Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Cos' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, January 1st, 2037
12:00 am	Other Places I Post I have two other LJs: cosmusic, coslinks See what links I've been reading on del.icio.us (coslinks),  and what links I've been promoting on reddit (cos) (if you use reddit, please check occasionally and rate my links up?) Photos: Some on my old web site, newer ones on Flickr (cospics) Videos: YouTube (youcos) Where are you? pin your location on the map, add yourself to my frappr group, and fill out my LJ poll. All Livejournals cos (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
3:16 pm	I got a letter... I got a letter, from the Netherlands. It is addressed to "POLYMORY c/o Sir Ofen Inber" and then my street address. A handwritten letter from a guy who says he lives in the Netherlands, heard something about polymory (it's consistently spelled that way), wants to know more, will I please tell him about it? And do I know of any poly groups ("like-minded organisation of polymory") in the Netherlands, and what their postal address is. I'm almost sure he got my name and address from the domain registration of polyamory.org (although I did spell my name correctly in the domain registration), but he sent a postal letter and says he doesn't have email, and the only contact information is his postal address. Knowing myself and my weird mental block about sending postal letters, I wouldn't be surprised if I never reply, or take a year or more to do so, but ... it's strange and out of the blue enough that I might get through that and send something soonish. If I knew what to say. Ummm, what do you think I should reply with? (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
10:51 am	Jan 31, 2007 - the 3rd Aniversary Sunday was the 3rd aniversary of the largest terrorist attack in Boston in our lifetimes. Okay, the terrorists were cartoon characters, and the attack was a fantastical illusion in the minds of the authorities, but it shut down buildings and highways, struck fear in possibly millions of people and hysteria in the media for a while, and Boston hasn't seen a real terrorist attack to top it yet. My reactions on that day included incredulous hysterical laughter, and mounting annoyance and dismay which, over the next few days, turned more and more into anger at the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts (and in particular, Mayor Menino and Attorney General Martha Coakley). A week after the craziness, I put my thoughts together and posted this: What Does Random Panic Protect Us From? Some of you probably read that back then, or when I re-posed the link on the first aniversary. If you missed it, or if you don't remember, please re-read it... and send a copy to your representatives? Because we're still overreacting to "terrorism" in absurd and nutty ways, and many people in government do it because they assume that all of us expect and demand it, and that if they don't do it they'll lose our support. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 31st, 2010
5:12 pm	Q&A After the State of the Union, Obama accepted an invitation to go to the House Republicans' retreat in Baltimore, where he gave a short speech and then answered questions for more than an hour (transcript). Watch it, it's very good. Audio on the Q&A is not good for the first ~2minutes, then they fix it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
4:49 pm	Haiti CrisisCamp Boston tomorrow From CNN, about last weekend's CrisisCamps: (CNN) -- A weekend meeting of technology pros looking to help victims of the Haiti earthquake yielded some ready-to-roll projects and a few more nearing completion. Perhaps more important, participants say, the gathering produced a framework that could keep aiding disaster-relief efforts in the months and years to come. ... Results included a digital map to help relief groups in Haiti coordinate their efforts and applications for the iPhone and other smartphones, including a Creole-to-English dictionary. There's going to be a CrisisCamp Boston here at ITA (by One Kendall Square) this Saturday (tomorrow) 9am-4pm. The wiki page has info, including a list of projects this camp plans to work on. ... and on that subject, here's a useful new tech tool for disaster response that you can help with from home with no technical skills: http://www.BeExtra.org/Haiti - it asks you to look at photos and see if the people match, to help locate missing people. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
5:03 am	Today's election: Martha Coakley [ Recap for people not in Massachusetts: Today is the general election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy last year. ] Since I made it clear how much I don't like Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee, I feel I need to say this: Please vote for her today. Most of those things I don't like about her? Scott Brown's positions are as bad or worse. Whatever her tolerance for shoddy prosecutions and low regard for civil liberties protections... Brown thinks the president should just be able to declare someone guilty and avoid the whole "fair trial" process altogether, and as far as I can tell, torture is just fine with him. Have you been frustrated at the way every decent piece of legislation Obama has asked for, has been hacked into bits in the Senate in strained efforts to get the support of Olympia Snowe or Joe Lieberman to get through the Republicans 39-member "filibuster every damn bill no matter what" block? If Brown gets elected, that block will grow to 40, and nothing will get past the Senate unless it can get both Snowe and Lieberman's support. Lieberman will become an even more unavoidable roadblock. Health care: Here's what will happen if Scott Brown wins today's election: the US House will vote on the Senate's crappy bill as is, because it's better than passing nothing, and since the Senate has already passed it, that will be the only way to get health care reform through without going back to the Senate. The House's ability to demand improvements would likely collapse instantly as soon as a Brown election victory is announced. Yeah, I still don't like Coakley, but all the good candidates in this election already lost last month. Sometimes you lose elections, it happens. Now, though, we determine just how much of a loss it will be. Martha Coakley will champion equal rights for women and LGBT people, work for more health care improvements, support infrastructure investments for economic recovery, fight financial fraud and predatory banking practices, support Obama's policy of diplomacy and engagement while also supporting efforts to remove American troops from Afghanistan, and support clean energy legislation. Brown would be her opposite on all of those things. Polls are open 7am - 8pm. Find your polling place at WhereDoIVoteMA.com. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
11:40 am	Successfully-Selected Sample Frequently, I (we?) see some interview with or talk by or article about someone who has succeeded in some big way, where things that person did on the way to success, or how they grew up, are presented as, or implied to be, advice: Here are things you ought to do to succeed. Sometimes, it's not even an interview or talk or article, but just little factoids delivered on their own, as the pre-success doings of a successful person, specifically intended as "do this to succeed" pointers. "Success" is a can of worms all its own, but lets assume for a moment some definition we can agree on, some people who have achieved something matching this definition, and a desire to match their achievement. If we find that a few people who "succeeded" in this way all did X* in their youth, what does that tell us? It tells us that people who did X and then succeeded, did X. In other words, it tells us nothing at all. It's a tautology. What if hundreds of thousands of other people also did X, and among them are thousands who wished for the same success, but failed? What if those thousands would have succeeded if only they hadn't done X? None of them succeeded, so we wouldn't hear about them. If we can either survey the majority of all people who have had a specific kind of success, or we can take a truly random sample of them, and then find that having done X in their youth is something a disproportionate number of them have in commone, then it would be worth investigating these two hypotheses: Doing X gives you a significant advantages in achieving this sort of thing. The sorts of people who are likely to try this sort of thing, or likely to succeed at this sort of thing, also have a tendency to do X. It's possible that both hypotheses are false, but we've at least established a reasonably likelihood that at least one of them is true. But no random sample? No broad survey? Then the mere fact that someone successful did whatever it is they did, tells us nothing whatsoever about whether doing that thing helps you have that kind of success. It may even hurt your chances. * Feel free to interpret X as literally X, if that amuses you. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
3:55 pm	Geek jobs in Cambridge, MA My department at ITA Software is looking to hire several people. I've been here since May and find it a fun place to work, and the boss & grandboss heading our groups are both great. The guy running this department is one of the few people I've worked for who would make me want to take a job somewhere just based on knowing I'd be reporting to him. We've got openings for: Some database people. Mostly Oracle and Postgres. A couple of ops tools/build/release engineers who would do things like write and maintain tools we use packaging, testing, deploying, and monitoring software. Heavy Python use on that side of things. What I do, which is not exactly "unix sysadmin" but close enough that it calls for the same sorts of people who'd do a sysadmin job. Operations/Applications administration, managing installations of software that was written at ITA. You don't handle the hardware at all, you don't configure the OS. Think of it like what a DBA does for databases, except that instead of databases you'd be dealing with very different (though just as complex) applications. We do things like monitoring, testing support, configuration management, upgrades, high availability, and so on. ITA is near One Kendall Square, about 8 blocks from the Central Sq T stop and 6 blocks from Kendall. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010
11:38 am	Another stock rant: End of the Decade The eighteenth century, if it is to have a coherent character, must be allowed to divest itself of strict chronological limits and wriggle itself into the period from 1660 to somewhere in the 1780s; that is, from the Restoration to the decade when the American Revolution triumphed, the French Revolution began, and the Industrial Revolution got underway with Cartwright's power loom and Watt's steam engine. [...] The term "nineteenth century" is another verbal convenience of some elasticity. If you want it to mean a century, you use it to cover the period 1815-1914. The quarter-century from Bastille to Waterloo, 1789-1815, is then fitted in as a sort of entr'acte between eighteenth and nineteenth, featuring a special performance by the French Revolution and Napoleon. -- Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword lilairen's rant reminded me to post one of mine from about ten years ago that's come up again recently: What's with people pedantically claiming that this New Years wasn't the end of the decade, because technically decades start with years ending in 1? Technically, any ten year period is a "decade". 1988 through 1997 was a decade. 1999 through 2008 was a decade. It actually doesn't need to even be a group of whole numbered years - decades start, and end, every day. The question isn't whether it was the end of a decade, because it obviously was; the question is which decade are we talking about when we say "the decade." When it comes to centuries, the pedants have a point, because the way we name our centuries implies that we're counting them one by one from the beginning. While the years 1900 through 1999 were most certainly a century, "the twentieth century" is not quite the right name for that period. But decades? We don't see people calling them names like "the two hundred and first decade". You'd have to be daft to claim that the decades we referred to as "the twenties" or "the 1980s" must necessarily have begun in 1921 and 1981 rather than 1920 and 1980. Not only is it obvious what decade people mean when they say this December 31st was the end of "the decade", but the way we name decades is just as clear. So, just to be clear: - The 20th Century AD: 1901 - 2000 (which is a century) - The 1900s: 1900 - 1999 (which is also a century) - The 202nd Decade AD: 2011 - 2020 (which is a decade) - The 2010s: 2010 - 2019 (which is also a decade) - Any roughly 100-year period you name and describe in context: also a century. - Any roughly 10-year period you name and describe in context: also a decade. Next time someone says "the decade" didn't just end, ask them how often they've heard anyone talking about "the two hundred and first decade". (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 28th, 2009
4:36 pm	Sherlock Holmes (almost completely non-spoilery) Fun action mystery with a lot of good lines and satisfying scenes. Fits in pretty well with the canon Sherlock Holmes (a lot better than the Star Wars prequels fit in with the original trilogy, for example). Clever. Not amazing, but a good time. Previews made it seem very violent. While it did have about as much fighting as the previews had led me to expect, the movie as a whole was a lot less focused on the fighting than I had expected. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
10:45 am	reddit comment on racism A comment I wrote on reddit got posted to "bestof", for the first time (after I mentioned the idea, in response to a commenter who said it was one of the best comments they'd ever read o reddit). Based on some of the responses it got, I feel like I really succeeded in what I was trying to say, and I'd like to get it out to a wider audience. To make sense of the comment, though, it helps if you first read the original post I was responding to: Someone confessing a blatantly racist outburst. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
8:52 pm	Economical Talk, Florida edition When I made fun of Atlanta earlier this year, I hadn't yet heard of this crazy place. I suspect it of secretly being a corn maze concept taken too far, or something from a puzzle book. [ Post title is a reference to some between-songs banter about West Virginia (mp3) by the Dry Branch Fire Squad ] (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
3:31 pm	Here's where Capuano & Coakley DO contrast on the issues In case you haven't made up your mind yet, or are just curious, I made another post in baystate about what I think the major issues contrast between Martha Coakley and Mike Capuano is. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 7th, 2009
1:55 pm	A disagreement with Mike Capuano Several years ago, when the country was plagued with touchscreen voting machines that made re-counts impossible and gave no way to verify that their counts weren't buggy, Representative Rush Holt (one of the few scientists in Congress) was pushing a bill that would've required these machines to at least produce a paper printout at the time votes were cast, that voters could look at. While he - and I - much preferred paper ballots instead of voting by touchscreen, he didn't think he could get that passed, while this seemed to have a chance, and was better than nothing. Holt's bill had about 150 cosponsors, including multiple Republicans (Holt is a Democrat), but my Representative, Mike Capuano (Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Chelsea) was not on the list. I called Capuano's office to ask, and they told me he opposed it. Why? They weren't sure, so they said they'd find out and call me back, and not long after, they did call me back to explain. ( What Capuano's objection was, and what I did with that information... ) Capuano's office thanked me for the call, and said they'd pass along everything I'd said to the Congressman. Shortly after, Capuano co-sponsored Holt's bill. I've had this story in the back of my mind for years, and am finally getting around to posting it now because Massachusetts is holding a special election tomorrow to elect a replacement for Ted Kennedy in the US Senate. Mike Capuano is running in tomorrow's Democratic primary, and I hope you'll vote for him. I've had several other interactions with him since this one, and he's changed my mind on a few things. I've found him to be effective, smart, progressive, great at constituent service, and great at his job in Congress, and I think he'd be a good replacement for Senator Kennedy. I hope that if you live in Massachusetts, you'll vote for him, and whether you do or not, you'll pass this on to people you know in Massachusetts. (40 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
11:49 pm	Thanksgiving's dubious origins Yesterday, my housemate asked if Thanksgiving is a holiday all over the world, or mainly just here? We all knew that Canada has a Thanksgiving in October, but she had no idea if it's widespread in the rest of the world. I thought it was probably just here, and couldn't think of any other country that has it, but didn't know whether maybe a few others might... so I went searching the net. Apparently, one other country in the world has a national Thanksgiving holiday. It's on October 25th, in between the Canadian (2nd Monday of October) and American (4th Thursday of November). Do you know which country, and what the holiday is commemorating? Think of your answer. Then click here to check. Then come back and vote in my poll, and also leave a comment with your initial reaction once you found out (preferably before reading anyone else's comments). Poll #1490935 theotherthanksgiving Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 63 Do you know what other country has a national Thanksgiving holiday? View Answers Yes, and I know what they're commemorating. 1 (1.6%) Yes, though I didn't know why. 3 (4.8%) Thought I knew / probably had it, but I was wrong. 1 (1.6%) I wasn't sure, but I guessed it! 0 (0.0%) Well, that was a surprise. 50 (79.4%) Other (a cos in cos' own poll?) 8 (12.7%) (27 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 25th, 2009
9:09 pm	Trillian Blonde I found an old cardboard box of CDs that I hadn't gone through since several moves ago, that contained mostly CD-R's, demos, show recordings, pre-release albums from friends' bands, and the like, from the mid/late 90s. Unfortunately some of them were damaged - I think this box was in my trunk on a road trip a long time ago and soaked up some automotive liquid (antifreeze? wiper fluid?) from a leaky container. I've been able to restore some of them by washing them, though even most of those have some damaged tracks. One that seems to have survived completely* (after washing) is "Bad Release: The Dead Opossum Sessions" by Oxytocin High. Which was their performance at WBRS that I recorded, and they possibly re-mixed then burned onto CD with track names and titles, and a nice printed label. Someone even entered all the track info into CDDB. So I'm sitting here listening to lyonesse and ceelove singing songs they wrote, with instrumental accompaniment by coraline, nacht_musik, and a few of their friends. I can hear chaiya in the audience, and I know iabervon and veek are there. I haven't listened to this in probably nearly a decade. But I used to sit in on some of their living room practices, and it's surprising how completely familiar every single song is. I didn't think I remembered their songs, and if you'd asked me yesterday I probably wouldn't have been able to recall any of them except maybe a title or two. * One small skip in track 4, Ashes and Sighs. [ Some of the other finds in this box: An early 4-track demo from January, and an early 4-track demo from Fluttr (before they became Fluttr Effect) which has some damage causing pops and hiss in the first ~10 seconds of each track ] (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
8:50 pm	Public Option: very quick update We lost one battle: the awful Baucus-Grassley health reform bill passed the Senate Finance committee. It's the "base bill" for the Senate now. Hopefully many pieces of the far superior HELP bill will make it into the final legislation. Overall we're still in a good position, and the public option still has better-than-even odds. Unfortunately, chances are high that at least some poison from the Baucus-Grassley idiocy will get into the final legislation. Hopefully, the calls we made over the past few weeks have influenced our Senators to fight harder to remove as much of that poison as possible from the Senate's final bill, and the calls and donations we made before that have influenced House progressives to stick to their guns and block anything from the Senate that doesn't have a public option. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, October 12th, 2009
2:25 pm	[Boston] Zap Mama tonight ... Five women dressed in many colors are singing a rhythmic soundscape on the state. They bring it to a quiet, and silently place their wireless mics, in unison, on the wooden floor at their feet (clack-clack-clack-clack-clack). Slowly, one, then the others, tap their feet lightly, recreating the rhythm. They swoosh their thin, colorful scarves in the air in front of them, lightly almost-touching the mics in time with the music, adding a flowing windy sound as they begin to sing again... I've seen several thousand live music performances, and the three times I saw Zap Mama stand out in my memory. They might possibly be the best band ever. Wikipedia has this: ... musical group founded and led by Marie Daulne. Daulne says her mission is to be a bridge between the European and the African and bring the two cultures together with her music. "What I would like to do is bring sounds from Africa and bring it to the Western world, because I know that through sound and through beats, that people discover a new culture, a new people, a new world." Zap Mama specializes in polyphonic, harmonic music with a mixture of heavily infused African instruments, R&B, and Hip-hop and emphasizes voice in all their music. "The voice is an instrument itself," says Daulne. "It's the original instrument. The primary instrument. The most soulful instrument, the human voice." They sing in French and English with deep African roots. Actually they also sing in some African languages and in made-up sounds and nonsense syllables. Their use of vocal music pretty spoiled me for a capella. One song on their first album is a story about a drive: the rattling of the keys, the start of the ignition, the quiet roads, the sounds of passing on the highway, the crash, the ambulance... all without words in any language. On stage, I saw them act it out, be the car as they sang it. Marie Dualne was born in the Congo to Belgian & Bantu parents, and grew up in Belgium with her Bantu mother after her father was killed; her music is very very much "world music", and deliberately so. So, Zap Mama has a show at The Paradise in Allston tonight. Doors at 7pm, I guess the show is around 8:30. Coming? Edit: Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, 02215. On the Green Line B branch. $22, 18+ (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
12:13 pm	Contra tomorrow Boston people: Who wants to go to the NEFFA contra dance in Concord tomorrow evening? Wild Asparagus, one of my favorite contra bands, who play a bunch of dances at Falcon Ridge every year, are playing this Thursday's dance. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
7:59 pm	Health Care: Public Option Update Several people asked me for an update to my earlier post about what you can do if you want a public health insurance option passed. Sorry I've been slow. Now's the time to call, so read this today if you want to help. Where We Are Now Everything I wrote then remains true. Here's what has changed: I said the Senate Finance Committee would come up with a terrible proposal. Indeed, the Baucus-Grassley proposal was completed, and it is irredeemably awful. I said that the public option probably had the support of a majority of the House and Senate. Now we know that to be true; it has been independently verified by Democracy for America. I said that the media was misleading you by focusing on the Senate Finance Committee, since other committees were done and Finance was the only one where there was still some action. That's even more true in the past few weeks, and the press has made it seem as if the fate of reform lies in what amendments pass or fail in the Finance Committee. That's still false; the fate of reform lies in whether or not we prevent the Finance Committee's idiocy from becoming law. I said that our best strategy for good health reform legislation with a strong public option is to defeat the Baucus-Grassley proposal in committee, so that Finance passes no bill at all. That vote may happen this week. If you want it, more detail about points #1 and #2 ( here behind the cut... ) What You Can Do Briefly: Call Democrats on the Finance Committee and ask them to vote NO in committee on the Baucus-Grassley proposal (officially "America's Healthy Future Act"). Last time, I asked you to call and thank those Representatives who had signed a letter saying they would vote against final legislation without a public option. They stiffened the House's backbone, vs. the Senate, on this. Now, the Senate is where we can make a difference: If we can prevent Finance from passing its awful bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will run out of time to wait for them, and will bring the much much better HELP Committee bill (with a public option) to the Senate Floor as the base legislation. If we can manage that, we head off that fight between the House and Senate, and nearly ensure a better bill becomes law. If we can't manage it, then things get harder; our odds for getting a public option would still be better than 50%, but they'd be lower, and all sorts of other bad stuff from the Finance Committee might make it into law too. Finance has 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans. We can expect Republicans to vote no, but there's a risk that Olympia Snowe will vote yes. So, to be relatively safe, I think we need 4 Democrats to vote no. If Grassley and Enzi vote yes, we'll need 6 Democratic no votes, but if the proposal turns out to be so horrible that even Grassley and Enzi would vote for it, we shouldn't have much trouble getting some extra Democrats to oppose it. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted an amendment in committee to add a public option to the Baucus-Grassley bill. It failed, but 10 of the committee's 13 Democrats voted for it. Can we find 4 from among those 10, who will vote no on the whole bill? Here's a list of Finance Committee members. Do you live in one of their states? Call! Tell your Senator's office that you think the Baucus-Grassley proposal is terrible and cannot be salvaged, and ask them if they'll commit to voting "no" on it in committee, so that the much better HELP bill can become the Senate's base bill. Here are the ten who voted for Schumer's public option amendment: Massachusetts: John Kerry - 202-224-2742 New York: Chuck Schumer - 202-224-6542 New Jersey: Robert Menendez - 202-224-4744 Delaware: Tom Carper - 202-224-2441 Michigan: Debbie Stabenow - 202-224-4822 West Virginia: John D Rockefeller - 202-224-6472 New Mexico: Jeff Bingaman - 202-224-5521 Florida: Bill Nelson - 202-224-5274 Washington: Maria Cantwell - 202-224-3441 Oregon: Ron Wyden - 202-224-5244 (28 Comments |Comment on this)