Nothing But Words

A sudden hailstorm – 15 minutes before this it was sunny and 73 degrees View at Picasa A sudden hailstorm – 15 minutes before this it was sunny and 73 degrees30-Mar-2009 12:00

The largest hailstones were about the size of a nickel View at Picasa The largest hailstones were about the size of a nickel30-Mar-2009 08:01, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.017 sec, ISO 100

We had a freak hailstorm yesterday, unlike any I’ve experienced before. I don’t think it measured up to the stories you’ve probably heard about baseball sized hail in the Midwest, but for the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, nickel-sized hail is very rare. By the time I grabbed the camera, the worst of it had passed, but the video should still give you a sense of it (not to mention a sense of my lovely garage, which I can’t wait to tear down). I’ve also never seen such a downpour – it usually takes a full day of steady rain to produce the kind of standing water in my yard that this storm generated in less than 10 minutes. What’s even stranger is that 15 minutes before the storm hit, it was sunny and 73 degrees.

The NBC Philadelphia site has a good slideshow of viewer-contributed photos.

So I can cross “major hailstorm” off my storm and natural disasters list, along with hurricanes, blizzards, and big earthquakes. So still to go is forest fire, tornado, flood, erupting volcano, and a rain of frogs.

My Jim Rice autographed baseball, from sometime in the late 1970s View at Picasa My Jim Rice autographed baseball, from sometime in the late 1970s19-Jan-2009 09:29, SONY DSC-W55, 2.8, 6.3mm, 0.025 sec, ISO 100

In 5 years of blogging I have never written about sports. This is the first time, and probably the last time, that I will.

I was a big baseball fan when I was a kid, but lost interest as I grew older. A few weeks ago I happened to notice in a daily news summary that my childhood baseball hero was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame: “…slugging outfielder Jim Rice, whose entire 16-year career was spent with the Boston Red Sox. In a vote of media members… [he] received the necessary 75 percent of the votes in his 15th and last year on the ballot.” Apparently it was quite controversial whether he was worthy of the Hall of Fame. I mainly remember him as a fearsome hitter, but also someone who was all business and didn’t get too hung up on himself as a celebrity. I also distinctly remember when “…he rushed into the stands to help a young boy who had been struck in the head by a line drive off the bat of Dave Stapleton. As other players and spectators watched, Rice left the dugout and entered the stands to help 4-year old Jonathan Keane, who was bleeding heavily. Rice carried the boy onto the field, through the Red Sox dugout and into the clubhouse, where the young boy could be treated by the team’s medical staff. Team doctor Arthur Pappas later said that Rice’s actions may have saved the boy’s life.” I don’t know how the Hall of Fame nomination system works, but everything I’ve read so far about his nomination has been all about statistics. I would think that character matters too.

The news sent me into my basement, rummaging through boxes, where I unearthed my baseball that was signed to me by Jim Rice when I was 9 or 10 years old. I’m not interested in selling it, but I think I will find a better place to display it now . And sitting next to it in the box, I found my old hand held video game, Head to Head Football. It still works! It’s essentially a glorified version of Pong, oriented horizontally instead of vertically. But judging by this early 80s commercial for it (you can find anything on YouTube), it must be the best game ever!

In reading about Rice I happened to come across some striking baseball news from Japan: a woman is now pitching for a minor league team. Baseball is taken at least as seriously in Japan as it is here, and like the US, the major and minor leagues have always been the exclusive domain of men, so this is a big story. And, of course, there’s a Red Sox connection:

Eri Yoshida, who left a line of male batters hitless in tryouts in November, recently signed on to become the first woman to play in professional baseball in Japan. Her drafting into pro ball has catapulted her from little-known high school jock to media darling, with camera crews following her daily rounds from calligraphy class to the dugout. Clips of her quirky side-armed pitch seem to be stock footage on nightly sports and news programs…

Yoshida began developing her signature pitch, the knuckle ball, a few years ago after her father showed her a video of Tim Wakefield, the longtime knuckle-baller for the Boston Red Sox. Her father thought she should develop a special skill to distinguish herself. She hoped the knuckle ball, which requires technique instead of power, would allow her to succeed in baseball despite her tiny frame. Her fluttering pitches top out at about 60 m.p.h., but are elusive to hit.

In discussing the story with Maria, I also learned a little more about Japanese culture. At first I thought it was insulting that the team’s coach referred to her as “Eri-chan.” Chan is a diminutive honorific that is used when addressing children (it’s like Mr. or Ms., but for kids). But Maria explained that in this context, it’s intended for cuteness and perhaps a bit of ribbing, but not in a sexist way. She said, for example, a chubby or boyish-looking male player might also be called “chan” by his teammates. I also thought it was odd that she showed up to her first press conference in her high school uniform. But this is in fact proper behavior – she’s fresh out of high school, and when you’re a student in Japan and you’re attending a formal event, you’re supposed to wear your school uniform.

Only towards the end of our time living in Tokyo did it finally dawn on me that I should see a Japanese baseball game. I ended up not having a chance. After we returned to the US, I came across this blog post describing an American’s first time at a Japanese baseball game, and it made me wish I had tried a little harder to make it to a game:

Having read before the game that Japanese baseball fans were an extremely noisy and energetic lot, I was surprised when, during the first half of the first inning, only quiet background chatter could be heard emanating from the crowd… Just as I was about to ask my friend why the crowd seemed so unenthusiastic, the third out was registered, and the Hanshin Tigers came up to bat.

And suddenly, every person in the crowd had their eyes riveted to the field. They were violently pounding together the plastic baseball-bat shaped noisemakers they had purchased outside the stadium in time with the drummers stationed in front of each section. They were chanting, singing. Giant flags were waved by excited fans. The cheering was accompanied by hand gestures, and both the gestures and cheers were different for each player. I was hit with such a deafening wall of sound that I stood dazed for a moment before grabbing my camera, snapping a few pictures of the crowd, and grabbing my own set of noisemakers and joining in.

…[A]t the beginning of the seventh inning, something interesting happened. Colorful balloons gradually started appearing in the hands of fans throughout the stadium… During what, in America, would have been the seventh inning stretch, the Tiger’s official theme song was again sung, and this time, it seemed almost everyone in the stadium sang along. After the singing was done, everyone quickly released their balloons. …I later learned that the release of balloons during the seventh inning stretch is a Hanshin Tigers tradition, performed by fans at both home and away games. Towards the end of the game, when it appeared certain the Tigers would be winning, the balloons began again to appear throughout the crowd, and when the final out was called for the Baystars, the sky was again momentarily filled with the colorful balloons.

Having launched their balloons for a second time in celebration of the Tigers’ victory, I assumed that the crowd would quickly begin to file out of the stadium. Instead, though, everyone stuck around for a good twenty minutes, singing songs of celebration and cheering their victorious team…

Whenever we make it back to Japan, going to a ball game is at the top of my to do list.

View at Picasa 1966 ad for sugar in Time magazine

About 13 years ago, I photocopied this ad from a 1966 issue of Time magazine. I was in grad school doing some research, I think on the Vietnam war, and couldn’t help but notice it. It’s almost as over the top as the old Saturday Night Live fake ad for speed. I thought I lost the photocopy years ago, but found it in a box in my basement the other day.

The image they’re going for with Mary is interesting – it looks like half her outfit is a school uniform, and then the baggy sweater and beads are hip but still fairly conservative.

If you can’t make out the “Note to Mothers” at the bottom, it says:

Note to Mothers: Exhaustion may be dangerous – especially to children who haven’t learned to avoid it by pacing themselves. Exhaustion opens the door a little wider to the bugs and ailments that are always lying in wait. Sugar puts back energy fast – offsets exhaustion. Synthetic sweeteners put back nothing. Energy is the first requirement of life. Play safe with your young ones – make sure they get sugar every day.

What makes this especially insidious is that it’s the exact opposite of the truth:

Studies have shown that downing 75 to 100 grams of a sugar solution (about 20 teaspoons of sugar, or the amount that is contained in two average 12-ounce sodas) can suppress the body’s immune responses. Simple sugars, including glucose, table sugar, fructose, and honey caused a fifty- percent drop in the ability of white blood cells to engulf bacteria…[and] can reduce the ability of white blood cells to kill germs by 40 percent. The immune-suppressing effect of sugar starts less than thirty minutes after ingestion and may last for five hours.

Now that I’m working at home, and at my computer all day, I’m trying to create a good ergonomic desk setup for myself (especially with my ongoing back problems). If you spend your time day in and day out working with the same set of tools, you need them to be quality tools. So I started today by shopping online for a good keyboard, and ended up taking a journey through history and language. But first, the keyboard…

View at Picasa An old Royal portable typewriter

A keyboard with fancy lights or extra multimedia keys holds no attraction for me. The currently popular flat, laptop style keyboards drive me crazy, as there’s hardly any tactile feedback. By learning to type as a child on my mother’s 1960s Royal portable typewriter, it’s been imprinted in some primal corner of my brain that the sensation of a nice mechanical whack when hitting (not tapping) the keys is really satisfying. Before the mouse became a common computer input device, computers were expensive, and people were used to the feel of typewriters. A keyboard that was popular then, and apparently still has a small but devoted following today, was the IBM Model M:

[Back then] the keyboard was the only day-to-day input device for almost all computers, and most users were tapping away at the things a great deal. Keyboards mattered. People cared. There were actually advertisements in computer magazines in which manufacturers bragged about how kick-ass their keyboards were.

The boasts were justified. There have been various technologies dreamt up over the years for keyboards, all trying to make the ‘board feel nice to use, last well, and not cost a million dollars. The “buckling spring” keyswitches in this IBM ‘board and some other old-style units are widely acknowledged to be the best ever developed in every regard, except cost.

They’ve got not-too-light but not-too-heavy key weighting, they’ve got the kind of positive click that I imagine you’d feel on the firing button for the Death Star’s primary armament, and their demonstrated service life, despite extraordinary abuse, is preposterously long. Essentially, if you don’t take to one of these things with a hammer, it’ll probably outlast you, even if you spend all day, every day, typing.

…The attractiveness of Real Keyboards faded with the arrival of mouse-based user interfaces. Suddenly all of that basic housekeeping typing became unnecessary. Programmers and data enterers and writers still typed like crazy, but everyone else could point and click their way through many tasks.

And when you don’t need to use the keyboard all day, you don’t really care how good the ‘board is, as long as it doesn’t stop working. Big heavy indestructible keyboards like the [Model M] became an unsupportable expense for the average personal computer, and they died out…

In addition to all that, apparently the Model M also makes you a better typist:

With the Model M, I type faster than on other keyboards – much faster. My personal best on a laptop was 50 words per minute on my old 12″ PowerBook. I’ve hit about the same speed on my various ThinkPads, MacBooks, and Toshibas, but the 12″ PowerBook was, in my opinion, the fastest laptop keyboard.

I just took a typing test using my old Model M and hit 64 words per minute – and I had fewer typos in the process. There’s just something right about the design; I really can’t describe it other than saying that my finger always presses hard enough and never too hard on a Model M – are two of the many reasons for typos on lesser keyboards.

Of course you still have to hit the right key, but even that seems easier on this most magical of keyboards. The new one I just bought cost almost $70 for something made well over a decade ago, and I consider it a bargain.

…while noisy and intrusive to your neighbors, there’s one very good reason why the buckling spring keyboard remained in production for so many years and why it’s something of a specialty item today. Those switches are very expensive compared to the cheap rubber domes in use today, and it’s those switches that give this keyboard its legendary feel (and make it too expensive for this age of made-in-China mass-production).

After reading all that I was hooked, and I ordered one. Unicomp now has the rights to the Model M and they still make them (but they’ve renamed it the “Customizer”).

View at Picasa A World War II recruiting poster for women stenographers

My keyboard quest got me thinking about that old Royal typewriter, so I did a quick Google image search and found a picture that looks just like it. I also came across a World War II poster for recruiting women to be stenographers. But that’s not all they did – many women worked as “computers” and after the war some went on to become the world’s first programmers:

Before the invention of electronic computers, “computer” was a job description, not a machine. Both men and women were employed as computers, but women were more prominent in the field. This was a matter of practicality more than equality. Women were hired because there was a large pool of women with training in mathematics, but they could be hired for much less money than men with comparable training. Despite this bias, some women overcame their inferior status and contributed to the invention of the first electronic computers.

In 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, hundreds of women were employed around the country as computers. Their job consisted of using mechanical desk calculators to solve long lists of equations. The results of these calculations were compiled into tables and published for use on the battlefields by gunnery officers. The tables allowed soldiers in the field to aim artillery or other weapons, taking into account variable conditions such as temperature and air density. Today, such calculations are done instantly in the battlefield with microcomputers.

…When the ENIAC was nearing completion, six women were chosen from among the human computers to be trained as programmers. …[They] devised the very first computer program, which was demonstrated when the ENIAC was unveiled in early 1946.

Before World War II, the term “computer” also referred to mechanical calculating devices (the Greek Antikythera mechanism, from about 150BC, being the earliest known example). ENIAC, unveiled soon after the end of World War II, was one of the first electronic, digital computers. As such computers came to replace all their human and mechanical counterparts, the descriptor “digital” was eventually dropped.

“Digital” is a word that has evolved into something almost antithetical to its origin. Digits originally referred only to fingers and toes. People use their hands to create and manipulate physical objects – to do things manually. Digits came to be synonymous with numbers, since you can count them with your digits. And computers are digital because they are essentially glorified calculators, and we rely on computers to do things for us automatically.

Sitting between the manual world and automated world, between the analog and the digital, is the keyboard. I’m looking forward to the arrival of my Model M, and feeling something akin to the satisfying whack of an old Royal typewriter as I type my programs – putting in the manual labor that ultimately lies behind all automation.

Today’s Photoshop Phriday at the Something Awful site had me in stitches. The original photo is at the top, and then many pages of doctored versions follow (don’t miss the “next page” arrow at the bottom). The set of historical photos on the last page is my favorite (although the picture of them on the bridge of the Enterprise really got me too). Note the fun many of the pictures have with the fact that one of his shoes is off.

…You see early morning commuters starting up their cars at 5:30 in the morning, and then going back in their houses for a while, so the cars can get fully air conditioned before they leave for work.

This is a good example of why the world needs the Japanese, because only they think of things like this. The complete collection is here – my favorite is the comb-over.

14 years after it was closed, the old Jamestown Bridge in my home state of Rhode Island has been destroyed – it’s center span was exploded last month, and the rest of it was blown up late last week. From when I was a child to when it was closed during my last year of college, driving across this bridge often gave me butterflies in my stomach. It was very narrow, leaving no margin for error when dealing with cars passing you in the other lane. And if a car broke down and blocked a lane, it would take hours to disentangle the traffic. But the worst part was the center span – as you drove across it, there was no concrete under you – only see-through metal grates that would clang noisily as they shifted under the weight of your car.

Newport is on an island (Aquidneck), and the Newport Bridge connects it to Jamestown, which is also on an island (Conanicut). The Jamestown bridge is what got you to the mainland from there. In the sunset photo above, taken before the blast, the old bridge is on the left, and the new bridge is on the right.

I don’t know the details, but apparently it took this long to get rid of the old bridge because of various financial constraints and environmental concerns. Back in 1997, the Rhode Island DOT shopped around Hollywood for a movie studio to blow it up it for them, but there were no takers (I think they were inspired by the exploding bridge in the movie True Lies).

More photos, as well as video clips of the demolition, are in a “Digital Extra” section at the Providence Journal site – you’ll need to register to see it though (I copied the photos above from there). One of their articles on the demolition made me laugh with this statement: “For all who came, the demolition was a spectacle not to be missed, a chance to say goodbye to a piece of Rhode Island history that carried terror-filled memories and yet somehow managed to endear itself with its striking profile.” I’m hoping that last statement is tongue-in-check – by “striking profile” I assume they mean, “too ugly to be forgotten” (the dim, warm glow of the setting sun in the photo above is masking a number of sins).

Some things to make you laugh:

• The Shining, Redux – a spoof trailer for The Shining, making it look like a heartwarming, father-son bonding film. It won a re-cut comptetition last year, and since then folks have made a bunch of these for other films – if you do a Google search for “trailer recut” you can find them.
• How to make an Easter turducken. “Many children wonder around Easter how it is that bunnies lay eggs. As a side benefit, Easter turducken illustrates clearly that this ‘theory’ is wrong. Obviously bunnies lay chickens, which then lay the eggs.”
• A Dr. Seuss interpretation of Bush’s defense of Rumsfeld, inspired by the actual Bush statement, “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best…” …All my decisions, they come Jesus-blessed.
• A History of US/Iranian Relations Since 9/11, in the form of a conversation between the US and Iran. For something written as humor, it actually sums up the real situation surprisingly well.
• The Senate Ethics Committee Mansion
• This is from last month, when Republican Howard Kaloogian was running to replace Duke Cunningham in San Diego (who was convicted of bribery). Kaloogian participiated in the up-is-down “Truth Tour” of Iraq, which tried to demonstrate how great things really are in Iraq. To help make this point, Kaloogian posted a photo on his web site, which he claimed he took himself, of a peaceful and bustling street in downtown Baghdad. But the photo didn’t pass the sniff test, and the blogosphere soon revealed that it was actually a photo of a street in a suburb of Istanbul, Turkey. Kaloogian then claimed it was a simple photo mix-up, and replaced the photo on his site with this aerial shot of Baghdad, where you can see that Baghdad clearly has buildings and trees (but he still kept the original caption, claiming this showed how great things are). All that may be sad rather than funny, but what I found very funny – as a former fanatical player of the game Civilization – was this take on the story.
• This SNL cartoon on John McCain is very funny, particularly the Apocalypse Now moment at the end. It first ran, I think, in 2003. It was inspired by McCain’s decision to make nice with Bush after the vicious personal attacks he suffered at the hands of Bush supporters in the 2000 primary race. As McCain is gearing up to run again for 2008, he’s cozying up to Jerry Falwell and others he once denounced as “agents of intolerance,” making this cartoon all too relevant again now.

As you can see, I’ve moved my blog to the top of the site. The blog is the only part of my site that isn’t gathering dust, so I thought it made sense to move it up. I’m still fond of the old toppa.com home page, but it’s about 10 years old now, and it’s time to move on. It shall be forever memorialized here, with these screenshots:

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