Terje Sorgjerd

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Passover wines 2011

For 2011’s seder we’ll go with last year’s winner, the 2009 Tishbi Emerald Riesling, for the first glass. Second glass will be the only red this year: a 2007 Recanati Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve. If we’ve finished those bottles by the third glass, as seems likely, we’ll open a 2007 Ella Valley Chardonnay, from the valley where David defeated Goliath. Then for the fourth glass we’ll go with a lightly sparkling Bartenura Moscato.

The Tishbi Emerald Riesling was my favorite again this year.

The Bartenura Moscato was startlingly light and clear, with almost a spritzer feel. At 5% alcohol, it barely feels like drinking wine.

The Recanati Cabernet was very dry, and those who like dry red wines seemed happy with it. Lisa and I both strongly preferred it with food, particularly paired with the lamb tagine that we served. It was not right for following the sweet Emerald Riesling.

The Ella Valley Chardonnay was fine, not very sweet, with no flavor notes that really stood out.

For 2012, we tried a Galil Cabernet and a Rashi Moscato d’Asti. They were ok.

Interface

When you have a couple of minutes, click on the squares.

http://mandaflewaway.tumblr.com/post/2057242738

Lies, damned lies, and BoingBoing; or why 42.03% is a dangerous number

A widely-read and widely-quoted post on BoingBoing said:

“Note 1: normal lifetime incidence in U.S. is about 42% (of developing any cancer). The increase in risk, i.e. 1 in 30 for 3,000 mSv (300 rem), changes the 42% to 42.03% chance of getting cancer in the exposed individual’s lifetime.”

1 in 30 = 3.3%, not 0.03%. Saying 42.03% understates the increased risk by two orders of magnitude. But BoingBoing trumpets the author’s credentials, highlights the sound bite which falsely trivializes the cancer increase, and ignores the numerous comments pointing out the error.

If you want to reassure me, you’re not going to do it by lying about the math.

Here’s another way of looking at it. Suppose you’re the Japanese government, trying to decide whether to expend the resources to evacuate 300,000 people from a hot zone where they’d receive a 3000 mSv cumulative dose over the next year. It might be nice to know whether the consequence of inaction is 10,000 additional people getting cancer or 90 additional people getting cancer. Math matters.

Last night at the PDF Hospital

Lisa checked a 6-page file into the PDF Hospital last night on behalf of a colleague. The complaint was a page that rendered very slowly and was impossible to modify.

Triage showed that the file was only about 2 megs, and the page in question only appeared to have a few images. Exploratory surgery confirmed that the problem was with the image components of the page by progressively removing the non-image components and still seeing the same symptoms.

This left 4 images to explore in depth. Each image was composed of a single background image, and 1024-16,384 copies of the foreground image mask and associated clipping path. The background image was larger than the foreground image mask, so it was easy to select and move out of the way. When we moved a copy of the foreground image mask, it disappeared because it was now outside the associated clipping path. But with the background image and one copy of the foreground image mask out of the way, we could select and delete the remaining image masks and clipping paths in the original image location. Once all of the clipping paths were deleted, the foreground image mask appeared again, and we verified through on-screen inspection and test prints that it was complete. We could then move the remaining background image and foreground image mask back into their original location without disturbing any of the item layering on the page at all.

Repeating this process on all 4 images resulted in a symptom-free page. We released the file back to its owner, and were left with the mystery of how you end up with thousands of identical copies of an image in a file. It’s almost certainly not the result of someone pressing a button 16,000 times.

The key is probably that the number of copies were powers of 2. If you are copying outside images and placing them into a file, the expected process is that when you select a new image to copy, that replaces the previously copied image in whatever bit of memory is being used as the temporary clipboard. Select A, place A, select B, place B. If, however, all previously placed images remain selected in memory along with the new image selected, then you’ll have exactly this sort of exponential result. If the brackets show the items previously placed, then you end up placing A, [A]B, [AAB]C, [AAAABBC]D, etc. You’ll have 16,384 copies of A happen after only placing 14 items. Fortunately, the damage was treatable in this instance. But it would be nice to know what software workflow is resulting in exponential pastes.

I’ve been thinking about opening the PDF Hospital for a while. We operate on PDF files all the time, and we’ve seen a lot of strange problems. Does your PDF file load or print really slowly, or give you PostScript errors? Do searches on the text not work? Do some pieces of text appear as different characters when printed than when they’re on screen? Do accents disappear, or capital W’s print as barcodes? Do some PDF viewers show little boxes in your PDF file? Do you want to move items around on the page, or make something larger or smaller? Do you want to remove or add items to the page? We deal with all of this frequently, so opening the PDF Hospital to outside business is the obvious next step. Not everything is treatable, but many problems are. The challenge is setting a price structure and managing expectations.

Help, I’m trapped in an elevator

No, seriously, we were trapped in an elevator on Saturday evening. Thank you to the Watertown fire department for getting us out. Apparently Schindler Elevator Corporation has repeatedly failed to fix the elevator, so people keep getting stuck in it.

It turns out that Massachusetts has no process for tracking elevator entrapments. The Department of Public Safety handles inspections, but they don’t take reports of entrapments. Neither does anyone else in the state. This means there’s no way to find out if Schindler Elevator Corporation is a terribly incompetent, dishonest, or dangerous company by tracking how many of the elevators they maintain fail repeatedly and compare that failure frequency to the failure frequency from other companies. It’s impossible to know whether this experience is an unusual occurrence linked to a single elevator that is supposedly maintained by Schindler Elevator Corporation, or a single incompetent repair technician working for Schindler Elevator Corporation, or a company-wide pattern of gross negligence. There’s also no way for the state to track whether elevator entrapments are linked to other sorts of elevator accidents, and no way for the state to decide whether elevator inspections should be about more than whether the alarm button makes a noise.

I like data. More than that, I like the idea of data, because I like thinking that decisions informed by data are, on average, better decisions. On the other hand, the building’s owner knows that they’re paying $4500 a year to Schindler Elevator Corporation, and they know that the elevator is failing constantly, and they know that Schindler keeps trying and failing to fix the elevator, and they know that people keep getting trapped in the elevator, and all of that is data. And the building owner’s decision is to keep paying Schindler, so clearly not all decisions informed by data are better decisions.

The plural of anecdote is not data. But the plural of silence is not data either. And since the data is unavailable, I’ll go with anecdote. Anecdotally, I don’t like Schindler Elevator Corporation right now. Because I don’t like being trapped in an elevator.

And no, I’m not retitling the post “Schindler’s Lift.”

Working my way up

For flooring, wide oak boards cut in curves and wandering paths to minimize wasted lumber by Bolefloor.

To put on that floor, an Art Nouveau rug from Sawbridge Studios, and perhaps one of their cherry and birdseye maple tables.

On second thought, maybe Lisa is right that the flooring should be on the wall, so you can see it properly.

And maybe that proverbial guidance counselor was right that I should go into a high-paying field, so I can actually afford this stuff.

Understanding the Fukushima news coverage

News coverage about the problems at the Fukushima nuclear reactors has been somewhat confused.

Radiation and radioactive are different terms. Radioactive substances emit radiation. A release of radiation is dangerous to those nearby. A release of radioactive substances is a wider problem, because those substances can then travel and emit radiation wherever they end up. For those of us who aren't near the Fukushima reactors, the key question is the volume and type of radioactive substances that are released into the environment, not the radiation levels near the plant.

A fuel rod within the reactor being exposed to the air does not mean that the fuel rod is exposed to the environment. There is air inside the containment structure. The concern with fuel rods at the Fukushima reactors being exposed to the air is that they then overheat, damage the cladding around the fuel rods, and make a core meltdown more likely.

A core meltdown is not, by itself, a widespread disaster. A meltdown that happens within an intact containment structure, as at Three Mile Island, doesn't mean that radioactive substances will escape. The key question with meltdowns at the Fukushima reactors is whether the containment structures stay intact.

Spent fuel rods are not safe. And the spent fuel pools at the Fukushima reactors are not inside containment structures the way that the reactors are (or used to be).

Using sea water for cooling is not just as good as using the purified water that is usually used for cooling. Purified water that becomes activated (turned radioactive) has a very short half-life. Sea water contains a lot of other substances that will stay radioactive a lot longer. Sea water can also damage pumps that are designed for fresh water, and the salt left behind may physically block continued access for the water needed to cool the fuel rods.

When radioactive substances escape into the outside air, it doesn't make a lot of difference whether they escape in a hydrogen explosion, in a steam explosion, in a fire, or in a steam release. What matters is the volume and type of radioactive substances that are then in the outside air, because they will gradually fall down to the ocean or the ground. The other key question that is unknown is how far the fallout will travel.

Choices

On its way to becoming a poster...

Five O’Clock Shadow

Tempo lib(e)ro

If you were my camera, where would you be?

If you were my camera, where would you be?
Would you be tasting salt spray in Paia, or gazing
out over the yachts in Camden Harbor all bundled up
for winter?
Would you be climbing the steps toward the dome of St. Paul’s,
or patiently waiting for a glimpse of blue sky after
we land, after
we dock, after
we leave this God-forsaken gray?

If you were my camera, would you wonder whether the elephant seals were back, or
where the humpbacks go for winter, or
why the great blue heron is always on the other side of the river?
Would you demand a daily walk?
Would you prefer a quick shot after dinner to take the edge off the day,
or a good long time staring up at the night sky pointing out meteors?

If you were my camera, would you sit in that
bag, in that
corner, in that
room with nothing to read?
Would you search your memory for brighter days?

If you were my camera, would you wonder where I was?

Now I just need a cat

I wonder if we could scale this up for Dobbie. She loves perching high up on the back of the couch or on the end table.

Heard it on the radio

I love the radio when I’m driving. Lisa prefers her own playlist on her iPod, but I love the randomness and diversity of spinning the dial. At home my music selection is mostly limited to folk and rock and jazz, but in the car I happily add in hip hop and country and Latin and the frequently uncategorizable local college station shows. And sports radio, and talk radio, and hate radio, and NPR, and almost anything that’s not Diane Rehm. But I only recall being really stunned by music on the radio twice.

On July 21, 1990, I was driving in a small town in Pennsylvania and heard a cover of a song from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And then I heard another. In my memory, it was Joni Mitchell doing “Goodbye Blue Sky.” And then I found out that this was a live broadcast from Berlin. I hadn’t heard this concert was happening, and here I was listening to a concert in Berlin while it was happening from my car in Pennsylvania. My 5 minute drive across town lasted over an hour.

About 250,000 miles later, on January 10, 2011, I was leaving Pennsylvania and had just started picking up radio stations in upstate New York. It was 11 a.m., at the time of the national moment of silence for the Arizona murders. The most prominent victim, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was lying in a hospital, somehow alive after having been shot in the head. I had wondered what music stations would do for the moment of silence, and the station I was listening to chose to play “Grenade” by Bruno Mars. With the repeated lyrics “I would go through all this pain, Take a bullet straight through my brain, Yes, I would die for ya baby, But you won't do the same.”

It’s almost enough to make me get an iPod too.

Resolution isn’t everything

On the left is the custom design job for a client to be printed at 11x17. On the right is what was just delivered. Forgive the webcam limitations: the printed version on the right has deep blacks on a perfect white background and is sharp as a tack. Except that everything has been turned into some sort of Space Invaders parody. Thanks, cafepress, but try again.