BeigeJournal

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. Tor Books, 2003. Also available on the web in a variety of formats under a Creative Commons license.

This is certainly different in style from the last work of fiction I read, Heinlein’s For Us, the Living, which I have also reviewed They are both set in a utopian future, with utopian economics and a utopian social order, but while the story in For Us exists primarily to allow the author to lecture the reader through the characters, Down and Out is considerably more subtle. The unfamiliar concepts are introduced with enough context to understand what’s happening, and more detail is filled in later in a natural manner. I also found suspension of disbelief easier Down and Out even though the technologies described are rather more…advanced. The principle that the less said about how the gadgets work the better seems to hold true.

I think the really clever trick was devising ways, in a story set in a world where death itself can be cured, to keep the tension up high enough to be interesting while still being believable in that context.

I liked the book a lot.

Want to learn unusual words and improve your knowledge of the obscure corners of the English language? Want a wacky name for your band? Well, all you need is spam. Thanks to unsuccessful efforts to evade spam filters, I get dozens of uncommon words sent to me daily, whether I like it or not. Unfortunately, the spammers don’t include definitions, but there is always webster.com. It’s almost a service. The spam message, as with most spam, is HTML, so I don’t even see it in mutt, so all I see is a block of odd words, neatly labeled as spam by my spam filter, which isn’t fooled at all. .

Fashion Victim : Our Love-Hate Relationship with Dressing, Shopping, and the Cost of Style, by Michelle Lee. Broadway, 2003.

It is kind of odd that I read this in the first place, being one of the less fashion conscious people around, but I found it very interesting.

The unifying theme of the book is that there is an ever quickening cycle of fashions going in and out of style, leading to pressure to manufacture and market garments faster and cheaper, and pressure on consumers to buy ever more clothing that will only be worn a few times. At one time styles took years to change, but now the hot new spring fashions can be completely out of date while it is still, technically, winter. This does not encourage the manufacture of high-quality, expensive clothing in nice, safe factories by well-paid workers. Nor does it leave much room for new ideas as everyone frantically emulates what everyone else is doing (and mocks anyone does anything original).

There is a lot written on fashion models, the relationships between celebrities and designers, fashion “journalism,” sweat shops, animal rights protests, and even dry cleaning.

The book is very readable, and even as someone with no clue to fashion, who buys clothes based on how I think they’d perform while cycling up a hill at 0°C (or 30°C), or while skiing, and who has never in his life had anything dry cleaned, I enjoyed reading it.

Boing Boing readers will have seen this link to a Japanese research group studying the physics of avalanches by dropping hundreds of thousands of ping-pong balls down the landing zone of a ski jump. They have a bunch of images on their web site as well as about a gigabyte of video. Most of the video is from camera angles that are more of scientific than aesthetic interest, but a few a just wonderful. In my opinion probably the best video, if you just want to enjoy the spectacle, is this one of 320,000 balls. All the videos have a computer-generated blue line marking the front of the avalanche.

This is a fantastic example of the ability of science to occasionally justify experiments that would be just wonderful to perform purely for fun.

Wisconsin’s Lapham Peak State Park now has excellent skiing conditions. The trails are 100% covered with snow and a classic track has been set throughout the park. Go out there and ski. Everyone else is doing it—the parking lot was nearly full.

Ski condition hotline phone numbers:

• Lapham Peak: 262-646-4421
• Southern Kettle Moraine: 262-594-6202
• Northern Kettle Moraine: 920-467-2099

My girlfriend and I enjoyed a dinner at Crawdaddy’s in West Allis, Wisconsin last Saturday. We arrived around 17:00 and were seated immediately. Shortly thereafter a huge crowed gathered, waiting to eat. So our advice is to arrive early. Air quality seemed much better than before as well. They let people smoke indoors there for some reason and in the past we’ve experienced spectacularly bad air, but it was much better this time. So our advice is to arrive early. Since bad air and long waits are our only complaints (and have discouraged us from eating there more often), we were quite happy with how well the last visit went as far as these issues go. They are, by the way, currently closed Sunday and Monday.

I ordered the Alaskan king crab again. I really ought to try something else there, but the crab is so good that I’ve had it three times. I am getting pretty good at getting the meat out of the crab. When you taste that good, you have to be armor-plated. Judging by the size of the legs, I wouldn’t want to meet that crab in a dark alley, prior to it being de-legged, I mean.

The Chocolate Beyond Reason desert, made with light and dark chocolate mousse plus additional chocolate, is wonderful.

For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, by Robert Anson Heinlein. Written in 1939, published in 2004.

Heinlein has a new book out. There is something a bit odd about that concept. (If you are one of those spoiler fanatics you might not want to read this before reading the book.)

For Us, The Living was written in 1938—1939, when he first started writing. I’m not a big Heinlein fanatic, but I have read a few of his novels and this one, early as it is, is definitely in the Heinlein style. It is a work of utopian fiction, in the classic model of the main character somehow transported into the utopian future, where he learns of the strange new customs and everyone else is a bit shocked by how people behaved way back then. If you always wanted more of that Heinlein preachiness without all that plot and character development in the way, this is the book for you. I actually rather liked it, probably because of that. I’ve always felt that writers who have something to say ought to say it and not leave generations of students in literature classes puzzling over what the author really meant. This book is perhaps a bit of an extreme case of not letting the story get in the way of what the author wants to say, but that is endemic in utopian stories and this was very early in Heinlein’s writing career.

In this story Perry Nelson is involved in a car accident in 1939 and somehow wakes up in another body in 2086. I kept waiting for some sort of explanation of what happened, but it never came. The other characters in the book seemed remarkably accepting of his odd situation. He’d explain what happened to him and they’d agree that it was very unusual, then go on to answer his questions about rocket planes or economics as if this kind of thing just happened from time to time, in 2086.

The book was not really meant as an actual prediction of the future, but it is hard to read in 2004 a book written in 1939 and set in 2086 without evaluating how that vision of the future matches up with what has actually happened 44% of the way into that future. I would have to say that the thing that strikes me as the most jarringly anachronistic is the fact that every single character in the book smokes. Everyone offers everyone else cigarettes, and everyone lights up everywhere. At least in my (somewhat special) social circle that’s odder than polyamorous nudists. The casual tossing of trash into the fireplace is similarly odd to our more environmentally sensitized eyes.

They have flying cars, of course, though not very technologically plausible ones, I’d say. I am inclined to agree with Scott Lynch’s comment in the huge discussion thread on electrolite that less detail is better in descriptions of not-really-plausible SF technology. We do still have 82 years to get our flying cars, though.

They have pneumatic tubes, and high-speed electromagnetic ones, too. The Monster House Retro-Future House featured pneumatic tubes, too. There is something oddly fascinating about that technology. The high-speed moving sidewalks Heinlein later wrote a book around appear here. Those haven’t made it out of the airport, yet, nor have they even gotten up to normal walking speed. I imagine that if we ever get moving sidewalks in the future, the next step will be to equip them with exercise machines so that you can work out while you ride, similar to a tall building with stair machines in the basement exercise room. I was inspired to get out my copy of Yesterday’s Tomorrows, which is a fun book that I hadn’t looked at in years.

The entire alternate history of world war two and the immediate post-war era is rather odd to read, with parts of it historically more-or-less accurate (in 1939 some of that history was already in progress) and much of it very, very different from what actually happened, in ways that seem very unlikely nowadays.

Regular passenger rocket plane service precedes the first lunar flyby, which might work out better than the frantic race to space just to show everyone we could really do in and then…well, then we’re done, right? Nothing more to see here.

Women have equal rights, but somehow the attitudes don’t seem to have fully caught up. When Perry asks, “Isn’t that a man’s job,” the reply is that she has a right to do it, not, as one might expect today, something on the order of “what is that supposed to mean?” or “what the hell is wrong with you?” I don’t remember the topic of racism appearing in the book at all.

A very large part of FUTL is devoted to economics. You’ll recall that it was written during the Great Depression. By the time you’re done reading it you’ll never forget that it was. The economic system of the fictional 2086 USA doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, but whether or not it makes more sense than the actual situation of Great Depression USA I don’t know. It might.

The society Heinlein depicted combined an activist government, providing free health care, education, child rearing centers, and distributing to everyone enough income to live on, with a fairly extreme culture of personal privacy. Even curiosity about other people’s private lives is strongly discouraged. It’s a vision not entirely unimaginable now, though it has a lot more government than is fashionable now, and more privacy as well, which seem to be especially rare in combination in current thought. I wonder if the seemingly inborn desire to gossip about people private lives and consume celebrity gossip could in fact be successfully discouraged. This would not leave room for all those blogs and Livejournals full of personal trivia published for all the world to see.

Perry ends up needing some counseling after punching Bernard in a fit of sexual jealousy. The goal, of course, is to help him adjust to society, rather than lock him up somewhere awful in hopes that he somehow comes out of the experience better for it like the savages of 1939 did to criminals. They seem to have perfected their psychological techniques in 2086.

Though Hedrick explains at length that what Perry thinks of as “human nature” can change as circumstances change, in an exchange with Olga we see acknowledgment that that may not mean that anything is possible. Perry says, “But that still doesn’t tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them.” Olga replies, “Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn’t fit the facts.” The examples, though, are all the junking of old notions, not failed experiments with new ones. We are presented with the finished product, and it is not clear what Heinlein thought of the limits to human adaptability. Some of the greatest horrors of the 20th century were brought on by people determined to remake society according to their predetermined utopian schemes no matter how many people had to be killed to do it. We are informed that arrangements vary in the different states, with Wisconsin, hard as it is to imagine now yet easy as it was to imagine then, socialist, so apparently there is more than one path to utopia.

I liked the book. It is a must for all Heinlein fanatics, of course. It might not be the best book to start with for someone who has not read any of Heinlein’s others.

SF book cover art checklist:

• V2-like rocket ship? check.
• Rocky landscape with stars above? check.
• Nude woman? check.
• Floating disembodied head? check.

I finally have some photos from the 2003 OVFF processed and scanned. These are from the Blue Moon songwriting contest and a few from the auction that followed.

Blake Hodgetts

ASH Productions, if I’m not mistaken.

The illustrious Pete Grubbs

Renee Alper and Ray.

The sound board (I am a geek)

Pegasus winner Cat Faber

An Interfilk auction runner (Susan, I believe)

And this Interfilk Wench would look great on the cover of a fantasy novel (just imagine her holding up a sword).

The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number, by Mario Livio, Broadway Books, 2002.

Imagine a line from A to C, with point B somewhere in between. If AC/CB=AB/AC, then both these ratios will be the golden ratio phi, 1.6180339887…, (1+sqrt(5))/2. You might not think that an entire book could be written about this, but Dr. Livio, head of the Science Division at the Space Telescope Science Institute, did.

This number turns up in logarithmic spirals, platonic solids, Penrose tessellations, and is deeply connected to Fibonacci numbers. Oddly, phi is 1.618…, phi^2 is 2.618…, and 1/phi is 0.618… This book is filled with this sort of amazing trivia.

A good part of The Golden Ratio consists of debunking claims that phi was used in the pyramids and other ancient structures and in more recent paintings and other art. Make enough measurements (with big enough error bars) and you can find any number anywhere. The only way to be sure is if the artist said so, and there are a few such examples.

I did feel that it started off a bit dull and got more steadily more interesting as I read it. That may be a quirk of my personal interests. You may wish to skip around a bit if part of it is not of great interest to you. It is probably not a very useful book, but some people (you know who you are) will find it fascinating. I did.

The last Mythbusters, in which an electric car motor was attached to washing machine parts in order to spin a crash test dummy up to high speed, was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. That was fantastic. The dog-pee collection was fairly hilarious, too. It does go to show just how much effort is required to make a myth that lame (and implausible) interesting, but Adam and Jamie are up to it.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.

Now that I’m getting lots of spam with the Habeas haiku in the headers, I do vaguely remember hearing about them a while back. There was brief media attention to the idea, then they dropped out of sight. Now they come back into sight by way of spammers using their headers. In a way, they are providing a useful anti-spam service, in that I have never received anything but spam with their headers, so they serve as a “this is spam, for sure” indicator. I gather it was not supposed to work that way. The notion that people in the fraud business would be afraid of trademark lawsuits does seem a bit unlikely.

Do you consider yourself some sort of geek or nerd? Do you understand power factor? If you answered yes, you need a Kill A Watt power meter. I mean, unless you already have some really expensive meter from Fluke or whatever that does the same thing, in which case you can skip it. Or if you live in some part of the world that does not use 120 volts or uses different electrical connectors than the United States, because this is a product for the US market.

The Kill A Watt is an electronic meter that measures volts, amps, VA, true power, frequency, power factor, and elapsed time and total kilowatt-hours since it was plugged in. Made by P3 International, the P4400 is rated for 125 VAC, 50/60 Hz, 15 A, 1875 VA. I paid $50 at the time I bought mine but they are running about $35 currently. It’s a box with three-prong plug on the back, socket on the front, LCD, and buttons to select which measurement to display. It is intended as a consumer product rather than some sort of industrial measurement equipment, and its build quality (it’s an indoor-use product), capabilities (120V, single phase, 15A, claimed 0.2% accuracy) and price (very low) reflect that. There are other consumer-oriented power meters out there, but as far as I know this is the only one with features like power factor and is the cheapest besides. Realistically, probably most people geeky enough to buy a meter to measure their TV set’s power consumption are probably curious about its power factor, too, and if you aren’t, we can’t make you press the PF button.

It is conceivable that an ordinary grid-connected consumer could, after making changes in her usage based on the actual data from the Kill A Watt, save enough power to eventually pay for the meter. Particularly if measuring what it actually costs to run leads you to get rid of that ancient freezer in the basement. Off-grid people will probably find it very valuable. It could pay for itself immediately if you use it to size a UPS, inverter, or generator based on actual data rather than just buying a really big one to be sure. The price is low enough, though, that it is a fantastic geek toy that does not necessarily need to be justified financially. That was my reason for buying it, as someone who spent a few years in the electrical and computer engineering department before ending up, eventually, with a chemistry degree. I have made some power saving changes in appliance usage based on the data, but not enough to pay for the meter anytime soon.

It is interesting how low the power factors of consumer compact fluorescent lamps are, usually below 0.6. Most small electronic devices have very low power factors, as do small motor appliances like humidifiers and fans, which can be below 0.5. The vacuum pump at work has a PF of just 0.33 and draws 6 amps. We residential users, of course, don’t pay for power factor in the USA, so this is more of academic than financial interest. On the other hand, high power devices may have some attention paid to power factor just to keep the current draw manageable for home use. My microwave draws 14.8A, 1605W, and 1700VA for a power factor of 0.94. My wet-dry vacuum draws about a kilowatt running with the hose on and unrestricted, with a better than 0.9 power factor, for some 9 amps. (With the inlet fully blocked it’s down to around 900W.) In the world of vacuum cleaners, with ludicrous “peak horsepower” figures advertised, it is nice to be able to measure true input power. It is also handy to monitor the input power to battery chargers to get at least some idea what they are doing without having to hack into the connection to the battery. You can at least distinguish the battery cookers from the more intelligent chargers. You can measure the power consumption of audio and video equipment when it is turned off, and be occasionally surprised by how high it is. My cable TV box is nearly the same on or off, but turning the stereo receiver off saves 14 watts.

Using the ability to integrate kWh over time the average power consumption of devices than cycle on and off, like refrigerators (100W, in my case), or systems with irregular consumption, like computers with monitors that go to sleep much of the time (120W, in my case, including a small TV set and the audio mixer) can be measured.

The Kill A Watt works well. If you are living off grid, or are trying to determine what size UPS to buy, you need one. If you have an ancient refrigerator that you are kind-of using, you might want to find out what it is costing to run. You might just decide that you don’t really need it. Otherwise, it is probably a geek toy, but a superb one. Highly recommended.

I received a Dremel Lithium-Ion Cordless rotary tool as a gift recently. (As far as I can tell the tool itself is the model 800 and the kit it is normally sold in is the 8000-01.) The Dremel is a traditional gift for anyone who you think would like a power tool, but you’re not sure which one exactly. I can tell you that I was happy to get one.

The Dremel is a tool of a thousand uses, although it was never obvious to me which, if any, of those uses were of use to me. Now that I have one and have a bit of experience using it, I can recall a number of projects that could have been done faster, more easily, and probably better with the Dremel than with hacksaw, file, or sandpaper. Aside from some fooling around (Hey, can it cut this? Answer: Yes) my first project has been a brass belt buckle that the plating had partly worn off of. I had spent some quality time on it with some steel wool attempting to remove the remaining plating to get a uniform appearance, with only partial success. With the Dremel I polished it up quite nicely in two evenings.

I’d be a better reviewer if I’d actually used a corded Dremel as well, but I haven’t. The Li-Ion cordless seems powerful enough and is reasonably light and easy to manage. With a bit of practice I have gotten used to the location of the center of mass and found it easy to manage on the relatively intricate task of polishing the corners and edges of the belt buckle mentioned above. The flexible shaft (which I do not have) is compatible with this model, though the manufacturer admits that the added friction will reduce battery life. Some of the attachments, including the 2217 tool holder, the 330 router, and 231 router table are not compatible with the Li-Ion Dremel. The 212 drill press requires an adapter.

Battery life is excellent. I’ve done over 45 minutes of fairly continuous work without running the battery completely down. The tool has three LEDs to give an indication of remaining battery capacity. I think that most of us casual users will be run down before the battery is. Certainly, if you work on bigger projects involving endless hours of grinding away at the workbench you’ll want a corded model, but the Li-Ion Dremel is not only convenient but capable of taking on relatively lengthy tasks. Recharge time is three hours.

Li-Ion is currently overall the best available rechargeable battery chemistry, and one aspect that might be considered a disadvantage I consider, in practice, a great advantage: Li-Ion batteries are spectacularly intolerant of abusive charging. Although primitive “battery cooker” chargers will substantially shorten the life of nickel-metal-hydride and (to a somewhat lesser extent) nickel-cadmium batteries, they will survive long enough that most products using NiCd or NiMH batteries ship with what I consider unacceptable chargers, with good chargers shipped only with the highest end equipment, or available only at extra cost, or sometimes just unavailable for some proprietary battery packs. Li-Ion batteries will catch on fire or even explode on the first charge cycle if such a primitive charger is used. Thus manufacturers are compelled to offer only decent chargers for Li-Ion. I have done no sophisticated analysis of the Dremel Li-Ion charger, but it seems to behave as one would expect, charging at a reasonable rate (I measured input power while charging at 7 watts) and shutting off when it decides the time is right.

This model has continuously variable speed, from 5000 to 35000 RPM. The lowest setting is off and it is possibly a bit too easy to accidentally bump the control, turning the tool on to low speed. It is something to be aware of. There is a button to lock the shaft for tool changing conveniently located near the shaft. This too is arguably a bit too easy to accidentally bump while the tool is running, but the tool does seem to be able to survive the occasional accidental light tap on the lock while running.

In an effort to keep the price down the Dremel kit contains a relatively small assortment of accessories, including a few grinding stones, some cutting disks, small and large drum sanding attachments with some sanding drums, some sanding disks, a carving cutter, drill, 401 and 402 collets, polishing wheels, and some felt polishing wheels but no polishing compound. It is certainly enough to get started and get a feel for the capabilities of the tool, after which you can buy whatever you find you need. Like the other Dremel products it comes in a nice plastic case.

I’m very happy with the Dremel. I always wanted one, and I have already found it more useful than I thought it would be. The Li-Ion cordless model, while more expensive than the others, offers freedom from the power cord while still light and powerful, with adequate battery life for all but the heaviest use.

In yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Road Warrior column a reader by the name of Knuth writes in, “I travel U.S. Highway 45 southbound every day, and am aggravated almost every day because traffic slows down to 45 mph from Burleigh St. to Watertown Plank Road.” Columnist Larry Sandler tells us that according to Kelly Langer, state freeway operations supervisor, the poor sight lines around the curve, merging traffic from the North Ave. on ramp, and backups extending back from the Zoo Interchange cause this slowdown.

I travel this road many days as well, when I drive my car to work rather than cycling. I too have noticed a frequent slowdown in this area. I, however, am not “aggravated” to be slowed all the way down to 45 mph for a short distance during rush hour. It just isn’t an issue in my life. If you ask me, Knuth needs to learn to relax a bit.

Actually measuring the time consumed in travel on different routes and under different conditions would probably help, too. That slowdown by North Ave. is not where the time is going. Two miles at 55 vs. two miles at 45 is about half a minute. My commute by car takes 20 minutes. How would I even know if I was delayed by half a minute?

My commute by bicycle takes around 40 minutes. How many people would guess that uncongested highway, on a short trip where the highway is most of the distance but getting to and from the highway takes a considerable portion of the time, is only twice as fast as bicycling? Either way, your speed while stopped at a red light is zero. The difference is far greater if you get on the highway and stay on it until you get to Ohio. That’s a lot faster than cycling. I’ve actually averaged 55 mph between refuelings on the way to OVFF, but my long-term average speed over all my driving (currently about 500 hours since I put the Hobbs meter in) is around 30 mph.

I have this feeling that many people’s subjective impression of speed is but loosely correlated with actual speed. That would explain all those people who tailgate me for a while (it feels faster if you are tailgating, I guess), and then pass me with rapid acceleration until, well, they catch up to the next car in the left lane (going the same speed I am), and then tailgate him, and so traveling at exactly the same speed as before but now in front of me, and thus eligible for valuable prizes just as soon as we reach that elusive finish line with the checkered flag.

The Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters has apparently been a big ratings success, by the standards of semi-educational cable TV. The success apparently brought a bigger budget, since they seem to be taking on bigger projects. Like pressurizing an old DC-9 airliner and blowing holes in it to see what happens. I’ve got a fairly firm grip on reality even though I have seen most of the James Bond films, but I did find it interesting that a bullet through the window, at 8 PSI, just put a small hole in the window without failing the whole window. I’m not surprised that plywood is not very good as a material for airliner windows, being both a bit weak for the job and rather hard to see through, though opacity would be useful to bomber crews during a nuclear war. Even the bomber crews wanted to be able to see out sometimes, however.

I do have the suspicion that the people at the bone yard thought that this was a cool project, and probably some of them always wanted to try it, if only somehow they could.

I like the show. The myths to bust do seem to be chosen more for good TV than anything else, which is certainly understandable. However silly the topics occasionally are, I’m delighted to see a show with people asking if the strange things people claim happened are really possible and trying to find out by experiment.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.

I went to Wisconsin’s Lapham Peak State Park on Saturday to try to ski. It is (was) possible to get around on skis but conditions were bad. I made it around the longer lighted loop, which is think is designated “Blue”. The snow was thin everywhere, with sections that were more wood from tree bits than snow. Unfortunately, the very worst snow was on the lower parts of the downhill sections, where you would normally be going fastest. We’ll need more snow before it is worth trying again.

I bought a Brother P-Touch model 2300 label maker. On the whole I’m happy with it, though there are some unfortunate design decisions.

I paid $80 for mine. It comes with eight alkaline AA batteries and a black on white 12mm wide tape that is 5 rather than the usual 8 meters long. The model 2310 is identical but comes with a case and extra label tape.

The 2300 has a miniature rubber-button QWERTY keyboard. You are not going to touch-type on it, but QWERTY is a good choice since even Dvorak users like myself are usually somewhat familiar with it and can hunt and peck fairly easily. It is intended to be used set on a desk or perhaps the floor but it can be operated handheld. There is a tiny, very low resolution, non-backlit LCD that displays two very short lines. It is usable, and certainly cheaper and easier on the batteries than a good display would be. With such a minimal display no effort is made at WYSIWYG operation.

The 2300 can use type “TZ” label tape in widths of 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24 millimeters. The label tape comes in cassettes that drop in and pop out easily to change sizes or colors. There are a large variety of colors made, though the selection at your local office supply store will probably be limited. What you will most likely find locally are black on white and black on clear and maybe red on white or black on yellow. White on black, white on clear, white on blue, and some others exist, but you’ll have to mail order them. Tapes with extra-strength adhesive and with security adhesive are also made, as well as extra-flexible tape for wrapping around wires and the like. There is a cloth tape for iron-on labels and some sort of kit for making rubber-stamps, neither of which I’ve tried (or seen).

The label tape is quite clever, with a clear outer layer printed on the inside by thermal transfer from a ribbon that is taken up inside the cassette and never seen by the user. The printed clear layer is then stuck to the sticky backing layer, which has another adhesive layer and cover layer on its back. The machine comes with a little plastic stick with a slot that you can wrap the label around to help unstick that protective cover over the adhesive in order to apply the label. It sort of works, with practice. There is a storage slot for the tool under the cover of the tape compartment, which is a somewhat awkward place for it. I just know that I’m going to lose it.

Users are cautioned not to mess with the white plastic lever that protrudes from the mechanism when the cover is opened, but they are not warned not to try to print with the cover open. I suppose you can always print yourself a reminder label to stick on the machine after you learn that lesson.

Label tape comes in eight-meter lengths and depending on width and color retails for around $18 to $25. If you want to keep a few widths and colors on had you can quickly spend more on label tape than on the machine. Depending on your budget and point of view, that either argues for buying the cheapest machine to save money for supplies or buying a more expensive machine on the theory that you are still going to spend more on consumables than hardware. About 24mm separates the print head from the automatic powered cutter. It can leave this width on both sides of the label or can cut the extra off to leave shorter margins. In the no margin mode it begins printing immediately, cuts after 24mm, and advances just the 24mm at the end before cutting. Oddly, if you select an intermediate margin width it advances the full selected margin of blank tape, then starts printing, then cuts the full 24mm off the start, then finishes printing and advances the margin plus 24mm on the end before cutting. It would seem that a bit of tape could be saved at the start by more intelligent programming, though some waste is inevitable. 12mm of even the wider and costlier tape is only $0.04. You can turn off the cutter and print several labels together to be cut by hand later.

My subjective impression of how much label eight meters is is that if you print a label today and maybe one next week, it will last a long time, but if you have a labeling project, such as that pile of mystery boxes in the basement, you can use it up surprisingly quickly. Probably most home users will go through a frenzy of labeling with their new toy and then settle down to a fairly low usage rate.

Print resolution is adequate. You can certainly see the jaggies on sloping lines, but it looks good from a distance and is legible. It can print two (tiny) lines on the 6 and 9 mm tape, up to 3 on the 12 mm tape, and up to six on the 18 and 24 mm tape. There are four fonts in seven sizes and three widths. It has an automatic font size mode that will use the biggest font that will fit the required number of lines on the width of tape loaded. It has a number of pre-programmed label length setting that will print labels to neatly fit cassette tapes, floppy disks, DVD cases, video tapes, and the like. It can do outline, bold, italic, shadow, and italic bold, outline, and shadow effects. It can print rotated 90 degrees, which qualifies as its own style and cannot be combined, as far as I know, with italic, bold, etc. It can print in mirror image, which can be used on transparent-back label tape to make labels that can be placed on the inside of a window to read correctly on the outside.

It can print a “gray” background of dots, square or rounded boxes around the text, or several goofy-looking outlines, with “torn” edges and pointing hands and the like.

It can print a variety of accented letters. I assume the set was chosen with care to cover many popular languages, although I have not been able to find, for example, a language that uses E-with-tilde that doesn’t also use a great many other accented characters that it cannot print. But I’m sure there must be one that I don’t know about.

It lacks generalized superscript and subscript capability but can print 2 and 3 as superscripts and 2, 3, and 4 as subscripts. There is an eccentric assortment of other symbols that can be printed, including arrows, the inevitable pointing hands, a heart, a jack-o-lantern, a bat and ball, a Santa head, and a few more plausibly useful symbols like the skull and crossbones. It can print no Greek letters at all, not even the ubiquitous μ. The symbols +, -, ×, and = are available, as well as the ÷ symbol, used on calculator keys and by small children just learning about division.

Between the goofy icons and the goofy borders, it is the perfect label maker for nine-year-olds who can afford an eighty dollar machine and twenty-plus dollar label tapes. Given that it is a relatively expensive toy, I’d have preferred grown-up symbols to jack-o-lanterns. Brady advertises the LAB PAL for serious uses, and might be a better choice for laboratory use.

The P-Touch 2300 has a USB port and comes with software for Macintosh and several varieties of Microsoft Windows. Lacking a Macintosh or anything running Windows I have not looked at the software. Some of the labels shown in the photo on the box the unit comes in cannot be made by the unit by itself, and I do hope they can be made with the computer software. I have not found any Unix software, anything open-source, or for that matter any third-party software at all. I do not know if Brother has publicly documented the computer interface so that such software could be written.

There are probably applications where a PC-controlled label printer is ideal. For general purpose labeling of miscellaneous boxes and bins in the garage or attic or wherever a portable device that can be brought right to the site is very convenient.

Overall I’m happy with the P-Touch 2300. I now have lots of nice neat labels on formerly mysterious boxes. Note that although it lets you print neat labels, sticking them on straight is still up to you. The labels are nice and the machine seems to work well and is easy to use. It is compromised for some more serious uses by the lack of even common Greek letters and full subscript capability, yet it can print a variety of silly symbols and borders, which seems an odd trade off in a relatively expensive tool. It can connect to a PC by USB, but apparently is supported only by the proprietary Windows and Macintosh software. I know nothing about this software, and for general labeling of miscellaneous items “in the field” (or in the garage) a PC would be a nuisance. Whether it is worth the cost you have to decide for yourself.

After reading a recent Dave Barry column I finally figured out what the drug Levitra treats. I’ve seen the TV ad a great many times. It features, as you know all too well if you own a television, a middle-aged-ish man throwing a football through a tire-on-a-rope swing. They don’t indicate what condition the drug treats, you are supposed to just pick up the subtle symbolism. I thought it was an arthritis drug. Turns out it’s an impotence drug. The football through the tire thing was just too subtle for me, taken without any context. Football just doesn’t remind me of sex. Instead it makes me think of advertising, because the only football game I watch is the Superbowl, and I only watch it for the commercials.

The Levitra ad is sort of an old-school prescription drug ad. It used to be that you never found out what the drug was for: You were supposed to “ask your doctor.” I suppose Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline decided to distinguish their brand from Viagra by taking the extreme opposite advertising approach. Pfizer/Pharmacia hired Bob Dole to tell us about his penile function and Viagra and Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline hurls projectiles through holes and hopes we’ll get the hint, so whichever style of advertising you prefer, you’ll see it. Over and over.

Prints: Art and Techniques, by Susan Lambert. Victoria & Albert Museum, 2001.

This book is a fairly quick overview of printmaking techniques, beautifully illustrated with examples taken from the collection of the Victoria and Albert museum. If you always wondered exactly what the difference between an engraving and an etching is, or how lithography is done as an artistic process rather than a photomechanical process as is more familiar to most of us, this is a great book. The scope is broad and the detail shallow, giving for each process a bit of history, a brief sketch of the artistic and printing techniques, and a description of the characteristics of the print, illustrated with an example from the V&A collection and often a magnified portion of the example. There is an annotated list of recommended further reading at the end of the book for those who want to learn more.

As someone somewhat curious and not very knowledgeable about printmaking, I found it a very nice overview.

This Dr. Fun cartoon features a character who could get on Outdoor Outtakes for sure.

I am warming to the show. They have found an amazing number of people willing to be videotaped doing things that, frankly, constitute asking to be laughed at. Kayaking down a ski slope? Snowmobiling across a fast-flowing and decidedly unfrozen river? Attempting to descend a slope that normal people would repel down on your bicycle/motorcycle/quad bike/snowmobile/skis/jet-ski/roller blades? I’ll laugh. There seem to be a lot of people who want to see just how general purpose a specialized vehicle can be in the hands of someone who does not fear injury or damage to the equipment. Snowmobiles on liquid water. Wheeled vehicles on snow. Jet skis flying through the air to land on, well, land. Wheeled vehicles on water. Snowmobiles on dirt. Snow skis on rock. I can’t say that I understand the apparently widespread desire to slide along a railing, particularly one where the nearly inevitable fall will be rather stimulating, but it’s fascinating to watch. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try to jet-ski along a rail, but it’s only a matter of time.

I don’t find most of the clips of animals pecking, biting, or spitting on people all that funny, but the goofy stories told with video of creatures doing whatever they do are generally pretty funny.

My least favorite outdoor outtakes involve spectators getting hit and people engaged in more-or-less reasonable, albeit high-risk, activities crashing, all with laugh track. It’s one thing to laugh at someone trying to ride a jet-ski down a ski slope, another to laugh at at a spectator getting hit by someone who might have been doing something basically reasonable in the first place. Fortunately, the supply of video of truly amazingly stupid activities seems to be abundant, so it seems that we see rather less of the semi-innocent victims than of the “Hey, watch me slide sideways on my skis on this bridge over the frozen creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek! Ouch!” people.

You know those commercials featuring the guy who bought a Brother P-Touch label making machine and has to seek psychiatric help because he develops some kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder and puts thousands of labels (neatly printed with his P-Touch) on everything? Labels you imagine might include “freezer,” “salt,” “pepper,” “dog,” and “dog’s nose?” Well, I just bought a P-Touch 2300 today, and I know how that guy feels. Binders, storage bins, cassette-tape storage units, those jars and canisters in the kitchen containing whitish powdery substances that all look about the same (Powdered sugar? Powdered milk? Hmmmmm…)? All labeled. I like this thing. I’ll write a more extensive review once I’ve used it some more.

Having stayed up late filking and then had a day off from work, I am convinced that it is Monday. Fortunately, it is actually Friday, so the weekend approaches. I went to the Lytheria new year party, where I saw the people who I see only at the Lytheria parties and other people I see other times as well. We had a nice filk up on the third floor. It was generally agreed that Dangerously Close shows some very subtle signs of having been written by Kanefsky. Right. Actually, it couldn’t be any more obvious, from choice of subject matter to choice of such a beloved song to do that to. Plus I sang it so that’s about a 50% Kanefsky probability right there. As I promised, I sang Witnesses Walloped. There was wonderful music from Barb, Carol, Art, Phil, Emory, Richard, Deirdre, and anyone else who I may have forgotten. I should practice the flute more—people like it.

Thanks to Lee for hosting these great events.

My brother made an interesting observation recently. Our lives are filled with automobile advertising. Every commercial break has several car ads. Billboards advertise cars and car dealers. Newspapers and magazines are filled with car ads. There are numerous magazines which are essentially entirely car ads of one variety or another. These are not cheap ads, either. Yet how often do you actually buy a car? Years go by without a thought to the next car purchase. One has to wonder what fraction of the price of the car goes to pay for the three-thousand-odd consecutive days of advertising since the last car purchase.

I also see mattress ads every day, yet mattress purchases make car purchases seem frequent by comparison, and mattresses are much cheaper than cars, though the ads are cheaper-looking than car ads, to match the lower price of the product.