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I'm selling my green 2001 Saturn SL1 sedan w/165,000 miles for $2800. I can tell you about its quirks if you're interested in buying, but overall it's in good condition, reliable, and I wouldn't hesitate to take it cross country again (I've done it a few times with this car). It's parked near my house in Central Sq, Cambridge, and I work a few blocks away, so it's very easy for me to show it to someone during the day.

Know anyone who might want to buy it? (feel free to pass this link on)

I meant my current car to be "temporary", then four and a half years passed. It's time: I'm not about to move, or change jobs, or spend half the summer away from home, or work on a big campaign in the next few months, so I can do stuff like find a car. What should I look at?

Whatever I get, I want to keep for a long time. At least 200k miles, maybe 300k or more. New or used is okay. I don't plan to resell for a long time.

It needs to basically work, and stay reliable as long as I maintain it regularly and fix things as soon as I know they need fixing.

I don't care if it looks cool or feels great to drive or any of those things, just reasonable.

I do want to be able to get up steep dirt roads in Vermont and the Berkshires and such places in bad weather. That doesn't necessarily mean all wheel drive. My previous car, a Saturn SL2 with front wheel drive and "traction control" (ability to have the two front wheels turn separately) was very good at it. My current car, a Saturn SL1 (less power) with front wheel drive and no traction control, is not good at it. I'd take a front wheel w/traction again.

And I want fuel efficiency, particularly on highways and country roads, which account for the majority of my driving. I've been getting 33-39mpg on those kinds of roads in my current Saturn, though it's not rated that high. I'd like something that good or better.

Edit: I'd also like to have as much space as a Saturn SL2/SL1, for people and for stuff. More space would be fine, but not needed. It'd be annoying to have to adjust to a car with less space.

Suggestions?

Yesterday was the 20th aniversary of June 4th, 1989 - the Chinese crackdown on a massive protest in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Although we remember June 4th as the climax, the military crackdown actually took several days, beginning on June 3rd - which was also the day the Ayatollah Khomeini died, and a massive gas explosion on the Trans-Siberian Railway destroyed two trains and killed 575 people. It was not a slow news day.*

Today is the aniversary of the photo that came to represent June 4th, 1989, but was actually taken the following day, as the military crackdown continued after Tiananmen Square itself was cleared. At the time, we saw it on TV: the man standing in the street as a column of tanks approach and then stop. The lead tank trying to go around him to the left and right a few times, but he keeps moving into its path. Finally, after about a minute, he climbs onto the tank, leans into the compartment to apparently say something (or just look?), and walks off.

Tank Man became a symbol of individual courage against the military machine of authoritarianism, as well as the icon representing the Chinese protests and movement of 1989.

That fall Shen Tong, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protesters, started college at Brandeis: He had already been accepted for a Wien Scholarship at Brandeis, and had a passport and visa which allowed him to escape to the US. Brandeis became a center of Chinese dissidents and activisim in the few years after June 4th.**

That fall I also started college at Brandeis, and I attended a big conference on the Chinese protests and prodemocracy movement that was held in a building almost adjacent to my dorm. Shen Tong was the keynote, of course, and I remember listening to him speak, but I don't specifically remember what he said. What sticks out most in my memory is a panel presentation on how the protests and crackdown were portrayed in the Chinese press...

... apparently, the famous photo of Tank Man was ubiquitous on Chinese TV as well. Although the entire incident has been whitewashed from Chinese history in the decades since, back in 1989 it was big news, and so was Tank Man. Here in the west, he represented courage and standing up to authority. In China, said the professor who had recently been there, he meant something else: He was the Chinese Government's symbol of the peacefulness of their military. How, even in the midst of it all, a column of tanks stopped for a lone unarmed man in the street, and did not move forward until he walked away of his own accord.

I was temporarily stunned, but then I realized: You know what? They were right, too. A column of armed tanks did stop for a lone unarmed man in the street. He represents that, too. Truth is like the blind men's elephant, but even though we have the capacity to look at other parts of it, we often don't notice they're there.

Yesterday, a new photograph of tank man was published for the first time. Take from street level, it shows a couple of other protesters fleeing, with him in the background standing alone on the street, waiting for the tanks. It tells a related but somewhat different story than the images we've seen.

What about all the stories that could be told of this incident, that we're never going to see, because a photographer didn't happen to be in the right spot to capture them? Or because a propogandist didn't happen to exist with the vested interest in ferretting out that particular interpretation?

* My memory keeps telling me that a fourth very big thing happened that day, but I can't remember what it was.

** For example, the Chinese dissident movement in diaspora had a weekly radio show co-produced in Chicago and at WBRS at Brandeis. They were on shortly after a show I did on Saturdays, and some weeks they'd just play the tapes from Chicago, so they often asked me to cover for them and I'd sit there reading or doing homework while playing tapes of Chinese announcers and interviews, all speaking very rapidly, with a music bit from the New World Symphony in between each clip.

[ Crossposed to Open Salon ]

Edit: First question is all in US/Eastern, even though I only explicitly labelled a few of the options. If you're on the other side of the date line and your Friday morning is US/Eastern's Thursday afternoon or evening/night, translate to US/Eastern.

[Poll #1399807]

Edit: Please ignore Daylight Savings vs. Standard Time adjustments for the second question - I'm labelling the "native" time zones.

The Facebook Terms of Service vote ends at noon pacific time (3pm eastern) today. About 610,000 votes so far.

Edit: Vote closed with about 660,000 votes, about 75% in favor of the new terms. Facebook will adopt the new Terms of Service after audit of the vote is complete.

Pick one word from each column
(optional)		(optional)		(optional)
New Old North South East West	Peachtree	Industrial Battle Ridge Hills Corners Dunwoody	Road Parkway Boulevard Avenue Street Place Way Lane Walk Drive Circle	NE NW SE SW

It's okay to include from both the first column and fifth column in the same name - names like "West Peachtree Street NW" do in fact exist. I'm not sure I got everything for the middle column, so if you see something I've missed, let me know.

Note: "Peachtree Industrial" cannot technically be generated from this chart, but appears to be a real name for a small road near (but not the same as) Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, according to Google Maps.

Vermont's legislature passed a bill legalizing same sex marriage last week.

On Monday, Vermont's Governor Douglas vetoed it. On Tuesday morning, the VT House and Senate will vote on overriding his veto, and the vote in the House is likely to be very close. If you know someone in Vermont who cares about this, their representative needs to hear from them.

The Vermont Senate voted 26-4 for this, so they will likely vote to override. The Vermont House voted 95-52; overriding a veto requires 100 votes. It's a real possibility, but it could easily fall short, especially since many of the reps who voted yes have gotten upset phone calls about it (even though polls show a majority of Vermonters support same sex marriage rights). Some more phone calls first thing in the morning (or messages left before 9am) could tip the balance.

If you're in Vermont:

• Find your Representative by clicking on your city or town.


• Find out how your Representative voted, and their phone number.


• If they voted Yes:
  "I'd like to thank Representative [Name] for supporting equal rights for same sex couples. Please vote to override the Governor's veto."


• If they voted No:"I'm disappointed that Representative [Name] did not support equal rights for same sex couples, but I hope the Representative will bring closure to this issue now, in light of the overwhelming support it has gotten, and vote to override the Governor's veto."

Please IM/text/email this (or a link to this post) to people you know in Vermont!

Edit: House voted 100-49 to override the veto. Phew, that was close!

On Sunday Molly was telling Val and I about this "friend" she had back in California, who invited her to come hang out and maybe go out. Oh, and by the way, since you're coming over, said this friend, why not bring some of that software you were going to try installing on my computer? Sure, said Molly, I can install it while we're hanging out.

She went over, with the software, and started... and a whole bunch of friend's Hollywood-ish friends came over, and friend said you don't mind finishing that software while we all go out, do you?

After our appropriate gasps of shock, Molly struggled to complete the sentence: "I can't believe she had the ... the ... what's the word for it? the nerve?" And right then, it came to me: I can't believe she had the blagojevich to suggest that!

We all agree this word should spread, so I indulged my habit of submitting to urbandictionary. It was while I was writing that entry, and trying to think of some good examples, that I made my recent post asking for stories. So now you know what made me think of it.

P.S. Urbandictionary has a bunch of other definitions of blagojevich, but mine's clearly the best one :) So please vote it up!

Tell me a story of something someone said or did that was so outrageously beyond chutzpah, it could only have happened if the person in question had not only a breathtaking sense of entitlement, but also no idea how out of line they were. They didn't just have a lot of nerve - they had no clue they had a lot of nerve, and observers could barely believe it happened.

Near the end of Arisia last weekend, I ran into shadesong and ktpinto in the "Hot Chicks with Books" room on dealer row, and somehow the topic of urban fantasy came up. I asked ktpinto if she'd read anything by one of my favorites in that genre, Holly Black (thanks, mzrowan, for introducing me to those books!). K had not heard of Holly, but shadesong piped in to say that she and Holly Black were going to appear in the same anthology soon, and handed me a flyer about Ravens in the Library.

There's here name, on the same list as Holly Black's - that was enough to make me want to buy it. But look! Featuring Tales by: Neil Gaiman! Charles de Lint. Francesca Lia Block!

It's a limited run, to raise funds to pay off s00j's medical bills (she's also got story in the book), and they will only sell enough copies to cover those expenses. If you want a copy of this book, preorder it now.

At Solarfest a couple of years ago, I attended a home energy efficiency workshop. One of the questions from the audience was about saving energy by not opening the refrigerator frequently, and his answer was: it doesn't really matter. I was just reminded of this when my housemate mentioned feeling bad about not planning ahead when she's cooking, so she opens and closes the fridge repeatedly. A lot of people think this wastes a lot of energy, and it actually doesn't.

The guy who spoke at Solarfest told us about some actual research that had been done: Same-model refrigerators were loaded with the same amount of food. A "control" fridge was left closed for several days, while the "experimental" fridge had its door opened far more frequently than even the most scatterbrained person would do in normal life, and held open for longer than people usually hold the door open. At the end, with the refrigerators cooled down to their set temperature, they compared the amount of electricity used by both (they'd had meters attached), and found the difference to be insignificant.

It makes sense if you think about it. Refrigerators cool the air inside, but cooling air isn't the point; the point is to transfer some heat out of the stuff that's in the fridge, and keep excess heat from getting back into the stuff. Keeping air cool is a means to an end.

Air itself has very little heat content, because it's so thin. Most of the heat a fridge is concerned with is in the much denser solid/liquid food. If you put warm food in, some of its heat will transfer into the cooler air, and the fridge will have to continuously cool that air until all of the excess heat has come out of the food, which happens slowly.

When you open the door, all you do is cycle a bit of cool air out, forcing the fridge to re-cool some air, but that takes very little energy. Since heat transfers much more slowly into solids, very little heat gets into your food while you have the door open. After you close the door, the fridge quickly re-cools some air, expending very little energy. There's hardly any extra heat to transfer out of the solid stuff, so that air stays cold. To really "waste" energy, you would need to do more than cycle a bit of air out. You'd need to take the cold stuff out of the fridge, and replace it with warmer stuff. But that's the reason you have a refrigerator in the first place.

If you want use your refrigerator more efficiently, don't worry about how often you open the door. Instead, if you have food items out that you plan to put back into the fridge, and that you don't need to warm up before you use them, put them back into the fridge before they have a chance to sit out for a while and get warm. Stuff matters much more than air.

Edit: Simplified way of thinking about it: What matters is the transfer of heat (not temperature) into the fridge; that's what it uses energy to get rid of. You can't easily move much heat into the fridge with air; you mostly do it with solids and liquids.

Ever since grad school, I've been carrying with me a stack of papers by Leslie Lamport, my favorite CS writer of papers. I'd tried to find them online back in the 90s but they were all paper-only publications and I never did... until yesterday, they first time I tried in years. It turns out that Leslie Lamport at some point went and scanned in all of his papers, and posted PDFs here:
http://research.microsoft.com/users/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

If you haven't heard of Leslie Lamport, or think of him only as the guy who wrote LaTeX: His entertaining, fun to read papers laid down much of the fundamental theory behind distributed computing. For example, Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. He's known for unusual ways of presenting the math, most famously in:

• The Part-Time Parliament, in which he described how to do distributed consensus (for example, as in three-phase commit in databases) cast in the form of archaeological findings about parliamentary procedure on an ancient Greek island.


• The Byzantine Generals Problem, in which he re-cast the problem of achieving concensus when some processes/processors may go "rogue" rather than simply stop working, as a story about treason in war.

(Actually, some of these are fun to read even if you're not a CS geek.)

Also, he was at Brandeis at the same time as my stepmother.

I find this archive is sucking my time. It has many more Lamport papers than my short stack from grad school, and it's easy to poke around wondering "what's this one about?", but hard to stop reading once I've gotten far enough into one of them to answer that question. Since it's got me hooked, I feel like spreading the affliction. Err, the wonder. Yeah.

"A distributed system is one in which I cannot get any work done because a machine I've never heard of is down." -- Leslie Lamport

Basic recipe:
- Put lentils in pot of boiling water and simmer about 15min
- Sauté some onion & garlic (and maybe other stuff)
- Add rice to sauteed stuff and stir to coat rice in oil
- Pour in the pre-simmerred lentils, and a bunch of broth
- Keep simmerring about 20min, adding more broth as it evaporates

I've done this several times with some variations, like:
- Sauté mushrooms, peppers, and/or prosciutto w/onion+garlic
- Add frozen peas near the end
- Chicken broth, homemade vegetable broth, other brothlike things

... and, different combinations of spices. But I won't say which so as not to bias anyone. Which spices would you use with this? (Let me know if you read others' comments before posting yours)