dsandler.org/wp

Study group.

Brian has a pretty good roundup of the death of TechTV. “After firing all the TechTV people in San Francisco, [Comcast] graciously hired back some of them [to the new G4/TechTV channel] and forced them to pack up everything and move to LA, only to be fired 2 months later just before Thanksgiving and Christmas.” More tales of corporate screwage and thickheadedness.

Well, now you know I have some terribly pedestrian tastes in music
(OK, I guess you knew already).
But I’m definitely always looking for new stuff (unlike some
people).

So, what are you listening to right now? Some of my favorite music
at the moment is a result of serendipity, recommendation, and chance,
so your advice may land on my solstice-holiday music wishlist. (Yes, family
members, it’s OK to buy me a CD or two. I know you feel like buying
music is just a half-step up from buying a gift certificate (horror!)
but, look, it’s cheap, and I’ll get a huge amount of enjoyment out of
it, because I’m like that about music.)

Send me your favorite jams, and help me blot out the sun!

I was tempted to seek out How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (it’s the U2 album coming out next week, gentle reader-under-a-rock) on the Internets this evening. (Before we go any further, let me explain that there is no chance in hell that I’m not buying the album when it comes out. This isn’t a question of long-run theft, but rather, uh, temporary ownership violation.)

I didn’t, in the end, download it. Not because I couldn’t—it’s definitely out there, if you’re patient enough to deal with that sort of thing—but because I’m really trying to curb my need for instant gratification.

For one thing: the album’s coming out in a week, for goodness’ sake—I ought to be able to wait. Normal people wait. Law-abiding people wait. Everyone waits, and I need to suck it up and take a number.

I have to admit, though, that that argument doesn’t hold nearly as much sway over me as does this one: You’ll spoil it. This is the first album in four years; I remember how excited I was in 2000, when All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released; I had been working at Be, Inc. for a few months, and things were already getting stressful and busy at the office. Chris and I decided to tear down our cubicles on the first floor of 800 El Camino and create a slightly more team-oriented space, and so I put the album on my tinny PC speakers and rocked out as we schlepped Hermann Miller module chunks across the office.

I don’t want my memory of Dismantle to be, “Oh, yeah, when that came out, I was hunched over my filesharing software, subverting law and order.” I’d prefer for it to be, at the very least, “… I was hunched over my final projects, despairing of finishing by the end of the semester.” You know, something glamorous like that.

Spotted a memepool entry about paper airplanes, citing this complex design as the best (also: lots more designs). But I can’t imagine that any of these flies as well as Joe Palmer’s planes, especially when you consider that no tearing or cutting is required. (The PL-1 is extraordinarily easy to fold, too—only a couple steps away from the old dart that everyone knows how to fold, but which flies straight into the pavement.)

And while we’re talking about paper planes, be sure to grab a copy of Glider PRO, now that John Calhoun’s made it freely available.

When you digest food, its carbon atoms enter your blood. Unless they are expelled from your body, they add to your weight. But here is the salient observation: the only effective way your body has to get rid of digested carbon is to combine it with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, and then expel it through your lungs. Unless you breathe out the carbon, you gain weight.

I’m not sure how I feel about this Physics of Gluttony article. Yes, the author is a respected UCB physics professor, and yes, the “conservation of carbon atoms” argument makes a great deal of intuitive sense. Maybe I’ve become distrustful of elegant solutions. Does that mean I’m growing up?