Friday fun

Whoops; I missed Friday. I've been a bit behind lately, as it is. I didn't hear until recently about the GOP (grandpa's oligarchy?) anointment for VP, and let me tell you, I'm thrilled. We now have a win-win election: either a palatable pair of intelligent experts [1] who might deviate just enough from business-as-usual to inject a bit of deference to the proletariate and respect for the bourgeoisie, or a spooky sell-out accompanied by a lumberjack.

What, not that Palin? Crap. Even so, once taken over by GOP 'handlers', M. Palin would probably end up more like his character in Brazil. Anyway, that's not the funny part; there's nothing funny about my baseline blood pressure being 20 points higher for the next two months as I'm reminded by poll after poll that an enormous number of Americans either don't see the world like I do or are too stupid to know the difference. *sigh*

Furthermore, why hasn't the phrase "hope-smoking hippie" come into the common lexicon? [2] I'm not sure what side it would help more, were it to; but, I hereby proactively reclaim it, just in case.

I may have posted a while ago about the XKCD geohashing comic. Brilliant. And now, posted to the associated blog a few days ago, this description of a bicycle-kayak trip to find the day's location. Again, brilliant. I wish the internet had been invented back in my school days, so I could have done cool things too.

Finally, kudos to the professor teaching a stochastic modeling class (read: math of random things) I'm taking, who's policy for late work reads

Homework that is n weeks late will be accepted, but its total score will be multiplied by p^n, where p is a random variable drawn from the uniform distribution on the interval [0,1].

[1] How have I heard eight thousand recent pop-media discussions about Obama's level of experience without a single mention of the fact that he has a J.D. and taught no small amount of law at a little school in Illinois? I drool at the prospect of hiring someone who understands law to enforce our laws.

[2] Props to Jason for the turn of phrase, which as far as I can tell was original when written in this post.

Word clouds

I'm a fan of the word-cloud's function as a super-adjective. Now, some dude has done a really nice job of it in a java applet: check out Wordle. Below is a cloud representation of the text on this page (as it existed prior to this post). Common English words are ignored, then the font size in the cloud determined by the word's frequency of appearance. I don't think color has any significance other than demonstrating that the programmer has written a nice algorithm for aesthetically pleasing patterns.

Encouraging velo-commuting

I always enjoy Dr. Hamermesh's succinct economics posts; this one from a few days ago discusses an incentive to bicycle-commuting (or, more specifically, bicycle ownership by employees of a company) in the Netherlands. The deal there is $750 pre-tax, once every three years.

A similar subsidy in the U.S. seems like a good idea. It's common for companies in urban areas to offer a payroll deduction for car-parking or public transit passes; I assume, but don't know, that this is because there's some method in the tax code to pay for this before income taxes are withheld.

$250 per year (say, $1500 to build and maintain for 6 years a loaded-up touring bike with racks, bags and Spy Hunter -worthy guns and oil slick for negotiating rush-hour traffic) seems like a reasonable cap. Pre-tax dollars are equivalent to about a 10-20% discount, depending on how much one actually shovels out to the IRS. If one worked for a hip, modern European corporation, maybe said company would be hip and modern enough to put up a matching 20% for the brand value of having a parking lot full of shiny new bicycles.

Net art

I live about two years behind the rest of the internet class, so it was about time that I discovered a web-based comic entitled Questionable Content. It's a soap opera featuring 20-somethings, indie music, a majority female cast, coffee and some robots. Verily.

I found the author's description of how he constructs the artwork particularly interesting. The comic looks hand-drawn but synthetically colored; in fact, it's drawn directly into Photoshop using a pen-on-tablet type interface, then shaded in using some semi-automated image processing. That's right, my image processing aspires to find its way into papers in low-impact engineering journals; this guy retires on it.

A few people I know use similar tablets for note-taking during class or meetings. There are some like this one that are less clumsy than carrying around a tablet PC but hold memory for several 'pages' of notes before plugging them in and dumping them to a workstation for storage. I tend to take notes in graphs, figures and concept maps rather than text, so a keyboard doesn't do me much good (although a guitar-synth might), but one of those would be a quicker interface into basketnotes than my current method of running ink-on-vellum through the office scanner.