Dispatches from Andyland

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and meet my younger self and give him a swift kick in the shins.

One of the stories that my parents that my parents tell about our childhood was one Christmas, it might have been Christmas of ‘74 or ‘75. I had an interest in science and that Christmas my parents bought me a ton of science equipment and supplies. They really pulled out all of the stops. Not just a microscope, but a binocular microscope. The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments. A starting set of small glass jars and metal tins of chemicals. Litmus strips, test tubes, beaker, and flasks, etc. They went all out to get everything they could for my budding interest. They expected me to be overjoyed, but some time after the ripping open all of these gift wrapped items, they found me moping around. Asking me what was wrong, I replied “Every gift I got was about the same thing.” Yes, I wanted this chemistry equipment, but it wasn’t a singular obsession. They wanted to give me the biggest head start possible in an interest in science, and wasn’t going to spend every afternoon in my brand new chemistry lab. I probably would have been spent some afternoon playing with Hot Wheels cars, playing with Big Jim action figures, playing outside, etc.

Looking back at that event, I’m embarrassed at how ungrateful I was. Not only did my parents spend a fair amount of money on all of this stuff, but they also took the time to find out what some of my real interests were and try to fulfill them.

What is funny about this is I don’t remember that Christmas that way. I don’t remember that conversation with my parents, I just remember getting a lot of neat stuff. I spent many an afternoon and weekend at the spot in the basement set aside for my lab (later to become a combined photographic darkroom and chemistry lab.) I hope besides that disappointed little child at Christmas, my parents also remember the dozen or so trips to Youldens in Westwood to spend my allowance money on additional supplies. They may not have seen the smile at Christmas that they wanted, but that time in my little chemistry lab may have been a major component of the steps that lead me from there to where I am today.

I wish I realized how lucky I was. I may have been the last generation of American kids who were allowed to have home science labs.

I don’t know if Youldens is still on 109 in Westwood, but I doubt the chemical supply section is still there. Chemcraft chemistry sets have long since gone. (On the other hand, my kids have access to things like Scratch and Microworlds, Mindstorms, USB powered microscopes, and other things I probably couldn’t have imagined at the time. So they won’t get away with telling me they were being deprived.)

Not only are kits for children (or even parent supervised children) nearly gone now. But it seems a home chemistry lab itself is now close to being illegal. In Chemist allowed to go home, sans his lab the Worcester Telegram and Gazette reports about a man from Marlboro, a retired chemist, who was barred from his house for three days while they removed and dismantled a chemistry lab. (coverage on Slashdot, Make, etc.) The paper describes the contents as Some of the compounds are potentially explosive, but no more dangerous than typical household cleaning products. This seems even worse than the Kevin McCormick episode. It seems that frostbyte lived a fairly wild life, and unfortunately his death gave the state an opportunity to examine the artifacts of that life pretty closely. (Closing off Congress St for three days crowing that they found some sort of major meth lab, then finally admitting there wasn’t anything more than a small package of pseudofed in the medicine cabinet.)

The events in Marlboro scare me a more than a bit. It implies that without being charged for any crime, the government can forcibly evict me from my house and seize any property they find undesirable (yet aren’t willing to legislate as being illegal.) Marlboro’s code enforcement officer was quoted in the Worcester T&G article as saying This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation. What do they consider a customary home occupation? A flat screen TV with American Idol on?

My older daughter was trying to talk me into buying a waterproof ipod speaker dock for the bathroom, so she could listen to music in the shower:

Three out of four of the people in the house have iPods. I have a bunch of cool music on my ipod, my sister has a bunch of cool music on her iPod. You (pause) um, you have a bunch of music that you think is cool on your iPod.

And then kept rubbing it in with bringing up music a couple of other times and putting the words “cool music” in sarcasm quotes ( sometimes called air quotes)

I paid her back for that remark by listening to Girl Talk all the way home. We got home in the middle of “Give Me a Beat“and when I turned off the car and the music my younger daughter asked “I wonder: just give me a what?” I was a bit surprised she was paying attention, but awfully pleased.

co-worker: The render processing was hogging up the machine. It took me 5 minutes just to bring up task manager, so then I started indiscriminately killing processes. I killed Outlook …

me (interrupting): That wasn’t indiscriminate.

I came across this An Infuriating Exchange With Another Reporter article the other day, and thought it was an interesting in a couple of ways.

The  basic gist of it was that Jonah Spangenthal-Lee from Seattle’s alt-weekly The Stranger wrote to a reporter of a daily Seattle news paper, complaining that their coverage was on a story was more than little biased. The reporter denies it and points to some of his later revisions of the article. Jonah clarifies that he meant some of the first reports, not the later edits. The reporter from the daily paper then admits those earlier versions were entirely one-sided”, but didn’t have enough time for the story.

First of all, it lets me know that I should never send any private correspondence to  Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. I think publishing it (even after taking the names off of it) was wrong.

I can understand  that news publishing for web sites has thrown news reporters into a big uncharted territory. The needs are different. The deadlines are different. The rules may be different, etc. But it really seems to me that the reporter is missing a couple of things:

Once something is published on the web, it should be considered published and they need to stand behind each version of the story. Following up the article with updates doesn’t take away the fact that people saw and read the earlier versions. They may in many cases only see the early copies and not the later ones. (I remember looking at traffic of most articles at boston.com when I was there would usually show a significant decline day after day. I’d guess that the first day traffic would be greater than the next 29 combined.)

If the web has turned news reporting into a mode where reporters have to publish multiple versions of a story with increasing level of detail, maybe the fact gathering has to be done in a different way so that a story gets produced with increasing level of detail, rather than from one side to the other. Maybe in this case, if some of the people to interview include the police, the hospital, the driver, the bicycle riders involved, and other critical mass riders, and you may not get to them all before first publication, then maybe that would be the wrong order to use.

_{(updates: because the subject of this post is a bit snarky, this above most other ones I probably don’t want to play fast and loose with any updates. The title of the post first had an awful typo that I fixed, “Journalism in at Internet speed”.  Then in the last sentence I clarified “the riders involved” to “the bicycle riders involved” and more importantly added the phrase “and you may not get to them all before first publication” which changes the conclusion somewhat.)}

Earlier today, I was talking to co-workers aboutPink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, in a sort of roundabout way.

We started Billboard’s charts. In particular, the small difference between the Billboard Top 200 Albums and the Billboard Comprehensive Albums charts. The Top 200 albums is designed to show new trends in music, so if an album more than two years old falls off the chart, and then gets renewed popularity, it is not counted on the Top 200 Albums. For this week, the differences consist of:

• ABBA-Gold is on the Comprehensive Albums charts, probably there due to the release of movie Mama Mia!
• Amy Whinehouse is there because everyone loves to watch a trainwreck.
• Journey’s Greatest Hits is probably there because they also have a new album out. (It isn’t, but wouldn’t it be funny if this album was charting higher than the the new album? That a new album release reminded the fans of the much better music they did decades before?)
• Bob Marley-Legend I have a theory about that I’ll get back to later.
• Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight. I have no idea. Its a pretty recent album, so I don’t know what they did wrong to make it fall of Top 200 chart.
• Guns and Roses-Greatest hits is probably there because of the latest leaked tracks of Duke Nukem Forever Chinese Democracy and the news that surrounded it. (In the last month, I heard a news piece on NPR about the album, of all places.)

As I pointed out, it isn’t just the age of the work that keeps it off the Top 200 chart. It has to be both older and fail to main a certain consistent level of popularity. The obvious example of this is Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It stayed on the Billboard Top 200 Album chart for 736 weeks and then on the Top Pop Catalog Albums for another more than 1500. Don’t get me wrong, its a great album, but a track record like that is practically unheard of.

Then it suddenly occured to me how that album sold as well as it did. I think that most of the sales came from people who already had the album, but forgot.

I think the reason I get nervous about hearing someone yell out “Mom, does red jello stain?” is because it makes me think of all of the other things that could have possibly been involved besides red Jello.What can anyone respond to that question other than, “No, why do you ask?” 

I just read the Boston Globe article A bitter-tasking jolt for Starbucks and noticed that the interaction between the Globe’s CMS and Boston.com’s CMS caused the autohyperlinking facility to mess up again. Alex Beam tries to plug George Howell’s terroircoffee.com, but a space snuck in between the two sending readers to coffee.com (which is Peet’s site.)

I’m guessing that in the paper, they needed to break the line in the middle of the URL, and what boston.com was some sort of for weird formatting code (non breaking space or hyphon code), which it converted into a space.

The recent news about Warren Buffet’s longbet about hedges funds reminded me that when I was working at Boston.com, New York Time Digital’s Martin Nisenholtz made a longbet with Dave Winer about the blogs vs. the New York Times.

I figured at this point the bet must be close to being over, so I figured I’d check it out. Winer won. I lost, but in a different way than Nisenholtz did. The terms of the bet itself were so steeped in the the state of the market at the time, I figured the bet itself would be irrelevant in the five years. I looked back at how the Internet looked in the five years previous. I had probably just switched to using Netscape Navigator. Google itself had just started. From back in 2002, I thought it was rather presumptuous to assume that the internet would look roughly the same.

I guess where I went wrong was the assumption that the rate of change would keep at the same pace, but looking back I’m starting to think that I was wrong.

When my family and I were in Chicago, a film crew for MSNBC.com asked us if we wanted to be in a video segment promoting Chicago as a travel destination. It finally seems to be online at Disney Video: Chicago’s Navy Pier

I saw an article Major changes urged in transracial adoption and although I can see the point to the changes they are suggesting, it brings up an odd question for me. If I can paraphrase the point, it is that mandating entirely color-blind adoption programs prevents adoption agencies even asking the questions of adopted parents to see if they understand the race issues that they will be bringing into a family by making it transracial. But I find it interesting that a child of mixed race needs a different sort of scrutiny if he or she went to caucasian parents vs. African American parents. Then I think of a man I know who was born from an African man and a white woman and then adopted. The report seems to be implying that he would have fit in better with African American parents. But that isn’t really the ethnicity of either of his biological parents, but one that he could perhaps fit into easier.
What that implies though is that his ethnicity in this case isn’t derived from either his biological or adopted parents, but rather something that is imposed on him from the society at large.