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Anil Dash has a hilarious post about those people who obsess (and rant and rave) over not seeing or hearing any spoilers before “consuming the media product.”

I’ve never understood the spoiler thing. Did I watch just about every episode of the Highlander TV series after reading more than a week of intensive discussion on the Highlander mailing list (since the network I saw it on was the very last in the entire world to air each episode)? Yes. Did that bother me? No. I kind of liked it that way, actually.

There isn’t really a concept of spoilers in the non-fiction realm, that I’m aware of, anyway, and I probably carry that attitude over. I don’t actually watch many movies or read much fiction. I imagine that among people who read more than one book a week and attend more than two science fiction conventions a year my level of consumption of SF and fantasy media product is way over on the low side of the distribution. I’ve seen the first thee Star Wars movies. I watched almost all of Babylon 5. I’ve read, um, three Harry Potter novels. I got maybe one centimeter into The Lord of the Rings back in college, leaving only about six centimeters to go. Maybe I should watch the movies someday. I guess eventually I’ll give in and get one of them DVD thingies. They’re so cheap now that it would be just a minor extra on top of the price of the deluxe special collector’s edition LOTR DVD extravaganza.

How Things Are Made: From Automobiles to Zippers, by Sharon Rose and Neil Schlager, 2003. Hardcover covered with denim with a pocket sewn on the front, complete with little notes about pocket construction printed around the pocket. Which is just adorable.

It brings to mind the classic The Way Things Work, though it differs in many ways. The focus is on fabrication rather than operation, but some entries contain more how it works than how it is made, for example, the seismometer entry. The entries are longer but many fewer in number than in The Way Things Work, and the diagrams, while useful, are not up to the same standard. The entries seemed to vary in quality, some, like the eyeglass and contact lens entries, seemed quite good, while others, such as the helicopter entry, seemed to try to take on more than can be handled in a few pages, with disappointing results.

There are touches of the style of industry promotional press releases, with the assurances that any waste materials are carefully disposed of, that highly trained engineers calculate everything carefully, that everything is assembled by highly skilled workers, and a bit of the gee-whiz isn’t this technology is making everyone’s life better tone. There are some of the all-too-common number problems. There are too-many-decimal-places metric conversions, like 32.79 yd (30m). Normally we see the opposite in American books: 30 yd (27.432m). There is at least one “mega” where there should be nothing at all. There is a “billion” where there ought to be a “million,” or else a “,” where there should be a “.” (and they do use the “.” as radix marker elsewhere, American style). Glaring as these are, this seems to be the normal level of error in book publishing. At least the authors avoided any mention of electric power consumption, or we’d be treated to the inevitable use of kilowatts, kilowatt-hours, megawatts, megawatts/day (a valid, if obscure, unit, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used correctly), kilowatt-hours/year, and every other variation on kilo/mega/giga and hours/days/years used as if interchangeable. Even in fairly technical books electric power units in particular are almost always garbled, often too badly to determine what was meant, if anything.

I’m not sure who the intended audience for the book is. The entries range from the surprisingly detailed to the breezily schematic, and the choices of topics themselves follow no obvious pattern, which makes it hard to categorize. Sometimes it seems like a children’s book (for older children), other times not. I’m not excited about it, but I’ve certainly read worse.

I have been enjoying my new scanner. It does quite well on color slides, black and white slides (I reversal processed a few roll of TMAX with the Kodak kit some years ago), and black and white negatives, including the C-41-processed T400 CN, of which I’ve used exactly one roll. I use color negative film very rarely, but I tried scanning a few frames and my initial results with that are pretty bad. Getting good color out of color negative film is rather more challenging than out of reversal film. I’ve gotten recognizable images but eliminating the severe color casts will take some work. This isn’t really an important issue for me given how little color negative film I use but if you wanted to use a cheap consumer flatbed scanner on color negatives you should keep this in mind and look into what software support for color correction is available for your operating system and scanner before you start spending money.

For $150 I’m impressed. I just did a comparison with two Photo-CD scans of color slides and it is distinctly softer. The color is less vibrant, though that may be improvable with some tweaking. The resolution is about the same as a consumer Photo-CD scan. It is clearly not as good as Photo-CD, but it is good enough that comparing it closely to Photo-CD is not a silly exercise. It is not a serious film scanner, but it is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot faster and more convenient than sending film out for scanning, which also gets expensive fast. It appears to be plenty adequate for getting images onto a web page. I’ve made some decent prints with my Epson Photo 870 using a now-aging version of gimp-print, which I’m in the process of updating.

I have a new toy, an Epson 2400 scanner:

It works. This is from a slide taken at the 2003 “Airventure” in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on the last day as many planes were departing. The Epson 2400 has a built in transparency adapter for 35mm film. What I really want is a real film scanner, but those cost a lot more than $150. This does seem to do the job. Eventually I’ll get a digital camera and have less need for film scanning anyway.

I use Linux. I had to edit the /usr/local/etc/sane.d/epson.conf file to get SANE to find it, using the info from sane-find-scanner, but once I did that xsane worked fine.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the scanner once I’ve used it more.

The Spirit of Lady Godiva, photos by Harvey Drouillard, edited by Paul Rapoport. Anecdote Productions, 2002.

Some 120 black-and-white photos of urban street scenes which include one or more nude people. The models practice undressing and dressing so that they can undress, get the photo, dress, and be gone before attracting too much attention, sometimes before anyone notices. The photos are generally filled with entirely oblivious clothed bystanders, though occasionally a few do notice what’s happening. Each photo’s facing page is text about the photo, often the story of taking the photo. There are, naturally, some interesting stories.

These are not, on the whole, carefully posed scenes. He’s working in the United States and even in the more tolerant cities there is plenty of pressure to get it over with quick, before trouble arrives. Sometimes there is a touch of camera shake as well. One can imagine the effort needed to accumulate so many good pictures under the circumstances.

There is an article about Harvey and this book in Nude And Natural volume 21 issue 1, Autumn 2001. As they note there, the photos offer a fascinating image of a world in which clothing is not important, though of course this is an illusion generated by freezing a moment in time and using Velcro shorts.

In the naturist way, the photos are unlike the many we see these days where you know the models are nude but you nonetheless can’t actually see any of the body parts that would normally be covered by clothes. Poses vary, but there are plenty with nothing obscuring anything.

The book is very nicely done, with high quality printing. The photos are beautiful, the comments delightful. If you like this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. If you don’t like this sort of thing, please don’t bother telling me about it.

This morning I had my best lucid dream in quite a while. I became lucid by noticing that the fact that I was flying was pretty good dream sign. After skimming over a building I had much more success than before in gaining lots of altitude and heading off rapidly into the distance, over water toward an island. I think some of this imagery was inspired by that TV commercial (for what product I do not remember) with the fellow running through the air from island to island. In the past I’ve tended to be stuck low to the ground when flying. It ended in a false awakening, in which I wrote up a description of the dream in my dream journal. False awakenings are always a bit strange to contemplate. This particular one was quite realistic as they go, with the only odd thing being that I couldn’t really see what I was writing, but without my glasses it’s hard to see anyway.

I think that the Semi-Truck Chopper project on Monster Garage was one of the coolest things they’ve done. It strikes just the right balance between being odd enough to be really interesting yet still close enough to being a normal, drivable vehicle that I can imagine wanting to drive it around attracting attention.

Most of the projects are interesting and make for great TV, but they generally are the kind of thing that is very hard to imagine anyone building outside of the context of the show. World’s fastest street line painter? How about fire engine limo or donut car? Great TV, but wacky ideas. It’s hard to imagine custom car enthusiasts building their own versions.

At the other extreme, some of the vehicles are almost too normal. The tailgate party vehicle, for example. The idea was kinda-sorta conventional, just taken to a somewhat over-the-top extreme.

Peterbuilt trike, thought, that’s perfect. I want one.

I’ve been eating salad increasingly often recently. I’ve noticed a trend of escalating complexity. First it was just lettuce and dressing, then croutons got added, then mushrooms, then onion, then cheese, and now something from The Spice House. I even have a wooden salad bowl. It’s getting out of hand. At least I’m still just using just one kind of lettuce at a time.

If you live in Milwaukee or Chicago, you ought to visit the Spice House. Just the smell is unique (though possibly overpowering) and the selection vast. The Milwaukee store is charmingly…historic.

The City In Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, by James Howard Kunstler, 2001.

Unlike his previous books on the urban condition that mainly make fun of cities in the United States (which is easy to do), here we tour the world with him, with a chapter for each of Paris, Atlanta, Mexico City, Berlin, Las Vegas, Rome, Boston, and London. As you can imagine, he likes some better than others. He writes extensively of the history of the cities, which I found quite interesting, though I have my doubts about some of the notions of Aztec history he relates, involving Julian Jaynes’ ideas of consciousness as a learned cultural ability.

Although I enjoyed reading the book, I do think that it would benefit from some maps and perhaps photos. Particularly with the international scope of the book a even fairly crude maps of each city would clarify how the different parts of each city relate to the others.

Kunstler may be shrill, but he is fun to read. You don’t tend to find yourself wondering how he really feels. I think the book is worth reading just for the numerous passages like the following:

“Buffalo looks as if it suffered a prolonged aerial bombardment.”

“To make sure the mall’s skin evoked the local vernacular, the developer hired an out-of-town consultant, Communications Arts from Boulder, Colorado, to research architectural motifs that would ‘relate’ to the region’s art, history, and natural characteristics. This is how psychotic commercial development has become in America.”

“The destiny of Las Vegas, therefore, would seem bright in the same sense that a thermonuclear explosion is bright.”

“It had the characteristics—and all the charm—of a freeway toll plaza.”

Driving Force: The Evolution of the Car Engine, by Jeff Daniels. A history of car engines, from the earliest days through the 1990s, with a chapter per decade. 220 pages extensively illustrated with black-and-white drawings and the occasional photograph. This is a British book, and so there is an emphasis on engines designed in or made in, or at least sold it, Europe, though American and Japanese engines do get plenty of coverage as well. This is a book about mass-production engines, plus those that influenced production engines even if they themselves were not made in volume. There are already plenty of books on race engines and exotic performance engines and this book does not try to duplicate that material.

The book is quite detailed, but with a century to cover in 220 pages it never gets bogged down in truly tedious minutia. As an American I find the European emphasis quite interesting. Though I have some familiarity with American companies that went out of business before my birth, European companies that disappeared or reorganized out of independent existence I knew little if anything about. Also new to me are the peculiarities of historic British vehicle taxation, which for many years was based on piston area, thus giving rise to some very undersquare engines.

One nice thing about this book is that it is new, and covers up through the end of 20th century. Not only are the engines of the 80s and 90s quite interesting, but this also avoids the very pessimistic endings that engine books up to the early 80s have that is so jarring in retrospect. Obviously, what the 90s brought were the finest engines ever, but emissions regulations and wild fuel price swings in the 70s had people writing that the last interesting engines, the last engines that anyone could like, were all past. How wrong they were.

I think it’s a terrific book and recommend it for anyone interested in the subject.

The Smart House, by James Grayson Trulove. Ten unusual houses, beautifully photographed. “Smart” refers to smart technology (computerized systems), smart materials, and smart design. The houses are all of the style that probably has a precise technical name but which we civilians would refer to as very modern, with lots of glass and steel. Many are on very steep slopes, leading to such unusual arrangements as entrances (even garages) on the top floor. Not the sort of thing you see in central Illinois.

As is usual in architecture books and magazines they have the very opposite of the lived-in look, virtually empty save for a bit of modernistic (probably uncomfortable, but really cool looking) furniture. There are some books here and there (not as many as I and most of my friends have), and the photos tease with the titles just not quite readable on the spines. Probably they are readable with a good loupe on the original chromes.

I always enjoy these sorts of books. I like seeing something different being built. Given the low tolerance for architectural creativity of even the mildest sort in the USA, just finding a place where it is possible to get permission to build anything unique enough to appear in a book must be the hardest part. (The situation in Germany I don’t know about.) Nothing so beautiful that it will end up photographed for publication can be permitted in the neighborhood, lest it reduce your property values. Indeed, it might, if perspective buyers of your generic condo unit saw something different to compare it to.

Some of these houses are rather extreme in their embrace of the bare modern style, which may limit the ideas most of us can draw from them. I’m not sure I’d want to actually live in some of them, and of course if I did they’d be full of junk. Still a fun book to look through.

The Myth of Homeland Security, by Marcus Ranum, is about as much fun as a depressing book on security can be. Generally humorous tone, not a lot of optimism. He doubts that yet another try at getting the FBI and CIA to cooperate will work, and doesn’t really have high hopes for the TSA.

Much of the book is about computer security, as you’d expect given the author’s background in that field. He’s not too happy with the opportunists and “former” crackers in that field. He thinks that if the federal government coordinated it’s computer purchasing to get a better integrated, consistent set of systems and to pressure vendors for better stuff at better prices a lot of good would come of it. But he doesn’t imagine that will happen soon, either.

The book suffers from some oddities in design. There are quotations from the text set off in large type on approximately half the pages. There are innumerable asides in boxes or at the bottoms of pages that mostly ought to be integrated into the text. It looks like magazine design applied to a book. Computer books look a bit like that as well, although at least here we don’t have icons and screen shots.

I’d say the book is worth reading.

I guess it isn’t really that surprising, but it is somewhat bizarre to get spam advertising anti-spam software.

Being new to this, I still enjoy looking at my web server logs. Yes, I have started getting referrer spam. Currently, it seems to be people hoping to profit from Paris Hilton’s video escapades doing the referrer spamming. I have to say that I’m just kind of amazed by the very notion of referrer spam. It just seems so…lame. It will only get more lame once everyone who still hasn’t pulled down their public recent-referrers listings finally gets around to doing so. But they will still keep spamming us anyway, I’m sure.

What actually interests me are the search terms people us to find my site. The shear number of bots crawling the site is quite amazing as well, so it’s good that people are apparently making use of the information so gathered.

In many cases, I’m sure that I’m providing valuable information. Many people find my bicycle light review, and probably most of them are finding the kind of thing they were looking for. My popular Dirty Jobs entry may or may not be all that people are looking for, but it is probably at least some of what they are looking for. I have some Blosxom weblog software installation advice that may be of some use to people. Probably the people looking for Moleskine info find my article useful, though what the many people looking for expensive pens think of my not-too-exotic Pico described in the same article I don’t know. My book reviews are also perhaps a positive contribution. I know from e-mail and writebacks that some people have found my filk and con reports interesting.

In other cases, I’m sure people are disappointed. I mention nudity occasionally, and, as a nudist, I’m in favor of nudity, but I imagine people are hoping for pictures. I’m not sure my Roy Horn entry is what people are looking for, either.

While in general it is a bad thing to attract people here who are looking for something else, in some cases I am perhaps providing a public service by waylaying people here for a while. Did the “DNS spoofing” person have only purely educational motives at heart? What about “videos of people hurting themselves?”

Some things are much more surprising than people looking for “nude outtakes.” Like “underwater logging.” If someone had asked me a few months ago whether I thought people often typed “underwater logging” into Google, I’d have wondered, “underwater logging?” But I get a few hits a week on my trivial contribution to the subject. I don’t know why.

Do I know what I’m going to sing at the next filk? Why, yes, I do.

In Boing Boing I discovered the notion of putting your name or initials after tinyurl.com to see what, if anything, that points to. Well, to my delight, see what tinyurl.com/msp points to…

Which Survivor of the Impending Nuclear Apocalypse Are You?
A Rum and Monkey joint.

The blast must have hit you particularly strong, because you’ve gained a billion new superpowers and can take on anyone you want. Even that kid Gunrock-with-nine-arms from down the street. Only problem is, it’s driven you completely insane and you now have a thirst for blood equalled only by your thirst for vengeance and peeing in the kitchen bin.

That’s me!

The Chambanacon science fiction convention is held the weekend after Thanksgiving at the Hilton hotel in Springfield, Illinois. This hotel is 30 stories tall, an irresistible challenge to stair climbers. I measured a step at the 14th floor level at 193 millimeters. I did not actually measure any others, but there were no noticeable differences in step height on my trips up and down. There are 28 steps from the lowest level to the lobby floor, 19 to the mezzanine, 18 to the mystery floor, then 16 between each floor up to the 22nd. From then on it there are 18 steps between floors up to the 30th, and 32 steps to the roof level, for a total of 597 steps and, at 193mm each, 115 meters, plus or minus a few meters.

I came prepared with heart rate monitor this year. I started off trying to stay below 180, but ended up mostly in the mid 180s with occasional intervals in the 190s. The highest heart rate I’ve ever observed was 201, while bicycling, so I was mostly over 90% of maximum.

The result: 4:36, four seconds faster than last year. That’s just over 0.4 meters per second. At 58kg (a bit more, since I was wearing clothes), that would be 65 kJ (15.5 kcal) at about 240 watts.

Oddly, the basement exercise room has two stair machines in it. The real stairs are more interesting. They are darker and dirtier, however, as is often the case.

One other vertical transportation oddity is that the elevators contain one placard indicating a capacity of 10 persons or 2500 pounds and another placard indicating a maximum occupancy of 9 persons. Perhaps two elevator regulatory agencies are not speaking to each other. The elevators have windows looking out to the outdoors, which is very nice. They are also kept much cleaner and brighter than the stairwells.

Plug and Pray (in Italian or English). Very Special.

I spent the weekend after Thanksgiving in Springfield, IL, at Chambanacon, having a wonderful time. The filk was lively, with a few more people, I think, than we’ve seen in recent years. Dave Alway shared quite a few poems and a few songs. The Suttons were entertaining, as always. We were treated to a wonderful display of musical talent (as well as Frank Hayes Disease) by Joe Haldeman. Juanita Coulson was present, as usual. Ernest (KB9SKI) played some great songs. (Mo is Om spelled backwards…although we who spent too much time in the electrical engineering department think mho is ohm spelled backwards, now known as the Siemens.) Milwaukee fandom was also well represented.

I experienced the joy of having a perfect follower, in my case Jabber-Whacky, a parody of Jabber-Wocky by Isabel Di Caprio using brand-names everywhere, which I’ve set to the tune of “Witch of the Westmoreland,” as a follower for a song about dreaming (or not) of ordering every single item advertised on late-night TV that Bill Sutton sang.

If you would like people to join in on an instrumental piece, Road To Listonvarna would be a superb choice. I think I had two guitars, a mandolin, a fiddle, and a drum joining my flute. I’m having to learn to play it more consistently, to avoid losing everyone.

I learned a useful lesson: Don’t sing Nobody’s Moggy Lands when Jan Di Masie is present. I had just gotten to the chorus when she took my filk book and removed the offending pages from the binder. I’m glad I don’t have memorized. I don’t want to find out what she does then. We had a cannibalism and death theme going, so I figured, why not road-kill cats? Now I know why not. Jan was giving out some excellent raspberry sake (all is forgiven) and brought along the always-entertaining Spot, the Ball Python. Both Jan and Spot are looking good. Spot was fairly energetic and spent some time crawling over me. I have no idea how he moves. He’s pushing somewhere and pulling somewhere else and sliding along elsewhere, and, well, somehow it all works. He knows what he’s doing.

The Cajun restaurant that formerly occupied the thirtieth floor of the Springfield Hilton is gone, replaced by an Italian restaurant with the somewhat cliche-sounding name Capisce?, which, annoyingly, has a piece of punctuation in the name. I guess we should just be glad it’s not CaPisce?DotCom or something. The food, however, was excellent. I had the canelloni alla nettuno and my traveling companion the canelloni tutti carni, two closely-related yet quite differently flavored dishes. Just superb. We thoroughly enjoyed the meal, as well as the view from the thirtieth floor, some hundred meters above street level. I highly recommend the place, if your budget allows it—our dinner for two totaled about $60.

I’ll post my stair-climbing times and measurements later. One can’t spend a weekend in a thirty story building without trying out the stairs, can one? (Stair article now up.)

I’ve just discovered that TV is much more hilarious than usual after a few glasses of Beaujolais Nouveau. Frankly, walking is more hilarious than usual, as well.