Foodie heaven

A new addition to the blogroll: The Boston Globe's new Dishing. Pretty snooty, as you might expect, but just about every entry is tempting in one way or another.

Hopefully they'll have more entries like great cheap eats in Vermont than how connected food writers get free premium steaks. OK, I'm just envious!

Scare science

Isn't it useless to know that 85 of 905 Swedes with brain tumors were "high users" of mobile phones without knowing what proportion of the Swedish population overall are "high users" of mobile phones? It's hard to believe it would be so much less than 9% that it would justify the claim of a link.

The study wasn't even posted on the "National Institute for Working Life"'s web page before they blabbed to Reuters, so it's hard to take seriously.

UPDATE: As always, the British have the right response.

The Horror: Fooling Thunderbird's Spam Filter with Stephen King

I really like Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client, but the spam filtering is not particularly useful. I keep getting the same luxury watch and prescription drug emails over and over, and maybe 5% of them are actually filtered, despite training the Bayesian "learning" filter for months.

The spammers seem to be fooling it by including invisible text of a non-spam-sounding nature. At least in the one I looked at this morning, it was a sequence of rarely appearing words ("operatic hermaneutic escherichia") followed by some text from Misery:

With Annie Wilkes that is a question which has no sane answer. Being such a straight arrow was part of the reason for this amazing fecundity, but Annie herself was a bigger one. "You don't want to write my book and so you're making up tricks not to start."

I have to say this is pretty clever, in that it's not obvious to me that there's a good solution, short of filtering any HTML message with a certain percent content of "hidden" text (figuring that out would be a little tricky, as they vary the font color in a range of "invisible"). And even if Thunderbird did that, there are probably lots of places to hide text that doesn't scan like spam. Has Bayesian filtering failed? What say you Paul Graham? Or is Thunderbird's implementation just broken because it doesn't pay enough attention to my "good" mail and is too concerned with false positives filtering things I actually want to see?

World of Warcraft

Dead-on assessment of the barriers to fun in World of Warcraft.

I'm grinding my way up to level 60 now, and while there's certainly an addictive aspect to the "get quest, kill monsters, gain level, get harder quest, kill harder monsters..." cycle, I really wish I could spend more time just wandering around "doing" stuff. The in-game economy seems kind of stale, since low-end skills are so common, what they produce is next to worthless. High-end skills and patterns require jumping on the 40-main raid train. I agree with the article: that doesn't seem particularly appealing.

On the other hand, maybe it would be a good thing to walk away before it's too late.

Repeal the Massachusetts "Happy Hour" laws

Since Governor Romney ended the "blue laws" banning of liquor sales on Sundays, and is interested in a real, consumer-oriented repeal of out-of-state wine shipment laws, is it too much to hope that the silly 20-year-old "Happy Hour" laws could be repealed?

These regulations hurt responsible consumers by restricting price competition in the marketplace, keeping beverage prices artificially high. They hurt small business owners, who can't fill their restaurants or bars during off-peak hours.
They hurt our sense of community by encouraging us to head home after work rather than enjoying a drink with friends or coworkers in a public space.

I'm sure no one is lobbying for this, but it's one of those little ways the state house could get off our backs and make life more enjoyable.

Rendezvous Redux

Indeed the bourbon cocktail at Rendezvous is terrific, as is the hot toddy.

I didn't sample the menu, but the Boston Globe liked it quite a bit.

Hallsey

This post exists entirely so that Hallsey can post comments.

Rendezvous

Central Square is a lot of fun, and I don't get there nearly as often as I should. This drink at Rendezvous ought to motivate me...

mmm..caramelized orange oils...

(Thanks Hallsey!! Get a blog so I can link to you!)

¡Pensamientos al Azar del Tequila!

• Cabo Wabo - Tastes great going down, but what ever Sammy Hagar puts in it messes with your head!


• If you're looking to sample a lot of great tequilas cheap, Fajitas & 'Ritas in downtown Boston is a great place to be. Ask for the tequila list and go to town. Just be prepared to smell like nacho chips for the next three days.


• If you actually want to eat something, the current champion Mexican place in the Cambridge area has to be José's, tucked away on Sherman St. near Mayor Danehy Park. Incredibly hospitable staff, even when the place gets busy. Margaritas are pricey but perfect, and the food is authentically delicious. Try the Burrito en Adobo, or the black bean soup.


• Is it wrong that I want to go to San Diego just to sneak across the border to the Cabo Wabo Cantina? See... they must put something in the stuff...

Worse than Stale Bread

Is it my imagination, or do the 21 finalists in the Service Employees International Union's SinceSlicedBread.com "new ideas" competition sound quite a bit like the policy wish-list you'd expect from these guys? I mean, did SEIU really need to survey the countryside to discover, "Wow, we think single payer health care, a constantly rising minimum wage and huge government jobs programs are terrific ideas!"

Not to mention that even this layman sees serious economic problems with most of the finalist proposals:

• Making college tuition tax deductible doesn't make college more affordable for the poor. If you hand everyone who wants to send their kids to college $10,000, colleges will just raise tuition by $10,000, and the same people who could afford it before can still afford it, thanks to the tax deduction, and colleges are $10,000 richer per student. Not to mention that the deduction saves more money for the middle-class and rich, who are in higher brackets! Many of the poor pay no income tax at all, so the deduction for them would have no value.


• Pulling the youngest (and on average healthiest) people out of the private health care pool would result in truly skyrocketing costs for everyone else.


• I don't even want to think about what would happen when a government-chartered corporation is in the business of allocating capital, deciding which small businesses should and shouldn't exist.

The ultimate organized labor candidate, Dick Gephardt, was flogging many of these ideas in his ill-fated presidential campaign (so ill-fated, the SEIU endorsed Howard Dean!), e.g. he described SSB's "Ownership of Retirement Assets" as "Portable Pensions". It's hard to believe a clever website is enough to turn stale bread big government into gourmet public policy.

The "ordinary people" who devoted far more time than I to this foregone conclusion of a PR stunt seem to agree.

Lost and the Cartesian Demon

At last, my promised theory on how to explain much of the strange goings on of Lost without resorting to (too much) mysticism.

The problem: there are too many random coincidences in the memories of the survivors to be explained consistently. How is it that the "numbers" and variations thereof turn up repeatedly in what would otherwise be meaningless minutiae? How is it that horse that Kate saw in a field in the middle of nowhere years ago is now on the island? How to explain the seemingly random encounters and relationships between the survivors months or years before they arrived?

We could assume that these are all coincidences, but that's dramatically unsatisfying and unrealistic. The same is true of assuming that some all-powerful force has manipulated the destinies of the survivors for years: Either it's a mystical or religious force (fate, God) that can never be explained, or we have to assume that the agency behind the island is nearly omniscient and omnipotent (and concerned with what looks like trivia for fans).

Instead, it's far more promising to assume that the "flashbacks" we witness are memories that are not entirely reliable, at least as reflections of what actually happened in the real world outside the island. Suppose the agency behind the island is playing with their recollections in subtle ways (either constantly or between when the crash happened and when they woke up on the beach). This isn't hard to imagine, given what the filmstrip discusses about the connections between the island and experimental psychology. With this manipulation in play, many "coincidences" become much easier to explain. I theorize that there was no horse in the field where Kate crashed, the memory was invented, so producing the same horse (by whom and for whatever purpose) was easy rather than magical. The same is true with all the trivial appearances of the numbers: injecting those false memories makes perfect sense if the goal is to ensure the residents of the island remember them and keep keying them into the computer. One could suppose that Hurley actually won the lottery with a totally different set of numbers, and had a string of bad luck, but now falsely remembers the numbers he used as "the numbers".

I suspect that none of this kind of memory manipulation is unheard of in today's psychology.

I don't know if this theory has been proposed before, since I don't read a lot of the speculation forums, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's a subtle form of the "Cartesian Demon": the idea that you can't trust your perceptions because you have no way to distinguish between a genuine sensory experience and one created for you by a demon (or a holodeck, or the Matrix ... this idea has gotten a lot of pop culture play in the last decade).

Of course, what the ultimate purpose of all this manipulation is (assuming it's more than getting a bunch of total strangers to sit around typing numbers into a computer every two hours) I can't say, but at least it doesn't require suspending too much disbelief to suppose what's happening on the island could "really" happen.

Speed up OpenOffice startup

Reading Slashdot is not always a waste of time:

I made the mistake of opting for x86-64 Gentoo for one of my desktop boxes ("upgrading" it to 32bit this weekend), meaning I have to use the 32bit precompiled OpenOffice binaries. But these need hooking into a 32bit JRE which x86-64 Gentoo doesn't have, since making 32bit apps available through Portage is seemingly something that Gentoo Won't Do Because You Should Be Happy With 64bit. So whenever you start OOo it spends about a minute looking for a JVM (and failing) before you can do anything. I could have manually installed Sun's 32bit JRE, but I can't be bothered.

Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.

By way of comparison, I tried the same trick on my 32bit box (similar spec but with slower HDD's) and OOo was as snappy as hell and opened like the proverbial soil off a shovel.

If there's any functionality I miss through disabling Java, I haven't encountered any yet. And please note I'm not saying that Java is slow to execute (it isn't), it's just appallingly slow to load.

I use OpenOffice at work, mostly as a viewer for documents others send around in Microsoft Office formats. As such, I doubt I'm going to run into the limitations of OpenOffice when Java is disabled. The speedup is amazing: from 5-6 seconds on my 1GB, 3.4 GHz notebook to almost instantaneous. I like Java as a programming environment, but Sun absolutely has to figure out how to cut down the JRE startup time, at least for embedded applications.

Lost

I'm trying to decide if the persistent telegraphing of the "twist endings" on Lost is intentional. I think it has to be. I don't read spoilers and don't obsessively rewind and freeze frame with the TiVo, but I still rarely find myself surprised by the revelations. Wasn't it evident about a minute into "Walkabout"'s first flashback that Locke was handicapped? Every shot was framed to accentuate Locke's powerlessness, not to mention that he was never standing up. Was there any doubt that Sawyer was going to kill the wrong man in "Outlaws"? If he kills the right man, there's no emotional turmoil, and no surprise, and Lost is never without both.

Kate's doomed childhood friend... Locke's kidney stealing father... Desmond in the hatch... all obvious well before the "payoff".

Part of it must be Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": if the audience knows what to expect, and the characters don't, the result is suspense. But that doesn't really explain spending so much time building up to the reveal of Locke's handicap. Maybe it was more subtle than I give it credit for, but it appears that Lost could be accidentally underestimating its audience's intelligence, or deliberately taking advantage of the typical viewer's desire to feel clever.

Of course, Lost could be brilliantly getting the best of both worlds: casual viewers are surprised, and regular viewers feel self-satisfyingly clever. The omnipresent "Easter eggs" of pre-island character connections (Hurley on Jin's TV, Locke's box company), and the inclusion of some "surprises", like Jack's future wife's miraculous recovery, that aren't surprises if you've been watching regularly, support this interpretation.

It's a tough balancing act: keep the twists from seeming like they come out of nowhere, but don't make them so obvious that the audience spends the whole episode anticipating the ending, ruining the suspense. Frequently (particularly in the case of the flashbacks), I think they err too far towards the latter.

This is all by way of praising with faint damnation. Lost is terrifically entertaining. The premiere was surprisingly satisfying, especially given the tendency of many shows to "wimp out" after building up to a suspenseful finale, premiering with:

• a flashback episode - Battlestar Galactica almost went this route for season 2, and much to showrunner Ron Moore's credit, they recognized it was a terrible idea.


• a flashforward episode - The West Wing began heading toward the shark jump in season 3, when the premiere skipped ahead to months after the MS revelation, which something like the last 12 episodes of season 2 had intimated would be a huge ordeal. I think ultimately the payoff was one congressional hearing that focused on Leo.


• a left-field episode - South Park becomes Terrance and Phillip...
  

Lost opened the hatch in the finale, and showed us what was in it in the premiere - and better still it wasn't another hatch, an empty room, or some other clichéd metaphor. Even though all of television history suggests the writers/producers don't have any idea where they're going (paging Chris Carter), so far everything has fit together so well that I have some faith there's a story being told here. Maybe I'll theorize in a later post.