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Vote

If you’re a citizen of the United States and registered to vote, please head out to your polling place tomorrow. To paraphrase and quote a little from the late David Foster Wallace’s superb essay (originally published by Rolling Stone in 2000) “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub”, don’t kid yourself into thinking there’s such a thing as not voting.

There is no such thing as not voting:

You either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard [partisan’s] vote.

So cast your own vote, not somebody else’s.

Updated, Nov. 4: I just voted, and I hope however this turns out that, unlike the way campaigns and partisans on all sides typically conduct themselves, people will take a lesson from John Wayne. Yeah, that John Wayne. I doubt I’ll ever have the occasion to quote him again, but he said just the right thing after the 1960 presidential election. He supported Nixon but said this about Kennedy:

I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.

There’s a lot that needs doing, and fixing, in this country. So while I hope the candidate I voted for wins, whoever it is, he will be my president and I hope he does a good job.

I know a guy who knows a guy

Blogging about blogging is boring, and if you agree (or disagree because you like meta posts) feel free to chime in via the comments. Which are now working, after more than what I consider a reasonable amount of effort and many consultations with my ISP’s technical support tag-team.

Why is this so hard? I hand-coded my first web page in 1994. It had a lovely gray background, a long list of boring links, and was old school Web 1.0 about a decade before anybody started talking about Web 2.0. But the thing was, I understood everything that went into that page, and for good or ill it looked the way I wanted it to look. If you’ve seen the cover for the first edition of Two-Fisted Science, you’ll know it was more ill than good.

But even though I wasn’t a good book designer, I used to be a pretty good programmer. I’ve written complicated and useful code in Basic, LISP, Perl, PL-1, Pascal, Fortran, and probably a few others that I can’t remember, using punch cards, dumb terminals, Cray supercomputers, and dedicated mainframes at nuclear power facilities. So formatting a blog should be easy (and basic functionality like commenting should just work, right out of the box.) But beyond not working, right out of the box, when I try to do something simple like change the message at the top of the comment form so it doesn’t mislead you into thinking you’re going to comment completely anonymously…I can’t do it. The text you’ll see (“Sign in to comment, or comment anonymously.” even though you have to enter a name, made-up or otherwise) lives somewhere, but your guess is better than mine where that is.** It’s no doubt embedded within a module embedded inside a widget embedded inside a template embedded inside a page or an entry or maybe even a comment preference (nope…looked there), and I can’t find it. Movable Type is offered by a company called Six Apart, and the irony of that name smacks me upside the head when I try to navigate the degrees of separation between what a page looks like and the code that controls it.

If there’s a MT wizard out there who knows where to look, comments are open. And I promise the next post will be about something less boring.

** This phenomenon is not confined to the web, of course. I could actually identify almost everything I saw under the hood of my 1980 Dodge Omni, and most everything in the 1994 Saturn. The 2007 Civic Hybrid? It might as well be powered by unicorns and elves cleverly disguised to look like metal and plastic thingees, as technology continues its march towards magic.

Better Zombies Through Physics

Quantum Zombies Inc.Tor.com has been running Better Zombies Through Physics for the last few weeks, and Sean Bieri and I aren’t finished yet. So please head on over — there’s a new installment up right now, and still plenty of time for you to get caught up before the end. And as you’d expect from them, Tor offers some great materials on their site in addition to comics about Schrödinger’s equation!

Space walking

Can you ever get enough of watching Ed White float in and out of the camera’s eye in 1965 during the first Gemini spacewalk? (I qualify it that way since Alexei Leonov performed the first walk ever a few months prior to this. His is also a great story, which I got to tell in the upcoming T-Minus.) No. White’s joy comes through the grainy video, clipped sound, and deadpan framing by the NASA official.

What the video doesn’t include is what he says as he gets back in the spacecraft (after what sounds a lot like very determined coaxing by mission control and Jim McDivitt): “It’s the saddest moment my life.”

Bonk

I’ve never run a half-marathon before, and in doing the Detroit/Windsor today I learned some things:

Train. OK, so the notion that my natural level of fitness was sufficient to allow me to finish a half-marathon without specifically training for it proved true. That didn’t make the last couple of miles fun, which they were not. If you saw the 2008 Olympics and watched Sanya Richards basically hit a wall about 75 meters before the finish, then you know what I mean. I saw her face, and her shoulders, and said “Ooh” for the full length of an exhaled breath. The friends I was watching with, none of whom were runners, asked why. I told them she was done, and at about mile 11 in this race I was too. Richards is tough, and even with a cramped hamstring still managed a bronze medal — all I managed was to not stop running.

Eat. I did, but not enough, and after doing some reading on the phenomenon of slogging through rapidly setting concrete I’m pretty sure that happened because I ran out of fuel. Glycogen in the muscles, glucose in the brain. Because of a minor illness, I had only about 500 (liquid) calories total on Thursday and didn’t eat normal amounts on Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday. Bad timing — for the last mile I was actively hungry, and in discomfort from it. Since I’m usually not hungry for an hour or more after a run, and certainly not during, this was probably bad. The technical term endurance athletes have for what happened to me is “bonking” (a.k.a. “hitting the wall”). If you’ve never experienced it, here’s a standardized test X is to Y as Z is to ?? solved for you: Bonking is to getting tired and wishing the run was over as a paper cut is to slamming your hand in the door of an armored HumVee. Hard.

Pace. My friend Dave and I went out fast. (For us. Rest assured, the elite runners weren’t worried.) It felt great, and was great for the first 10 miles. Then Dave dropped back, and I kept on, still feeling fine. And about 1.5 miles later (see above) Dave had found the right pace and I hadn’t and he passed me and I said see you at the finish line and that was that. I still surpassed my fairly modest time goal, but if I’d run a little smarter I could have shaved at least a couple more minutes off.

Enjoy. Sunrise on the Ambassador Bridge was beautiful. Running through the pre-dawn streets of Detroit was fun. A tour of Windsor’s waterfront was a treat. Running a mile underwater (we took the tunnel back into the U.S.) was cool and weird, even though it took us away from the beautiful weather and friendly spectators. It’s a great course, and I look forward to trying it again. After I train and eat and find a smarter pace.

b(ack)log: Xian — the movie

A misleading title. But this is about Xian, and this is about a movie.

In 1986 I spent the summer in the People’s Republic of China, about which I have written (depending on when you read this) and will write (almost certainly) more. After spending most of the summer in and around Nanjing, studying Chinese and working in a machine shop, the group I was with did some traveling as well. And one night, in the city of the Terra Cotta soldiers, my friend Keith and I did some pool hustling and saw a movie, both outdoors as I recall. What I don’t recall is the title of the movie, so if the collective wisdom out there can help me out I’d be grateful.

What I wrote down is Disciples of the Shaolin Temple, but when I rented a movie with that name it was clearly not the one I remembered. It’s possible that we saw Hong quan xiao zi (1975) aka Disciples of Shaolin/The Invincible One or Shao Lin gu di zi (1983), for which IMDB gives the same translated titles.

I have no idea, and all I remember of the movie is that we loved it, and it ended with the heroes in a river (or a pond?) being splashed by some lovely women.

Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?