free variable

Apparently, the religion reporting in AP wire stories that the NYT runs isn’t much better than the religion reporting in the NYT proper:

Archaeologists recently unearthed and opened the white marble sarcophagus located under the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, which for some 2,000 years has been believed by the faithful to be the tomb of Paul.

Consider this some vindication for Wenham’s reading of Paul: not only was Paul not a theological innovator, but, given that his tomb has been regarded as such for “some 2,000 years,” many of his epistles must even precede the birth and ministry of Christ!

(Note also the gratuitous Ratzinger-bashing in the final paragraph: “At the end of Sunday’s service in the warm basilica, Benedict, 82, lost his balance slightly as he slipped on a step on the altar….”)

Happy birthday, Thomas. Dad loves you.

I’ll miss you saying “onange” (instead of “orange”), like you did when you were two, and I’m almost sad that your gleeful confusion between TACKLING Daddy and TICKLING Daddy (source) didn’t last a little bit longer (especially since you’re becoming such a terrifyingly good TACKLER). I’m looking forward to many more adventures with you, no matter what other awesome habits you grow out of as you get older. Living with the world’s coolest little guy is a pretty great deal, and I’m thankful for you every day.

This Kottke post on a moronic dietary subculture is definitely worth reading. However, the “breatharians” are not uniquely deserving of scorn: a “breatharian” who sneaks an occasional cheeseburger is no worse than most of the “straight edge” people I knew in high school, whose various and intricate proscriptions always seemed to stop short of one undeniable appetite or another. Pop asceticism is the slave of the passions, I guess.

One of the finest achievements of western art is Bach’s d minor Partita for solo violin (BWV 1004); in particular, the Chaconne is technically dazzling, emotionally loaded, and sublime. (For a fun middlebrow musicological excursus on the piece and its relation to German chorales, check out the Hilliard Ensemble’s amazing Morimur album — but be sure to get it on a physical disc; the liner notes explain the project and are spectacular.)

Below are a few beats of Antonio Sinopoli’s guitar transcription of the Chaconne. Unlike Segovia’s famous and idiosyncratic arrangement, Sinopoli eschews scordatura and transposes to e minor; he is otherwise far more faithful to the original. The score I have was published by Ricordi Buenos Aires; it identifies the piece as “Chacona” and the author as “Juan S. Bach” (!)

RIYL: Music for the rest of your life.

When I was a kid, my dad made me a timeline on the plastic roller shades in my room. It seemed unbelievably broad to me, and covered among other things Biblical figures and events; major works of literature; the prominence of various kingdoms, dynasties, and tribes; the lifetimes of composers, authors, scientists, and theologians; and so on all the way through to the discovery of the double helix and the race to space. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by timelines: a good timeline can make sense of a vast amount of data and present a forceful argument. So I was delighted to see a timeline covering the recent global financial collapse, courtesy of the New York Fed (pdf link); here’s a small taste:

Each page covers Fed policy actions, market events, and other policy actions in a quarter; each event is hyperlinked to an explanation; and the timeline is updated every month.

(via the Atlantic’s business blog)

When Circuit City existed as an actual, physical retailer I thought they offered a surprisingly good online shopping experience. You could go to their site, check to see if something was in stock in your local store, and, if it was, pay for it online and pick it up from the front desk in about the time it would take you to drive there. (This was and probably still is vastly superior to the Best Buy experience, where purchasing something for in-store pickup means “within 24 hours or so” rather than “within 20 minutes.”) The workflow combined the best parts of shopping in person (immediate gratification) and shopping online (searching via a text box from one’s desk, rather than hunting around physical stores).

However, after Circuit City was liquidated, some company bought their trademarks and applied them to a fairly generic e-commerce site. Apparently, the fairly generic e-commerce site was also able to purchase customer lists, because I’ve been getting spam from them fairly regularly. Since the new circuitcity.com doesn’t allow me to purchase something, drive six miles away, and pick it up in the same hour, it is not significantly more compelling than Amazon Prime; in any case, I’m not particularly interested in “hot deals” on mediocre computer hardware, which seem to be the bulk of circuitcity.com’s current offerings.

My experience in trying to unsubscribe from these mailing lists — and I had been added to several, apparently — bodes poorly for the usability of the “new” circuitcity.com, especially in light of how nice the old one was. The first problem was the “unsubscribe” notification at the bottom of one of the messages, which I have included below:

Not only does this (or “th is,” perhaps?) appear in a larger block of text that recalls every nearly-plausible phishing email I’ve ever received, the address is misspelled: “circuitcity-oline.com” isn’t a real domain. So my first attempt at unsubscribing bounced. Fortunately, this was fairly easy to correct: I sent a blank email to the appropriate address at “circuitcity-online.com,” and was on my way. Or was I?

(Do note that I had sent a blank message — one without the word “subscribe” in it anywhere. Also note that “circuit-city-master-unsub” is an awfully strange name for a list.)

On the third try, I was able to unsubscribe, as far as I can tell. (I’m actually not sure whether or not “leaving” the “master-unsub” list will cause me to get additional mail.) A more cynical observer might conclude that circuitcity.com has very little incentive to make it easy for me to opt out of further advertising, but this seems more like garden-variety incompetence to me. (Although I’m not particularly interested in entrusting my payment details to businesses who can’t manage their most basic computing infrastructure.)

It is, however, a little sad that the retailer who used to have my commodity consumer electronics ready within twenty minutes has given its name to a pedestrian “hot deals” list that requires twenty minutes of effort to leave.

One of the perils of computing is this: one encounters a problem that has some unappealing solutions (or partial solutions) and one or more obvious workarounds. Nevertheless, one is compelled to think about the possibility of an elegant, general solution to a class of similar problems. That happened to me this morning, and I wrote it up at Chapeau.

UPDATE: I’m not kidding.

Never mind the bollocks and never mind the provenance. Imagine you’re an auction house selling off a flyer for a Sex Pistols show from 1978. Now imagine that said flyer has a huge chunk of Comic Sans (designed by V. Connare in 1994) in it. The thread on typophile that presents this sad case is the sort of thing that you’ll love if you’re the same kind of nerd I am.

Unlike the infamous forged Killian documents, which were clearly the product of a delusional and careless conspiracy theorist’s extended reverie, some effort clearly went into this Sex Pistols forgery. The creator of this fake flyer didn’t merely dump some text into Microsoft Word’s AutoAnarchy Wizard (see below); he or she was obviously concerned with aping at least the most basic characteristics of the form. The fact that the flyer included four consecutive characters in Comic Sans makes me wonder if the creator wanted to be caught, whether he or she intended such flagrant anachronism to be a John Lydon-style two-finger salute to the sorts of people wealthy enough to buy old punk rock flyers at auction.

RIYL: See my take on the Killian scandal and consensus genres, which is the source of the above image; see also my post on Nike and Minor Threat, in particular the humorless, outraged comments from (I assume) suburban kids who were born years after Minor Threat broke up.

Like almost all sophisticated and clever people, I am delighted every time Facebook announces a new, easy-to-abuse feature that might at its best enable some of its users to become sharecroppers of a trivially larger chunk of the AOL of the oughts. If you’d prefer to see a rather dimmer view, then you’ll want to read Anil Dash, who wrote an amusing article speculating on the immediate aftermath of the “user-specified URL” feature rollout on Facebook; it is chock-full of goodness like this:

LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they’ve had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it’s more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

(via Ben Brown)

This sign, as found in rural Wisconsin, is all-around delightful, but please be sure to note the irritable snowmobiling badger, who is apparently trying to find his way home from the rough vicinity of Rochester, MN.

I’ve noticed many cars here in scenic Madison, WI featuring a bumper sticker saying “A woman voting for McCain is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” While I think it’s probably time for the drivers of these cars to “move on” from the 2008 presidential election (or move to Arizona before 2010), I do appreciate their willingness to shine a bright light on Sen. McCain’s terrible and grossly underreported woman–frying activities. Thanks, hippies!

In an unrelated story, I note that the American Medical Association has issued a statement opposing government-run insurance plans. Smarter people than I have constructed arguments as to why we should side with the doctors over the bureaucrats, but I’ll just say this: as someone who would probably be dead at least twice over if he’d been born in Ottawa instead of Minneapolis — and who wants his 401k returns to continue to beat inflation — I’m glad to see some pushback against the McDonalds-in-the-cafeteria promises made by the advocates of this constellation of absurd ideas.

Here’s some exciting news from Brent Simmons that may signal the end of my syndication lament. Being able to use Google Reader’s web interface when I need a web interface and NetNewsWire’s application interface on my Mac sounds almost perfect — although mediocre sync performance could kill the utility of Google Reader syncing, as it does with NewsGator sync. (It’s not clear whether syncing with NewsGator is slow, whether NewsGator simply is slow in processing new items, or both. But one very nice thing about Google Reader is that it seems to lag very little when compared to NewsGator.)

In another update to the original syndication lament, the newest version of Byline is much better overall (certainly more stable) than prior versions, although it still takes ages to sync and regularly forgets that it has done so.

I enjoyed this comment by Marc Hamann in a discussion of MIT’s switch away from SICP for undergraduate computer science education; the whole comment is thought-provoking, but this excerpt is especially delightful:

Somewhat more facetiously, I have to suggest that maybe they are just being merciful to their students, since it seems that many people, seduced by the excitement of SICP, go on to suffer miserably in their career as API and framework plumbers, wishing that being a programmer was actually the elegant and rational process that Abelson and Sussman had made it out to be.

SICP, if read carefully and properly, presents almost an entire undergraduate computer science curriculum in a semester. It’s a shame that MIT EECS students won’t be drinking from that firehose any more. Furthermore, I have long believed that Scheme is unbeatable as a language for teaching computer scientists rather than programmers. (Although “unbeatable” implies a partial ordering: I’d guess it’s possible to argue that Haskell or an ML-family language is equally suitable.)