Critical Exponent

Knox and I decided to spend Christmas weekend in New York City. While we took the cheap Greyhound to get there, we splurged on a king-bed suite at the Murray Hill East Suites. We walked a lot around the city. Sight-seeing highlights included:

• The New York Public Library, where we saw “The Splendor of the Word” exhibit on illuminated medieval manuscripts; the detailed workmanship is just amazing. We also saw the “I am with you” exhibit celebrating the sesquicentennial of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

• The Sea, Air, and Space Museum on the aircraft carrier U. S. S. Intrepid, where I got to meander the flight deck and to walk through a British Airways Concorde. To be honest, the rest of the museum was too martial for my taste

• Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport Complex, one of several corpse shows making the rounds where we got to see plastified real corpses with various systems, organs, diseases, and malformations clearly displayed. Most ethereal of all were the displays of the human circulatory system: the blood vessels were preserved while the surrounding tissue was removed chemically, creating ghostlike impressions of human beings.

• The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, where we saw the exhibit “Fashion in Colors,” in which every room was dedicated to examples of a given color in fashion. We also saw a smaller exhibit, “Yinka Shonibare Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection,” which included new pieces by Shonibare in his signature style depciting two of the museum’s founders.

• The American Folk Art Museum whose permanent collection of art-by-the-masses has some curious and touching pieces. Most eye-catching, I thought, were the anonymous painted and ornamented insects made out of soda cans, which the museum picked up at a yard sale; a crocheted rug made entirely out of Wonder Bread bags and found in an old woman’s house upon her death; and a quilt made out of condom containers. One of the temporary exhibits, “Obsessive Drawing”, consists of works by people dealing with traumatic life events or just their own OCD.

We had excellent food as well (not even counting street vendors!):

• A fancy meal at Le Bateau Ivre, a delightful little French restaurant
• A Christmas Eve dinner at a wonderful Mexican place, Zarela, where the dulce de leche pancakes were to die for
• A fancy organic lunch at Le Pain Quotidien
• A wee bit of European-style hot chocolate at our most favorite haunt of all, Marie Belle

If you are a Massachusetts resident, please check that your name hasn’t been fraudulently added to the petition to put an anti-marriage amendment in the state constitution.

…is watching you. No joke.

Current-day fundamentalists, take note: It was Christians of yore who first “declared war” on Christmas celebrations:

Liberal plots notwithstanding, the Americans who succeeded in banning the holiday were the Puritans of 17th-century Massachusetts. Between 1659 and 1681, Christmas celebrations were outlawed in the colony, and the law declared that anyone caught “observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offense five shillings.” Finding no biblical authority for celebrating Jesus’ birth on Dec. 25, the theocrats who ran Massachusetts regarded the holiday as a mere human invention, a remnant of a heathen past. They also disapproved of the rowdy celebrations that went along with it. “How few there are comparatively that spend those holidays … after an holy manner,” the Rev. Increase Mather lamented in 1687. “But they are consumed in Compotations, in Interludes, in playing at Cards, in Revellings, in excess of Wine, in Mad Mirth.”

Forget overnight delivery– send yourself an email in the future.

A Pennsylvania judge struck down “intelligent (sic) design” in the public school curriculum.

In his ruling, Jones said that while intelligent design, or ID, arguments “may be true, a proposition on which the court takes no position, ID is not science.” Among other things, the judge said intelligent design “violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation”; it relies on “flawed and illogical” arguments; and its attacks on evolution “have been refuted by the scientific community.”

“The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources,” he wrote.

The judge also said: “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.”

Former school board member William Buckingham, who advanced the policy, said from his new home in Mount Airy, N.C., that he still feels the board did the right thing.

“I’m still waiting for a judge or anyone to show me anywhere in the Constitution where there’s a separation of church and state,” he said. “We didn’t lose; we were robbed.”

Amendment I to the US Constitution, dude.

Read Jonathan Alter’s take

Remember all those doomsday scenarios about what would happen if Bush and his cronies came to power? Guess what: Big Brother is watching you. In fact, it’s getting so that you can’t even stage a kiss-in to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell without being watched as a terrorist.

I just ran across an article on balanced ternary notation, a ternary number system that uses -1, 0, and 1 for digits.

What makes balanced ternary so pretty? It is a notation in which everything seems easy. Positive and negative numbers are united in one system, without the bother of separate sign bits. Arithmetic is nearly as simple as it is with binary numbers; in particular, the multiplication table is trivial. Addition and subtraction are essentially the same operation: Just negate one number and then add. Negation itself is also effortless: Change every 1(overbar) into a 1, and vice versa. Rounding is mere truncation: Setting the least-significant trits to 0 automatically rounds to the closest power of 3.

Doonesbury on intelligent design.