I have to run off for a college interview — no, my daughter’s — so this will be fast. But here are three sites worth a look.

1. J.D. Lasica points out that John Hiler has launched a blog site that serves as aguide to NYC. My family has just booked a frequent flyer trip to Venice and Florence in March and I’d love to find similar sites for those cities. (In English, of course, because sono un idiot americano.)

2. Michael O’Connor Clarke points us to a hyperbolic tree of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I’m not quite sure what’s going on (how appropriate!) but it is rather wonderful.

3. Someone could do Honeywell a favor by telling them that it’s time to rescan the manual for the Chronotherm III model T8600. The PDF looks like it was scanned from a fax.

By the way, if you want to see a thermostat UI that looks like even I might be able to master it, take a look at the Lux (a Consumer Reports Best Buy) documentation. In fact Lux has a little “interactive demo” that shows you how to program it.

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Jock Gill points us to GNU Radio, and, in particular, to Eric Blossom’s work. (He’s been slashdotted here.) GNU Radio is a software-defined radio. Unlike regular radios that are hard-wired about what they do with the information they receive, software-defined radio can do anything it’s programmed to do… including simultaneously receiving two broadcast FM stations from a single input. (Say wha’?)

In fact, the GNU Radio — which may be your computer with a little hardware added — doesn’t have to assume the inputs are sounds at all. Although I’m only following this topic by the skin of my teeth, it seems to me that this is where the real promise lies.

(As with all GNU Brand^TM; products, GNU Radio is a public and free software project.)

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AKMA recounts his decision not to engage Derrida in conversation. It’s towards the end of his amusing-frustrated recounting of how hard it is to do simple computer things sometimes.

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In a comment in the discussion of my blogging about never being done, Dylan Tweney writes:

I watched “A Beautiful Mind” recently and was struck how much John Nash’s schizophrenia was like my online life: ethereal voices constantly impinging on my attention, demanding responses, distracting me from the work (and people) at hand. Only in my case it’s email messages, not hallucinations.

Too true.

(The entire discussion is well-worth reading. Lots of great comments.)

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Steve MacLaughlin is taking the rest of the month off and recommends we do the same.

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Andrew Leonard in Salon writes about a topic I was going to blog today anyway: how damn good video games are compared to movies.

I’ve been playing No One Lives Forever 2 which is, more or less, a James Bond movie set in the late ’60s. It “stars” (i.e., you play as) Cate Archer, as cool as James Coburn and as appealing as Diana Rigg. I’ve jumped in fright more times during the game than in any James Bond flick. It’s also funnier. And the graphics kick ass: fighting ninjas in the middle of a tornado in a trailer park was something.

As far as I’m concerned, we’re already at the cross-over point between movies and video games as a popular entertainment. And we can’t be far away from video games developing at least some of the emotional impact of more serious films.

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Stephen Talbot writes an astonishing piece about an interview he conducted with Henry Kissinger. (It’s in Salon’s for-subscribers section. Pay ’em the money already!)

Here’s the jaw-dropping ending:

As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question. Something I really wanted to know. “What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?”

“Wouldn’t have mattered very much,” Kissinger muttered. Lights off. No camera recording what he was saying. “If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss.”

Talbot writes vividly about this disgraceful, banal man.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we now have the greatest example ever of why quantified, standardized tests should not be used as the way of certifying students’ achievements. A novelist couldn’t have come up with a better one.

In Massachusetts, we’ve introduced the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) that all students must pass in order to get a high school diploma. Fail the MCAS, no diploma.

So, along comes Jennifer Mueller, a senior at the Whitman-Hanson Regional High School in (Go Panthers!) who took the MCAS last spring and got a score of 218, two points short of passing. So, she looked over the results and thought there was one particular answer marked wrong that she was convinced she’d gotten right. So, she took it up with the State Department of Education and convinced them that her answer was acceptable. So, the Department upgraded her and everyone with the same answer. As a result, 557 students who had failed, now passed.

You can read the question in question at the Boston Globe site for the next couple of days before the article gets moved to the Ash Heap of Broken Links. It represents the numbers from 0-10 in binary by showing each as a set of 4 circles, either white or black. Then it gives a multiple choice answer asking you to find the set of 4 circles that express 11.

Jennifer Mueller looked at the sets of white and black circles in row after row and observed a social pattern: The first white circle has dinner alone. Then the second white circle has dinner alone. Then they have dinner together. Then a third white circle has dinner alone. Then the three of them have dinner together. That pattern holds: a white circle has to have dinner alone before it can have dinner with the rest. Jennifer used this to correctly predict the next in the sequence. Unfortunately, the next line in her pattern expresses the number 12 in computer language, not the number 11. The pattern she found is indeed there. Her answer is right. And she deserves credit for it.

Jennifer’s discovery hits all the bases. She came up with a pattern that took a particular type of brilliance to see. Furthermore, to make this a textbook example, the pattern she came up with depended on her thinking about things in terms of pictures, not numbers. And she thought this through in terms of sociality — those dots were having dinner together. Where’s that type of intelligence being measured and valued?

The biggest point is that 500 students who yesterday were not worthy of a high school diploma today are worthy, without anything about them changing. I understand that these tests are standardized and quantified in order to make them fair, but here’s a case where accuracy actually works against fairness. A score of 220 passes, 218 fails: because it’s so precise, who passes and fails is arbitrary. It has to be, because being educated doesn’t have a sharp edge: “Yes you are, no you’re not, and here’s the dividing line.” It doesn’t work that way, no matter how much comfort we get from thinking that tests can sort us into two piles. “Accurate and unfair.” It’s not a junction we’re comfortable with, but it’s there. Fairness is all about our ability to make exceptions, to look at context, to dwell on what the numbers don’t say…Just like Jennifer Mueller, who almost failed because she is so much smarter than the test she took.

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Sharon Hill got the same fax as I did. I almost fell for it. Sharon, in a comment on my blog entry about it, writes:

I just got this same fax this morning. In doing a keyword search for the company – no site, of course – I found this site and your comments.

I called them and was told Mr. Moore was not yet in the office but Eddie, who answered the phone, could help me.

I asked Eddie what it cost to be an Advisory Board member. He said he could certainly give me info that would ‘lead up’ to that point. I told him, no, I didn’t need the info I just needed to know how much it cost.

This Eddie, clearly not a very clever or articulate con man, said “they don’t usually like me to give that information over the phone.” I said “Im sure they don’t. I am on a web site where people are discussing this scam. I will let them know that indeed it is a scam.”

And I hung up.

Thank you.

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While writing an email to AKMA, I realized why I’m not as happy as I should be given the externalities of my life: I’m never done with anything.

I used to be. I’d work on something and then it would be complete. I’d mount the stuffed head on my wall and move on. Now everything is a goddamn thread. At best, things peter out. They may even end. But they’re never done, the type of done where you close the door behind you and it hear it click shut.

It’s probably just me.

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