Heading uptown on 3rd avenue last night, traffic is unusually heavy and our cab driver gets all worked up. Something is obviously going on. He's yelling across the way to other cab drivers to find out what: this is information exchange, old school, which also means that most of the time there is no information here, only the ritual exchange of good-natured insults. A driver from Bangalore insults the Sudan. Our Sudanese driver, in return, launches a salvo that ends with "go clean your heart." We're laughing in the back without knowing why.

Eventually the information comes through. Obama's supposedly in the Waldorf Astoria, they've blocked off 42nd street. So we get out and walk the last 20 or so blocks along deserted 3rd ave.

Between our president blocking off east side traffic, and our mayor blocking off west side traffic (see the Times Square Pedestrian Mall experiment) they've damn near partitioned the city.

Dream in which an empty life is laid out before me. This person lives in a hotel room and puts together dog puzzles. The place is tidy, but there's nothing else here besides the dog puzzles.

Earlier, ice cube and a man in a pink spandex suit were shown robbing a house. I'm walking down the street now and it hits me: a single god universe makes sense of this. It's not that he's a negligent parent, he just doesn't have more than a few seconds to spare for each of us. He's that one little thing that makes your otherwise awful day.

A third world child in a long tshirt runs down the street crying from sheer happiness.

On the 71 line from Market to Haight there's a bum chuckling to himself in the back. Another one in a San Fran State University beanie shuffles on and sits down next to me, wrapped in a blanket. After a few stops, he starts nipping off a bottle, and after a few more he's loosened up: "The only difference between Mecca Godzilla and Godzilla...is that Mecca Godzilla...is a machine."

Little known fact: our national anthem was a drinking song in its former life. The tune familiar to us now as the "Star Spangled Banner" originated with the Anacreontic Society, a group of amateur musicians in 18th century London who met to celebrate "wit, harmony, and the god of wine,"

Though the wikipedia article on "To Anacreon in Heaven" downplays the obvious element of Bacchanalia, it also goes on to point out

This absence of an official connection to drinking did not keep the song from being associated with alcohol, as it was commonly used as a sobriety test: If you could sing a stanza of the notoriously difficult melody and stay on key, you were sober enough for another round.

Alas, the original text fails to mention the eye sockets' red glare the next morning.

Singer Mario Barrett was filming outside on my stoop today. I only noticed because the screaming groupies from the nearby high school were making it impossible to concentrate.

So, keep your eye out for a nationally-airing Yahoo! commercial featuring a dingy old brownstone and one warbling, phone-toting Mario Barrett.

I'm standing on the subway platform at my stop.

When I look across the center track, I see the platform opposite, where a train going "the other way" is just pulling in. The people that get out seem foreign and distant to me, and in fact I think of their side as a different stop entirely, despite the realization that in a few hours I will also arrive like them, going "the other way" but thinking of it as perfectly natural then: a return. It's unimaginable to me now.

There is a strong directional bias at the stop you call "your" stop, even if only one platform serves both directions. One side is for waiting, peering down the tunnel, pacing around. The other is for disembarking and scrambling up the steps. But it goes beyond this, and it goes beyond the mental vectors of expectation.

Why is it so hard to regard these people arriving as part of the same continuum--to see yourself in their midst?

Hello to everyone who attended Analog Divide. For those of you who didn't get to attend, here's what happened: people tried to distinguish a vinyl record playing through a digitizer from the raw analog signal. People also drank a lot of wine. It was all part of the experiment, okay?

You can read more about the setup (or lack thereof) here. Without further ado, here are the rather curious results, in time order:

One enthusiastic participant took the test multiple times, so each line is the outcome of one guess.

Only 3 out of the 13 participants correctly identified the analog and digital signals. If the participants really had no clue and were equally likely to guess correctly or incorrectly, the probability of getting such a lopsided result is a little less than 1 in 10. (See binomial distribution). So it looks like you guys had a clue.

More likely is that most people really could distinguish the signals, but labelled them incorrectly. Before taking the test, several people asked "What's the difference--is analog supposed to sound better?" We told them "not necessarily, that's just what some people say" and tried to explain how the ADC <-> DAC circuit worked. Who knows if it made any sense. In the end, those people that weren't sure what they were listening for probably fell back on the labels "better" and "worse," mapping these to "analog" and "digital" respectively.

Does this mean you guys actually think a digitized signal sounds better? That kind of freaks me out. So here's a theory: the high frequency pops and hisses coming from the record player were converted to lower-amplitude noise by the ADC <-> DAC circuit. I'm still reading up on this myself, but here's a starting point. Less popping and hissing = "better" = analog?

This theory is supported by 2 of our 3 correct guessers, who said they were specifically listening for high frequencies and noise levels. One, wb, went from a string of correct guesses to a roughly 50/50 record after we started cleaning dust off the test albums. Our 3rd correct guesser, id, says she was listening for the "sound stage" which didn't come through in the digitized signal.

In the end, we must concede that the experiment was fun but woefully inadequate as a scientific inquiry. Many suggestions were made to improve things: use the same, artifact-free analog test signal for all participants; get the survey script working so the test would be double-blind; drink less wine, etc.

If you feel like taking an improved test, come on over, but I can't guarantee the less wine part just yet. ;)

Thanks to everyone who attended. All the code for this party was open source.

Classic average joe brooklyn guy, with the brooklyn italian accent and everything, on the subway with his chinese wife and kid. Wife is stuffing her mouth with a dry sandwich, dropping crumbs into a host of christmas shopping bags attendant upon her feet. This family is awash in shopping bags. I suspect both parents are drunk, the wife more so. They look to be about 40. The kid is maybe 5.

Wife hands a radio to the kid. It's playing traditional chinese string music tinnily. Kid is very cute. She wants daddy to hear the music too so she holds the radio up to his face. "Turn it off," daddy says wearily. "What is that? That's not music. Is that some kind of chinese music?" he asks. Wife grabs radio from kid and repeats the childlike gesture herself: she holds the radio up to his face in a silent bid for appreciation. He takes the radio and turns it off.

This afternoon's matinee is the last run of Miral & Jen's show, "With a Twist," Thanks to everyone who came out! If you enjoyed yourself, be sure to check Miral and Dancers and Axis Danz for upcoming stuff.

This is a picture of the tunnel connecting the main concourses at Detroit Metro Airport. I'm going to take a guess and say it's about two football fields long. But the point is actually not to think about how long the tunnel is, or what kind of crappy airport design this implies. Just let the ambient sonic wash and psychedelic colors soothe you while you sprint.

You can enter the belly of the giant cuttlefish known as "Light Tunnel" via this Youtube video.

From the front page of Google Finance this morning. Could the sudden, widespread inability to perform simple floating point calculations be responsible for the panic? ;)