On being surveyed

Increasingly, I find merchants (both physical and on-line) and services actively asking to survey me about my reaction to their offerings.  I respect the motivation to tailor and improve what's presented to customers, and appreciate that the data has to come from somewhere, but it sometimes can become irritating and unproductive.  Is it really likely, for example, that I'd be able or enthused to submit a review of something like a printer ink cartridge?  Was it unique, the best one I've ever had the opportunity to use, yielding those special black tones that made my resume stand out from others and opening new doors of personal opportunity?  It seems unlikely, or even that many other purchasers would have much that's special to report about a fairly generic item.  (Disclosure: I haven't checked for purchaser reviews of ink cartridges before writing this.  Maybe there are many.  Maybe even an active forum of ink cartridge connoisseurs.)  Seriously, it's hard to see the motivation and value of soliciting comments on topics where there's unlikely to be much to say.  

And, the most important item is...

It was unusually cold a few days ago, and a local media source was advising the public about how they should prepare before going out in their cars.  They referred to traditional items like ice scrapers and windshield washer fluid, but I was interested to note their stress on one particular piece of equipment as more important than others: a charged cell phone. This makes a lot of sense, so as to be able to summon emergency assistance. On the other hand, it doesn't say much if your goal is self-sufficiency in an emergency.  I don't think most cell phones would work effectively to clear windshields, though they could be useful to obtain weather forecasts. 

Two years of books

Two years of completed books, 2009-2010. I've been keeping these logs
for some time now, and have often found it interesting to review them to
see what I've read and to recall some of my motivations and reactions.  It's another view on a personal empire of interests, a mix of highbrow, lowbrow, sidebrow, and nobrow, and maybe a challenge case for a "you liked this, so you might also like that" algorithm. I count 48 books over 24 months, but my average consumption rate has a high standard deviation and is probably trending downwards given competition from other media and activities.  Still, finishing a book represents a form of completed commitment and offers a metric to observe.  If any readers here would like to comment about books cited here or to provide "if this, try that" suggestions, please do.

Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Brendon.
The Wrecking Crew, Frank.
Thames, The Biography, Ackroyd. (More mystical in parts than I'd prefer.)
The Forgotten Man, Shlaes.
House of Cards, Cohan. (Bear Stearns crash and history. Good, but
sometimes technically obscure.)
The Man Who Smiles, Mankell. (Good mystery.)
The Media Relations Dept. of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday,
MacFarquhar. Engaging and insightful, and one of the more fascinating
titles that I can recall.
Before The Frost, Mankell.
Origins of the Specious, O'Conner.
The Toothpick, Petroski.
The Dogs of Riga, Mankell.
Julie and Julia, Powell.
The Aggressive Conservative Investor, Whitman & Shubik. Some interest,
but also appeared somewhat dated. Deprecates total return investment.
Return of the Dancing Master, Mankell. Very good.
Spoken Here, Abley. Well-done travels among endangered languages.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Kindleberger. Classic and authoritative.
The Man who Loved China, Winchester.
The First Tycoon (Vanderbilt), Stiles.
The Devil's Picnic, Grescoe.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, de Botton. Thoughtful and witty.
The Lost Art of Walking, Nicholson.
Rogues' Gallery (Metropolitan Museum, NYC), Gross. The discussion of later years seemed more focused on society gossip than on the museum itself.
A Splintered History of Wood, Carlsen.
Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, Kohnstamm.
The Ground Truth (9/11), Farmer.
An Arctic Voyage, Carter.
The Last of His Kind (Bradford Washburn), Roberts.
Traitor to His Class (FDR), Brands. VG.
The Match King (Kreuger), Partnoy.
The Technical Culture of Ham Radio, Haring. A sociological remainder.
Italian Shoes, Mankell. Sometimes odd, but moving novel.
Inventing Niagara, Strand. Intriguing.
Birds of Concord, Griscom, Fascinating changes over decades. I picked up a
well-annotated copy in a used bookstore some time ago, and this is one
of the few cases where I've appreciated comments added to a book other
than by the author.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux. Worth savoring.
Panic!, Lewis. Good collection.
Too Big to Fail, Sorkin. Long, informative, and engrossing.
Brush Cat, McEnany.
To Hellholes and Back, Thompson.
The Big Short, Lewis. Riveting and insightful.
The Last Fish Tale, Kurlansky.
Red House, Messer. Engrossing.
Grounded, Stevenson, Fun, short.
Idiot America, Pierce. Good.
Brilliant, Brox. (very good, history of light)
To Rule The Waves, Herman.
Dark Genius of Wall Street (Jay Gould), Renehan.
Enemies of The People, Marton.
At Home, Bryson. (Engaging. More quotable points than maybe I've seen assembled in any one book.)

Thanks, great bird, for standing still!

On New Years' Eve, I was walking along a snowy trail, having seen few other creatures larger than chickadees, when I was startled to see this heron perched on a bridge.  It didn't seem fazed at all by my approach, and I'm sure that I found it more interesting for the next several minutes than it found me. (To me, it was a rare chance for a close-up portrait; to it, I must not have appeared relevant in either the food or threat category.) When a couple of other humans arrived nearby, this may have been too much, too close, and then it flew. 

Streak planning for the well-annotated calendar

This JPL link has a convenient writeup about meteor showers through 2011.

Crash Blossoms

There's a good summary of the concept in this NYT column by Ben Zimmer. When language is compressed in newspaper or web headlines, ambiguity results, sometimes with bizarre or comic effect. Confused readers step back and reset. There's a long and delectable tradition of such occurrences: ask your favorite search engine, e.g., about "British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands".  I experienced this the other day, observing a BBC headline of "Web attacks plague rights sites", with surprise that there might be a significant number of web sites devoted to plague sufferers' rights and that they'd become likely attack targets by the Web as a whole.  The full story made the context clearer.

500B words can't be wrong!

I just discovered Google Labs' Books Ngram Viewer.  It presents a fascinating view into the words and phrases occurring in a corpus of scanned books, showing how their usage frequencies have evolved over time and displaying the results graphically.  Try, for example, this query comparing references to different communications media.  I thought it was illuminating to include both "telephone" and "phone" there; while both terms persist and describe the same thing, use of the shorter one accelerated sharply as of the 1960s.