libraries rock! i'm in the bangor public library, which has free internet [ but no wifi ] and appears to be heavily subsidized by tabitha and stephen king. cool.

flights went well considering there were layovers in chicago and boston and puddle jumpers from grand rapids and to bangor. no major delays, although i did have to take my shoes off and unbuckle my pants in public more than once. hi. ho.

who's leaving the confines of the midwest to make a pilgrimage to The Great Northeast to the Land of Ones Youth? why me, silly.

i'll be in various various locales in maine, new hampshire, and vermont over the next week or so. depending on internet coverage and motivation, updating may be spotty.

please don't drink all the beer in the fridge.

sure, it might be academic hyperbole of the worse sort, but it still makes for a great sound bite :

""This will have the impact of a small nuclear bomb" in the field of human evolution, Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman told Nature. The discovery contradicts the idea that hominids -- the earliest creatures who branched off from apes to create the human family tree -- got their start in eastern Africa."

so, i bought an irock wireless music adaptor for my ipod today. coincidentally, i had been scoping it out around the same time that dave was pointing it out to the masses [ i suppose this is where i should probably point out in the interest of full disclosure that i am a motorola employee and the irock is produced by a motorola-off spin ].

to determine whether or not the irock is right for you will require being exquisitely in tune with your own personal sense of price and performance. the ipod lounge review pretty much nails it:

"Kudos to all who were involved in the product's design, the Irock! unit exudes future-geek modern looks. Now, if they had just paid all this attention to its reception capabilities, this product would truly i-rock."

"The Good: Inexpensive, small, easy to use, unique design, cool red glow.
The Bad: Noticeable static, must find the right placement for best reception."

are you an audiophile? don't get the irock. i drive a '97 camry sedan with stock stereo. my home system is a aiwa all-in-one that is almost a decade old. since there's no mistaking me for an audiophile, i figured i'd be willing to put up with the occasional static for the price [ 30 bucks at comp usa ].

post purchase, i'd recommend taking doc's comments to heart before plunking down your hard earned cash:

"The problem is that the iRock radiates on a choice of only four channels: 88.1, 88.3, 88.5 and 88.7. That's not enough. Say you're in the Bay Area, where KQED is putting out a 110,000-watt signal on 88.5. Even a good car radio (and most of them are remarkably good -- much better than home receivers), that signal is going to blow away not only an iRock signal on 88.5, but also on either of the two adjacent channels."

how big of a problem is this? well, the irock has a hard time with wyce, a local, independent community radio station that broadcasts on 88.1. it's probably a good bed that wyce is putting out considerably less that 110,000 watts. hi. ho. whoever decided on the price point was a genious, because $30 bucks hovers just on the upper edge of being cheap enough that i'll put up with having to move the unit around to occasionally pick up a better signal. if you're not that kind of person, then just spend 60 more bucks on a higher-end fm modulator like those found at c crane company.

Web application testing with Puffin :

"This first of four articles introduces the Puffin testing system. Puffin is an open source framework for testing Web applications. With Puffin you can build dynamically driven regression tests for even the most complex Web applications. Written in 100% Python, Puffin is easily extended to handle even obscure testing conditions."

there's must be a german word for that odd, jarring feeling that occurs when you're innocently googling for something and your site comes up first.

case in point - blogchalk reminded me of something i had seen on geographic metadata and syndic8 awhile back. and lo, inexplicably, i was staring at yours truly in response to querying for "syndic8 geography" .

anyway, i did end up tracking down bill kearrney's recommendation for adding location metadata to your rss feed :

"<META NAME="geo.placename" content="place name">
<META NAME="geo.position" content="latitude;longitude;elevation">
<META NAME="geo.country" content="xxx">"

in a recent profile of the creator of alice , richard wallace, we learn that he finds human's collective conversational capability to, er, lack in complexity:

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

and in related linguistics news, our humble lexicon puts kevin bacon to shame :

"Word association can link just about any two common words in the English language using an average of three steps, says a team of scientists in Arizona."

"he small-world network also means that apparently quite different concepts, such as 'actor' and 'universe', are closely linked by a short series of semantic steps. This, say the researchers, makes it easier for us to carry out mental searches when using language - we can get to our intended destination quickly, regardless of our starting point. A database cross-referenced in this way would be relatively easy to search computationally."

so we're optimized to not have to thing very hard about a limited number of conversational topics? sounds about right.

well, who'd a thunk that chicago would get top honors as the most "connected" city in the u.s.? of course, you'll need to take the following with an appropriately sized grain of salt - just because there are big, fat pipes all over town doesn't mean that you can get cheap, ubiquitous broadband:

"Chicago came out top because there were more net paths to and from it than any other city."

"History is also at work in helping Chicago to the top spot. The city was the site of one of the early internet nodes and has become a place where a lot of data traffic is swapped between networks."

i've seen an interesting thing or two on the things you can do with omnigraffle, but haven't been motivated to fork over the cake. well, it looks like the new version might warrant a closer look-see, if the reviews can be trusted:

"What this clever piece of software does is use Cocoa's beautifully rendered graphics classes to draw boxes and connect them with "smart" lines. Unimpressed? Let me put it another way: what OmniGraffle attempts to do is provide you with virtually anything you could ever imagine you need for drawing boxes and connecting them with lines. And that often surpasses what programs costing almost ten times as much can offer in that particular field."

"What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" and cory's lament about how being fat sucks are timely since there's a lot of discussion amongst the accidental marathonists about the relative merits of zoneish diets.

interestingly, this month's runner's world reports on new studies that document potential health problems [ mostly due to dehydration and kidney strain ]for endurance athletes after only a few weeks on the diet. just to make things even more confusing, they also profile a doctor who used the diet as part of a successful program to run faster marathons. hmmm.