When listening to Wooden Wand (James Jackson Toth) in the many monikers and lineups that he has participated in (Wooden Wand and the Vanish Voice, etc.) it is most difficult for me to write a review from the dispassionate music critic. The hubris of the detached observer is sheared away, very often, leaving a captivated fan and nothing more. In my last review of Wooden Wand (in this incarnation it was Wooden Wand & the Skyhigh Band) I wanted more Toth and an accessible sound. That is definitely the theme of of “James & the Quiet.” It is both a blessing and a curse however. Toth explodes into some tracks with sounds and lyrics that seal my respect for the artist. There are others that have a Dylanesque ernestness but don’t quite live up to the promise of the tracks that really make the album. (more…)

The CNN/YouTube presidential debate, in which voters submitted online videos with questions for the Democratic candidates, was praised in some quarters as the most earthshaking change in communication technology for presidential politics since the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960. So says the New York Times editorial page today. I am not really feeling the shaking beneath my feet but hey the questions came from… online… you know… the internets… the tubes? Looks like the Times seems to feel the same way. But the format was still basically the same one that’s been used for nearly 50 years: candidates standing on a stage, answering questions selected by the news media during a made-for-television broadcast. The rest of the op-ed asks various experts for their opinion on what a real “new media” debate would be. I was not really satisfied with some of the answers others I like a lot. So I thought I would let the minds of vdov readers turn it over for a while and see if we could come up with anything better. (more…)

Short and sweet: My first paper and my first first-author publication entitled “Simulation of Atmospheric Transport and Droplet-Thin Film Collisions in Desorption Electrospray Ionization” has been published in the journal Chemical Communcations, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, UK. You can find the link to it here.

Pretty much every news media outlet from paper to TV station to blogger to the president of these United States has had something to say about Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record recently (on the same day that the A-Rod hit into the 500-club no less). Time Magazine recently had an extremely poorly organized feature taking the reader through Bonds’s stats year-by-year from his rookie season in 1986 until 2007. Unfortunately you had to click 22 times to get from 1986 to 2007, which made it nearly possible to view the data in any meaningful way. Not only that, they had a very curious statistic up there called “Runs per at bat” and listed numbers from the 10s to the 20s. Now, as someone who watches baseball religiously, I would be absolutely impressed if Bonds had managed to score an average of 10s of runs per at bat. That would be quite remarkable, albeit impossible. Instead what they meant to have up there was “At bats per home run”. I have compiled their statistics into 3 graph’s that I think without question seal his fate as a complete and utter disgrace to the game. (Note that his batting average didn’t really correlate with weight or at bats per HR, which means he didn’t connect with the ball any better than he ever had. All it means is that when he did connect, it went further.) (more…)

Doesn’t this seem fundamentally wrong somehow?

pts/4 root@enskog:/etc/apt # apt-cache policy iceweasel
iceweasel:
  Installed: 2.0.0.5-0etch1+lenny1
  Candidate: 2.0.0.5-0etch1+lenny1
  Version table:
     2.0.0.6-1 0
        500 http://debian.osuosl.org unstable/main Packages
     2.0.0.6-0etch1 0
        600 http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Packages
 *** 2.0.0.5-0etch1+lenny1 0
        900 http://security.debian.org testing/updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2.0.0.3-1 0
        600 http://debian.osuosl.org stable/main Packages
        900 http://debian.osuosl.org testing/main Packages

I just thought it was a little funny. If you use Debian or Ubuntu and Co., you might get it.