I went to a party as a Tall Blond Man In Black With One Brown Shoe but apparently nobody there had seen the movie.

Sometimes I complain that no one ever gave me a nickname; now a couple of spammers have seemingly remedied the omission:

To: “Malik Riley” <bpotter@pobox.com>
Cc: “Bradly Fisher” <broker@pobox.com>, “Jaymie Tucker” <bronto@pobox.com>, “Kathlene Gardner” <bruce.metelerkamp@pobox.com>, “Sarai Little” <bugs@pobox.com>

To: “Meritriona a’Hettinel” <bronto@pobox.com>, “Cylin aup’Gaveryou” <eric.loew@pobox.com>, “Jaiwenna aup’Qunnewur” <m-wild@pobox.com>

How do you suppose these handles were generated? (And by the way how do you efficiently write a hanging indent in HTML?)

A collection of London Underground maps including some silly ones. (Link from Andrew Bulhak.)

It is often said that Harry Beck‘s famous diagram “abandons geographical relations” — even though it shows the Thames! More precisely, the Beck chart reduces geography to its topological essentials.

Embarrassed myself this morning by not recognizing Jeremy Bornstein on the street, having attended his housewarming last winter.

I’m a bit slow in the morning. I’m very slow at learning faces.

Self-service for milk cows.

The machine allows his 140 cattle to effectively milk themselves as often as they want to.
Once inside, the animals receive a measure of feed, have their udders washed and sterilised by a robot arm and computer-guided suction cups attach themselves to their teats.
Their milk is tested for impurities before a gate opens, allowing them to walk back to the field.
While Mr Gibson initially had to coax his cattle into the milking booth, he now claims animals wait in line and some have doubled their yield.

(Cited way the heck back in May by Vicki Rosenzweig.)

Satellite view of California fires. (I am at a very comfortable distance from all this.)

From the Mercury-News: What’s next? Redistricting

Emboldened by the success of his recall initiative, anti-tax crusader Ted Costa said Tuesday he plans to go back to the voters with a ballot measure to break incumbents’ grip on California’s Legislature and congressional delegation.

. . . .

The details of Costa’s 2004 initiative are still under discussion, but in general, he said it would take the redistricting process out of the hands of party leaders. Instead, all legislators and outside interest groups, such as the League of Conservation Voters, would be invited to submit redistricting plans to a panel of retired judges appointed by a court yet to be determined. The judges would choose the best plan based on a new set of guidelines designed to discourage gerrymandering.

Rather than transferring the task from one body of men to another, my apportionment reform would ask the People to choose among a number of purely algorithmic approaches. The three most popular algorithms would then be applied to the three sets of seats to be assigned, in order of their size. (California has 80 seats in the state Assembly, 53 in Congress, and 40 in the state Senate.)