Google Art Project appears to be collecting high-quality images from art museums around the world. I haven't explored much yet but it looks like it'll be nifty.

I thought this picture from APotD of the moon and Venus over Switzerland was a painting rather than a photo when I first saw it. Pretty!

I've often wondered what "X% chance of rain" really means -- anywhere in the geographic area during that time period, or something more specific? I found this answer informative.

The comic in a recent Language Log post made me laugh out loud.

Speaking of language, so did this 101-word story (link from arib). Go, read!

This elaborate prank on a phone company with terrible customer service is making the rounds. As nancylebov put it, some people deserve live muzak. (Hey, the Firefox spelling checker knows "muzak". But not "Facebook".)

Who knew Facebook was so complicated? -- a flow chart for one "what comment to post" decision tree.

Reminder: the Jewish Life and Learning project over at Area 51 is still looking for people interested in participating in a beta.

The easiest way to describe what happened to us this afternoon is: we were in the right lane of Baum Blvd, a four-lane "25mph" (yeah right) road, when we were hit by oncoming traffic. Um, right. No bones are broken and there was no blood, but lots and lots of muscles are rebelling against both of us, some of which waited a few hours to make their complaints known. Tomorrow will not be fun, I suspect. And just in case there was any doubt, yes, airbags can inflict bruises. (Dani, who was driving, said he didn't notice any impact from his airbag. I most definitely did from mine, but then would expect that in the death seat.)

This should be a no-brainer as far as fault is concerned, though it may be complicated some because the person who hit us said he had to swerve to dodge someone else, and that driver also stopped for the police report. I don't know if that's true or not, but either way it shouldn't be our problem; not only was he in our lane but he crossed another lane of oncoming traffic to get there. But Dani hadn't been planning to replace that car just yet, and the odds are pretty good that it was totaled. (The tow-truck driver offered that opinion, though of course he doesn't make the call in the end.)

I've never seen an airbag go off before and was a little surprised by it. One moment some idiot was barreling right toward us and the next I was sitting in a cloud of smoke wondering how in the world our engine could be on fire (that being the only explanation for smoke that then came to mind). Once I was willing to move at all I had to grope around quite a bit to find my glasses (I was unwilling to open the door or move my feet much until I found them). Fortunately they seem undamaged. We found Dani's glasses in the back seat. Yup, airbags pack a punch, but it beats the alternative.

Auto glass is amazing stuff. The windshield was completely shattered (tiny little pieces), but held entirely in place.

Dear Pittsburgh CLO: I gave you my phone number so you could contact me if there were problems with my theatre tickets. You lost points by calling to ask for a charitable donation, and you lost lots of points when your agent argued with my labelling of the call as a solicitation. His claim: you're not selling anything but asking for a donation, so that's not a solicitation. I recommend you buy him a dictionary. Unfortunately, you'll be doing it with your own money, not mine.

I'm used to size variation in women's clothing. (Why oh why can't women's jeans use waist and inseam like men's?) And I'm used to minor variations in shoes in US sizes (I seem to wear a size 7.75, which doesn't exist). I had not realized that there is significant variation in sizes on the (tighter) European scale. The size-38 Naot sandals I just tried are nearly half an inch shorter than the size-38 Birkies that fit (and that I bought). They're both the same style, your basic two-strap slip-in sandal.

Dani's company watched searching for evil recently. It's an overview of Internet security issues -- probably nothing new, but he spoke well of it so I want to bookmark it for when I've got a spare hour.

IANA considerations for TLAs was making the rounds at my company this week.

Via goldsquare comes this bizarre story: a man lost parental rights to his younger child, appealed, and was then killed in a car accident. Now state child-welfare agents want to support the appeal, so the child can share in his estate. The court says this is uncharted territory.

Specialized seasonal question: can anyone tell me, in the next 8 hours, if I use high-holy-day melodies in Hallel for Rosh Chodesh tomorrow morning? It's the last day of Av, not the first day of Elul (so we don't blow shofar yet).

( funny image and video behind the cut )

Quote of the day #1: "My parents visited a planet without bilateral symmetry and all I got was this stupid F-Shirt" (from bitsy_legend and Fred).

A few weeks ago BitDefender, my antivirus software, stopped working -- attempting to run a scan emitted a very unhelpful error message. Some time with Google showed me that lots of people were having that problem, and after some work I found and installed a patch. Today it shut down again, and after I tried all the new remedies suggested on a BD forum (lots more people are having this problem) I, in a moment of "it can't hurt" desperation, reinstalled the patch. (It should already be there, right?) And it started working again. I wonder what is going on. Customer support has been responsive but of mediocre quality so far. Ah well, one more reason to move to the new machine sooner rather than later. Once I have the Mac, I won't need the PC to be on the internet. And if I were staying with Windows, I'd surely replace BitDefender with something else when the annual subscription expires. (I have not, by the way, seen any evidence that the machine has actually been infected with anything.)

Signal boost: 530nm330hz has been developing his own siddur for personal use, and wants to know if enough people to justify a small production run are interested. The sample pages are quite lovely (a nice siddur can be more than just the words on the page); he's using color to effectively indicate variations for weekday, Shabbat, and festivals, and is laying it out in a way that sounds useful. Andrew's Orthodox, so it'll be a complete siddur.

This afternoon we saw a flurry of bicyclists cruising down our street. (There appears to have been some sort of organized activity, but I'm not sure what.) And, among them, I saw one guy on a huge unicycle. The wheeel was at least three feet across, possibly four. I wondered how one mounts a unicycle with a wheel diameter bigger than one's inseam. I don't yet have the internet in my pocket, so I had to wait until we got home to find out. Err, now that I know I'm even more impressed. I'm still not sure what you do about temporary stops, like red lights, though. It sounds like you need a hand-hold to get going; what do you do if none are available?

Quote of the day #2: "Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved", via kyleri.

Why aren't people commenting on my post? I've had this in a browser tab for a while waiting for a "misc" post to add it to, and I no longer remember where I got it.

I bought a new calendar today and, to my surprise, among the candle-lighting times on each page it lists Pittsburgh. (Usually we don't make the cut.) While looking at this I noticed that sunset in September is moving by about 12 minutes per week, but that in March it only moves by about 8 minutes a week. Shouldn't it be symmetrical? (The delta for sunrise and sunset changes over the course of the year, with the widest swings being at equnoxes and the smallest ones at solstices. I grok that; I don't grok that they don't match.)

Friday night I saw something unusual at services: a man lit candles and a woman made kiddush and there was no special occasion dictating that. For all that egalitarianism is a core principle in my movement, I don't think I have ever seen a woman make kiddush in our sanctuary before, unless there were special circumstances (sisterhood service, a bat mitzvah, etc). Gee, maybe there's hope that someday I will be offered that honor after all. (There's still another barrier: there is a strong meme of giving that pair of honors to a couple. This was violated this week, too.)

Yesterday morning after services our newest rabbi (hmm, I need a shorthand notation for him -- the others are "senior rabbi" and "associate rabbi") talked with the group about adult education. He wanted to know what we want to learn, when we want to learn it, and how we want to learn it. It was a good discussion; I wish im luck in distilling down feedback that, in aggregate, meant "all of it". :-) He seemed a little surprised by the idea that, actually, we'd love to learn on Shabbat -- ideally right after services, but late afternoon leading into havdalah would be acceptable to some. I hope that idea bears fruit. (Of course, he was asking the group of people who self-selected to stay around after services for the discussion... but every option doesn't need to appeal to every congregant, only to a critical mass. And we also discussed the idea of giving the same class multiple times, in different kinds of timeslots -- a teacher's dream, but for some reason we don't tend to do it.)

At the end of the discussion he said something interesting, so after it broke up I asked him "did you just imply that you're available for individual study?" and he said yes. Heh. I'll be in touch.

Short takes:

I assume that everyone has by now seen Jon Stewart on election hypocrisy. You might not have seen Language Log's discourse analysis on Karl Rove.

(I have not posted about the election; it's not because I don't care, but because there's so much as to overwhelm and lots of other people are already posting good, thoughtful pieces.)

I recently found myself in a discussion about internet discussions and used the phrase on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. I later went looking for the cartoon; it shouldn't surprise me that it has a Wikipedia entry, but it did surprise me a little that Google suggested the phrase after I'd typed only "on the internet". That real-time search-guessing thing is good sometimes. (I also went looking for a recipe for a dish I ate last night at Ali Baba's, and when I'd typed only "mujdara" it offered two completions, "recipe" and "calories".)

Speaking (sort of) of internet discoveries, this article from Real Live Preacher taught me about the Caganer, a figure we don't often see in nativity scenes these days but apparently quite normal in times past.

This article on using the internet for identity theft (link from Raven) didn't have anything new for me, but it's a good summary to give to people just getting started. It did remind me how annoying I find the canned security questions used by most banks -- things like "mother's maiden name" and "city of your birth" were way too easy to crack even before the net was ubiquitious. (And the ones that aren't tend to be non-deterministic, like "favorite color".) Fortunately, in most cases your bank doesn't really care about the answer; it's just a password. So lying adds security at little cost, assuming you can remember the lie. (What do you mean my first pet wasn't named "as375m~@z"? :-) )

This morning I was on a standard local street, one lane in each direction, at a red light. There was one car in front of me. The guy behind me, apparently impatient as he sped toward me, pulled up beside me (straddling the yellow line) and then proceeded to pull up next to the car in front of me, at which point I noticed he was signalling a left turn. Note: there is no turn lane and this light has no advanced green. I guess he couldn't wait the anticipated five seconds to get to the intersection once the light changed.

As he pulled up next to the car in front of me I heard a crunch: he had locked side mirrors and kept going. (He had to back up to disentangle the cars.) When the light changed they both went through the intersection and pulled over, and I pulled over behind them. As I walked up I saw the guy playing with her too-flexible mirror and saying "really, it's no big deal to fix this". This might or might be true, but given his behavior, I took a small amount of pleasure in handing her a card with my phone number and saying "just in case you need this, I was behind you and saw the whole thing". (I figure this is below insurance thresholds, but IMO he should cover her repair costs. Maybe knowing that she could bring a witness would help to motivate him to do so.)

I'll bet this cost him way more time than waiting his turn would have. Maybe this isn't a fitting thought for the month of Elul, but: serves him right.

This morning the parkway was uncharacteristically slow, which I discovered only once I was well down the ramp. As I was crawling along I spotted a signboard ahead. Oh good, I thought; it might say what's going on. It said "congestion ahead". Well duh. Would it have been so difficult to say how much farther ahead? (Didn't affect me; I was getting off at the next exit anyway. It could have helped others, though.

I'd sure like to know why, semi-randomly, no browser installed on my home PC will render the ThinkGeek site. The only deterministic aspect so far is that once it fails, it apparently won't work until a reboot. I even tried clearing the cache, turning the firewall off, and trying the site -- zip. (Yes, of course I immediately turned the firewall back on.) Maybe I'll pull out the laptop later.

For what I assure you is a perfectly good reason, tonight I was trying to find DVDs of the Star Wars movies in the Italian language. Searching got a little more productive once I switched to the term "guerre stellari", but it's still bringing me no joy. Looks like even if I could find them, and find them in NTSC, they'd be region 2. Oh well. But it wasn't a completely wasted effort; back-translation supplied the following titles: "Vendetta of the Sith", "The Ghost Threat", "The Empire Still Hits", and "Stellar Wars YOU - The Return of the Jedi".

Last night I learned that my former boss (the most recent ex-boss) is going on the Israel trip. He doesn't live in this city any more, so I didn't expect that. Nifty! More people I actually know in the group. (I already know less than half the group, so far.)

From passionateusers: The zone of expendability: how management feels about you.

osewalrus has an excellent post about why "stealing" wireless isn't stealing but trespassing.

On a different subject, osewalrus also had an interesting entry recently looking at legal aspects of marriage, custody, and consent a little differently.

Scott Adams on Bill Gates for president. There are worse ideas.

Our power went out this afternoon during a storm. After a couple hours, Dani said it's worth making sure we haven't tripped the main breaker to the house (i.e. it's not us). I pointed out that the power company's report-an-outage line wasn't answering and was instead playing a recording saying "power's out all over the place and we don't have time to talk to you; go away", but said he should feel free to check.

He went down to the basement with a flashlight. A couple minutes later, the power came on. A minute later, he came up.

I asked: did you do that? He said the only breaker that was tripped was the one powering the dehumidifer and he'd flipped that one back, but he hadn't touched anything else. Weird timing!

I'm just glad the power came on in time for me to use the oven for dinner. We had guests, and I really wanted to bake the fish rather than pan-frying it. (I wasn't too sure about the idea of poaching, the only other stovetop option I could think of.)

I assume that Amazon's recommendations are computed largely from overlapping purchases (the "people who bought X also bought Y" approach), though they are also influenced by personal data like what I've put on my wish list and, apparently, ratings. These methods are good at capturing positive data, but they're weak for negative data. And the similarity groupings seem to be broad (not deep), which sometimes means wacky results.

There seems to be no way to tell Amazon's engine that yes, I am interested in (Jewish) biblical texts and Hebrew, but this does *not* mean I'm interested in Greek or Christian texts. There seems to be no way to tell it that I'm (currently) uninterested in books about C++, though Java and general programming are interesting. There seems to be no way to stop getting it to offer me baroque, classical, and modern music (or books on music) just because I'm interested in medieval and renaissance music. I have no idea if the copious "not interested" indications actually feed into the data pool, or if they merely act as a filter on what to show on the list.

As long as I'm going on about the recommendations scheme: there are different flavors of "not interested", and there seems to be no way to capture that. I might be uninterested because of the subject -- e.g. don't offer me books about football. I might be uninterested because I own something else that fills the same niche -- a different, similar text on Hebrew, or a compilation album that contains most of the good stuff from the CD offered. In the latter case, I don't want it to draw broad conclusions about the genre/topic (she's not interested in Hebrew any more, or she no longer likes Eric Bogle, etc). If I check "not interested" in those cases, am I sabotaging myself down the road?

I do, by the way, sometimes send questions/suggestions like these to Amazon via their feedback form, but there is absolutely no way for me to tell if that's effective (or welcome).

(Deeper posts coming, but maybe not for a day or two due to other time pressures.)

You know your cat-sitters love you (and/or your cats) when they're willing to learn how to give subcutaneous fluids. Thank you lorimelton and ralphmelton! I do hope you don't need to apply that knowledge.

This morning at work the (reported) temperature was 66 and the landlord was working on it. This afternoon I saw it hit 79 and we had to poke the landlord again. On average the temperature was ok, but has no one explained to the landlord about variance? (This is a new building and our first summer in it. I do hope this isn't a sign of things to come.)

Bill Walsh posted a link to this review of the Da Vinci code. Fun read! I have no idea about the spoiler severity, as I've neither read the book nor seen the movie.

They say that shared pain is diminished, so let me diminish mine: Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheeseburger. autographedcat has it right: "That is quite possibly the most horrifying thing I've ever seen served on a plate".

Ulpan (intense Hebrew course) so far: I have a choice between being somewhat bored and being lost. I expected better calibration. I have hopes that the pace will pick up (I opted for the former) tomorrow or Thursday. (It's divided into two sessions, with two different teachers. In the first one, for reasons unknown to me, they grouped my class and the rank beginners together. I was already near the head of my (pre-combined) class. I visited the next-level class for 10 minutes and couldn't follow it, mostly due to vocabulary. The second session was significantly better.) On the positive side, I don't have the underwhelming teacher for either session.

My email provider is currently experiencing delays, apparently due to a flood of spam. Don't assume I've seen your LJ-comment mail (or anything else) just at the moment.