News You Can Bruise

Hey, how's it going? I've got a ton of important stuff to do, but that just means I can procrastinate by putting up pictures from our Paris trip. Today I'd like to introduce you to the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a museum not found in either of our guidebooks but recommended by every French person we talked to. You know how The Da Vinci Code starts in the Louvre? Well, Foucault's Pendulum isn't having any of that mainstream nonsense--it starts off in Arts et Métiers, a museum of Science and Invention with none of that postmodern self-reflection seen in museums whose exhibits were updated after, say, 1995.

That's probably why it's not in the guidebooks; it's kind of old-fashioned and disjointed. You'll walk through a bunch of exhibits that don't seem to have changed since the 1960s, and then suddenly jump forward in museum time to the electronics age (mid-1990s I'd say). You check out some cool old computers and awkard "interactive" exhibits, then you walk through a doorway or around a corner, and you're back in the 1960s with things behind glass in wooden cases.

Nonetheless, if you're reading this weblog, this is a must-see museum when you're in Paris, because the amount and type of incredible stuff they have is off the charts. Here's just a sample to whet your appetite:

I figured out who buys all that Statue of Liberty kitsch in New York —it's tourists visiting from Paris! Parisians love the Statue of Liberty. There's a 1/4 scale model on the banks of the Siene, there's this thing (I think a 1/16) in front of the museum, another one outside the Musée d'Orsay. Look, you gave it away, it's ours now... don't make this weird, France.

This is the sort of thing you come to the museum for: Léon Foucault's 1862 apparatus for measuring the speed of light with a rapidly rotating mirror. To see how it works you can either watch a very slow video or promise yourself you'll read the Wikipedia page later and then never get around to it.

Or how about this wicked bastard? This is a steampunk oscilloscope, made by Rudolph Koenig in the 19th century. On the left is a big stack of Hemholz resonators, each designed to pick up one specific frequency and dampen all other frequencies. Each resonator is attached to a little gaslight. You set all the gaslights blasting away, and when a resonator vibrates it makes the flame of the attached gaslight wobble. Then you turn the crank on the right to rotate the mirror (everything had a rotating mirror back then), and the resonant frequencies of whatever sound you're playing show up visually as wavy lines across the mirror, versus the undisturbed lines of all the frequencies not present. There's almost no signage on this thing and I had to sit through a slow five-minute audioguide explanation to figure out what's going on here but it was worth it!

Perhaps the plastic arts are more your speed. Here's a show-offy piece by Colville from the 1855 Universal Exposition, which demonstrates all the colors the manufacturer is capable of slapping onto a piece of porcelain. It really reminded me of the DOS color palette the way there are adjacent dark and light versions of the same color.

Or maybe you're too pure, too abstract for such material concerns. Maybe you'd like to take this sample case door-to-door, selling geometric solids to the public? This was briefly a popular business model among the Willie Loman types of nineteenth-century France, who eventually gave up and used the shapes to study geometry. These two pieces are by Louis Dupin (1846) and Baradelle (1805).

You know that the French Revolution gave birth to the metric system and had its own calendar, but did you know they also used decimal time? Tragically, counterrevolutionary clocks, like this two-faced example, made it easy for slackers to continue using the old system, and decimal time was only the law of the land for about a year. Look at it! The decimal time face is the tiny one on the bottom! They're not even taking it seriously!

Sumana with a model of the Jacquard loom, distant ancestor to the mighty general-purpose computer. What we didn't expect was all the other looms that came beforehand! They were all here in one big room that people walked right through, not knowing how cool the things they were seeing are.

Here's an example: a model of an earlier loom controlled by holes punched in paper. Now that's computery! Looks just like 1980s dot-matrix printer paper. (We also saw a full-size loom that basically ran off a player piano roll.) The problem here is that it's one huge sheet of paper. If you want to add or remove an "instruction", sucks to be you. It's like programming in BASIC when you can't change the line numbers. Whereas the Jacquard loom is programmed by small cards that are tied together. It's a lot easier to go in and change something.

		There was a whole exhibit hall about keyboards and other input devices, a section I like to call "Telegraphy and Typewriters". The museum is full of unusual keyboard layouts. You'll have to trust me on this because I'm showing you a stenography typewriter, and those still have weird keyboard layouts. The second picture shows the box the stenography keyboard came in, and another, more spidery stenography keyboard in the background.

Here's perhaps my favorie piece from the "Telegraphy" section of that exhibit hall. This brave inventor refused to succumb to Not Invented Here syndrome. In an era when everyone was inventing weird telegraphy keyboards, this person thought "We already have keyboards! The keyboard has been around and successful for hundreds of years! I'm not going to reinvent the wheel!"

I'm going to close with this shot of the classic Minitel terminal. The museum had a very Pavel Chekhov rah-rah attitude towards all things French, and I don't begrudge this attitude—technologically the French have a lot to be proud of. But sometimes it was kind of a stretch. Did you know that the European ground station for the Telstar satellite was in France? I don't really think that's sufficient grounds to display a model of the Telstar in a museum exhibit and do a whole thing about it. You made Minitel! Minitel was amazing! You should do a whole Hall of Minitel! Just a suggestion.

There's a lot of boring graffiti in the world, but sometimes it's cute or interesting, and I think the Francophone cartooning tradition means there's more interesting stuff in Europe. Here are the greatest acts of vandalism I saw on our trip to Paris:

Man, that second one's like a Paul Klee graffito. The snail and the "Nos amores digitales" were on the same wall!

Sumana and I just returned from an anniversary trip to Paris, courtesy of Sumana's mom. We had a great time, and as time permits I'll be putting up mini-travelogues of the major sights we saw. I'll start things off with a catalog of our lesser adventures and discoveries.

As always, I travelled exclusively by private bus. We had to make some minor livery changes to make my usual ride street-legal in France.

We skipped the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, Paris's two biggest tourist traps. However we did take a boat cruise of the Seine the first day, so there is proof that I was near the Eiffel Tower at some point.

We were more enthusiastic about Montmartre, home of the perspective-tastic steps seen in Celine And Julie Go Boating.

I loved the Jardin du Luxembourg. For some reason people were always taking selfies next to this statue.

Also in the garden but a bit harder to find was this awesome metastatue! The Luxembourg also features a functional Beaux-Arts latrine (not pictured).

The most touristy thing we did was a walk down the Champs Élysées, which was the Paris equivalent of walking through Times Square on Broadway, then crossing the street and walking back. It was cool at the start (Arc de Triomphe), and again later on once it turned into a park, but I'm gonna let this picture sum up the middle:

We ate a lot of great food! I won't be sharing pictures of the food because I don't take good pictures of food, but I'll say that raw milk cheese is fabulous, and pastries and bread were routinely as good as the best you can get in New York. High-quality carbs and cheese: the culinary highlights of my trip. We went on a food tour with two other tourists and since three of us were from New York, when we went into the cheese shop the tour guide said "Look, you can get most of these at Murray's, so we're just gonna focus on the raw milk." Much appreciated. We didn't eat at La Grenoille but I thought it was cute and it can stand in for a lot of Paris restaurants. I tried escargot, as well as the mysterious Futurist dessert known as the floating island, and my verdict for both is "meh".

We also didn't eat at this restaurant, because it was closed, and because the passive-aggressive note taped to the window ensures that no one will ever eat there again. (My translation: "We will reopen upon completion of the work to stop the recurrent floods of fecal water from the WC installed in the basement. We are waiting on the leaseholder to act.")

But I'm sure you're asking: what do the French think of America in today's Je Suis Charlie world? Well, here's the answer, in sidewalk menu form. Bad luck, rest of the country! According to France, New York City is coextant with the United States, and Toronto stands in for all of Canada. It could be worse; in the airport I saw a French guidebook for "New York + Brooklyn". I mean, I get it, we didn't really leave Paris, but I know there are different regions in France.

This tote bag we saw in a €1.20 store (i.e. a dollar store, but more expensive) managed to achieve greater overall accuracy by avoiding pesky details. Not sure where that subway map comes from though.

Okay, that's it for now, but tune in soon for scientific instruments, Duchamp's obviously fake readymades, and the Tetsuo Milk-approved netherworld of Versailles. Just to whet your appetite, here's the sort of thing you see in the Musée des Arts et Métiers, a really cool museum that wasn't mentioned by either of the guidebooks we used, but was mentioned by every French person we asked.

An early steno keyboard! Awesome. See you next time.

New England has great place names:

• Murderkill River
• Pepperbox
• Wequetequock

That reminds me of the town I found in New Hampshire called Sandwich Landing, which brought to mind The Young Ones.

Sumana was looking at the map and found Grey Whale Cove south of Pacifica. We thought that was a nice-sounding name and decided to go visit it, but then I discovered that it's a nude beach. So we're going to walk the Golden Gate Bridge instead.

Can someone please go to Japan and find out what the Hakone 3D Space Dinosaur World/Fairy Tale Aquarium is? Sumana went near enough to it to get a brochure that mentions it in a big list of attractions, but not near enough to it to find out if it really is the most awesome thing in the world, or just a bunch of meaningless words strung together.

Though I have no particular love for Las Vegas, I do love articles that treat the city as a perverse optimization problem. It's the generalization of trying to beat the casino games. Here are a couple such articles I found a ways back, and today I found another, more pragmatic one. Now that's what I call better satisfying the fitness function!

Sumana, preparing for her vacation to Tokyo, showed me Why don't you try simulation of earthquake,wind and flood damage. Why don't I? Great tourism interface on that site.

Date with Sumana along Valencia yesterday evening. Bookstores: bought used Iain Pears, which so far reads like a less clever Quicksilver. Bombay Creamery: ginger ice cream is good, saffron pistachio ice cream is better. Pirate store: fun! Secret code: bring almonds to the girl behind the counter; she loves almonds. Addams Family-esque garden supply/taxidermy store next to the pirate store, and from which the pirate store seems to have acquired some of their merchandise: not as fun, but okay. They sold largeish test tubes, which I would turn into a spice rack if I wanted a cool-looking spice rack that was hard to use. BART back home: comfortable.

For Sanil's benefit I cropped and put up pictures of the Kevin/Sanil/Leonard peace grove hike, but I haven't named the pictures yet so unless you like poking through directories full of unnamed files, you might be frustrated. But here's a special picture for Susanna, which I took while walking to the BART from North Beach.

So, I know all the standard British English and when I went to England a while back I thought I would have no problem communicating with the natives. And for the most part I got along fine. Nobody even tried to confuse me with double-talk about boots and lifts and parliamentary governments. But I did run into some verbal confusion for which no guidebook or web page had prepared me, and these experiences were kind of embarrassing in a that-aggravating-American or a Leonard-suffers-in-silence kind of way. For the benefit of future tourists I will now commence a vocabulary of lesser-known differences between UK and US terminology.

Exhibit A. In the US, when you order an "x salad sandwich" (eg. "chicken salad sandwich"), you get a sandwich made of x salad, which is x mashed up with mayonnaise and celery and other unsavory things. I'd never order any kind of "x salad sandwich" here.

But in the UK "x salad sandwich" means "do you want a sad little slice of tomato and piece of lettuce on your sandwich, or do you just want the bread and cheese and meat and whatever?" And clearly you want the x salad sandwich in preference to the x sandwich, because you need that tomato and vegetable to lubricate the sandwich which is otherwise pretty dry or slathered with some obscure Qwghlmnian sauce.

Exhibit B. I ran into some confusion between "chocolate" meaning a candy bar and meaning an individual, unwrapped piece of chocolate candy and meaning a piece of candy in general. I never did figure this out, and in the end I just went chocolate-less rather than navigate what seemed to be another country's "Want a Coke?" "Sure, I'll have a Sprite" issue. Now that I think about it it's kind of weird that it was easier for me to buy chocolate in French in Belgium than in English in England. Anyway, can anyone clear up this point? It's possible I was merely faced with a surly or inexpert cashier.

In the future, guidebooks will only have things you're interested in. (From Sumana).

Distributed stereotype ranking self-evaluations for Great Britain. Food and monarchy head the list. Full list nowhere to be seen online, which is a shame as that sort of list would be a good air-clearer for finding out less-appreciated facets of a national psyche.

Unfortunately, WikiDay is on hiatus due to insufficient funding. How will I tell the children that WikiDay has been cancelled? Please, think of the children.

On Saturday, a sadistic Kevin made me and Sanil (visiting from Chennai) hike up Wildcat Peak near Berkeley. Apart from the hellish ascent and the treacherous descent, it was nice. A Nike missile silo (q.v.) on the summit has been beaten into a plowshare of an observation deck from which you can see the entire San Francisco Bay. I have pictures but who knows whether you can see anything in them--I've only seen tiny thumbnails so far because I can't find my USB memory card reader.

There's a "Peace Grove" below the observation deck in which certain trees have been provided the local Rotary Club with plaques comemmorating peacemakers (from a Rotary Club point of view, I guess) like Desmond Tutu, Anwar Sadat, Adlai Stevenson, and Edward Teller. Kevin claims Henry Kissinger has a plaque, but we couldn't find it.

The Peace Grove is great because there's no trail through it, no list of plaques, and no guidebook references--just a marking on the trail map and the word of your (not particularly trustworthy) guide. I probably shouldn't even be talking about it, lest I spoil the fun of crunching through the brush looking for plaques. It's like a monument plus a geocache.

While driving across the Missouri river, Brendan and I passed a riverboat casino. Except it wasn't a riverboat. It was a building built on a pier with molding on the outside that made it look like a riverboat. It was connected to an onshore parking structure. How can that possibly skirt any state regulation about gambling? Is onshore gambling actually legal in Kansas, with this casino merely trying to provide the experience of Old Tyme Riverboat Gambling?

Check out The Religious Policeman, an relatively new English-language weblog written by a Saudi. Your average political complaining weblog, except he's complaining about the lack of elections in his country. Caution: contains pictures of public executions. I'm not kidding.

I'd love to find more English-language weblogs written by natives of non-English-speaking countries--please post your favorites in comments. I want English-language weblogs because I want to read them, not collect them, and unfortunately I don't speak all the world's languages. I'm a failure!

From a meandering Salon article Sumana pointed me to, I found out about the ultra-decadent Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai, which I could never go to for fear the hotel would suddenly start sailing off into the Persian Gulf. It sure has a lot of stuff, but the bizarre all-caps style of the ad copy makes me think the person writing it is asking for my help smuggling money out of the country.

SPANNING 330 SQUARE METRES.. THE CLUB SUITE.. LOCATED ON THE 19TH AND 20TH FLOORS..IS THE PERFECT ENTERTAINMENT SUITE.SPORTING A SNOOKER TABLE.. COCKTAIL BAR AND DINING TABLE FOR 6 PEOPLE WHILE CLEANING.. THIS GORGEOUS SUITE I DISCOVERED $20 MILLION IN US DOLLARS LEFT.. BY A PREVIOUS OCCUPANT BENEATH THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE WHICH LEADS UP TO AN ADDITIONAL LOFT COMPLETE WITH SITTING AREA CONTINUING INTO THE BEDROOM WITH ITS KING SIZE BED.. I WRITE THIS FROM THE COMPLETE BUSINESS CENTER CONSISTING OF A WORK DESK..LAPTOP..PRINTER PRIVATE FAX AND TELEPHONE SERVICES AND DATAPORT ..

I got very excited when I read:

But the Japanese always think big, even in miniature. That's why they built the entire world to precise scale at this odd site about two hours by train from Tokyo.

Sadly, that is hyperbole. The entire world is not represented to scale at Tobu World Square. It just has a bunch of scale models of famous buildings. They're nice models, though! Check out the pictures. They even have Tom, the famous 150-foot tall beefeater.

I look forward to the exciting future, where terraformed planetoids recreate Earth at scale. But I had this mental image of the portion of the model world in Tobu World Square that contained a tiny model of the model of the world in Tobu World Square, ad infinitum, and you can't get that on no planetoid.

One of the advantages of having a digital camera that fits in your pocket is that you can take a picture whenever your arms are not paralyzed. I kind of had this when I had the Hiptop (That reminds me: I got rid of the Hiptop because it never worked for me. I now use a cheap old reliable cell phone with no features beyond Tele-Talk^TM), but my time trials indicate that it takes about ten seconds for me to take my camera out of my pocket, turn it on, take a picture, turn the camera off, and put it back into my pocket. I don't think I could have taken a picture with the Hiptop in 10 seconds. Plus you can actually see details in the camera pictures.

All that was seemingly a big lead-up to the fact that I've had to start putting up "misc" directories to contain pictures that don't correspond to a "big event, better take the camera" thing. Here they are for February and March. These sets include hilarious moments like At least they didn't park in the handicapped space.

Bonus for Joe: this Ad campaign for New Zealand found near the Apple store which opens up new fields in tautological advertising. "Don't even come," it says. "We won't let you in."

Bonus bonus for everone: for some reason they're ripping up all the greenery around the building where I work. I assume they know what they're doing. Anyway, I call this picture set The Scouring of the Shire, and it should satisfy those of you who were hoping Return of the King would be even longer.

California's pretty stingy with its brown highway signs, the ones designating an Official Government Attraction. Even zoos and wildlife preserves don't generally have brown signs. So it was a surprise when I went out to the Midwest and started seeing brown signs everywhere, some on ridiculous things not worthy of a brown sign, like the National Pontiac Corvette Museum and the Maker's Mark Distillery. (There's also the My Old Kentucky Home State Park featuring "Steven Foster: The Musical", none of which should even exist, much less have multiple brown signs. The state that MAMMOTH CAVE calls home put Steven Foster on their state quarter!)

The point of this entry is that there are three brown signs we saw that point to things that should exist, and that we would have visited had we had more time. The first is the Abraham Lincoln birthplace in Kentucky. It apparently has a Lincoln Memorial type marble building which protects from deterioration a log cabin in which Lincoln was not born.

The second thing is the Agriculture Hall of Fame near the Kansas/Missouri border. Untrue to its name, the Agriculture Hall of Fame is not the destination for which the state fair is merely the semifinal. It does not house the World's Largest Grape. It does have inductees, who are pretty much who you'd expect. It has a lot of old farming implements. It has tours. It has a large collection of barbed wire and Harry Truman's boyhood plow. Speaking of which...

The third thing is the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, where it turns out Truman is buried. A little weird. The online-but-not-really gift shop lets you buy "The Buck Stops Here" desk sign replicas.

The signs leading into Santa Nella say "Everything For The Traveler", which always makes me feel like I'm entering a creepy cult town that worships the Traveler from Star Trek. "Noooo! You cannot order the Traveler's Breakfast Special! Only the Traveler may order the Traveler's Breakfast Special!"

Google image search: don't mess with texas. Includes the polite version.

They got some funny business names here in Little Rock. For instance, there's Catfish City, which has a great logo (no good image of same on web) and a water wheel in front which cost $4200. And there's a pizza place called Damn Good Pies, which I've been told is a good approximation to Super Pizza Hut Plus. But my favorite business name is "Tourism Research & Warehouse". It's a nondescript building in a strip mall of other nondescript buildings. That whole strip mall has to be a front for something. I know there's a Strategic Helium Reserve, but I'd think we'd have outsourced our Strategic Tourism Reserve to Japan.

That reminds me of a joke Jason made up. "What do miners say when they strike helium?" [squeaky voice] "We're rich!"

Sumana said I need to post another entry about my going to Arkansas so people don't think the previous one was for Canadian April Fool's Day or something. So, let's talk about Arkansas. I remember being in Texarkana and then being in Tennessee on a road trip when I was younger, but I don't remember going through Arkansas, even though that's the only reasonable way it could have happened.

What is there to do in Little Rock? Sumana and I were there last weekend and there was not much besides a farmer's market and a Red Bull promotional event. This makes me feel as though the people in charge of my Truman Show-style simulated life were caught unprepared by my sudden excursion, and that when I come back it will be bustling.

Kevin has a longstanding yet irrational fear that the final act of the HBO drama of his life will begin when he goes to Bolivia and is caught in a Cryptonomicon-style luggage sa-bo-tage. These people are not in as much trouble as Kevin will be in his hour of need, but I'll link to anything that makes him apprehensive. They're taking it pretty well, all things considered:

"Bolivia is one of the last strongholds of indigenous values," Reimuller said. "It needs to be preserved in our world."

The Commissariat Of Enlightenment: a novel about a Russian filmmaker who ends up running the Soviet propaganda department. One of those novels where famous people show up for no reason but to let you say "Oh, the author has brought a famous person into the story." Not as bad as The Difference Engine in this respect. Great ending, and a funny set piece near the end where an attempt to film an assault on the tsarist Kremlin turns into an actual assault on the Soviet Kremlin. But the story consists almost entirely of foreshadowing, which gets boring. Makes the Lenin/Stalin relationship out to be like The Lockhorns, where Lenin burns the dinner and Stalin comes home drunk and crashes the car into the garage door. It was better than It's Hard To Be A Russian Spy, which I guess is an accomplishment because IHTBARS is by a Russian and TCOE is by an American.

Here they stand, 83 in number, your EuroPython/Belgium/Amsterdam pictures! My favorites:

• A good picture of PrustiTaina and Jarno, and Jarno plotting something in Amsterdam.
• My hotel room was about twice the size of my cubicle at work. At first I thought this was way too small, but over time I began to sympathize with my Belgian captors.
• My attempt at duplicating from memory the picture of Rachel by the Manikin Pis. Prusti took a picture of me attempting to duplicate Rachel's other picture from Brussels, the "scarfing down a waffle" picture", but I don't have it yet.
• For Danny, some surreptitiously-taken NTK T-shirt sightings: 1 2
• My attempt at nature photography: a spiderweb on a footbridge in Amsterdam.
• Signs: a dinosaur, the world's most confusing road sign, a woman who should just put the fish down, a great store name, and a liquid tot. (I hate to spoil this by telling you, but that last sign actually says "Liquidation Totale" and part of it is covered up by the graffitti-ridden corrogated metal anti-theft device.)
• Remember that one-inch square of text in Time magazine about the Dutch-designed urinal that had a fly painted on it to encourage good aim? Well, the urinals in the conference center in Charleroi had that fly.
• At around 2 AM on Belgian TV, they broadcast Missile Command-esque typing games. Why don't they just play the national anthem and call it a night?

Welcome the latest addition to the NewsBruiser family: Timo Virkkala's WeeTee's Piece Of Mind, all the way from Finland. (Wow, I now know an amazing 0.00005% of the population of Finland! Only 5909239 to go!)

Timo's installation story is pretty harrowing, but only one of his problems was directly caused by NewsBruiser (and it's been fixed in CVS), so I feel a little better. It's always painful setting up a web application on a machine you don't control; I tried to design NewsBruiser for that situation because I know the feeling. Anyway, I hope Timo has a great time with NewsBruiser.

Incidentally, the download URL I gave Timo is this one, and here's the patch against nb/NewsBruiserCGIs.py which fixes the infinite loop problem in version 1.13.0. I guess I'll have to release a version as soon as I get Internet back:

131c131
<         while not os.path.exists(dir):
---
>         while dir and not os.path.exists(dir):

For no real reason, Kevin sent me some funny reminiscence essays on post-Communist Czech culture.

On the bus to work, nauseated but not tired. The fact that on my last night in Belgium it was completely impossible to sleep nipped my returning jet lag in the bud, I hope. The Belgians are a festive people, delighting in musical concerts, fireworks displays, honking their horns at each other for no reason, and on-road off-road racing, all right outside my hotel room.

The last deserves some explanation. There are people who have big dirt bikes which they race down the twisting streets of Brussels. They avoid condemnation from the superstitious natives, who believe them to be the characters from Power Rangers Ninja Storm.

I'm at EuroPython, squandering my precious laptop battery power that I need for my presentation tomorrow. I bought a wide variety of adapters and power convertors but they're all useless because my laptop won't plug into them due to its grounding plug. Fortunately, I'm supposedly about to meet up with someone who has an IBM power cord with a European connector.

I went to Amsterdam. I've been hanging out a lot with Jarno and his girlfriend PrustiTaina, because their travel plans have overlapped with mine to an unbelievable extent (eg. they planned to go to Amsterdam the same day I planned to, they chose the same hotels that I did, etc.) I also ate a waffle. My French is only good for reading and not for hearing what people are saying, nor for talking because when I try to talk to someone in French they just respond in English.

Riana writes:

Belgium, eh? What a dazzling array of people hovers nearby, just across the Channel. GBP14, return, sans taxes. Although it's a pain getting out to the not-really-in-Brussels airport, and into London from the slightly-outside-London airport. All the same, you should demand of all your contacts within a reasonable radius of Belgium that they come see you.

Yes, scenic Belgium. Centrally located to... other countries.

How are you on the Wonders of the Ancient World?