a deep and troubling mystery!

What is the deal with institutional clocks? In the classroom I'm working in this semester, the wall clock has been wrong, differently, every day so far this semester...but always by approximately exact-hour intervals (in other words, it might say 5:11 when it's actually 10:11). The two nearest clocks in the hallway are also incorrect - and different both from one another and from the clock in my room, but also wrong by exact hours.

This is something I've noticed about institutional clocks, in schools, universities, and the like, for years...and it baffles me. In the rest of the world, setting a clock is no big deal: it runs accurately for a good long time, and sure, once in a while someone might forget which way to move it when Daylight Saving Times comes or goes, and so for a while it might be two hours out of whack - but that's easily corrected. What doesn't happen is random, arbitrary shifting of the time such clocks tell.

There seems to be some centralized (or at least distant) control for institutional clocks...since, as I'm sure you've all observed, when they're wrong, sometimes they suddenly start progressing rapidly forward or backward. Presumably someone somewhere is causing this to happen. But that still doesn't explain why such clocks are so prone to going wrong...or why when they do so, they're so often wrong by exact-hour intervals.

One more thing: these are the same kind of clocks whose minute hands creep backwards for a second before advancing...a phenomenon well-known to clock-watching test-takers, causing momentary heart attacks as if they will never get out of that room.

stand in the place where you live...

Strictly local content here...but it's curious how marketers assume certain things based on geography. In today's mail was one of those packets of coupons that arrive periodically - usually, I open them to see if one of them might be for somewhere I go to regularly or might be interested in, then toss it in the recycle bin.

But I've noticed that that marketers assume folks in our neighborhood (about two miles north of the airport, near the Walgreen's where Howell and Chase meet) are more interested in businesses to the south: nearer the airport, in St. Francis, Cudahy, or South Milwaukee. Of the 11 coupons for local businesses with one or two locations, 9 of them were south of us, and of the 2 whose location is to our north, one was three blocks north. Only one featured anything north of I-94...and that was one with two locations, one of which is in the Third Ward. (Those coupons were for an exercise center and a fried chicken place. The other coupons were for a bar that serves your typical bar food, two different Chinese restaurants, an Italian restaurant, a pizza place, a donut shop, a discount haircut joint, a hotel, and a carpet and tile outlet.)

But we ourselves are far more oriented toward businesses to the north of us. We're far likelier to head north when we go out or shop - to the Bay View business district, to the Third or Fifth Wards, downtown, or the East Side or Riverwest. That might be because we're former East Siders and Riverwest residents...but more likely, it's because of the kind of restaurants, bars, and other businesses we're interested in. My guess is that if we lived in a hipper part of Bay View, more of those businesses would show up in such mailers.

Or not: I'm kind of thinking the older, lower-middle-class crowd these places imply are probably more into coupons than yr hipster joints might be. (O noes did I just out myself as being vaguely hipsteresque? Vaguely...I mean, Blogger is like the AOL of free blog sites, isn't it?)

he is the Japanese sandman?

I'm a bit of a collector of phrases - sometimes for their content, often for their sound. An excellent example of the latter (which I could easily imagine Zippy the Pinhead repeating three times...) came up in class today.

One of my students was showing off the various ringtones on her phone, one of which was an obscure (particularly to my students) '80s song. I couldn't ID that song, but I mentioned the bit of trivia that the guy who did the contemporaneous "Science!" song (only a few heads nodded as I imitated Magnus Pyke...) was also a pioneer in ringtones: Thomas Dolby, according to his Wikipedia entry, "found[ed] Retro Ringtones LLC ... which produces the RetroFolio ringtone asset management software suite for companies involved in the mobile phone ringtone business."

In other words, I said, he was a ringtone tycoon.

Ringtone tycoon! Ringtone tycoon! Ringtone tycoon!

it is teh awesome...

Found this floating around the Facebook, where all those young whippersnappers hang their virtual...

aughts for naughts

Over at his spankin' new blog Reading Pronunciation, my pal Miles wonders why it is that no one's come up with a clever nickname for this decade yet. (It could be worse: it could be retroactively named like MTV named "The Big Eighties"...)

I have this vague idea that around the turn of the millennium (the odometer-turning-over, big-round-number millennium, not the pedants' millennium marking a numeric event that's just as illegitimate since there was no "Year 1" either - oh wait, looks like I'm earning the right to celebrate that millennium after all...) I came up with some clever name for the then-upcoming decade - but I can't remember it. Probably vanished along with the Y2K problem.

That locution, though, reminds me of one of the two irritating year-related things I've noticed since the beginning of the 2000s. One: the use of "2K" as part of a slangy way to write the year designation, as in "2K8." Folks, "2K" is two characters, so you're only saving a single character by typing it that way...and since you have to hit the shift key to do so, slowing down the flow of characters, you're saving no time at all. (See also: "@" for "at" outside of e-mail addresses.)

The other is people who, in using the date format m/d/year or d/m/year, leave off the initial "0" in the year field, creating date like "9/7/8" (that would be either September 7, 2008 in the US system or July 9, 2008 in the British). That simply doesn't look like a year - more like some bizarre hybrid shoe size - and with two digits in the month or date field - say, 10/15/8 - looks even weirder. I can understand dropping the "0" in month or date fields - for the month, there are only three that go into two digits, and for date, there are enough of them that the usual numeric designations (which do not generally include leading zeros) seem sufficient. But it's conventional to refer to years by dropping the century designators (i.e., the first two digits) and leaving the last two years of the number (thus the more traditional "'08" as an example). A naked "8" there simply doesn't mark out the concept of year, and makes one confused as to whether you're using yet another date system (such as year/month/date). But mostly, it just looks stupid, in my entirely subjective opinion.

hunters and collectors

Momus has an interesting article on record-store taxonomy (and yes, I'm sure he's aware of the oddly archaic air the whole notion of record stores might have). The essential problem is something I run into frequently, which is what to do in attempting to classify an item which is both A and B. One of my geekly traits is being fairly insistent on the classification system of my CD collection: CDs are stored alphabetically by artist (with some exceptions, below), within artist chronologically (what to do with collections is always iffy: do they go before the earliest represented selection, after the latest represented selection, or simply at the end of the artist's section?). That's the bulk of the collection - but after that is a separate section for various-artist items, which also includes tribute albums (which some folks might want to file with the artist so honored), soundtracks, etc. And after that is classical music - which I've organized in alphabetical order by recording label and within label by catalog number. That last one seems hopelessly arcane, I'll admit...and it certainly isn't obvious - but it does solve a problem. Some classical recordings might consist entirely of recordings by a single composer (whose name is, therefore, featured strongly on the cover). Others might consist of pieces by multiple composers and might be highlighting a particular musician or ensemble. Still others might be thematically organized. But here's the problem: here's a piano concerto by Composer X, featuring Musician Y and Orchestra Z, conducted by Conductor A. If I were a huge fan of any one of those, I suppose it would make sense to file the CD under that artist...but what if I'm a huge fan of several of them...or all of them? The label/catalog number solution simplifies: it uniquely identifies a CD, and it cuts through that selection process by saying "none of the above." Yes, it means I need to remember what label a recording is on in order to find it - but that wasn't all that challenging even before I assembled my music database, and now it's even less of an issue.

This system, logical as it might seem to me, still presents problems. Let's say there's a split CD, an EP each from two bands on one disc. Let's say I'm a huge fan of one band, while I've never heard of the other one. The nearest example I can think of is the Lilys/Aspera ad Astra split CD: I'm a huge Lilys fan, and although I'd heard of Aspera (they later shortened their name), I'm only lukewarm about their music. In that case, I just ignore the Aspera tracks where filing is concerned and put it in the "Lilys" section. But what about a split CD for two bands I like equally (or hadn't heard of: arrived for review, good enough to keep, not good enough to investigate further...)? Similarly: if all the other Kronos Quartet recordings are in the "classical" section, what do I do with their CD full of Thelonious Monk tunes, in which Monk is essentially treated as a composer? It's not a "tribute CD" (although I suppose it kind of is, just when Japancakes covers My Bloody Valentine's Loveless in its entirety), and it isn't played like jazz anymore...so I suppose it becomes "classical" by default. And what about Frank Zappa? Most of his work, of course, just gets filed under "Z" for "Zappa"...but what about the two-CD London Symphony Orchestra set playing his original compositions? And what about the various other small ensembles that have played Zappa's orchestral or small-ensemble compositions...or arranged his rock-band pieces for same? Do those recordings go in the "classical" section, or in the "tribute" section, or in the main alphabetical section under the name of the ensemble (just as that Japancakes CD would be under "J"...if it were a CD and not merely a collection of mp3s I purchased from eMusic).

Momus's article notes that the record store he visited had created such intensely imbricating classifications that it became nearly impossible to determine where a particular recording might be found. And woe to the artist whose style varies dramatically over a career (like Momus's own): they get stuck in whatever genre they began, even if their later recordings bear no relation to that genre whatsoever. This is true also of online database genre labeling: Wilco is "country" forever and ever, it seems...even though there's not a single second that sounds like country music on their most acclaimed release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I know I find it maddening trying to shop at a store that's excessively enamored of classification...is this in the main "rock" section, the "indie" section, the "bizarro-pop" section, the "what the hell were they thinking when they recorded this?" section, or the "please - we'll pay you to take this off our hands!" section?

The ironic aspect of this situation is that I imagine stores categorize items by genre in order to help shoppers: presumably, it's easier to find "No Age" in a section helpfully labeled "indie" than if their CDs were in amongst recordings of all the other genres in the store. But is that true? Is it necessarily the case that someone looking for the No Age CD is likelier to be swayed into buying another CD by its mere adjacency in the "indie" section? My guess is that many, many factors enter into whether someone decides to buy a title they weren't planning on buying: whether they know of the artist, have heard some of the music, like the cover, etc. It seems to me that anyone likely to buy a CD without having heard most or all of it (that is to say, something they randomly run into on the shelves) is the same sort of person whose interests probably transcend particular musical genre designations...particularly those set up not by fans of the music but by the store, which necessarily has to choose how to categorize items without hearing the music on them. (I'm sure record labels help out here.)

So I'm with Momus: my ideal record store would (big surprise) file its selections pretty much the same way my own music collection is filed: mostly a big alphabetical selection, with various artists at the end (or beginning). As for the classical stuff: the advantage of a record store is that it presumably has multiple copies of the same CD...so if it's Emanuel Ax playing a Beethoven piano concerto, some copies can go under "B" for "Beethoven" for the Beethoven fans, while others can go under "A" for "Ax" for fans of Mr. Ax. Same with split CDs, ad hoc collaborations (Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs' "Sid and Susie" CD), and so on.

Incidentally, one advantage of the music database I use (Music Collector, from Collectorz.com) is that it allows multiple entries in the artist field, both for "album artist" and "track artist." So consider the second Billy Bragg/Wilco album of Woody Guthrie lyrics: I can have that show up under Bragg, under Wilco, under Guthrie (and I could create a separate entry for "Billy Bragg and Wilco" if I were so inclined) - and on the song that features Natalie Merchant on lead vocals, her name under "track artist" along with all the others (they transfer down from the album level). Unfortunately, Collectorz' MP3 Collector database program does not (yet) include a similar feature...rather annoyingly since, if it ever does in a future upgrade, a whole lot of relabeling will become necessary. (Note that "geek" is one of the labels for this post...)

which demon incapacitates fact-checkers?

I picked up a used copy of an amusing little book called The Psychology of Joss Whedon, which looks at psychological themes as played out in Whedon's TV series and the film Serenity. Nothing earth-shattering - not that I expected it - but you'd think a book clearly catering to rampant geeks would recognize the need for scrupulous fact-checking...a need the publisher amusingly falls short on twice within a single page.

In an article called "Existentialism Meets Feminism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (the book occasionally seems to confuse philosophical questions with psychological ones...), authors C. Albert Bardi and Sherry Hamby rather trivially misidentify whose song Giles sings at the open mic club (it's "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who, of course - they think it's a song by Eric Clapton) and then, rather amusingly, confuse the mad Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula with the former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist: "Every Dracula needs a Rehnquist..." they write.

Actually, I think a sitcom featuring Dracula and Justice Rehnquist would be kind of a blast: both were, after all, rather fashion-conscious, what with the Gilbert & Sullivan -inspired stripes Rehnquist infamously sewed to his judicial robes.

myBandZnameIz43

Once upon a time, someone (either Don Marquis or E.E. Cummings) figured out that if you futz around with the typography of your name, it will appear more distinctive in relation to other names. This was true then - but since every teenage poet and corporate brander has come to the same conclusion, we're now faced with a situation in which non-standard typography is nearly standard.

How standard?

One of the bands whose mailing list I'm on (The Hidden Messages) entered an "unsigned band" contest sponsored by Intel. Of the 265 bands listed, nearly one-third (78) displayed their names either in ALL CAPS, all lower-case, featuring InterCapitaliZation, runtogetherasifit'soneword, or with superfluous numerals tacked8 on4. I didn't count lower-cased or all-capped entries if they appeared to be only e-mail addresses, nor did I count intercapitalization when it's standard (surnames like "McDonald") or numbers that were relevant to the makeup of the act (such as the Bob Smith 3 if it had three members).

The breakdown:

All caps: 12
Non-standard lower-casing: 25
Non-standard intercapitalization: 9
Words run together: 23
Superfluous numerals: 9

There are some double-dippers. I think the champion is an act called (take several aspirin now; wait until they take effect to read on) ill-a-noiZe. They should have been "ill-a-noiZ3" if they'd wanted the crown for real, though.

two annoying consequences of computer graphics

Both of these have more to do with lazy humans than with computers - so please, take me off any Luddite mailing lists you might just have added me to, thank you.

Onward:

1. The same damned cheesy fonts everywhichwhere. Once upon a time, your small-business owner who didn't have a whole bunch of money to hire an expensive graphic artist, but who needed a sign, could probably still afford to hire a sign painter - or take the DIY approach. While the quality of the resulting work would obviously vary, at least the results (even if the business owner was a lame-ass letterer) would be distinctive, not the same cookie-cutter set of fonts now available to any business owner who can afford a computer.

2. Pixelation. This results when dull humans blow up a low-res image to a scale it was never intended to be viewed at. Quite often, there's probably a higher-res version available - but you know, you can just blow it up, and hey who'll notice that it looks like crap? Other than anyone with eyes, that is.

The upside of this is it's easy to tell the level of damn-giving a business (or individual) has. Papyrus font, pixelated graphics (especially if they're clip-art of the lamest sort), and a handful of missing or misplaced apostrophes: either the folks who put this together just don't care, or they're so insensitive to the effect that whatever they're selling, you can be sure they're not paying attention to quality there, either.

Punctuation Patrol!

Saving the world from typos, one apostrophe at a time! If only they had their own theme music...

why the metric system never caught on in the US

When I was a kid, I remember a big push (from my math teachers in particular) to get everyone to become familiar with the metric system. I remember baseball stadiums (even those not in Canada) suddenly sprouted metric measurements on their outfield fences. Unfortunately, when those signs said things like "106.68 m," they reinforced the notion that the metric system required a nerdy precision, what with carrying things out to a couple-few decimal places. This was completely unnecessary, since in most cases we do not need an exact measurement. I doubt that your typical outfield fence that says "350 ft." is exactly 350 feet - it may be 350 feet give or take a few inches, and given that the fences are rarely curved in such a manner as to be equidistant from home plate, at one point in the "350 ft." sign they will be 349 feet and 6 inches and at the other end of the sign maybe 350 feet and 4 inches.

What should have been emphasized wasn't conversion but familiarity. We really don't need to know most measurements to the centimeter, and it would have been far more effective to know that a meter is a little longer than a yard, a kilometer's a little less than two-thirds of a mile, etc. - but beyond that, we become familiar with these units in reference to what they measure. We're all used to 2-liter beverage containers, for example (for some reason, that measurement took hold). And if we got used to how fast 80 kph felt, or how long it took to drive 125 km on the freeway, who cares about conversion?

the font that caused the Vietnam War

I finally got around to watching the Helvetica film the other night. I liked it: an interesting pocket history of a particular pendulum swing in cultural meaning (when what was once fresh, clean, and modern becomes sterile, cliched, and corporate, at least in one narrative), and the film had a well-chosen soundtrack including a selection of musicians (including the Album Leaf, Caribou, Sam Prekop, Battles, and Four Tet).

But where was Couch Flambeau? That's right: Milwaukee's own Couch Flambeau recorded a song called "Helvetica" way back in the late '80s, originally released on Atomic Records' Badger-a-Go-Go compilation in 1989. (A different recording was on the Couch's own career compilation I Did a Power Slide in the Taco Stand a few years back.)

So how many other songs are there about fonts? Arguably Camper Van Beethoven's New Roman Times album title takes off from the font name, and of course the band Times New Viking's name is probably some sort of homage to the same font...but song titles? P22 Fonts out of Buffalo also runs a record label, and it's released a few "tribute albums" to some of its fonts (I suppose "commissioned" might be a better verb there), but that all seems a bit in-house: Couch Flambeau's got nothing to do with Linotype (the current owners of Helvetica) so far as I know. So: does anyone know of any other songs about fonts?

Couch Flambeau "Helvetica" (Badger-a-Go-Go compilation, 1989)

because recognizing obscure in-jokes makes me feel superior to you, that's why

Those of us fortunate enough to live in areas served by print editions of The Onion may remember a period maybe five to ten years ago when, in inner pages with space to fill too small for an article, they'd use a fake story-continuation that consisted of nothing but the words "Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood" - repeated to fill the space. (I think nowadays they fill those spaces with in-house ads...like my favorite: "Page Numbers. Only in The Onion.")

Well, in this week's edition, they finally printed (or wrote) the story from which those words come. I'm curious as to whether this is a rerun of a very old Onion story, or a new one, with the "passersby" phrase a shoutout to that old little in-joke.

geeknits being picked

It's always sorta bothered me on science fiction movies and TV shows, where some sort of matter transporter device always manages to readily distinguish between which matter belongs to the person and which just happens to be nearby. Oh - and miraculously, recognizes clothing and things the person's holding as transport-marked, also.

Seems to me that even if you imagine that you could somehow code for biological entities such that a transporter would recognize the physical entity as a unit and not, you know, the floor beneath the transporter pad, etc., there'd be no particular way to recognize clothing, or the communication device the person's holding, etc.

In fact, it strikes me as weirdly analogous to the problem of spam-recognition: while various algorithms do a reasonable job of recognizing much spam as spam, it's still not as accurate as human eyeballs in spotting out obvious spam (though it's much, much quicker and less prone to succumbing to sheer tedium).

I think it'd be much more believable if a transporter device were less physics-based and more a matter of extreme mental discipline, the sort of thing that takes years of intensive training for the transportee to focus on exactly and only what needs to be transported - sort of a yogic discipline scenario.

Of course, I read very little SF these days...so far all I know, a million stories have taken up exactly this concept.

I am glad they did not use the "Bimbo" font instead

I'm pretty sure most font geeks and alphamanes have already found this...but if not... ('tis a Flash animation, if that's the sort of thing you want to know in advance).

Batman Begins...to tediously paulrusize*

It took me nearly a full year...but I finally have an answer to the question I raised in this post. We're visiting our friends Tonia and Cason in Dallas, and as it happens, Cason is a major fan of Batman (or, as he might insist, "the Bat-man") and, when for some reason my dumb little theory about the musical access code in Batman Begins came up, he felt compelled to check it out. So, courtesy a bootleg DVD of the Batman TV series (incomprehensibly, still not out on DVD - maybe it'll come out on Blu-Ray...) and a perfectly legitimate copy of Batman Begins, I can provide the following comments:

1. I theorized that the little three-note sequence of clusters Bruce Wayne plays on the library piano, which allowed access to the Batcave via an entryway hidden behind a set of bookshelves, might have been the same three-note sequence of clusters often heard as brass blats during fight scenes in the 1960s Batman TV series. While I thought I had a clear memory of how that brass blat sounded, as it turned out, at least in the couple-few episodes of the show we skimmed, those brass blats had no particular scoring: they seemed merely to be groups of two-note clusters (at the interval of a major second) overlaid on the underlying fight-scene score when punches were thrown...but which notes seemed variable and irregular.

2. In the first instance of the piano key (har...), the notes Bruce plays are as follows (and I haven't found a good way to put musical notation in these posts): the C and D two octaves above middle C; the B and C a seventh above that; and the F and a fourth down from the second cluster. Amusingly, one musical figure abstractable from this is D-B-G...a sequence identical in intervals to the well-known NBC musical call-sign. (This would be significant except that the TV series ran on ABC.) Neither of us was patient enough to listen closely enough to the second instance (during the fire) of this piano business to note whether it's the same as the first one - except that I did notice that the notes are detuned in the second example (presumably to indicate fire damage to the piano), implying either that the access is mechanical rather than sound-based, or that I pay far too much attention to detail and I should really just relax.

3. Still: that the TV series used a series of two-note clusters based on simultaneous seconds, and that the movie used the same musical idea as a key, is similar enough to suggest that this just might not have been an accident. Finally: the second-based clusters are a key sonic element of the well-known theme to the TV series (the various interjections that sound like "Batman...").

* a new verb, coined based on the image here, and derived from the "Paul Is Dead" craze and the way fans desperately squeezed the most vague traces of significance from the most recondite, trivial, and incidental atoms in the Beatleverse in order to support a patently absurd notion...

my new invention

A pair of glasses featuring a series of parallel vertical panes of glass with small handles at the top that allow the panes to be moved horizontally, in order to allow obsessive font geeks to visually correct painfully bad kerning in public places.