The Brunch Table

Uh-oh, the in-laws finally have my number—they’ve stumbled upon my fondness for odd timepieces. There are plenty of appealing clock faces out there, but I’m not so interested in anything that could be built using a standard movement. No, since timekeeping is so efficient these days that you can literally get watches in cereal boxes, it’s much more interesting to see devices whose creators have made a deliberate effort to be impractical: flip clocks, nixie clocks, binary clocks, and the like. Not only did Justina’s parents get us a marble clock, which I’ve been wanting since I first saw one as a kid, but they also gave us a nifty pin clock:

The pin clock is uses a typical 7-segment number display, except that instead of using LEDs, the segments are made up of little pins with solenoids behind them to push them forward when they’re on. The digits change with a satisfying “chunk”.

The marble clock is also interesting from an aural perspective—the nature of the mechanism means that it makes different types of clattering sounds at every minute, 5 minute, and hour increment. I think I’m going to try living with it in my office, to see whether the sounds of time passing will be helpful, distracting, or simply drowned under my music.

This week’s brain-melting internet folk art meme comes to you from Octopus Dropkick via Waxy. The monkey donkey will advise you on what to buy this Christmas season. This reminds me of Susan somehow. Incidentally, if you want to make your own creepy synthesized voice tracks, go here (Monkey Donkey uses the “Rich” voice).

Welcome back! If you’re reading this, you’ve successfully transitioned from the old blog, vector, to the new one, The Brunch Table. Why the change? Most immediately, I realized that the hosting plan that Justina and I have with DreamHost could host more sites than we were using it for, so I decided to move retrovirus.com over there and save a bit of cash money. While I was at it, DreamHost has a one-click WordPress install feature, and WordPress has better anti-comment-spam options than the old version of Movable Type that I was using before, so I decided to migrate over to WordPress.

At the same time, some things had changed about vector. For one, it had become just as much Nick’s blog as mine (he’s been much better at posting interesting stuff than I have). Also, I found myself conflicted by my desire to talk about both work stuff and random interesting things about the world in general, because I thought those two trains of thought might have somewhat different audiences. So, this blog has become The Brunch Table, more focused on the sorts of things that Nick and I would talk about at Sunday brunch. (Thanks to Ratha, LiveJournal users can syndicate this feed through brunch_table.) At the same time, I’ve created a new shop talk blog for myself called The Incrementalist, where I can geek out to my heart’s content without boring you guys with my code listings. Also, neither here nor there, I’ve been posting more photos to my Flickr account, which tends to be more about my day-to-day life than either of the blogs. So, thanks for reading—we’ll keep doing our darndest to stuff your RSS stockings with worthwhile content.

(Update) Mike created an incrementalist syndication account on LiveJournal—thanks!

A factoid from the evening’s dinner party, courtesy of Margaret, who some of you might remember from CMU (she certainly recalls some of you), and who is now doing interesting HIV research: there are apparently some people who are highly immune to HIV. These people have what is known as the delta 32 mutation of the CCR5 gene, which changes the shape of the receptor sites that the virus uses to bind to. If both of your parents have this mutation, you inherit strong immunity. (With only one, the infection is slowed, but not stymied.) What’s interesting is that this same mutation appears to have been effective against the bubonic plague as well—that the passage of the plague through Europe might have selected for the mutation, so that to this day, some close-knit European communities have an unusually high incidence of the mutation.

Honestly, the Watercube is the only recent architecture that feels properly post-millennial to me. Gehry gives me this 90’s “computer graphics are cool” vibe that just leaves me cold. Bring on the biomimicry! (Even if only at a superficial level.) I hope this thing does indeed get built for the Beijing olympics, because I’m intensely curious about how this sort of structure will age. Rusting bubbles? Blown out pseudo-cells?

Overheard on the radio, a bluegrass-style chorus:

“Oh anything can happen
On any particular day
There ain’t much you can do
When the Force is not with you
The world burns down around us and we walk away.”

The Force is not with you. Wow.

After the oil runs out and the Library of Congress is run by rats and pigeons, I bet itinerant actors in covered wagons will be doing the story with wooden lightsabers. (And fortunately, since very few smallpox-vaccinated people were ever exposed to the New Trilogy, its memory will be erased entirely.)

Listening to CKUT, McGill U.’s college radio station, as I put the finishing touches on my last thousand frames or so…currently, they’re playing a sort of Dick Dale Goes to Bollywood thing. Very nice.

Although it’s odd, I’m close enough to get their old-school broadcast radio signal. But in room after room of workstations here, there’s not a single such device to be found.

P.S. DJ just came on. I’ve been listening to Kalyanji-Anandji (google fixed my spelling).

Just discovered the blog of British journalist George Monbiot…remarkable stuff.

Take this, for example:

…this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don’t understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.

Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America.

But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation…Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God.