GLXmas

Dec. 18th, 2022 04:49 pm
l33tminion: (Default)
Another big event for this week: The second branch of the Green Line Extension project opened last Monday. Feels a bit unreal.

It really is a big deal, though. It's the most significant expansion of MBTA service since the extension of the Red Line to Alewife in 1985. It's been in the works since 2006 (formal start of planning for the project) and a dream for a century in the minds of Boston transit planners.

And it's particularly significant for my own town of Somerville, it brings a huge percent of Somerville within walking distance of light rail and makes Somerville perhaps even better transit-connected than Cambridge. At the very least, we now have seven T stops (Davis, Assembly, Union, East Somerville, Gilman, Magoun, Ball) to Cambridge's six (Kendall, Central, Harvard, Porter, Alewife, Lechmere).

So much is possible, let's not take quite so many decades next time!
l33tminion: There's that sense of impending doom again (Doom)
World news has certainly been interesting this week. There's the situation in Ukraine, which on the plus side seems to have a very high ratio of military maneuvers to actual violence for a war (there's still a complete lack of any casualties from military action). Does this end with Russia quasi-annexing Crimea just as with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008? Probably.

There was also a serious aviation disaster today, as Malaysia Airlines flight 370 went missing, presumed crashed. There aren't too many things that could cause a 777 to be instantly destroyed in clear skies, and it seems that at least two passengers made it aboard using stolen passports (if that's a rare occurrence, that's likely to be related, but I don't know if it is, maybe criminals make it on to flights for that journey using reported-stolen passports all the time due to lax or corrupt security). 777s are insanely reliable aircraft, this is by far the worst 777 accident (there have only been two other 777 accidents with three fatalities total, all from a crash last year).

Earlier this week, Newsweek returned to print with a splash by ruining the life (I hope that is hyperbole) of some guy who used to be named Satoshi Nakamoto (who now goes by Dorian). Personally, I think Leah Goodman's desire for a scoop resulted in her shoving this guy into the spotlight on some pretty flimsy evidence. I can't be sure that Dorian Nakamoto isn't Bitcoin's creator, but from the evidence I've seen I think it's most likely he's not. That he denies it says little, and a denial from one of Satoshi Nakamoto's accounts (disused for some years) says even less, but the background doesn't fit well and an analysis of writing under both names makes it seem like the two are different individuals. Of course, it could be an elaborate ruse, but I currently think that unlikely.
l33tminion: (L33t)
It was great to see Melissa again and hear about her artistic endeavors.

Visiting family was fun. The trip out to the Cape on Sunday went all right. Weather was clear, the drive went fine (though I drive infrequently enough that driving in Boston is always an adventure), and Julie finally got a chance to meet my Aunt Alice.

We also went out for a fantastic dinner at Journeyman on Saturday night. Even better than the last time I ate their. The chef's counter makes for a really impressive show.

Flights were cancelled on Monday due to Chicago being frozen again, but Melissa was rebooked and flow home via Baltimore instead.

The weather was briefly warm on Monday and then got cold again, but at least it's not as cold as the midwest.

Work is going well, but still stressful. Lots to do.

Actually catching up on sleep.
l33tminion: Mind the gap (Train)
The MBTA service disruptions from the past three days of rain are quite something. I'd heard about the sandbags and emergency pumps between Kenmore and Fenway, but I hadn't heard about this. That's going to take a while to fix...
l33tminion: Earth: Harmless. (HHGTG Stub)
Overthinking It has some rather excellent (over)thoughts on advertising in the wake of last weekend's Annual Television Commercial Grand Prix (and Football Match). First, there's an article on a particular genre of ads, the commercials for which have a message of "bad things happen to you when you use our product". But the real brilliance is in this piece, analyzing the Dodge Charger commercial:
The motto at the end was “Man’s… last… stand!” but it might as well have been “Compensate… for… something!“ This is not, generally speaking, behavior that your audience is going to want to emulate. [...]

Are we to understand, then, that the add is targeting mid-life crisis sufferers who are so far gone that they just don’t care anymore? Or is it targeting aging hipsters who think that the crisis-of-masculinity is going to be the next trucker hat, making this the first ironic muscle car?

[...]

To sum up—the premise of the commercial, to begin with, seems like it would only appeal to someone whose basic attitude is “Look, honey, I feel emasculated, and want a big car to make myself feel better.” The specific aesthetics that they bring to bear on it makes the message even darker: “Look, honey, deep down underneath, I scarcely qualify as anything you’d recognize as human. The only thing that makes me feel alive is driving this car, and quite honestly, this persona that you think you know? The one that you were planning to introduce to your parents soon? Is a lie, and I only created it because it’s the most efficient way to trick society into letting me drive this car on a regular basis.”
l33tminion: Mind the gap (Train)
A relevant bit of news to discuss:

On Christmas day, a Nigerian man boarded a Detroit-bound flight in the Netherlands. As the plane was about to land, he attempted to detonate an explosive device concealed in his pants. Had the device not been defective, the story would have been "plane blows up over Detroit, was it terrorism?" But the bomb was defective, and the would-be bomber only managed to set his leg on fire.

It's amazing how similar this is to Bruce Schneier's hypothetical "underpants bomber" (though Cory Doctorow's nightmare scenario along those lines, thankfully, has not quite been realized). As with the shoe bomber, the TSA has implemented a new set of reactive rules. And again, some of the rules are reactions to the facts about the plot only known because it failed and some are completely unrelated. To summarize, the new regulations are:
  1. Pat down all passengers.
  2. Physically inspect all carry-on items.
  3. No more in-flight communications services, at all, ever. Was your non-refundable ticket purchase influenced by the free wi-fi? That's really too bad.
  4. No "out of the left window, you can see..." announcements (which is both made relatively useless by the next measure and makes the next measure slightly more aggravating).
  5. The last hour of flight must be spent in your seat with nothing in your lap (no "blankets, pillows, or personal belongings", that includes books, I assume, and the iPod in your pocket, too?). Have a bit of traveler's indigestion? Well, you can just hold it for the next sixty minutes. (And I presume "last hour" means from an hour before expected arrival, which can actually be many hours of mid-air holding pattern hell if there's a storm / there's fog / the gates are understaffed because the airlines are going broke.)
So with the TSA performing their pre-molestation warmups, extra mandatory boredom time, and the presence of in-flight restrooms looking far less comforting than usual, I'm feeling significantly less good about my Boston to San Francisco airline tickets for February. I did seriously consider taking the train, but decided against it because that trip struck me as just too long.

We'll see if the proposed regulations get implemented as written and if they remain in effect for long. I also wrote to my representatives, asking them to oppose the regulation being implemented in that form.

ETA: Also, Schneier still has the best reaction: "I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks."

ETA2: Might be a non-issue. The TSA directive applies to arriving international flights and expires at the end of the month, so we'll see what permanent measures, if any, get implemented. Still is going to be bad for anyone flying into the country in the next few days, and there's a fair amount of travel between Christmas and New Year's.

ETA3: Looks like the new rules have been overturned, probably on pressure from the airlines.
l33tminion: (Bookhead (Nagi))
Been ages since I did a links post, so here's some of the best of the web since last time:

A bunch of Overthinking It essays: One on Starship Troopers (on why critics got it wrong), one on Fantastic Mr. Fox (a Freudian analysis), one on Avatar (the James Cameron sci-fi movie; starts off slow but then gets brilliant at the end). For those of you who don't read Overthinking It, it's a great site for those who like literary criticism applied to things that often aren't looked at through that lens.

A comic, Mysteries of Public Transit, mainly because I identify far to much with point 3. Subnormality is a great comic (for those who like their comics to be WALLS OF TEXT).

An 18-minute video essay on the world's most important six-second drum loop. Actually rather fascinating.

Every two years, Robert Jensen writes an essay on how much he hates Thanksgiving. Here's his offering for this year.

Here's an essay titled Can Videogames Be Our Friends. Yeah, it's about Japan.

Here's a post explaining why only an infinitesimal subset of all numbers can be described. Speaking of things which can't be counted, here's some crazy's argument that the real numbers are countable, and a rather entertaining takedown of that essay.

Finally, here's a news piece on one of my favorite charities, Kiva.org. Evidently, there's some confusion about how the site actually works, some people were surprised to learn that money can be loaned out before a loan is marked as "funded". To be clear, it's not necessarily your money that goes out to the entrepreneur in question. Rather, your funds secure the loan in question, if the loan is not paid back, you take the loss, rather than the microlending institution. That spreads their risk, so they can keep on lending. As long as every loan funded through Kiva is actually disbursed to the entrepreneurs by someone, and as long as Kiva lenders are repaid when the loan they agreed to secure is repaid, Kiva is living up to their end of the bargain.

A few brief bonus links for those of you not yet put to sleep:
l33tminion: (Default)
l33tminion: There are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something. (Do Something!)

Here's an interesting graphic, the map of changes in voting patterns between 2004 and 2008 by county. Almost all of the country went more Democratic, which is hardly a surprise when you compare Obama and Kerry (world of difference) versus McCain and Bush (basically clones). Except for that one infected-looking patch, for which the usual metaphor applies quite a bit more visually than usual. Other 2008 election maps and cartograms are also interesting.

The rest of the stories I have to share are largely unrelated to eachother, so hang on a moment while I break out the bullet points:
l33tminion: Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a car club? (Carpool)
Here's a nifty concept vehicle. Wonder what kind of gas mileage this thing gets:

Zipcar

Feb. 9th, 2008 04:12 pm
l33tminion: Have you really tried to save gas by getting into a car club? (Carpool)
I took Zipcar to drive Ginneh to a job interview yesterday. Zipcar is cool and convenient, but we got lost, Ginneh got me more lost, then we were 20 minutes late and had to pay a $50 late fee. :-/ I suppose that's not the most expensive mistake one could make with a car... (That aside, I only got somewhat lost three times and had three near-death experiences while driving from Kiva Systems to Porter Square and back, pretty on par for normal Boston driving.)
l33tminion: (Default)
Man, I haven't had time to write in a while. It's been another busy week: Squeky!Alex's 21st on Friday (complete with a keg and 6 gallons of ice cream), a strange nightclub on Saturday, the end of the radio play I Love Bees, a flamewar on Randomness after some semi-famous kid wrote a rather scathing post about Olin in his blog (parts of his post are way off, although some of it is just that awesome!Mel and squeky!Alex aren't his sort of crowd; you'll get pretty much the whole story if you read the comments), the end of my first MatSci project, and the start of a project getting a bug tracker implemented for the school (not for software written at the school, for Olin itself), mid-semester feedback for SRC (this week's was the best class so far), learning the last characters of hiragana, and lots and lots of work...

My parents are showing up tomorrow for Family Weekend.

And I bought a new bike from Wally the Wellesley bike dude. Mountain bike, 21 speeds, good condition, $50. Most excellent.
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