A tree (and some other crap) grows in Brooklyn

It is not often the case that I get to brag about having produced something tangible. A cry of "look at the fully normalized relational database I designed!" just does not bring the crowds beating down my door the way it ought to.

In that spirit I have taken photos of all the plants I'm growing on my rooftop deck. My thumb is thoroughly green, as you can see.



Sunflowers and a Cypress Vine, which it taking over the Time Warner utility pole (I hope it shorts out their switching office).


From the left: sunflowers, lilies and a white rose bush I bought Saturday.


Elephant ears, clematis and (mixed in) morning glories. There are also some marigolds in the two barrels.


Elephant ears, up close. I thought I was just going to get one ear out of each of the three bulbs I planted. This thing just EXPLODED....



In the lower right, African Violet (second bloom of the year).


In the rectangular planters, morning glories (regrowth from last year's plantings).



Clematis and Morning Glories (from the other side). The idea here was to, with some help, get them to grow up and into the oak tree that overhangs that spot. The string I set up for them to grow on sags rather severely under their weight so it looks chaotic (which it is) but I think next season I'll get it right.



Here is the string I've set up THIS year.. it's about 20 feet long and I know the MGs will just eat it up (and the clematis will soon follow).


In the metal barrel: ivy, which I'm told will grow (over the next two centuries, perhaps) to cover the entire neighbor's exterior wall (and increase the value of my property by $50k at least I'm sure).


Sunflower. The one on the right recently decapitated by a hungry squirrel. The fox urine I bought should prevent that but I don't always remember to sprinkle it about regularly. I'm told mothballs and/or soap (!) would work as well. Any other ideas?


The lilly, now in the spotlight. Who needs orchids?


Zinnias.



MGs, growing up the sides of the stage area.

More sunflowers. Always, more sunflowers. Never enough.

The greenhouses I bought. They're quite cheap.










Marigolds and a hydrangea (in the foreground of the green planter, post-bloom). There is also a stowaway tree (planted by a bird I imagine) which I've just learned would swallow my entire building if left unchecked (and apparently is of the species that inspired the book from which this article's title is derived). Scary stuff since there are actually three others growing in various containers around the deck -- good thing it's not an actual yard so I imagine it will grow to the extent that the pots will allow -- killing everything else it shares space with...)

And, finally, what allowed me to fire Time Warner's CEO.
More people should take this option, I think.

On top of the world with Obama

Never the most timely of photojournalists, I have taken slightly over a week to post these photos of a rooftop cocktail party / fundraiser I attended last weekend which was thrown by and for Obama supporters. With particular thanks to our hosts, Molly, Jeff and Terrence.

Asperger's Syndrome: Diagnosis as performance art

Recently I was diagnosed with a strange little neurological developmental disorder called Asperger's Syndrome (and, no, I don't watch Boston Legal although I hear perhaps I should; we'll see when time is made for THAT; it took me three months to put this together). Here is the diagnosis letter from the professional who evaluated me (clicky biggy):

In one sentence, Asperger's is a condition that is related to autism, learning disabilities, obsessive-compulsiveness, Tourette's, ADHD, schizophrenia, epilepsy, etc etc without managing to be quite any more of any one of those than any of the others. The particular outwardly-apparent symptoms are loudness of voice, lack of eye contact, lack of social engagement, a seeming disregard for the feelings of others, monotonic voice and an affinity for mathematics / engineerings as well as music and other arts. The inward symptoms are social anxiety / panic / aversion, sensory hypersensitivity, inability to understand subtleties of social interactions, inability to "see the forest for the trees" in any given situation, cognitive fixation with an object, word or idea, etc etc all of which most of the time is appreciated by innocent bystanders as narcissistic self-centeredness. Read more about it here; some symptoms are more prevalent in some people than others so I tend to focus on those that preoccupy me (cue laugh track).

As a bonus I also have a rather intense case of ADHD, which jives with the statistical co-morbidity of A.S., i.e. that if you experience one of the above-listed conditions you (or a relative, as these things are genetic) are also likely be diagnosable with one or more of the others.

Please note that the vast majority of diagnoses for this and related conditions these days are done of people under the age of ten. Even highly educated and trained professionals until recently didn't have the awareness of this and so often children were either dismissed as "retarded" (which we are in some specific areas, strictly speaking, but not in most and certainly not in a purely cognitive sense) or else were just chided for not trying hard enough to be normal or otherwise address whatever the "problem" was.

It feels like a watered-down version of coming out as gay at age 17 (1991) -- while at the time the prospect of coming out might have perversely suggested sordid, unwelcome and unfathomable images into the minds of friends and family, now the only response to the question "Well, what do you *do* as an Asperger person?" is "I try not to get hit / fired / dumped." Not exactly fuel for conversation one way or another.

So, in honor of this and my now having to re-evaluate 33 years of painful, boring, significant, mortifying, unexplainable, happy, transcendent experiences in terms of them having been certainly colored (if not outright caused) by a weird brain, I have put together a small piece of performance art in the form of a scientific study. It is a MS Word document which you may download by clicking on the image below:

portrait of the artist as a scientist

My favorite linear equation of the day

A report-with-analysis released by Gallup in the last week shows a direct and "sturdy" correlation between favorable ratings of Barack Obama and the level of education of the respondent.

In other words, the more (formally) educated the person is (feel free to translate that to "smarter" or not as you see fit) the likelier they are to think the guy is OK.

I used the word "sturdy" because the Gallup people were smart enough to also present the data controlling for the fact that

(a) higher-educated people are more likely to be Democrat, across the board (also a surprise that wasn't a surprise but it's nice to see it written down), and (and this is the real surprise)

(b) among Republican respondents Obama is the only candidate for which the favorable numbers go up significantly as a function of education(*).

(*) Conversely, the other consistent finding in this survey/study is that Hillary Clinton is the only major Democratic candidate for which the favorable numbers drop significantly as a function of educational level -- both on the Democratic and Republican side although strangely not for independents (added 8/17: most likely a taxonomy issue; "independent" often being a catch-all term for "don't know / don't care / hung up").

If only there were more smart people than non-smart people this would be a lot easier.

Richland County Public Library

The first in what I'm threatening myself with being an ongoing series of architectural photo essays.

In my recent trip down south I stayed with a friend in Columbia, SC. One of the more pleasant surprises of that trip was this absolutely WHACKED OUT building, inside and out, that proved to be the county public library. Fits in rather nicely with my photographic style. Kudos to the guy that sold them on the design (see? not all magnet buildings come from the Gehry tissue box).

Click to see the photos (will open a new window with an automated slideshow from Fotki.com; once that begins I suggest you use the popup menu on the right on that screen to activate "Picture stretching" to make sure the images don't get cropped inside your browser).

Hillary Clinton: Compassionate Misanthrope

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me, [...] So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

Hillary Clinton's letters to a former high school classmate during her college years have been released. They make the self-lamenting sighings of Lisa Simpson seem like the mouth-breathings of a soccer hooligan by comparison. They are peppered with.. oh how should one who would never release his high-school writings if the world depended on it put it.... an unfortunate use of flowery constructs and unnecessary $10 words. These were days before the Kaplan Review and paranoid cramming for the SAT were commonplace so one can only assume that young Ms. Rodham's logorrhea were a result of too much of the wrong kind of reading.

It is well fitting the observed life to note this karmapimple: that the person who used to be Hillary Rodham, college student and expert on all things ennui, will spend the next 16 months trying to impress crowds at BBQs, turkey weighing contests, county fairs, simple-minded special-interest rallies, and generally speaking into TV cameras using short sentences composed entirely of short words for the benefit of those she used to dismiss as “[knowing] a lot about ‘self’ and nothing about ‘man’ ”.

Politics, Twenty Minutes into the Future

In the Max Headroom movies & shows (one each, on each side of the Atlantic) almost exactly twenty years ago, a number of prescient futuristic predictions, one by one, have proven accurate to the point of making them seem like hindsight.

On this primary season one more fulfilled prediction that might have flown under TV viewers' radars was realized when people who watched the debate via the Web instead of the broadcast/cable channels were treated (if so they chose) to superimposed graphics of real-time feedback from focus groups (delivered via dimmer switches, where each of the 100-odd individuals expressed their approval as a matter of degree by rotating the wheel, or somesuch device, in their hand) as they themselves watched the debate. (post link goes to web page with many atomic examples of this).

This is the same opinion/emotion gathering technique used by marketers and TV programming experts (and political strategists, which is the same as the previous two groups) for decades to save them the trouble of actually having to know anything in order to do their job.

What I'm keen on is that, through the Web, the political process now saves EVERYBODY the trouble of having to know anything. It neatly closes the feedback loop circuit of people basing what they think on what other people think.



(I admit I happened to find out about this Monday night out of necessity because the Demo debate was shown on CNN and I don't have cable, not because I watch the debates on the Web just so I don't have to get up from my desk chair, which is somehow less shameful to me; guess which one I'll be using from now on?)

Trifecta, anyone?

three for three? what disaster shall await us today?

This really has me all steamed up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SImhkapRuIs&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fgothamist%2Ecom%2F
(link above goes to this video link)

http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_199211634.html

I was working in midtown today... but on the west side, "safely" about a mile away in the early PM when this happened. Had no idea about it until the other half called me from work to see where I was (he works in an E.R. so he's privy to these things more immediately than yours truly boring web developer). You can still (midnight now!) hear firetrucks go by outside MY HOUSE IN BROOKLYN rolling in to help out.

My proposal for a tourist season slogan: "New York City: Home of the 27-alarm fire". What we'll do is implode a building every year at the exact same time, like the New Year's ball drop, and invite people from all over the world to come see it. The twist is we don't tell them which building. Seeking a good vantage point for the event then becomes as much an effort in game theory / positioning as that of having a good exit strategy. No other city in the world could pull it off; we don't just have a handful of oversize skyscrapers... we have MOST of them. I'm sure the t-shirt sales would produce a healthy net gain after just a few years of promotional losses.

a very bad day for somebody

The Tam airline's Airbus-320 skidded off the runway at Congonhas airport, then crossed a busy road at the height of rush hour in South America's largest city before slamming into a gas station.

I don't personally know any Brazo transportation safety officials but I'm sure they all know where to find the want-ad classifieds. Unfortunately for them (and us) we have all of our entry-level transportation safety positions filled.