a flight in real time.

I am approximately here:

FlightAware adds the third dimension, putting me at FL360.

Of course, I have actual work to do, which is really why I bought Internet access for this flight. I still think this is incredibly cool.

(For the record, my flight didn't leave on time, but it did leave. At takeoff, O'Hare conditions were 1600 m visibility with 400 m indefinite ceiling, blowing snow, and 48 km/h wind gusts. Had my plane not gotten to O'Hare when it did, it might still be holding over Janesville. Also for the record, the picture above shows my location when I started this post; the little globe icon below right will show you where I was when I posted it.)

Via James Fallows, here is the FlightAware track (and the KML) for yesterday's Boeing 787 test flight:

That. Is. Cool.

I remember traveling in the 1970s and 1980s, when no one could reliably answer this question until the plane actually left the runway. But today I'm at O'Hare while snow is falling, and it looks like my flight will in fact take off on time despite the snow and the lengthening list of delayed flights on the arrivals board.

How do I know?

First stop is the American Airlines website. Their flight status tool says my plane departs on time from gate K5. And the page has a link to "arriving flight information," which tells me that the plane I'm on will land in 10 minutes.

Oh, really? Yes, really, as Flight Aware's real-time tracker shows me. At this moment, the airplane taking me to San Francisco is heading straight for the O'Hare VOR about 70 km away. (It's over Joliet—no, wait, now it's over Naperville!)

The airline has done it right. By providing real-time information, they're putting me at ease. Even if the incoming plane were circling over Springfield, that would still help me by letting me plan how long I can sit here working before I have to schlepp to the gate.

Update: In the time it took to write this entry, my plane has arrived, and I can see it taxiing towards me right now. I am not making this up. That's not my plane, by the way. That's a plane being de-iced, to show you why I might be a little on edge about my actual departure time today.

Via Microsoft guru Raymond Chen, news that tourists continually block traffic outside Abbey Road Studios:

Apparently the studio also has a webcam.

The famous zebra crossing is here.

New time-lapse video from the International Space Station:

My weather demo, Weather Now, is 13 years old today. I launched it as an ASP 2.0 application on 11 November 1998.

The Wayback Machine first crawled the site about a year later, on 20 September 2000. Check out the site's evolution; it's trippy.

Singer Kina Grannis has released a new video that used 280,000 Jelly Bellies and took her nearly two years to make:

As a plus, it's a catchy song with not one but two ear-worms in it. (Watch for the second one.)

I've now set up the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ at Digital River, a software-distribution company. You can now buy developer, commercial per-server, and non-commercial per-site licenses for reasonable prices.

Check out the overview and SDK (reg.req.) pages for tons o' info. You can also check out the no-nonsense license agreement before you buy.

The Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ has had support for the tzinfo database for several years now. Weather Now uses it; so do a few of my clients.

Like the lazy software developer I am, however, I never put up a decent demonstration of the code, which might, you know, make someone want to buy it.

Well, the documentation, she is here. Licensing, you will be shocked to learn, is available for a modest fee.

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title.

The Daily Parker is about:

• Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until a few months ago when I got the first digital camera I've ever had that rivals a film camera. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
• Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.

I've deprecated the Software category, but only because I don't post much about it here. That said, I write a lot of software. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got about 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. Facebook's lawyers would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior claims, which contravenes four centuries of law.

Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it (unless otherwise disclosed). I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. My photos, however, are published under strict copyright, with no republication license, even if I upload them to other public websites. If you want to republish one of my photos, just let me know and we'll work something out.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

Do you ever eat fish? If so, are you aware that many fisheries are unsustainable, that popular fish species have high incidence of contamination, and that while generally good for you, some sushi can give you heavy metals with your wasabi?

For years I've carried around a pocket sustainable seafood guide the Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes semi-annually. Now they've got a smartphone app for both iPhone and Android. No more printing it out on paper! W00t!

From the World's Greatest Newspaper, aka WGN-Chicago:

Via one of my cow-orkers, a company that can tell you all about yourself at a hitherto-impossible level of detail. All you have to do is spit:

23andMe is a retail DNA testing service providing information and tools for consumers to learn about and explore their DNA. We utilize the Illumina OmniExpress Plus Research Use Only Chip which has been customized for use in all of our products and services by 23andMe. All of the laboratory testing for 23andMe is done in a CLIA-certified laboratory.

How does 23andMe genotype my DNA?

Once the lab receives your sample, DNA is extracted from cheek cells in your saliva. Your DNA is then copied many times so that there is enough DNA to use for the genotyping step. Next, the DNA is cut into smaller, more manageable pieces. These DNA pieces are then applied to a DNA "chip." The DNA chip is a small glass slide with millions of microscopic beads on its surface. Attached to each bead are "probes"—bits of DNA complementary to sites in your genome where SNPs are located. There is a pair of probes for each SNP, corresponding to the two versions of each SNP. Because two complementary pieces of DNA stick together, your DNA sticks to whichever probes match your versions of a SNP.

The service claims to do the following:

• Identify health risks based on genetic propensity (and quantify how much of the risk is genetic);
• Tell you where your family came from, and when they got there, going back several thousand years;
• Find your long-lost cousins; and
• Send you updates as new research comes in.

My colleague paired this suggested site with this TED talk about the future of human evolution.

Remember when Gattaca was just an interesting fiction? Let's hope not all of Andrew Niccol's predictions come true...

Fascinating, and not bad at all. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez assembled a top-notch cast (Danny DeVito, Carla Gugino, Zachary Quinto) and put them into a watchable, funny film—only available on YouTube. If your line supports it, watch in HD. Alas, I think it's only available in the U.S. for the time being.

Every day a few minutes past midnight UTC (7pm CDT), I get a report from The Daily Parker about its health, wealth, and wisdom. And every day, someone hits the blog from somewhere through a search I never thought about before. In the last day, for example, people have hit the blog looking for:

• Laguhing too loud;
• The great flood of 1992;
• Chicago parking scandal;
• Neurology of spending (this one from Canada);
• One of my classmates;
• My high-school choir director; and
• The daily sunrise times in Chicago.

I'm glad I could help.

The University of Illinois has a stash of aerial photographs of Illinois from 1938 and 1939, including one that shows the house I grew up in under construction. The photo at left is 1938; at right is 2001:

Here's a larger crop of the 1938 photo overlaid with a 2010 image:

Natives of the town will probably recognize it instantly.

Here's an extreme close-up with the foundation of my house highlighted:

I also looked at photos of Chicago from the same batch, and after posting this, I will look for more recent photos. The construction of the city's expressways started in the 1940s; I'm curious to see "during" photos.

NPR put listener comments about the State of the Union address through a word-cloud generator and came up with this:

They explain:

Why is "salmon" so big? As The Two-Way explains, NPR's Facebook followers were referring to one of the night's humorous moments — when the president joked about the complicated and convoluted way the government regulates salmon.

"The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater," Obama said. "I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked." That last line drew big laughs from lawmakers in the Capitol.

Mmmm. Smoked salmon. Inspiring.

No, I'm not making a dig about the Republican Party. Wired has a story this month about the quiet increase in AI happening all around us:

Today's AI bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers in the 1950s and '60s believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. In 1957, the AI crowd confidently predicted that machines would soon be able to replicate all kinds of human mental achievements. But that turned out to be wildly unachievable, in part because we still don’t really understand how the brain works, much less how to re-create it.

So during the '80s, graduate students began to focus on the kinds of skills for which computers were well-suited and found they could build something like intelligence from groups of systems that operated according to their own kind of reasoning. "The big surprise is that intelligence isn't a unitary thing," says Danny Hillis, who cofounded Thinking Machines, a company that made massively parallel supercomputers. "What we've learned is that it's all kinds of different behaviors."

We're a long way from ELIZA, except in the field of software project management. (Little joke there.)

I've just pushed out an interim build of the Inner Drive Technology demonstration project, Weather Now. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs, I added a significant new feature. The weather lists on the home page now can show whatever text I want for the weather station names. Before, it could only show their official designations, which made the lists harder to use.

You can see how useful this is immediately. The list of NFL football games now shows you what game the weather goes with. Also, I added arbitrary sort ordering and station begin/end times, so the lists you see today may not be the same as the lists you see tomorrow.

These features take the site a half-step closer to the next major release, due at the end of January, that will allow you—yes, you—to set up your own lists. That feature set will take a while to develop, which explains why I wanted to get this half-point release out first.

Strange Maps finds our state mottoes through Google:

Google any word, and the search engine will suggest a longer phrase, based on the popularity of current searches starting with the same word.

This so-called autocomplete function (1) is, like any good advice, in equal parts helpful and annoying. Also, being a clever piece of statistics, it offers a fascinating insight into the mind(s) of the Great Online Public.

The same principle of random revelation can be applied to geographic terms, which is exactly what this map does. These United States of Autocomplete have been collated simply by typing in the name of each US state, then plotting the autocompleted results on an actual map of the US.

Montana's, and Washington's are, for different reasons, the most surprising.

The first official 2010 Census results are out today. As of April 1st there were 308,745,538 residents of the United States. California, the most populous, had 37,253,956; Wyoming, the least, had 563,626.

We have a decennial census in the U.S. because our Constitution mandates it. Every 10 years, we reapportion representation. This time, very much like the last time, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are losing a seat; New York and Ohio are losing two; Washington, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Georgia, and South Carolina gain one; Florida gains two; and in a sign of the Apocalypse, Texas gains four. Louisiana also lost a seat, most likely as a result of people fleeing after Katrina in 2005 (though the state did have a net gain of around 70,000 people). With these results, each member of the House represents about 711,000 people.

Oddly, only Michigan and Puerto Rico lost population since 2000. Nevada had the biggest proportional gain, its population increasing 35%. Texas had the largest numeric gain, of about 4.5 million. Other big gains include North Carolina (about 1½ m), Arizona (25%), Utah (23%), and Idaho (21%).

The Census has an interactive tool that has data back to 1910 for more information.

Also from Sullivan:

It's called the Books Ngram Viewer, and it allows you to track the plot of words and phrases through time. The service draws on the absolutely massive Google Books corpus. Google estimates they've scanned and OCR'd 10 percent of all the books ever published, so this isn't a perfect dataset. But man is it fun to play with.

The New York Times has released an application mapping key Census indicators by census tract.

Seriously, you could spend hours playing with this thing.

I almost forgot: the Inner Drive demonstration site, Weather Now, got a significant upgrade this weekend, to version 3.6. I added two new features that are part of long-term plan of improvements. They don't sound like much, but they're pretty important bits that other features will depend on.

First, the lists of weather stations that appear on the home page are now generated dynamically from a database table. This means that I can change them, remove them, add them, or schedule them without having to make code changes. For example, during NFL Football season, you'll notice a list of home football games that changes every Tuesday at midnight Eastern time. In the past, to add a list like that, I'd have to make code and configuration changes. Now I don't.

Now the cool part, and how this is just a step towards a larger feature: In version 3.7 (coming out in January, I hope), you, dear user, will be able to create your own lists.

Second, I've added caching to the current weather reports. Before, every page view required multiple round-trips to the weather database. Now, any time the site retrieves current weather from the database, it stores the reports for some length of time. Any subsequent page requests will find the weather reports in the cache. This means the home page loads significantly (10x) faster on most views. The site gets about 11,000 page views every day, so this is non-trivial.

The cache right now has a fixed expiration time of 180 seconds, and I can change that through the standard application configuration tools. By "fixed" I mean the cache will discard all reports older than three minutes, forcing the application to refresh those reports from the database. This strikes a good balance between current data and application speed, I think, especially since the National Weather Service (whence comes the data) has new information at about that frequency. (You can read more about how caching works in the Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™ SDK.)

I think these are really cool changes, and I'm excited about how much it moves me down the roadmap. And the 3.7 update will be even cooler.

My demo site, Weather Now, has a feature showing weather extremes for the world. Northwest Canada right now is having unusually cold weather. What's the connection? The Calgary Herald published a story about the website yesterday and syndicated it across Canada. Jenna McMurray of the Calgary Sun also picked up the story, and called me for a quick interview.

As a result, Weather Now went from a daily average 4,000 page views up to a server-smashing 337,000 yesterday. It seems traffic has tapered off a bit today, but I'm still getting enormously more hits than usual.

I'm also getting a lot more feedback, like this note from Judy C., who had a Canadian IP address:

Get your facts straight. You and others in your country love to make statements based on minimum research and not double checking what you "think" is correct! Calgary: 2nd coldest place on earth is just as stupid a comment as other comments on your home page: the world (just the US)! Good grief, no wonder the rest of world laughs at you behind your back.

It took me a few seconds to work out the "just the US" part, but apparently she referred to the link of "coldest places" that filters for just U.S.-based weather reports.

For my reply, go to The Daily Parker.

Via TPM, this Duke project is cool:

This animated interpretation accentuates certain phenomena: the breadth and duration of support for Roosevelt, the shift from a Democratic to a Republican South, the move from an ostensibly east-west division to the contemporary coasts-versus-heartland division, and the stability of the latter.

More broadly, this video is a reminder that what constitutes “politics as usual” is always in flux, shifting sometimes abruptly. The landscape of American politics is constantly evolving, as members of the two great parties battle for electoral supremacy.

This is cool:

Across New York, there are USB drives embedded in walls, buildings and curbs. The idea is to create an anonymous, offline file-sharing network in public space. The drives are completely public and anyone can plug in to drop and download files.

Seriously, you can plug the USB drive into your laptop. ...

It's part of an art project called "Dead Drops" by Aram Bartholl and I have to say, it's pretty awesomely creative. I mean, if I saw a USB stick stick out of a random wall, I'd be dying to know what's in there. I'd have to plug in. It'd also be interesting to see what people would anonymously share on the public drive, well, until some jackass decides to upload a virus to screw up everybody's computer.

Reader DW pointed me toward this blog, a salve to the tortured OCD mind:

I love the blog's design, too. Very...neat.

The Daily WTF links to a set of 30 CVs created by graphic designers:

Check out the rest.

Diane will understand why Wired editor Jonah Lehrer keeps his crappy GPS. Not because her GPS is crappy, but because "Jack" talks to her:

I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal. Then, it couldn't find the street I was searching for. Then, it found the street but lost the satellite signal. Then, it regained the signal but sent me in the wrong direction. And then, after I'd already gotten accurate directions off my phone, the GPS unit finally decided that it knew where I was going. In other words, the device sucks.

But here's the funny part: I still use the device every time I'm even a little lost or unsure of where I'm going. In fact, I sometimes turn the machine on even when I know exactly where I'm headed. Why? I'm not quite sure. Although the device drives me crazy, and I'm constantly complaining about it (see above), I also enjoy interacting with that posh British voice emanating from the gadget, as it mispronounces every street name and tells me to take the wrong turn. When I'm alone in the car, the stupid piece of plastic feels like a companion.

... Why, then, am I so indulgent of my GPS unit? The answer, I think, has to do with the facade of agency. This machine speaks to me, calmly telling me where to go and why it's failing to telling me where to go. Sometimes, when the gadget is really struggling, I get the sense that it wants to apologize, that it feels bad it's so utterly ineffective.

For the record, "Jack" is Australian. And I have to laugh the way "he" reacts when Diane decides to follow a different route than Jack plotted for her: he seems to sigh and, with the patience of someone training a puppy, tells her he's "recalculating." We really aren't far away from Genuine People Personalities, are we?

What will they think of next. Now you can get a pair of 2GB USB cufflinks in silver or gold. They're maybe a little pricey ($195), but I do have a birthday coming up...

This may be the coolest computer ever:

Good luck to Jeff and Erin:

Nice. Very nice.

Randomness:

• Parker and I did, in fact, walk today (8 km), and it is, in fact, sunny and 16°C.
• Roger Ebert responds to Rush Limbaugh
• Via Greening Your Library, a quick and informative explanation of single-stream recycling.
• My books for next term only weigh 4 kg this time. I appreciate that. The 6 kg I carried to London was not fun. (This is a joke. Ha, ha.)
• Speaking of: "The cause of the floor's collapse remains under investigation." (I believe this is the source link.)

Really. January.

Via Strange Maps comes a field outside Minden, Neb., shaped like...well, like Nebraska:

IBM has created a supercomputer with more cerebral capacity (as measured by neurons and synapses) than a housecat:

The simulator, which runs on the Dawn Blue Gene /P supercomputer with 147,456 CPUs and 144TB of main memory, simulates the activity of 1.617 billion neurons connected in a network of 8.87 trillion synapses. The model doesn't yet run at real time, but it does simulate a number of aspects of real-world neuronal interactions, and the neurons are organized with the same kinds of groupings and specializations as a mammalian cortex. In other words, this is a virtual mammalian brain (or at least part of one) inside a computer, and the simulation is good enough that the team is already starting to bump up against some of the philosophical issues raised about such models by cognitive scientists over the past decades.

...[B]uilding a highly accurate simulation of a complex, nondeterministic system doesn't mean that you'll immediately understand how that system works—it just means that instead of having one thing you don't understand (at whatever level of abstraction), you now have two things you don't understand: the real system, and a simulation of the system that has all of the complexities of the original plus an additional layer of complexity associated with the models implementation in hardware and software.

On the other hand, I've met a number of cats in my day, and as cute as I think they are...do your really need that much computing power to outsmart one? I've seen gerbils do it.

Via Tom Hollander comes Strange Maps, a blog I will have to read through when I get a free moment next year. The blog supports Frank Jacobs' forthcoming book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. The blog starts with "Lunatic Asylum Districts in Pennsylvania," moving through "The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World" and "Heineken's 'Eurotopia'" on its random walk through maps. Very cool blog.

Example: a map showing the best beer in America, based on the number of medals won, with a handy refiguring of the results by population:

The top 10, reshuffled to reflect the number of medals per million of inhabitants, looks quite different, reflecting a dominance by states with a strong micro-brewing tradition:

1. Colorado – 64.4
2. Oregon – 42.5
3. Wisconsin – 38.6
4. Washington – 16.2
5. Missouri – 15
6. Pennsylvania – 13.5
7. Massachusetts – 12.6
8. California – 12.8
9. Texas – 5.6
10. New York – 5.1

Also from Hollander, a report that Samoa changed sides:

As sirens and church bells wailed across Samoa just before 6am on Monday, drivers obediently stopped their cars. Then, after instructions issued over the radio by the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, they shifted to the other side of the road and ushered in history.

"After this announcement you will all be permitted to move to the other side of the road, to begin this new era in our history," Mr Tuilaepa told his people, warning: "Don't drive if you are sleepy, drunk or just had a fight with your wife."

Good advice, that.

Via the Chicago Tribune, Budweiser has an ad running in Ireland shot in Chicago. It's kind of fun:

Really cool slide show of alternative mass-transit maps via the Economist's Gulliver blog. One, for example shows North American systems to scale.

I know I should be studying financial accounting, but this stuff is distracting.

Via The Daily Dish, the results of the American Time Use Survey, in very cool form.

Background:

Sunday Business analyzed new data from the American Time Use Survey to compare the 2008 weekday activities of the employed and unemployed. ... The annual time use survey, which asks thousands of residents to recall every minute of a single day, is important to economists trying to value the time spent by those not bringing home a paycheck.

The chart, though, is wicked cool.

Via Andrew Sullivan, 329 hot-air balloons taking off from Chambley, France, in time lapse.

Via Beth Filar-Williams, the National Resources Defence Council has ranked U.S. cities by environmental factors. The study ranks 67 large (population 250,000+), 167 medium (100-250k), and 405 small (50-100k) cities on nine factors, including standard of living, water management, transportation, and environmental participation. Seattle comes out on top for big cities; San Francisco, 2nd; Chicago, 10th.

Other leaders include Madison, Wis. (medium) and Bellingham, Wash. Bottom of the pack: Lexington, Ky., Paterson, N.J., and Pine Bluff, Ark.