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David Boles wore cat ears and writes about his cat’s reaction.
His tale reminded me of the time that I started imitating my cat by licking my “paws.” It garnered me some strange looks from the cat.
If you’re reading this, you’re missing GECCO: The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference for 2008, Saturday to Wednesday, July 12 - 16. It’s in Atlanta, Georgia. If I weren’t on a contract right now… I’ll bet it will be a lot of fun, even if I couldn’t understand the most rarefied and technical papers.
GECCO conference
Statistically Improbable Phrases has a good article on “How to be a freelance illustrator.” First bit of advice:
Get a website. I can’t consider anyone who isn’t online. I’m sorry, that seems harsh, but I physically do not have time to spend an hour going to a coffee shop and shuffling through the portfolio of each of the dozens of illustrators I hear about. I need to see all your work in about 30 seconds, then move on to the next candidate.
In other words, make it easy to find you.
Maybe it should be called a “thinko.” Someone at CNN blanked out on the name of a senior statesman and inserted some other random name starting with the same letter.
Unfortunately, that other name is the fictional protagonist of 1950s romantic literature. “Mandingo” was the kind of book sometimes called a “bodice-ripper” from the nature of the action and the character Mandingo was a slave. Freudian slip, anyone?
Blake Stacey of Science After Sunclipse explains The Necessity of Mathematics.
…More and more people are becoming convinced that our civilization requires wisdom in order to survive, the sort of wisdom which can only come from scientific literacy; thus, an increasing number of observers are trying to figure out why science has been taught so poorly and how to fix that state of affairs…
Our thesis will be the following: that if one does not understand or refuses to deal with mathematics, one has fatally impaired one’s ability to follow the physics, because not only are the ideas of the physics expressed in mathematical form, but also the relationships among those ideas are established with mathematical reasoning….
Annulla tells us about Lynda Barry at the Post Bang conference.
Author, teacher, humorist, cartoonist, muse, Lynda Barry is an American original. She is brilliant, creative, dedicated and inspirational, yet somehow the fame and fortune (especially the fortune) she deserves have managed to elude her.
Instead of being a household name, she is more of a cult figure. While a devoted fanbase worships her every jot and scribble, she still struggles to have her work published and derives most of her income by selling sketches on eBay.
Tonight, Lynda spoke as part of Post Bang: Comics Ten Minutes After the Big Bang!, a symposium on the growing cultural significance of comics sponsored by New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU with the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA). This was a serious academic event which described Lynda’s appearance thusly: “Harvard scholar Hillary Chute in conversation with one of the country’s foremost alternative cartoonists, LYNDA BARRY (Ernie Pook’s Comeek, The Good Times are Killing Me, What It Is).”
This was reported last October and has been languishing in my drafts ever since.
Lately we’ve been seeing news reports that bad marriages can damage women’s health through increased stress levels. What’s it like to be considered potentially a dangerous criminal everywhere you go?
A science teacher, minding his own business, was subjected to a “high-risk takedown” by police in Brooklyn.
This has kind of thing has also happened to a lawyer, a singer, a diplomat, and a prominent TV announcer, that I know of.
BY JOHN MARZULLI
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERA mild-mannered Brooklyn high school teacher says he was nearly scared to death by NYPD cops who mistook him for a perp.
When the violent encounter was over, Lester Jacob, 50, suffered a heart attack and was left on his own in the street by cops, who accused him of “acting.”
In July he underwent open-heart surgery.
Jacob had the misfortune to be driving home through Brownsville, Brooklyn, on June 22 around the same time cops were on the lookout for a hit-and-run driver. Jacob, an earth science teacher at James Madison High School in Midwood, heard a siren, looked in his rear-view mirror and dutifully pulled over for the radio car behind him.
He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Two officers rushed up to Jacob’s vehicle and pointed their guns at his head, according to a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Cursing at him, they ordered Jacobs out of the car and roughly cuffed him.
“One officer crushed his knee into Mr. Jacob’s back,” the complaint states. “They then repeatedly slammed his head onto the car and then pressed his head against the car for some time.”
Additional officers arrived on the scene with a witness to the earlier accident. The witness told them Jacob was the wrong guy.
“‘I told you it was a white Maxima,’” the witness reportedly said, according to the complaint. Jacob drives a white Infiniti.
Jacob told the cops he was experiencing chest pains and began coughing uncontrollably.
A female cop said, “Nice acting,” according to Jacob, and then drove off. Jacob said he struggled to drive home, stopping to vomit on the side of the road.
His wife rushed him to the hospital, where doctors determined he had suffered a heart attack.
“I was scared to death,” Jacob said of his brush with the NYPD. “I was feeling terror.”
His attorney John Lambros said there was no reason for the cops to handcuff or use excessive force against the 150-pound teacher while they were waiting for the witness to show up.
The cops were not identified, but their radio car number has been turned over to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. A spokeswoman for the city Law Department said the complaint is being reviewed.
I can find nothing on the Internet about the results of the complaint or a decision by the review board.
Here’s a contrasting example within the same person’s body: Driving as a black woman, then as a black man.
The Toronto Transit Commission has given the public access to their new Web site, which is in beta test. I urged:
Take time to visit the new site and leave your feedback. We can help the TTC to improve their user experience if we act now.
First, go and roam around the TTC beta site. Then return to its home page. At the bottom is a link to a survey. Follow the link and fill out the survey.
Now I have to add—if it works!
Maybe an e-mail to the TTC’s Webmaster? No, there’s no e-mail address.
What about the Contact Us page? No.
There’s no link back to the old site, so no way to get back unless you have the presence of mind to use the Back button in your browser enough times to get to the introduction page.
This is getting funny. It’s reminding me that many editors have called the TTC over the years, offering to help improve their signs and instructions, only to be told, “We’re all right. We have the best safety record in North America, so everything is fine.” Meanwhile, their warning on the in-car alarms still ask people to set off the alarm in case of vandalism or passenger safety!
I will try to get in touch with them via the old site and tell them that the survey form isn’t working. Of course, it could be my computer. But I hope they tested it on external computers.
UPDATE: I phoned the TTC and they said, as help-desk people often do, “That shouldn’t be happening.” I described the problem, then read them bits of the error message, then offered to send a screen shot. So I’m doing that.
That’s one of my favourite ironic jokes. How can an illiterate person read the sign that tells him to call for help? (Generated sign is from AddLetters.com.)
For just a taste of it, take a look at this Web page.
Well, at least you know that was about a fishy thing. But what’s important about it? What are we supposed to notice?
Frustrating, isn’t it? Who are those people? What are they doing? Where are they? Is it important to know?
What can we do to help people who really can’t read? Who can’t read street signs or maps or employment forms?
These pages are from the Tiktaalik Web site, translated into Inuktitut by the government of Nunavut because the fossils were found in their territory.
For more about Tiktaalik’s story, see “Your Inner Fish” or “Tetrapod transition.”
The Toronto Transit Commission’s new Web site is in beta test, which means it’s not in production but we can visit it and the TTC wants our feedback to finalize the design. You’ll be doing yourself and myriads of TTC users a favour.
The Toronto Star reports that the TTC’s new home page is still a work in progress:
—Tess Kalinowski, Transportation Reporter
Now there’s a better way to navigate the TTC online but the transit agency isn’t home yet when it comes to its new website. The TTC previewed its long-awaited homepage today to replace the version it’s been running since 1998. With new easy-to-read graphics and search engines for bus and streetcar routes, it nevertheless doesn’t yet have a trip planning tool or up-to-the-minute service updates for the system. Those features, along with an e-commerce function, will be added by next year, said the TTC’s marketing manager Alice Smith. Eventually the TTC’s site will function like the Chicago transit system’s where users can actually watch the buses and see delays, said commission chair Adam Giambrone.
This is the TTC’s old home page. It’s quite long. Notice the link at the top to the new site.
The badges in the old page are links to sub-pages. Those might be in the TTC’s own Web site. This is the result of clicking “TTC Service:”
Or they might go to a page in the extensive City of Toronto Web site:
The new site has an introduction. It uses a lot of abstract nouns and needs a plain-language rewrite.
Then you click “Continue” to get to the new home page:
This new web page is quite wide, about 960 pixels. People with older monitors might not realize that there’s a far right-hand column with more choices unless they have horizontal scrolling turned on and they look at the horizontal scroll bar.
The new site looks pretty. It uses the streetcars’ colours of red, black, and white. But close your eyes half-way and squint at the screen. You’ll see that the heavy black bar across the top is the strongest visual element. It pulls your eye away from the more important text below.
Because of the strong horizontal elements, It took me a while to realize that the menus should be read vertically from the heading above the line.
Four topic areas are headed by a red line faintly divided by grey bars, and with a dot like a station on a route map. To me, the dot separated the menus from their title rather than connecting them.
The site is divided logically into four main topic areas
This is the Schedules & Maps area.
It was not obvious to me that the three symbols along the top stand for the three kinds of routes. Perhaps the symbols could be placed vertically with their descriptions beside them. Also, there’s lots of room to write “Rapid Transit” or “Rail Transit” instead of the cryptic “RT.” When in doubt, spell it out.
There’s a place-holder for a link to the future trip planner. I hope that it will allow you to say when you want to arrive will tell you when you have to leave, instead of just asking you when you want to leave. Or perhaps it will even ask you which way of planning to use.
To get to a schedule, click in one of Subways, Buses, or Streetcars. If you know your route number, such as 501C, you can type it instead of searching through the schedule menus.
I chose Streetcar Routes. You go to a second-level menu of major routes.
Select a route. (I chose 501 Queen.) The white-on-black text at the top of the route tells you that this is for eastbound streetcars. Many people can’t read reverse video easily and will read “Westbound” more clearly than “Eastbound.”
The schedules have the very nice feature of showing the next vehicle scheduled to go by in each direction. (In future, you may see real-time results.) The next scheduled arrivals appear at main intersections for active routes.
If you select a sub-route, you get a more detailed schedule:
Unlike the Streetcars menu, the Service Alerts menu is scattered over the page:
The Service Alerts menu makes your eye rove around to see all the choices. This seems like an attempt to use up all that horizontal white space. There’s nothing wrong with the old, vertical format:
If drill down a level in the new Web site, you’ll find that warnings such as Construction Projects are unfinished.
Until the Web pages are are complete, I think that they should link to the updates on the City of Toronto site, as the old Web site does.
The Star is correct: it’s a work in progress. Take time to visit the new site and leave your feedback. We can help the TTC to improve their user experience if we act now.
First, go and roam around the TTC beta site. Then return to its home page. At the bottom is a link to a survey. Follow the link and fill out the survey.
The Royal Ontario Museum is hosting an exhibit about the life and work of Charles Darwin. Toronto Star writer Peter Calamai has a review: “Darwin Still Battling Creationists.” Here are a few points:
Only those with unusual physical stamina will be able to take in the admirable richness of this show in one visit….
In the first place, the explanatory panels crowding the Garfield Weston exhibition hall contain – by official count – almost 39,000 words. At an average rate of two words a second, that’s more than five hours of reading.
And there are far too few places to sit and rest both mind and feet, particularly if your idea of intelligent contemplation doesn’t include being assailed by proselytizing film clips.
… parts of “Darwin: The Evolution Revolution” are an exercise in anti-creationist persuasion….
Plan to go and see Darwin’s notes, a replica of his study, and information about the evidence and insights that helped him to realize the mechanism of evolution.
A blogger in China helped rescuers to locate a suitable landing field for their operations in Wenchuan.
A college girl successfully helped the Chinese air force to send relief effort, by posting on the Internet, Chinese news reported on May15th, 3 days after the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Wenchuan County.
The girl, a student at Culinary Institute of Sichuan, is originally from Wenchuan. After knowing all roads to Wenchuan had been cut off by the earthquake and landslide that followed, and rescuing effort had major trouble to reach the epicenter by air due to the mountainous landscape of this valley county, she realized that a construction field near her village was probably a good location for helicopter landing….
You can see where the events of the 2008 World Science Festival will be held: all over Manhattan. Follow the link to reach an interactive map.
The festival will be held in New York May 29 - June 1. The World Science Festival is meant to communicate the wonder of science to non-scientists.
The World Science Festival is being held in New York May 29 - June 1. The theme is A Universe of Science.
The goal of this conference is to communicate about science, stimulate interest, and help science writers to demystify science to the general public.
Worlds are colliding: I got a note about this conference from the Society for Technical Communication (STC)
because I’m in the Science SIG; and members of Scienceblogs are going to speak at the conference. I notice a philosopher of science, as well: Daniel Dennett will be there. Science writers Carl Zimmer and Eric Haseltine will be there. What about you?
Also look at “World Science Festival Venues.”
Blake Rig was conducting a class exercise with his students when he got a disconcerting response: What’s America Famous For?” Blake is a writer and teacher in Sudan.
Maybe the U.S. is framing it wrong.
