Category: Hmmm

I love the weird world of logistics. On Saturday I shipped 7 boxes from Chestnut Hill to be delivered here in Seattle tomorrow, Thursday August 10. I just checked on how they were doing:

Those boxes are visiting cities that I’ve never seen….

What a bizarre race. The rain, the tyre wars, Raikkonen’s early lead, Alonso’s domination of the middle period of the event. And then it all fell apart: Raikkonen’s crash, then Alonso’s wheel nut drive shaft, finally Schumacher’s steering… and Jenson Button sails through to win his first GP. Finally!
I just checked, and the last time we had a race where neither Alonso nor Michael Schumacher were on the podium was in October 2004, at the Brazilian Grand Prix. And the last time that neither Fernando nor Schumi finished a race? May 2004, at the Monaco race. Amazing – and utterly absorbing.
(Yes, I know that Michael was classified 9th. That’s just book-keeping. He was out.)

Per Boris Johnson in The Observer – but this isn’t a partisan issue: it’s a national crisis:

The figures are terrifying. In the 20 years from 1985 to 2005, the overall number of entries at A-level rose by about 100,000, from about 680,000 to about 780,000. Yet maths fell from 71,608 to 58,830. Physics A-levels slumped from 46,606 to 28,119. Chemistry fell from 40,337 to 38,851. There are some London boroughs where further maths is virtually extinct.

UPDATE: There’s a good follow-up discussion here.

Jonathan Swift was the most brilliant satirist of the 18th century. From the outrageous “A Modest Proposal” to the subtle delights of “Gulliver’s Travels”, he demonstrated that the stiletto of satire could be more effective than the bludgeon of outrage. And now the blogosphere has its own Jonathan Swift. Here’s a sample of his work, from Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers:

Coulter is understandably frustrated at how the liberal media fawns over these women and hangs on their every word, while she has struggled to get her message out through the occasional television appearance, talk radio, college campus tours, her syndicated column, her website and her bestselling books. The media seems to believe that these women deserve some sort of special status just because they happen to have lost a loved one, even though they lack Coulter’s long list of credentials. These narcissistic women persist in believing that their loss was somehow greater than that of the rest of the country who watched it all happen on television.

Brilliant. And then there’s the case of the suicides at Guantanamo:

Admiral Harris contends ominously that the suicides are in fact an act of war against the United States. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Harris said. Asymmetrical warfare is a tactic used by a weaker enemy to surprise and disorient his opponent. In order to restore symmetry to the battle, our side will have to engage in increasingly self-destructive tactics of our own and abandon certain principles and ethical values that hold us back and hand our opponents weak points they can exploit to strike back at us, a strategy we are already using with some success in Iraq.

Just returned from a quick postprandial walk around the block. The rain has let up enough to make it feasible, and the torrents of rainwater have retreated to the gutters. We’ve been relatively lucky: I think we’ve had just under seven inches of rain here. (Logan had 6.68″ by 3pm.) North of us, things are much worse: according to the NWS, Andover has had 10.5″, and there’s street and stream flooding all over the North Shore. The various graphs on the AHPS (Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service) pages show that the Merrimack valley is in for some major flooding. (At Lowell, flood stage is at 52 feet; right now the river is up to 54.25 feet, and they expect it to crest at 60 feet by tomorow afternoon.)

And there’s more rain to come over the next few days….

There were three big sporting events scheduled for this weekend:

• The England vs. Sri Lanka Test Match
• The F. A. Cup Final between Liverpool and West Ham, and
• The F1 Spanish Grand Prix from Barcelona, with the Spanish World Champion Fernando Alonso (in front of his home crowd) taking on Michael Schumacher.

For the first, I knew there was no chance of getting any TV coverage. Unless you have the gear to pull in the right satellite feed, cricket in the US is a non-starter. Football? (Soccer to you Americans.) I watch the Fox Soccer Channel regularly, but I’d seen no announcement of local coverage of the Cup Final. Not until half an hour after the match had started (and after an email nudge from Chris) did I discover that it was available on cable pay-per-view for $25. Being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided not to pay up. Had I known how exciting it was going to be, I might have done differently.

Which left the Grand Prix. I watched the qualifying sessions on Speed TV yesterday, and was looking forward to seeing the race live on Sunday morning. I checked the schedule for the start time…. Nothing. Further searching showed that the race was being shown on CBS at noon.

[RANT ON]
Every year, most of the Grands Prix are shown live on Speed. However CBS Sports always buys the rights to a couple of the races and shows them tape-delayed. Obviously any tape-delayed sporting event presents a few problems: you have to be careful to avoid news and blog sources which might reveal the result. But with CBS it’s a lot worse. First, they clearly don’t understand motor sports, and the coverage and commentary really sucks. Second, the local CBS affiliate doesn’t treat it seriously, and supplements the regular commercial breaks with random newsflashes and even more commercials. The result is shambolic. I wound up playing Civilization 4 on my PC and looking up on the rare occasions that there was some Formula 1 action on the TV.
[RANT OFF]

Oh, well. Congratulations to Alonso for driving an almost perfect race, and to Steve Gerrard and Liverpool for their tenacious performance against the Hammers. As for England vs. Sri Lanka, despite brilliant work by Pietersen, Hoggard and Mahmood it looks as if it will all depend on the weather….

Took a walk around the Massachusetts Audubon reservation at Broadmoor in Natick this afternoon. The signs of spring were everwhere – trees in blossom, painted turtles sunning themselves, signs of fresh work on the beaver lodge and dam, and a patient frog waiting for an unsuspecting fly. I’ve uploaded a bunch of photographs here. In particular, see if you can make out the frog in this shot. He’s on the semi-submerged branch just below and to the right of the centre of the picture, as you can see in the subsequent images. (I don’t think I’d have seen him if a more experienced photographer hadn’t pointed him out to me.)

We’re back in Brookline, having returned a day early. (I had an unexpected meeting here in the Boston area.) We packed up on Monday afternoon (occasionally peeking at the television to check out the progress of the Boston Marathon), then stopped off in Mashpee for a little shopping and dinner. On an earlier visit, I’d spotted an intriguing restaurant, and I wanted to check it out. Bleu Restaurant proved to be a revelation: one of the best French restaurants I’ve found in the US.
[WARNING: Food porn follows.]
I had the shepherds pie – but this was unlike any shepherds pie I’d tasted before. Perfect creamed potatoes over shredded braised lamb shank with sweet onion, mushrooms and leeks. (I’m determined to try to replicate this at home.) Merry had a “simple” roast chicken: crusted with sea salt and rosemary, started in the oven and finished on an open wood grill. The flavour and texture were sublime. They offered some of their very best wines by the glass, and the service was exemplary. If only it wasn’t so far from Boston…

River just wrote that television stations in Baghdad broadcast the following warning:

“The Ministry of Defense requests that civilians do not comply with the orders of the army or police on nightly patrols unless they are accompanied by coalition forces working in that area.”
[…]
It confirmed what has been obvious to Iraqis since the beginning- the Iraqi security forces are actually militias allied to religious and political parties.
But it also brings to light other worrisome issues. The situation is so bad on the security front that the top two ministries in charge of protecting Iraqi civilians cannot trust each other. The Ministry of Defense can’t even trust its own personnel, unless they are “accompanied by American coalition forces”.

So what are Iraqi civilians supposed to do?

“It means if they come at night and want to raid the house, we don’t have to let them in.” I answered.
“They’re not exactly asking your permission,” E. pointed out. “They break the door down and take people away- or have you forgotten? […] Besides that, when they first attack, how can you be sure they DON’T have Americans with them?”

A little bit Catch-22, a dollop of Lewis Carroll, and a splash of George Orwell….

Save the date:

We are excited to announce that on Wednesday, April 12th Harvard Book Store and Seed Magazine will cosponsor a discussion on Science in the Age of Certainty with John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett, Daniel Gilbert, Marc D. Hauser, Elizabeth Spelke and Seth Lloyd. This event coincides with the publication of the new book What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by Mr. Brockman.
Eminent cultural impresario, editor, and publisher of Edge (www.edge.org), John Brockman asked a group of leading scientists and thinkers to answer the question: What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it? This book brings together the very best answers from the most distinguished contributors.

It’s taking place on Wednesday, April 12th, at 6:30 PM, in the Askwith Lecture Hall at Longfellow Hall, in Cambridge, MA.
UPDATE: And speaking of Brockman, read his piece about “The Selfish Gene at 30” with a splendid rant about the dire consequences of ignorance about science.