smokerblog

The Nuttonbutton

The truth has finally been revealed. You know those pedestrian crosswalk buttons, the ones that supposedly activate the traffic light to allow you across a busy street? Today's NY Times reveals that the vast majority (in NYC, at least) don't work.

Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked...By the late 1980's, most of the buttons had been deactivated, their steel exteriors masking the lie within. But city officials say they do not remember ever publishing an obituary, and the white and black signs stayed up, many of them looking as new and official as ever.

Is this some kind of sophisticated conspiracy to sooth and placate the pedestrian rabble? Is it a plot by auto-makers and oil companies to favor auto traffic in the downtown of major cities? The city claims that they are saving money by leaving the buttons in place, removing them only during major reconstruction projects. Either way, this revelation adds a whole new dimension to one's street crossing decision making process. Is it really worth the effort to push that button?

Rules of Relegation

Today's post is about English soccer, erm, I mean football. So okay, it's not the most popular sport in this country and the team I'm talking about is even less popular, maybe downright anonymous: Manchester City.

Not Manchester United. Manchester City.

In England's Premier League, Manchester City began the season having gone on a spending spree to attract several big name players and make a push for a top six finish. One of the big purchases was US National Team captain Claudio Reyna who joined Manchester City in a $3.9 million last minute deal from recently relegated Sunderland.

Relegated, you ask? Imagine Major League Baseball setting up a system where the teams finishing in last place in each division were forced to play a AAA minor league schedule in the following season while the top minor league teams get promoted to the majors. This relegation/promotion scheme would cascade down through the minor league system to the AA and A teams. That's roughly how the English soccer system works.

So a top six finish in the Premier League is crucial because it guarantees a place during the next season in one of the European cup championships which include the Champions League, the UEFA Cup, and the Inter-Toto Cup. These can be quite lucrative campaigns for a club and can dramatically increase their prestige throughout England and Europe. The pre-season spending spree was widely interpreted as an investment in Manchester City's future in European cup play.

Alas, after a lackluster season, including a 15-game losing streak at home which was only just broken this past Saturday, the Blues find themselves instead in a battle to avoid relegation to the First Division. The team remains positive: as of this writing, bookmakers are putting the odds of City's relegation at 8/1. For Reyna's sake, I hope the team can stick it out. It would be sad to have played two different relegated teams in two years.

spam haiku

One of the (many) nice things about using the Macintosh platform is getting Apple's Mail client included as part of the operating system. Sure, it's not perfect, but I haven't found an email client yet that fits my needs perfecly. Besides, Mail is free.

I didn't care much one way or the other about Apple's junk mail filter until I started using it. Now, I think it's great. Others have reported mixed results, but I only receive a couple spam messages a day that slip through the filter (out of more than 100) and only one message or so a month that registers as a false positive. I still have to occassionally skim through my junk mail folder to double-check and recently I found a couple of interesting spam trends.

One way that spammers try to fool junk mail filters is by sprinkling semi-random innocuous words throughout a message. Sometimes (okay, rarely) this results in some interesting not-quite poetry:

Their soft cat is on fire.
Their odd shaped t-shirt smells.
A round-shaped spoon is angry the time that whose soft printer sleeps.
His brothers noisy sofa stands-still.

So it's not that great. There's a certain amount of shock value in the first couple of lines and I can totally imagine how a round-shaped spoon might be angry. But then yesterday an email that evaded my filter startled me with its haiku-nature:

no degree no job
get a instant university degree
no neeed study or test

Even though it doesn't exactly conform to my haiku standards, I still was afraid that someone had specially targeted me after reading my site. The sad thing is, this spam might make better haiku poetry than much of what I've done so far...

Doggie Two Card Monte

To continue the dog kick I've been on lately, Harvard anthropologist, Brian Hare has conducted a study that reinforces what every dog owner already knows is true: dogs can read our minds.

Mr. Hare compared dogs' ability to react to human gestures and facial expressions with the same ability in Chimpanzees (humans' closest genetic relatives) and wolves (dogs' closest relatives). Two identical containers, one containing food, were placed next to each other. A human would gesture toward the container holding the food and record the subject's response. Dogs were most likely to choose the correct container while wolves and chimpanzees chose the correct container not much better than 50% of the time.

The test was conducted with animals of varying ages and having had varying levels of human contact. Puppies who had had little human contact still outperformed wolves who had been raised entirely by humans. This suggests that the ability to understand human cues was an important factor in the evolution of dogs from their wolfish ancestors.

But really, is there any doubt about this?

Top Fives

A while back, Ted asked me to post a list of my favorite books and I basically blew him off. Well, here's something to rectify the situation: a list of top 5 lists. I plan to update these lists sporadically and may even add top 5 lists of other things (like my favorite cereals, perhaps).

Why top 5? why not top 10? ummm, because I'm lazy. I had a list of top 100 movies going for a while, but it's too much of a hassle to keep it updated. So I'll stick with top 5. And before you get all weirded out by some of my choices, keep in mind that these are not my critical picks for best music/book/films of all time. These are personal preferences. These are works that have for one reason or another had a big impact on me personally (another reason why the lists are in a constant state of flux).

So there you have it. Enjoy!

Not Just Jack

While listening to KCRW recently, a particular tune caught my fancy and kind of moved into my head and stayed there for a couple hours. I happened to catch the name of the artist, Sean Hayes (no, not that Sean Hayes) and did a quick search on Amazon with no luck.

I'm not a huge folk music fan, but his music strikes me as fairly interesting, so I found his website and listened to some samples. It's got some rock and African influences and reminds me a lot of the most recent album by The Brothers Creeggan. Seems worth a listen.

Going to the Dogs

Anyone familiar with us or this website may have a clue that we love our dogs, perhaps to a fault. It shouldn't be surprising then, that we will be watching NOVA tomorrow night for their show on dogs.

Did you know that all dogs are classified as part of the same species? How is it possible that the Chihuahua and Great Dane breeds both share the same set of dna and are both descended from the gray wolf? Well, it's because we humans have been breeding dogs in ways that never would have occured in nature. The study that points to the wolf as the ancestor of domestic dogs (as opposed to the coyote, jackal, and fox, for example) is also the basis for an article the National Geographic recently ran.

Tomorrow night's show, which airs at 8PM on PBS, will also explore the strangely symbiotic relationship between humans and dogs. As an active host to my dogs' parasitic tendencies, I'll be interested to see what I might learn from tomorrow night's program.