I’ll post pictures when the move happens after September 1. For now, you’ll have to settle for maps. Here are the places that are twice as close to my new place as my old:

View Larger Map

That includes:

• Buena Vista Park
• Alamo Square
• The Panhandle
• All of the Mission

For comparison, here are the places that are two times closer to my old apartment:

View Larger Map

Most of that is underwater. It even includes a piece of Alcatraz!

The images offer a fascinating tour of San Francisco history, from Chinatown in 1952

to hippies on Haight street in 1967:

The real coup, though, is to find an image of your own block or apartment from the photographic past. To that end, I’ve put the Cushman images which include a street address on a Google map. There aren’t any pictures here from my block, but maybe you’ll be luckier!

View Larger Map

If you catch the old photo bug, the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection is another great place to look. Here’s a photo I found of my block in 1926:

Just look at those cars!

1. Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris
3. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore
4. Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz
5. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple
6. An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim
7. Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff
8. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
9. The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris
10. Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore
11. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock
12. Don’t Look Back (1967) D.A. Pennebaker
13. Salesman (1968), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
14. Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), Godfrey Reggio
15. Sherman’s March (1986), Ross McElwee
16. Grey Gardens (1976), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer
17. Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Andrew Jarecki
18. Born into Brothels, (2004), Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
19. Titicut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman
20. Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Wim Wenders
21. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore
22. Winged Migration (2002), Jacques Perrin
23. Grizzly Man (2005), Werner Herzog
24. Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais
25. Woodstock (1970), Michael Wadleigh

Only seven out of the top 25. I’ve got some documentary-watching to do!

• It’s free. Unlike some other papers.
• It’s convenient: there’s an Onion distribution box within 100 feet of my apartment.
• It’s online (w/ answers!). Here’s a link to the June 17 puzzle.

Now some spoilers… don’t read these if you plan on doing that puzzle I linked to!

• I rarely learn new words from a crossword puzzle. If an answer looks strange, it’s more likely to be because I’m not parsing it right than because it’s a word I don’t know. But the last two weeks, we’ve had:
  • This week, 45 Across, “Gelatinous, edible molds”: ASPICS.
  • Last week, 36 Across, “Taste for fine art”: VIRTU.
• The cultural references are more up-to-date. Unlike the NYT puzzle, I have a chance with these. Case in point, last week’s 23 Across, “Trent Reznor’s band, for short”: NIN.
• It’s more irreverent than the Times. Take this week’s 7 Across, “Not worth doing?”: BADINBED. It took me a long time to get since an answer like that would never be in the NYT. I thought the joke might be “worth” referring to “net worth”. I’m glad I was wrong!
• The themes are hilarious. This week’s was inventors killed by their inventions:
  • 17A: Invention by tailor Franz Reichelt in which he fell to his death (as seen on YouTube)
  • 24A: Invention by Otto Lilienthal in which he crashed to his death
  • 27A: Invention modernized by William Bullock that mangled his leg and led to his death
  • 50A: With 50-Across, invention of bedridden engineer Thomas Midgely, Jr. that strangled him to death
  • 62A: Procedure improved by physician Alexander Bogdanov that left him dead of TB and malaria

  The fun is that, as you fill in the answers, you have to think of bizarre inventions that could kill a man.

Drag the column headers to rearrange the table. dragtable is incredibly easy to use. To make a table rearrangeable, just add class=draggable to the table tag. And, if you set class="draggable sortable", you can have a table that’s simultaneously sortable and rearrangable! For more details and a download link, check out the dragtable page.

I’m calling this v0.9 since I’m sure there are plenty of bugs and tweaks left to make. I’d love to get some feedback, so take it for a spin and tell me what you think!

Update: I’ve added full-column dragging and bumped the version to 1.0. Head on over to the dragtable, grab a copy, and let me know what you think!

We want to capture R. Kelly, the world’s most notorious terrorist.

I know R. Kelly is bad, but the world’s most notorious terrorist? It took me a minute to realize what the quote really was:

We want to capture or kill the world’s most notorious terrorist.

What does this say about me!?

But before checking out for a few months, I’ve got one last Presidential Primary post left in me.

The question for the last few weeks has been “why is Hillary still in this race?” She can’t win a majority of pledged delegates, overall delegates, states, or votes (unless you use very strange definitions of who “counts”). Could she have something up her sleeve with Michigan and Florida?

According to Daily Kos, here was the delegate count at the end of the night:

Obama passed 1,622 pledged delegates tonight and claimed a majority. But that excludes Florida and Michigan. Florida had 185 delegates and Michigan had 156. To get an absolute majority of pledged delegates including Florida and Michigan, he’d need 1,622 + (185 + 156)/2 = 1792.5 delegates. With only 86 pledged delegates left, there’s no way he can make Florida and Michigan irrelevant.

Or so goes the argument. But what did those excluded Florida and Michigan actually look like?

I don’t know precisely how the “Uncommitted” delegates work, but I imagine they’d be under enormous pressure to vote for Obama at the convention. Add those in and you get:

So if you include the Florida and Michigan delegations, he hasn’t passed that magic mark, but he’s extremely close. And more interestingly, he’s the only one that can pass that mark. Hillary needs 113 pledged delegates for a majority, but there are only 86 left. This is because of the Edwards delegates.

If you don’t give Obama the 55 uncommitted delegates from Michigan though, he’s unlikely to pass the 50% mark, even by June 3. Could that be the trick? It seems a bit far-fetched. We’ll find out in three months when I start paying attention again!

On Sunday, Ryan and I rode out to the far Western edge of San Francisco, just north of Ocean Beach. While it’s only six miles from my apartment, this felt like a much longer trip. There are no freeways in this part of the city, so our route was stop and go through neighborhood after neighborhood: Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Pac Heights, Laurel Heights, Inner Richmond and Outer Richmond.

This is the land of Adolph Sutro, a former mayor of San Francisco who I learned about from this Sparkletack episode. Sutro’s two claims to fame in this area are:

The second Cliff House, which lasted from 1896-1907. This must have been especially dramatic back then, when this area was completely uninhabited. Nowadays we’re on the third Cliff House, a swanky restaurant with spectacular views. I’d love to eat there someday, but that degree of swankiness requires a special occasion.

The remains of the Sutro baths, which Sutro once hoped would be his great legacy. It’s a shame that these public baths no longer exist. I can only imagine how nice it would be to relax here with a magnificent view of the ocean and feel the sea breeze coming in. The rocks you can see peeking out of the sea were covered in mussels, which made the waves slowly drain off them, rather than crashing. It was a sight to behold.

Here’s what the baths used to look like. I believe you can see the lack of a Cliff House in the background.

I was disappointed to find out that the baths were enclosed. While it is a spectacular building, I liked the idea of catching the sea breeze from the baths. I also find it amazing how very old these ruins look, even though the building only burned down in 1966.

It’s rare for me to watch a documentary and conclude that it undereditorialized, but that’s exactly the reaction I’ve had to the first few episodes of this season.

First we had The Medicated Child, which looked at the rapid increase in drug prescriptions for ADHD and Bipolar disorder in children. Frontline’s approach was to follow several families that had either put their children on drugs or decided not to. Each family had widely varying reactions. One family felt that the drugs prevented their child from committing suicide. Another felt that the drugs had led directly to their child committing suicide. And so on. I doubt that these cases are typical, but with only a few stories in the show, it’s difficult to get any sense of proportion. The issue of what’s caused the increase in prescriptions, the issue I found most interesting going into the show, was hardly touched.

Then there was Growing Up Online, which purports to look at the increasingly prominent role of the internet in the lives of kids. I was really excited about this one since, unlike with most documentaries I see, I have very direct, personal experience with this issue. I was left with the distinct impression that I knew more about growing up online than the producers did. Once again, they followed a few extreme examples. One girl created an entire online world revolving around erotic, gothic pictures of herself. Another boy was driven to suicide by cyberbullying. These are interesting cases, but again, they are so rare that they throw off all sense of balance in the episode. The show was not without its strengths, however. Some of the kids had interesting perspectives on the role of the internet that I was able to relate to. And most interestingly, it showed me how growing up online has shifted since I did it. We had AIM and email when I was a kid, but most people didn’t have blogs and there was no Facebook. We had dialup. Going online was a decision. Nowadays kids have laptops, cable and wireless connections that are always on. Being online is no longer an experience, it’s just a given.

Finally we have Rules of Engagement, which looks at the incident in Haditha, Iraq. I was inspired to watch this by an interview with the director on On The Media, one of my favorite podcasts. Haditha is an especially thorny issue, even by FRONTLINE standards. The Marines say one thing. The Iraqi’s say something completely different. Several Marines have changed their stories, but only after being offered immunity to testify against one another. There’s essentially no physical evidence. It’s just one man’s word against another’s. I certainly feel as though I understand the Haditha situation better after watching this documentary, but I have no idea who to believe.

I guess this is a problem inherent to the documentary. Is a mere data dump valuable? Is it possible? Is it better to editorialize explicitly and make an argument, or is it better not to take sides and only incidentally present a skewed or unbalanced view.

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know that FRONTLINE has left me wanting unqualified statements of fact. Maybe I’ll go read some math books…

Not so, GW-BASIC. To save space, it stored code in a compact, binary format. This seems like an unnecessary optimization now, but back in 1984 it made a lot of sense. GW-BASIC was an interactive environment, and it stored all your code in memory. Memory was a scarce resource at the time, so every byte counted. Hence the binary format.

I wanted to read my old GW-BASIC programs, so I dug around and found this discussion of the GW-BASIC binary file format. It’s incredibly detailed, which let me whip up a decoder in Python over two solid hours of hacking. Without further ado, here it is:

GW-Basic Program Decoder

For a sample decoding, see below the fold.
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