Monday, October 31, 2011

A Hawaiian Musical Selection

Today's musical selection celebrates the life and music of Hawaiian ukulele artist Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. The album containing the song below and his cover of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World sold over a million CD's after its release in 1993 and made him a celebrity. Upon his death in 1997,  thousands of fans gathered as his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at Mākua Beach. A beautiful song from a big man with a gentle voice.    

      





The Lockout Continues

Starting to worry about what to do with the basketball season going down the tubes? From the friendly folks at the Grantland website - a translator that tells you which European soccer team to root for based on who your NBA team of choice is.Here's the verdict for those of us who cheer for the Chicago Bulls:   

What can replace the giant-size hole the lockout has left in your life? Your franchise has fielded one of the most dominant starting lineups in history. Your current talent-soaked roster, loaded with championship expectations, lures the NBA’s best attendance to the nation’s second city. Mazel tov. You have the good fortune to be a MANCHESTER UNITED fan, current and perennial champions, sponsored by Chicago-based reinsurer Aon. 

For those Boston Celtic fans:   

You live and die for a tradition-rich franchise with a rabid fan base in an Irish-tinged city. Your team’s legend was cemented by the glory of the 1980s, though the 21st century has been less kind, delivering just a single taste of meaningful silverware. Seventeen championship banners and 21 retired numbers waft over the floor. You are born to be a LIVERPOOL fan. Swap Lucky the Leprechaun, the mascot purveyor of high-flying dunks, for the toothy alacrity of Luis Suarez and the teams are basically interchangeable.  
Or maybe a Nets fan:   

Your team is relentlessly crap. Will a change in ownership and the promised land of new digs (obtained in slightly controversial fashion) make a difference? No chance. Congratulations. You are a WEST HAM fan. Born to be Claret and Blue. Ever hopeful, yet always cruelly denied.     
Portland Trailblazers anyone:   

You have a nasty case of Blazermania — a love so blind it compels you to bellow for your team, whatever the result. As one of the most rabid fan bases in pro sports, you are born to be a NEWCASTLE UNITED fan. Few teams mean more to their fans, despite giving them so little in return. In the same vein as Portland’s “Jail Blazers,” the law has often presented more of a challenge for Newcastle than opposing teams. But an injection of talent has transformed results, and Geordie fans, fueled by multiple pints of Newcastle Brown Ale, are living proof that few acts are more joyous than cheering for your local team.     
 Finally, maybe you are a Lakers fan:   
Simply put: We have had too many e-mails from Lakers fans begging “not to be Chelsea” to not make you CHELSEA. Lakers Nation, you doth protest too much: Your winning tradition has been soiled by an arrogance which, real or imagined, has caused you to be roundly despised across the league. You have a young coach attempting to gain the respect of a veteran squad, led by a soft Spanish big man and an aging Kobe, who could be any one of Chelsea’s graying superstars — John Terry, Frank Lampard, or Didier Drogba — attempting to substitute experience for pace.   

So enjoy your new team, NBA fans. And pray that at least some season is still left by the time the negotiating ends. Although every thing I read says that the Cavaliers owner (along with several others) thinks he will make more money if there is no season at all. Doesn't sound good. Now what do we do to take the place of eleven Bulls games this winter?     


   

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

13 Days When Music Changed Forever

WFMT, the Classical Music radio station and the San Francisco Symphony have developed a classical music series called the "Keeping Score Series - 13 Days When Music Changed Forever". Remember, these are classical music people, so the breakup of Creedence Clearwater Revival is not on the list. What is on the list are a number of musical pieces that I haven't heard (or heard of).   

It begins on February 24, 1607 with the premiere of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. The radio broadcast for this one runs 59 minutes and, according to the description,  
This is a program about the dawn of opera, but also about secular music becoming ...  high art (something that had been the exclusive purview of church music).  We’ll look at precursors to L’Orfeo in Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Jacopo Perri’s Euridice, written a generation before Monteverdi.   
And it finishes on November 4, 1964 with the remiere of Terry Riley’s In C.   
This piece, which debuted at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and the minimalist outpouring that it sparked, were a reaction to the rigid strictures of serialism and the stranglehold of the academic composers of the time.  

           

I may not know art, but I know an alarm going off in the morning when I hear it. I think it probably gets really cool later on. I don't know - I shut the alarm off after 3 minutes and got up. Maybe Mary can explain this to me sometime.   

Anyway, it does show my incredible lack of knowledge in the area of classical music. We sang a lot of Bach in high school choir and in church and when I was in the State Singers choral group at Michigan State University we did a Beethoven festival in 1970 with the MSU Orchestra and Albion University's choir to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. I still have the two vinyl records from the concert, though I haven't pulled them out in twenty years. The classical list on my IPod nowadays consists of Aaron Copland (I love Fanfare for the Common Man), Vivaldi, and Pachelbel's Canon in D. So, time to get to work. Let's see if we can teach an old dog to enjoy classical music. But we're going to avoid Terry Riley for a while. No need to go overboard here.   

May I Have the Envelope, Please?

I know you've been waiting for this. Grammar.net today announced the winners of the Best Grammar Blog of 2011. (Drumroll, please)   

3rd Place - Arrant Pedantry     

   Most recent post - "Rules, Regularity, and Relative Pronouns"   
          The age-old struggle to determine the correct usage of who, which, and that.   

2nd Place - Grammar Girl  

   Most Recent Post - "Why Does 'Gadaffi' Have So Many Different Spellings?"  
         The age-old struggle to translate Arabic words into English.   

1st Place - A CLIL To Climb

   Most Recent Post - "Compound Adjectives - To Hyphenate or Not"   
        The age-old struggle to decide whether to hyphenate "ten-mile run" and "loud-mouthed lime".   

  A fellow blogspot resident - so we are happy they won.  


The scariest part - online voting determined the winner - over 8000 votes were cast. And my high school English teacher, Ms. Geiger, would be 115 by now, so I don't think she's doing much voting anymore. I didn't know there were people who followed in her footsteps - but I can still diagram a sentence, so she is probably looking down on me (OK, she is probably looking up at me - she was a grammar teacher after all) with a smile.     



Monday, October 24, 2011

Conspiracy Theory, Anyone?

The movie Anonymous is due out soon. I have already started seeing trailers on TV. That's good, because I haven't had a bizarre conspiracy theory to think about for quite some time. I've worked my way through the Dan Brown Catholic Church conspiracies pretty well by now. I've quit seeing Opus Dei each time I go to the grocery store to buy grape juice. And the birthers have pretty much given up for a while, although with the Republican primaries starting up soon, I expect to hear at least one  candidate call Obama's citizenship into question.  I can hear it now - "No, 9 - 9 - 9 is not bad for the middle class and besides, how would Obama know - he's a Muslim."  I'm pretty sure we did go to the Moon in 1969 and not just to a NASA soundstage in New Mexico. And contrary to what Tommy Lee Jones tells me, I don't think Dennis Rodman is from another galaxy.   

Steven Marche, a former college English professor, writes an interesting article in the NY Times about the movie Anonymous and about conspiracy theories in general. He explains that he wasn't sure if the movie was any good. He spent most of the movie being upset by the absurdities given to justify the original premise: Shakespeare did not write his own plays. He describes a good final exam for a graduate class in Shakespeare would be to have the student find 10 ridiculous things that are stated as facts in the movie. The Oxfordian hypothesis, he writes, is a dead issue. But after this movie comes out, the loonies will come out and play. Despite having no background in English literature or English history, some people will take this seriously.    

I think that is the part that is so frustrating to me. Texas governor Rick Perry, in a recent debate, was talking about how climate change is a fraud perpetrated by scientists to get more funding, then goes on to compare his skepticism to that of Galileo. Come on, Mr. Perry. Really? It is frustrating to me that a denial of science comes so easily to those with no science background whatsoever. They can't explain what Galileo or Newton or Hawking did, but they are sure that their position on climate change and evolution and quantum physics is scientifically valid. And they take the fact that there are constant arguments about each of those to mean that they don't exist. The scientific community has a lot of arguments about how climate change will manifest itself, about the speed of the change, basically all about how it will unfold. But there is almost no argument in the scientific community that climate change is real and needs to be addressed soon.    

Marche sums it up very nicely:   

The Shakespeare controversy, which emerged in the 19th century, was one of the origins of the willful ignorance and insidious false balance that is now rotting away our capacity to have meaningful discussions. The wider public, which has no reason to be familiar with questions of either Renaissance chronology or climate science, assumes that if there are arguments, there must be reasons for those arguments. Along with a right-wing anti-elitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness has also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say.
The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some opinions deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.     
And neither is climate change or evolution.  I'm just really happy that my brother Alan is retired from teaching Shakespeare courses at SOU; I feel sorry for the instructors next fall who will have a student say, "Well, everybody knows that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. I mean, that's why they did the movie, right?"  
 

Friday, October 21, 2011

Costume Ideas if You Grew Up in the 80's

We know you have every intention of making your own costume this year for Halloween. You do every year. But you know things will get busy and you will run out of time and you will end up putting in a pocket protector and going as Steve Jobs. Well, BuyCostumes.com, the world's largest costume store, has just the thing for you twenty-somethings - a blast from the past.    


Yes, it's an adult size Skeletor Masters of the Universe costume and it includes "A chiseled muscle chest jumpsuit featuring attached brilliant purple armor, matching hood and a vacuform character mask." What it doesn't include are the socks so you are on your own there - and somehow tennis shoes or black dress shoes just won't look right, so you're going to have to spring for the purple boots.    


And we don't want to forget the ladies, so you can "Embody the powerful princess of Eternia in the Masters Of The Universe - She-Ra Adult Costume which includes: A white dress featuring a gold emblem with aqua jewel detail, tiara headpiece with a faux ruby accent, red cape and a pair of gold wrist cuffs." It's a good thing they told us it's a faux ruby accent. I expected real rubies for $54.99, didn't you?     

 And Thundercats are on the loose with your official Lion - O costume.    


Or you have lots of other choices:    

Super Grover - Numero Dos!
Optimus Prime

  Waldo  

 PacMan 

  Stay Puft Marshmallow man 

  Waluigi  

So let's get going out there. I want to see pictures of all the costumes. Unless you're going with the Naughty Nun again. I'm still recovering from seeing that one last year.     









Is Florida Becoming the Scariest Place on Earth?

So a lot of the state - level political bickering these days seems to center around the idea of testing people on welfare for drug use. As a follow-up to the post a couple of days ago about conditional probability and drug testing, this just seems like an incredibly expensive program with few benefits, but let's see what the experts say. As of July 1, residents of Florida have been required to be drug-tested to receive their welfare benefits. According to Governor Rick Scott, the program will pay for itself and is needed because people on welfare are notorious drug users. But the Tampa Tribune reports that according to the Department for Families and Children which runs the program in Florida, the state is seeing a fail rate of 2% through the first two months of the program. According to the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, performed by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, 8.7 percent of the population nationally over age 12 uses illicit drugs. The rate was 6.3 percent for those ages 26 and up. That seems a tad higher than the 2% use rate among welfare recipients in Florida. Welfare recipients must pay for their own drug testing, but are reimbursed by the state if the test proves negative. So a welfare recipient must shell out $30 ($60 if he/she ends up being a false positive - and remember that more than two-thirds of the positive tests are false positives) to be eligible to receive welfare. Estimates in Florida so far show little savings for the state in what they spend on welfare. Adam Cohen of the Yale School of Law (not exactly a hotbed of liberal thought) , in a Time Magazine op ed piece entitled "Bad Policy, Even Worse Law", writes, "If Florida and other states are really concerned about drug use, they should adopt stricter laws and better enforcement policies aimed at the whole population, not just the most vulnerable. But these laws are not really about drug use. They are about, in these difficult economic times, making things a little harder for the poor."   

As Cohen states, the problem with Florida's law is that it isn't about drug use. It's about bullying.  And it's about bullying a group of people who don't have the resources to fight back.All the research I have read about student achievement has stated that the single most defining statistic in whether students pass the standardized tests is the poverty level of the families involved. It would seem that if we care about kids, attacking poverty should be our approach, not attacking food - stamp recipients. I guess that's why the Occupy Wall Street movement has struck such a basic chord for me. There is plenty of money out there to help people out, to create the jobs that would lift people out of poverty and give them a sense of hope. But the private job creators have other uses for that money - bonuses for the banking execs who received bail-out money, stock-options, and a record dividend paid out to the shareholders of BP.   

In Ohio, there is a big push to pass this odious piece of legislation about drug-testing welfare recipients. In a marvelous counter-strike, Ohio Democratic legislator Robert Hagan has taken it to the next step.  Rep. Hagan’s bill would require statewide officeholders, legislators, members of Gov. John Kasich’s jobs board and recipients of federal bailout money to pay for their testing for un-prescribed pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs and alcohol. Officials testing positive would have to undergo treatment or be booted from office.    

Now that seems a little more fair - everybody who gets state or federal money gets tested - farmers who get crop subsidies, executives whose companies get state contracts, legislators and legislative boards. I like that idea much better.   
  
  
  

Let's All Go to the Lobby, Let's All Go to the Lobby!

Trailer 2 for the Muppet Movie is out for your enjoyment. I see a reclining seat with pillow and blanket in South Barrington on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Popcorn for everyone. Woooo!   






Monday, October 17, 2011

Today's Math Lesson - Conditional Probability

The instructor in the AI online class I am taking from Stanford was discussing conditional probability today, which is an old topic for me. One contest every year for the North Suburban Math League was only probability: simple probability for the Freshman team, geometric probability for the Sophomores, and more advanced probability for the Juniors and the Seniors. And in the lesson, the instructor does a problem that I first saw done by John Allen Paulos in 1988 in a book called Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences.

It is still available on Amazon - although if you buy one it probably won't be signed by Dr. Paulos like mine is. What can I say - I'm a math geek. The example Dr. Paulos gives is intended to give people a more numerate understanding of drug testing - something to counteract the typical "Well, he tested positive and the test is 90% accurate, so he's probably guilty."

So, let's assume the test is 90 % accurate and let's guess that our population of drug users is 5% of the total population. That is, for any random group of 100 people, 95 are drug free and 5 are not. Let's suppose that our workplace has 1000 people. 95% of 1000 is 950, so 950 is our expected drug free population and the remaining 50 are drug users. So we give everyone the drug test.

Of the 50 drug users, 45 test positive. (Remember the test is 90% accurate - 90% of 50 is 45.) The other 5 drug users test negative.

Of the 950 people who are not drug users, 855 test negative (Again, 90% accurate and 90% of 950 is 855). That leaves 950 - 855 = 95 people in this group that test positive, even though they are drug free.

So, let's suppose you are contacted by your employer and told that you tested positive. What does that mean. Well, 140 people tested positive - the two big numbers above added together. And only 45 of those 140 people are drug users. So the probability that you are a drug user if you tested positive is 45 out of 140 or about 32%. Less than a third of the positive tests are accurate. But the company sells itself as being 90% accurate, which it is. You just have to understand that  90% accurate doesn't mean what it sounds like. Or to modify an earlier statement, he tested positive and the test is 90% accurate, so he's probably not guilty.

So what should the company do? Well, at the very least it should retest all the positive results. Should it fire everyone that gets two positive tests? The probability that you get two positive tests if you are drug-free is pretty small, but there are still going to be people fired who are not drug users but are labeled as such.

Well, one solution would be to focus on people whose performance has slipped or who are making a lot of mistakes at work. But that should really mean that they should start by seeing counselors to find out other reasons for behavior changes. Stress at home, maybe difficulties with a spouse or adolescent children, the beginning of a physical or mental illness that may need treating; in general, that would require an interest in the worker and his welfare. And that would require managers who are skilled at working with people. Nah, the test is simpler. Besides, it's 90% accurate. Let's just go with that.

And that's what Paulos meant by the consequences of mathematical illiteracy. 


Thursday, October 13, 2011

Today's Music Selection - The Cat Song

One of my favorite things to do is to listen to the radio broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion.  If you are unfamiliar with the show, here in Chicago it airs on NPR's 91.5 WBEZ at 5 PM. Since Saturdays tend to be a bit busy, I rely on their website to hear the show. You can see a rundown of last week's show (or earlier archived shows) here.  The show runs for two hours and includes songs, skits, and commercials from places like Bertha's Kitty Boutique and Powdermilk Biscuits (Heavens, they're tasty!).  Each week Keillor gives a 20-minute monologue about the news from Lake Wobegon. After a while, you know all the characters and you enjoy it even more. You look forward to hearing the latest about Lutheran Pastor Inqvist, Father Emil of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, the Lake Wobegon Whippets baseball team, and various members of the Bunsen and Krebsbach families. When our kids were young, they fell asleep listening to cassette tapes, then CDs of Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." The best show of the year is the Pretty Good Joke Show, which usually has Roy Blount, Jr. or Paula Poundstone as a guest. A typical example:   
What does your father do for a living?
He is a magician. He cuts people in two.
Do you have any brothers or sisters?
Yes, one half-brother and one half-sister....   
I have used several of their jokes over the years in Commencement addresses. Always a hit. I would encourage you to listen to a show on the website. It takes some time, but I think that's one of the messages of the show. Sometimes you just have to make time to do the things that are worth doing. The video below is from quite a few years ago and is typical of the songs and skits you will hear on the radio show.  Enjoy.     





Whimzy Makes a Statement

So our puppy Whimzy (5 months old now) has obviously decided that the celebration of Christmas should be confined to the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Here's the story.   





Buddy 1 was a stuffed toy something - it looked like a moose, but had a horn (unimoose) - that Whimzy loved. At least she loved to chew it. And she would run around the back yard with it in her mouth until it tangled with her legs and she did a somersault. It died an ugly death when the puppy ripped open its stomach and pulled out lots of stuffing. I had already sewn it up twice before from small tears. This one was not going to be sewable.   






Buddy 2 was a stuffed giraffe. Also well loved and her first (and only) choice for what to take to bed with her into her cage. Whimzy performed a tail-ectomy on Buddy 2 and, more importantly, ruined the squeaker in its tummy. No squeaker made Whimzy very sad, so we went today to pick up some things at the pet store (and look for a new stuffed toy with a working squeaker). Now you might ask why we are spending money on a third stuffed animal if she destroys them within a month. I have no answer for that except that if we weren't spending it here we would probably be wasting it somewhere else, like on our kids. And they're the ones who talked us into getting a puppy to begin with, so they will just have to deal with it. Week by week their inheritance is getting eaten up by stuffed toys with a squeaker. So be it.    

Which brings us to Buddy 3. This time we are going with a more spherical animal - which could only mean ... ? Right, a hedgehog. And because the pet store has already shifted into Christmas mode, a hedgehog with a Santa hat sewn on. I would like to show you a picture of that, but it took me five minutes to find the camera, and during that time, Santa the Hedgehog was unmasked (well, unhatted, anyway).      


Does Whimzy look guilty? No, I didn't think so, either. So now the toy is just Buddy 3, the non-Christmas Hedgehog. And no, we don't call her Buddy 3, but we explained it to Whimzy when we bought it today so that she would know that it was a different Buddy. Unlike Darrin on Bewitched and the new Dumbledore that didn't really look like the old Dumbledore, but never gets explained in the movie. Come on, it's a movie about magic; you can't figure out a decent explanation to give us?   

Old Dumbledore

New Dumbledore

So we have a pool going on how long Buddy 3 lasts, but I'm worried that Ann may not be an impartial observer now that she has money on it. If I see her taking too much interest in Buddy 3,  I may have to set up the video camera to keep an eye on her. I'll let you know the outcome.    



Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Official Avengers Trailer

The Avengers, coming out in May, 2012 is next summer's big blockbuster geek movie. The Avengers include Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye. This summer and last summer, we saw the origin shows for the first three listed above, and got a glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. Directed and written by geek superstar Joss Whedon, who wrote the original Toy Story and the Buffy, Angel, and Firefly TV series. We may want to see this at the fancy movie theater in South Barrington that has the recliners with pillows and blankets. We saw Moneyball there last week and it was pretty cool. Plus they have Chicago style popcorn (mixed cheese and caramel corn) for sale.  



Has It Really Been 24 Years?








Good Morning America invites most of the main cast of The Princess Bride to the studio to talk about the movie.

My favorite character: Vizzini played by Shawn Wallace.

Inconceivable!











Friday, October 7, 2011

Best Blog on the Internet - Well, Top 5

I have been looking for a way to introduce you to a really funny blog called "The Bloggess". Subtitled "Like Mother Teresa, only better". Jenny Lawson is the author and she also writes a humor column called Good Mom/Bad Mom for the Houston Chronicle. She is an admittedly mentally ill person (depression and anxiety disorder) which sometimes gets in the way of her speaking schedule, but she is very edgy and candid in her posts. I will warn you ahead of time that if bad language bothers you, you should skip this post and wait for the next one, which will be much more mellow.    

This was posted on her site this week:   

Remember last week when I wrote about the sign I’d put up on my neighborhood bulletin board?
This one:


[NOTE: last comment says "This is why it's important to put collars on all of your pets."]

Well, I checked today to see if anyone else had responded to it, but IT WAS GONE.  It had been taken down, presumably by someone who hates snake reunions and happy endings. It was disconcerting.
Luckily, I knew the perfect place to ask for help:





UPDATED:  The missing sign lasted less than 24 hours before vanishing.  It’s a losing battle, but it’s a losing battle I’m willing to fight.  Mainly because I work from home and have an entire ream of copy paper at my disposal.  I can do this all damn day, vandals.




[End of post]

Ann and I originally started reading this blog this summer when she posted about buying a huge metal chicken that she named Beyonce. You can read it here. (But this one is much more graphic.) If you can get past the language, you will laugh out loud.    

I hope you enjoy this blog - it is all over the place with only one thing in common on each post  - they are consistently funny.     

Thursday, October 6, 2011

A Visionary Lost

On the way home from the movie theater tonight, Ann and I heard the news on the radio that Steve Jobs had passed away today. It seemed a few comments are in order. First off, if you hang out in the geek world at all, you know that there is such a thing as an Apple fanatic. From the blog NewMac Online   
Remember when the iPhone came out? It was like a new Star Wars Movie starring Steve Jobs. There were actually people camping outside the store in costume. For a phone!   
And Geek.com has this headline:   

Apple fanaticism similar to religious devotion, according to scientist.    

It is a running joke among non - Apple devotees who have very little brand loyalty and don't understand it. The Dell that you bought 20 years ago translated into a  Gateway (remember the cow logo) 12 years ago, and maybe a Sony Vaio 5 years ago. But if you were an Apple family, you probably didn't buy outside the Apple brand over that same period. The first computer class I took after college was at Deerfield High School and I learned to write programs in Basic.  That was in 1980 (yes, 31 years ago and I know many of you weren't alive yet). I remembered the instructor asking us to go to the computer store to buy a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk to store our programs on. When I went to buy it, the clerk asked me how many I wanted and I was astounded that anybody would need more than one. When we decided to buy our own computer shortly thereafter, I asked our school computer geek Rob Luby what I should do and he said, "IBMs have more programs, Apples have smarter programs." He was already an Apple fanatic. And so we bought an Apple IIc. With the optional muppet keyboard for the kids to use.     





They became very familiar with the effects of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. And they played with the dancing lobsters on the counting game. And within three years, we had over 300 floppy disks. I remember lying on the living room floor typing in instructions from the Robinsons and the Lighthalls for the interactive adventure game ZORK. (Sure. let's carry the mongoose. You never know when you might need it.)  Since then we've had a Mac IISE (my favorite), an EMac, several IMacs, several IPods,  a MacBook, an IPhone, and an IPad. We are extremely loyal to the Apple brand and have never been disappointed with our purchases. And Ann's job for many years involved (among other things) being in charge of the Apple computers in her elementary school. So the news of Steve Jobs' death may resonate more with us than it would another family.    

I used a few lines of Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford University commencement speech a few years ago when doing the commencement speech for Wauconda High School (with attribution, of course). He was talking about being fired from Apple at the age of 30 and what he decided to do. It included working with a small production company called PIXAR. The key line I was interested in was the phrase "Don't settle." I also quoted William Somerset Maugham, who used that phrase, along with some others. I appreciated their sentiments, and I hope the WHS graduates and families did, too. I've read that Jobs was not an easy guy to work for and often a not very nice boss, but just in music alone with the creation of the IPod and the ITunes store, he had a tremendous impact on popular culture.    

Apple's home page consistently entirely of this picture today:    
Steve Jobs  1955 - 2011
Just as in the case of Jim Henson, he died too young.    Godspeed, Mr. Jobs.    

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The Daily Show Is Back to Number One

Bad news for Uncle Jay lovers. His work schedule has changed and he is going to be away from the camera for awhile. If you have never watched the podcast of Uncle Jay Explains the News, here is an example:    

         

For the last four years, Uncle Jay has been my main source for understanding the news of the week, followed closely by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Both are more enjoyable than the network news shows (and probably more accurate as well). Unfortunately, Jay Gilbert, a Cincinnati radio personality, is powering down his show for awhile, citing work demands that keep him from devoting the time necessary to produce the show. It just means we have time to go back and watch some of the older episodes here. And remember, a good kid is great news.     

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Wrestling With Python

I have signed up to take an online class (Computer Science 221) from Stanford University that is about Artificial Intelligence - the science of making computer programs that reason about the world around us. It begins next Tuesday and runs until the middle of December; there is a homework assignment to turn in each week, a midterm exam and a final exam.  It is free, so you don't get credit for passing the class, just a certificate signed by the instructors: Sebastian Thrun, a CS professor at Stanford and Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google (and previously the head of the Computation Services division at the NASA Ames Research Center). It is an ambitious undertaking for Stanford: 130,000 people from all over the world have signed up for the class. In the group e-mail I got last week, they are struggling with handling all the language barriers.    

I am struggling with learning to program. It is not a requirement for the class, but it is suggested that being able to write programs for the scenarios given will make the class more valuable. Now programming for me means writing a program in Fortran, punching the correct holes onto note cards, and then leaving them with the CS Department to be run overnight. Each card was one command, like FOR I = 1 TO 20.    



If the 4th card (of 60) was incorrect, the program stopped, gave you an error message, and spit out your cards. You fixed card 4, turned them back in, and waited until the next day again. Computers in 1970 used a lot of juice; there wasn't enough electricity to run them during the day for students. There were no personal computers; just room sized monsters with names like UNIVAC and ENIAC.    

The class I'm taking suggests that I learn to use the Python programming lnguage. After a couple mis-starts on Python tutorials, I've finally found one that lays everything out for me. The program seems easy enough so far, but I'm only on lesson 5 of Learning Python the Hard Way. Along the way, I'm learning how to use a text writer called GedIt and the computer's Terminal program. I'm sure if I get in trouble, Tammy's brother Sean will help me out. This is probably kindergarten level to him.  

The week of December 5, we are studying Robotics and Robot Motion Planning. I'm going to build a robot that will take Whimzy out late at night. That's probably the week that I, Robot will be the movie of the week, with Will Smith battling the killer robots in Chicago in 2035. So far when I leave out the quotation marks, I just get a syntax error. If my robot turns red all of a sudden like they do in the movie, I'm going to hit it with a sledge hammer. Better safe than sorry.    

What Dancing in Music Videos Used to Be

The interesting thing about these two guys is that neither one was known for dancing. Jimmy Cagney (playing composer George M. Cohan here) was an actor, most well known for his "You dirty rat" portrayal in gangster movies - almost always the bad guy.  And Bob Hope (here as Eddie Foy) was a comedian, later known for all his USO shows for the troops overseas.  But if you came out of vaudeville, you'd better know how to tap.  According to the comments on YouTube, Hope was 47 when the movie The Seven Little Foys that this comes from was made in 1955; Cagney was 56. Cagney's part in the film is just this sequence. He had played the role of Cohan (and won an Oscar) in Yankee Doodle Dandy in 1942. He agreed to do the part if he didn't get paid. He called it a tribute on behalf of the many struggling actors (including Cagney) who found a free meal at Eddie Foy's house in the 20's when they were just starting out.  Enjoy!    


          

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Wait, Wait, I Have to Tell You

I mean, it's what I do here on the blog, right. So I'll tell you about my visit to see a taping of the National Public Radio show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. It is the only national NPR show taped in Chicago and one of my favorite things to listen to on Saturday mornings. It was a birthday present from my son Nate and he and Ann went with me to the Chase Auditorium in downtown Chicago. If you have never listened to the show, it is billed as a News Quiz show, but it is mostly a current events comedy show. The host Peter Sagal gives various news quizzes to a panel of guests, but the idea is to see who can be the funniest in their answers and remarks. Part of the show is scripted, but much of it is impromptu. The guests last Thursday night were Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 - "We'll leave the light on for you" fame), Maz Jobrani ( a stand-up comedian) and Faith Salie (actress, comedian, and radio show host). We missed Paula Poundstone, who is on most weeks.  But the group we saw was great to watch.    

It is hard to describe any more clearly. The easiest thing is to just listen to it. The show we went to see is supposed to be posted on their website by 12 noon CST Saturday. Just go here and click on "Listen to Saturday's show". Our taping was non-stop and lasted 2 hours (for a one hour show). I am interested to see what gets cut from the taping we watched. When the show was over, they spent about 4 - 5 minutes redoing some parts of the show which didn't come out right. It looks weird because the panelists just start talking about something that happened earlier - then you realize the producer has cued them over their headsets as to what they are supposed to do.    

After a brief Q and A session, it was over. Just enough time to walk across the street to Italian Village (one of our favorite restaurants) for a late dinner. A perfect end to a great evening.