At the 4 train stop in the Bronx where I get off on my way to work, there is often someone milling about requesting a Good Samaritan Swipe. So far I've always declined for a mix of reasons including uncertainty about legality and just wanting to get out of there. But I always feel a little guilty afterward, as I think about how easy it would have been to just swipe on my way out, and how expensive a $2 ride probably is to that person. One day a man asked someone exiting right in front of me to swipe him in, and he said "Man, there's a cop right there!" The first man said emphatically "I know!", not explaining how that bore on the situation in his view. I decided at that point that it probably wasn't worth the risk, unless I found out definitively that it is allowed. Today, for the first time at this stop, I saw someone grant the swipe. There didn't seem to be a cop present, and the token booth clerk looked on in his usual daze.

I can understand the MTA objecting to the Samaritan Swipe for the same principle as they would to selling swipes--that you are depriving them of the income they would have gotten if the person paid for their own card. One can't expect the MTA to have sympathy for these people that might otherwise spend hours panhandling for the $2. But certainly in practice the Samaritan Swipe is not the threat to revenue or public safety that the swipe salesmen are. I can't help but think the wording of the ads acknowledges that sale of rides is the much bigger problem and will be dealt with much more strictly. And yet the official rules of conduct have this to say:

Section 1050.4 c

Except for employees of the Authority acting within the scope of their employment or other expressly authorized agents of the Authority, no person shall sell, provide, copy, reproduce or produce, or create any version of any fare media or otherwise authorize access to or use of the facilities, conveyances or services of the Authority without the written permission of a representative of the Authority duly authorized by the Authority to grant such right to others.

and after all, the MTA is not exactly known for its proportionate response to such civilization-rending offenses as taking up more than one seat on a mostly empty train. So I think for now I have to continue denying the Samaritan Swipe, much as I'd like to offer it.

The work is in Menlo Park, but I'm staying two towns to the north, in Redwood City. In both towns, there seems to have been an abundance of time, money and effort to spend on urban design. Curbs, intersections, dividers and roundabouts all appear to have been exquisitely planned. And yet there are very few pedestrians anywhere, and it's clear that the designers were in some ways very aware of pedestrian issues, and in other ways utterly clueless. The buttons that one is supposed to press to cross the street not only work, but issue audio signals and speech for the blind ("The walk sign is on for crossing Alma Street.") And yet, at many four-way intersections only three sides are crosswalks, meaning that you are supposed to cross the street three times instead of once if you happen to want to cross a certain way.

The taxis in this town are total amateurs. Having to call ahead I expect. But though the driver had a CB radio receiver, he kept getting calls from the dispatcher on his cell phone, and seemed unpleasantly surprised every time it rang. While on the calls he said things like "I don't want to do that, I'm tired" and "I don't want to deal with traffic."

I know that Cold Stone Creamery doesn't serve the best ice cream. But there's something about the name that just draws me in. Creamery. Cold Stone. It's a great name.

Just now I was riding back to my hotel on a public bus. When I got on, a homeless man behind me asked for change, and I couldn't very well say no with a big cup of Cold Stone Creamery in my hand. He got off at the same stop as me, and walked behind me toward my hotel. When he called out to me, I tried to balance my fear with respect for the homeless, which I had seen advertised on TV earlier in the day ("Whether you say yes or no, look them in the eye when you do it"). I decided to see what he had to say. As he approached he counted out change, and then handed back to me an amount that appeared at least close to what I had given him, saying "I just needed some change." Confused, I said "so...you don't want it?" He said "Nah." Judging by the sounds I heard as I headed to my room, he then went over to use the ice machine.

"He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists."

This makes it sound like the prisoners there are terrorists who are both angry and accused, rather than accused terrorists who are angry.

Then there's this part:

A Tennessee study found that after zero-tolerance programs were adopted by the state’s public schools the frequency of targeted offenses soared: the firm and unambiguous punishments weren’t deterring bad behavior at all. Is that really a surprise? If you’re a teen-ager, the announcement that an act will be sternly punished doesn’t always sink in, and it isn’t always obvious when you’re doing the thing you aren’t supposed to be doing. Why? Because you’re a teen-ager.

That doesn't explain why the frequency of offenses rose under the policy. It sounds more like they were rebelling against the policy than ignoring it, though it's hard to know without more details.

But my main point will take fewer words: it's funny to me that 'tolerance' and 'zero tolerance' are simultaneously watchwords in our culture. Everyone agrees that tolerance is a good thing, except when someone has done something wrong, and then zero tolerance is appropriate, because clearly tolerance is not what we need. It's not necessarily a contradiction, but it's surprising that advocates of zero tolerance didn't choose a more inviting name for the approach, like 'Zero Problems' or 'Lots of Justice.'

Googling produces 1,290 results, many of which are random lists of words or obvious misspellings like Regecca Romijn. One result is in the backstory of a character on a Dungeons & Dragons website. In the first 40 results there are 6 that appeared to be names of real people. There's also this doll named Regecca, which perhaps indicates that it was slightly less rare in Victorian Britain (now that I've repeated it to myself enough times it is starting to sound rather aristocratic). I wasn't able to find it in any national name databases; the ones I checked only include the 1000 most popular names.

So the most likely explanations I can see, in descending order of likelihood, are that a) the earrings were custom-made, despite not looking it... Well, that's really the only explanation I can imagine. The chance that they were either mass-produced on purpose or as a mistake but then still sold somewhere, and that this woman then obtained them either because they matched her name or despite the fact they didn't, seems vanishingly small. Any other possibilities?

To a topologist, a sphere, a cigar and a rabbit’s head are all the same because they can be deformed into one another. Likewise, a coffee mug and a doughnut are also the same because each has one hole, but they are not equivalent to a sphere.

Okay, certainly a strange way of looking at things, but so far I'm with you.

In effect, what Poincaré suggested was that anything without holes has to be a sphere. The one qualification was that this “anything” had to be what mathematicians call compact, or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent.

Alright...

In the case of two dimensions, like the surface of a sphere or a doughnut, it is easy to see what Poincaré was talking about: imagine a rubber band stretched around an apple or a doughnut; on the apple, the rubber band can be shrunk without limit, but on the doughnut it is stopped by the hole.

When did we start talking about being able to shrink things without limit? And how do spheres and doughnuts exist in two dimensions? Or is it just the rubber band that's in two dimensions?

With three dimensions, it is harder to discern the overall shape of something; we cannot see where the holes might be.

What? Now I'm picturing a mathematician bent over an apple or a sponge, turning it over and over in his hands, shouting "Damn this conjecture! Where are the holes?" But evidently since we were talking about an apple as being two dimensional before, we're now really talking about four-dimensional objects:

...when we envision the surface of a sphere or an apple, we are really seeing a two-dimensional object embedded in three dimensions.

And at this point I've pretty much checked out. Now I admit this may be an issue of the mainstream press's understanding and reporting of science as much as anything else. It's probable that a topologist would pick this account apart the way the guys at Language Log do any article that contains a single sentence or more that appears to make a claim related to linguistics. But I wouldn't have any chance at understanding the primary sources, the academic papers, so this is pretty much what I'm stuck with, unless anyone can show me a topology version of Language Log.

For quite a while I periodically puzzled over the Four Color Map problem, which stated (as I had heard it) that you never need more than four colors to have a map with no adjacent territories having the same color. I couldn't understand whether this referred to maps of the real world, or abstract maps with any conceivable layout of territories. Of course it would be odd for mathematicians to be concerned with the real world, but I couldn't see how it could be true in the abstract, because I assumed the real-world rule held that territories can be non-contiguous (imagine how many colors you would need on a world map that shaded embassies as part of the countries they represent). Finally a coworker informed me that they have to be contiguous, and that they have to share a side, not just a point. I then spent much of a day drawing shapes, trying unsuccessfully to find a counterexample, then being amazed when I realized it was true.

More remarkably, I managed to bring my Espion S digital camera that's disguised as a Zippo lighter in my pocket on the way out without even thinking about the security implications. In most circumstances this is a device that's suspicious disguised as one that isn't, but at an airport it suddenly becomes an innocent object disguised as contraband. I stupidly walked through the metal detector with it still in my pocket and set it off. When I reached in my pocket I thought, crap, but decided the best thing to do was take the camera and the lighter case apart and put it through the X-ray machine that way. The screener on the other side looked it over for a bit, and said "Originally I thought you had already had a lighter confiscated, because we let people keep the cases and just take the inner parts." He also said "Thanks for taking it out and apart like this, otherwise we would've had to do a bag search. Evidently you've been through this before." Uh, right, yeah, I said.

On the way back I thought about putting the camera in a checked bag, but I didn't want to take the chance that it would be seen as suspicious by an agent at the checked baggage X-rays while I was on my way to the plane, and be confiscated without my knowing until I got home. So I carried it through again. The camera was taken off the X-ray conveyor belt and 5 or 6 screeners gathered around to look at it. Maya couldn't believe what a troublemaker I was. When my leatherman was found, it fortunately didn't seem to create any compounded suspicion in the screeners, but it did distract me so much that I started walking to the gate while they still had the camera, and they had to page me back on the PA. When I went back the screener who had the camera was very nice; he asked me where I got it, and said it was totally fine but that I shouldn't be surprised if it causes delays next time, due to looking like a lighter. Yep.

But now to get to the actual point of this entry, by now a subject of some debate in this household, which debate I will present here. While boarding a plane, I often hear flight attendants on the PA announce "We have a very full flight today..." And other times, such as on the flight back from Portland, they say "We have a full flight today." When they say it in the latter way, I interpret it as meaning that all the seats on the plane are reserved. When they say it with 'very', and this is where you may disagree, it means to me that almost all the seats are taken.

What's happening here, assuming I interpret the 'very' form correctly, is that there are two different meanings of full--one absolute, and one relative. For example, the word 'unique' has the first definition:
1 Being the only one of its kind.
But definition 3b, now much more common in American usage, is:
3b Informal. Unusual; extraordinary.

It's my contention that the same thing is happening to 'full' in this case. My reason for saying so is that clearly 'very' does not make sense as an intensifier if 'full' is being said in the absolute way, because practically speaking, the airline would never intentionally let more passengers on board than there are seats. It is possible that by "very full" they mean the same as "[absolutely] full", that all the seats are taken. But since I sometimes hear them say it as simply "full," it does seem that at least some of the time they just say that to mean all the seats are taken. The only meaning that remains is that not quite all the seats are full. I don't remember looking around on any specific flights when this was said, but I believe this is the meaning usually intended by "very full." If this is true, we can then say that "very full" means the same thing as "not full," even though it's really two different meanings of 'full.' But I do accept the possibility that sometimes they mean "absolutely full" when they say "very full." Does anyone have anecdotal evidence one way or the other? My next air travel is planned for early September, so I'll have my eyes and ears open.

Two screenwriting trends that have emerged in recent years have caught my attention. The first is the device in which, while at first glance the movie appears to tell a straightforward story, in fact part of the story was not 'true' in the movie's world. It was either made up or dreamed or fantasized by one of the characters. 'Figuring out' the movie then entails determining where this break between the movie's reality and the character's fantasy occurred, absent any of the usual cues like wavy lines or ethereal music, though sometimes with more subtle ones. The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Dr. and Swimming Pool could all be cited as examples. The funny thing about this technique is that only critically acclaimed movies seem to use it. I'm not aware of any crappy movies that had such a twist in them. Some are probably out there, but they're forgotten indies or B movies rather than Hollywood blockbusters.

The other trend is the ambiguous ending, which sometimes renders the entire plot ambiguous. In this case, there is usually evidence presented for multiple explanations of the action, but it seems to have been carefully balanced so that only each viewer's personal prejudices will lead them to conclude that one or another was what really happened. I hesitate to name examples for the reasons below, but the one I just watched that inspired this was Caché. I think The Minus Man also qualifies, or at least it wanted to.

There are two points to be made, and this thread illustrates both pretty well. First, these two techniques tend to dovetail. For many films that appear to divert from reality into a character's fantasy, the question can be asked, did they just imagine all that, or did it really happen? This is the case at least for Memento and Swimming Pool. And for any film with an ambiguous ending you can find at least one person arguing that some part of the movie was just imagined. The second is that the ambiguous ending is particularly devilish, because you never know for sure if it was meant to be ambiguous, or if there really is one true explanation, toward which one piece of evidence tips the scales. After all there are many films, such as The Usual Suspects and Primer, which might seem inexplicable on first viewing, but in fact have perfectly logical explanations. This always provokes arguments, and thus this is probably the easiest way to make a movie that "you'll be talking about for hours!" The director always refuses to say anything one way or the other. The question often comes up in these arguments of what makes it a better movie. Does it make a point about realism or anything else to have a truly ambiguous ending? Are some of the explanations just too mundane to be true? After a while I feel a bit embarrassed to be debating something that seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of being debatable--though again, most of the movies that use this have plenty else going for them, and meaningful ideas that are not weakened one way or the other by the ending.

I've also been buying a whole lot of household stuff that either belonged to my roommate or was just really old and crappy. This is fun because I have the chance to overthink each item, asking if it's the best design, the right material, the right size, though I know that even if it weren't, I would easily get used to it and never think about it again, as I've been doing with many of the suboptimal things I had before. Many of these are items I've never had to buy myself before. It's making me feel very bourgeois to be shopping for them, rather than picking them up off the street or dragging them from place to place after years of usage. That's what happens I guess.

I pulled it out again tonight and figured out that it's in IMDb and is supposedly in pre-production. The title is "Horrible Bosses" and Frank Oz (who played Yoda, was the voice of Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, and directed "Bowfinger" and the Stepford Wives remake) is listed as the director on the script, though the IMDb page indicates nothing about the people attached other than Ryan Reynolds and the writer. Perusing the message boards for the movie (a tremendous addition to the site for gossip, the stories behind a movie, or interpretations of enigmatic plots), I realized that PSH stood for Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Phil Acting referred to this being an acting project for him. The IMDb page also gives the plot outline: "Three best friends join forces and agree to kill their horrible bosses."

My first thought was, what a horrible title, and I assumed the movie would be pretty bad too. But after reading the first few pages, the script at least is actually pretty funny. There are a lot of phrases and word choices that communicate visual ideas very efficiently, which is probably par for the course in a screenplay, but I've never read one before. The dialogue is pretty humorous as well. It's probably not the kind of movie I would go see in a theater, but if they stick close to the screenplay it could be decent.

The only downside is that Criterion has a new logo that, so far, I don't much care for. It's a tilted 'C', and though I can see the motivation behind it--it's more of a symbol, and certainly more recognizable in small images than the previous skinny capital letters with the horizontal line. But those letters and that line had come to symbolize so much to me. This is just a letter 'C' that could be anything. On the other hand, they are also releasing all of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

Recently I puzzled over these posters that appeared in the vicinity of my workplace (these two were taped to one another around a lamppost, and there were at least a few more). Why would someone go to such an effort to reclaim their pet two years after it went missing? I don't have an answer I can back up with facts, but being halfway through the complete Sherlock Holmes, I endeavoured to reason it out. First, some observations:

• The posters went up, I believe, in mid to late April. They're now in pretty bad shape and no attempt has been made to replace or fix them.
• Judging by the handwriting in the vital stats area, not to mention all the other differences, it seems safe to say that these two posters were made by more than one person.
• The text that has been blacked out on both posters said essentially that the dog could also be brought to a specified police precinct, which I believe was the closest one for our neighborhood of Mott Haven.
• A peculiar feature is the perfect white background and poses in the pictures of the dog. These would have to be either lucky shots or the result of Photoshopping, both unlikely to appear on posters like this. This leads me to think they were either taken off the web or copied from a book. I'm inclined toward a book because I don't see any of the pixelation that would be likely when printing web images at this size. Cursory Googling didn't turn them up.
• Googling did turn up this listing at PetLocator. The presence of the pictures points away from my book hypothesis, as its unlikely someone would go the trouble of scanning them in as opposed to just taking them off the web. It doesn't show when it was posted, but the Internet Archive has the page showing up on Feb. 18, 2005. Also, seeing the pictures on there makes me rethink the likelihood that the owner might have used Photoshop to erase the background in them.

And some possible explanations:

• The impending Mother's Day anniversary of the loss inspired a renewed sadness in one of the pet's owners, and either that person, or others close to them, made the posters more in an attempt to feel less sad and guilty than out of any sincere hope of finding the pet.
• The owners got a tip that the pet might have been seen recently, renewing their hope.
• This is part of a larger, consistent campaign to recover the pet that I haven't been otherwise aware of. This supported by the PetLocator page, but contraindicated by the poster stating that the dog was lost on Lincoln Ave., that being where the posters were put up. It's unlikely they've been fanning out their poster distributions from where it was lost for 2 years.

That's about as far as I can take it. Anyone?

Can anyone tell me what's going on in the solid-colored areas in these photographs? I took the aerial from a plane close to landing at San Francisco airport, and the satellite image shows the same area highlighted in the upper left corner. Though you can't really see it in the images, the surface of these areas was clearly water--I could see waves on it. I'm assuming they must be farms of some kind, but the only thing I know of that's commonly grown this way in the US is cranberries, and I doubt that's what's being grown in all of these areas. I'm also confused by the fact that they're adjacent to the bay, but bounded off from it by some sort of wall. So it's not bay water inside there, yet they're connected to the bay, and the walls didn't seem that high. And what's grown in salt water? Fish I guess, but would fish or their feed turn the water such colors?

By the way, has anyone else noticed deteriorating performance from Google Maps? Lately I see a lot of tiles failing to update after a change in the query or the zoom level, sometimes leaving me with a confusing if not unusable mishmash of tiles from different locations or zooms.