Monthly Archives: April 2007

“MacArthur Maze Meltdown”

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Overpass Near Oakland Collapses After Truck Explodes - New York Times:

    The crash, which occurred at approximately 3:40 a.m. Pacific time, sent flames soaring hundreds of feet into the air, according to witnesses. The overpass carrying eastbound lanes of Interstate 580 overhead quickly buckled, causing it to collapse onto part of Interstate 80 below. The accident occurred near the approach to the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco with Oakland, Berkeley and other cities on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Several major highways converge at that spot, a complex multilevel interchange known as the MacArthur Maze.

Note THE MAZE MELTDOWN / First commute day: Free rides as transit leaders work on plan:

    All transit systems are offering free rides today to ease the congestion anticipated on the region's freeways following the collapse of a major section of the MacArthur Maze.

Useful links:

The new home for my personal weblog

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I'm giving my personal weblog to a new domain (hypotyposis.net) and setting it to run with WordPress software rather than Movable Type. The new address is https://hypotyposis.net/blog I hope to redirect links aimed at the old weblog to the corresponding entry.

I moved my entries from MT to WP by using the export feature of MT and the import feature of WP. The translation wasn't perfect; for instance, a lot of formatting was not done correctly. However, it's good enough to move ahead with.

One thing that excites me about moving to WordPress (on dreamhost.com, where I'm hosting a bunch of my sites) is that I can easily keep up with the latest versions of WordPress through a one-click install and update process. In theory, I should be able to keep my software up-to-date; in practice, doing so was never high enough priority to go through the steps needed. A simple process makes all the difference. Keeping up with the latest software also enables me to enable commenting on my blogs without getting overrun by spammers. So far at least, I've been impressed with the ability of Akismet at blocking spam through its WP plugin.

Dark chocolate it is then!

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Remedies: Dark Chocolate Similar to Blood Pressure Drugs - New York Times:

    Four of the five studies on chocolate found
    reduced blood pressure after eating, but none of the tea studies showed
    significant benefit. The magnitude of the effect of eating three and a
    half ounces of dark chocolate a day was clinically significant,
    comparable to that of beta-blockers like atenolol, known by the brand
    name Tenormin, or propranolol, known as Inderal. The authors
    acknowledge that the studies were short and that results may not apply
    to habitual use.

Such news, of course, will not stop me from continue my tea-drinking
habit. It does he me and Laura justify our newly revitalized eating of
dark chocolate after dinner!

Richard Hyde’s “In Search of a Sense of Place”

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My friend Richard Hyde has started a weblog In Search of a Sense of Place.
I've always enjoyed reading the email reports he would send out and
encouraged him to share them with the larger public. Here's a sample of
one of Richard's entries from February 2, 2007:

    I had just walked out of the Holocaust Museum,
    where I was attending an academic conference on the great culture war
    between fascism and communism in Europe between the world wars. A
    couple of the morning presenters were pretty good, but the literary
    critics were front and center for the afternoon. After a paper full of
    words like 'transgressive,' 'essentialist,' 'inversions,' 'subversive'
    and so on, and on, I had had enough. As I headed for the exit, I
    remembered the comment of someone who dropped out of Yale’s English
    Ph.D. Program: "It’s become the place where language goes to die."

Darfur, Google Earth, and Kristof

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BBC NEWS | Africa | Google Earth turns spotlight on Darfur. (More coverage of the use of Google Earth at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth, Google Earth Blog: Crisis in Darfur - The Google Effect, Ogle Earth: Darfur)
I finally got to take a look at the "Crisis in Darfur" layer in Google
Earth. I'm reminded once more of the need for prayer and advocacy on my
part and the part of those around me. Following the list at What Can I Do to Help Prevent Genocide? is a start; engaging with | Save Darfur is another.

I'm pondering Nicholas Kristof's words in Driving Up the Price of Blood - New York Times:

    All this makes genocide easier to stop than people
    imagine. Where it arises from a weighing of costs and benefits, then it
    is possible for outsiders to impose additional costs and change the
    outcome. That’s what we need to do. The U.S. should lead other
    countries in pushing hard on all sides for a negotiated peace agreement
    among the warring factions, for that is ultimately the best hope to end
    the slaughter in Darfur and in neighboring areas in Chad and the
    Central African Republic.

    I find President Bashir’s ruthlessness pretty easy to understand. What
    is harder to fathom is President Bush’s refusal to stand up to the
    genocide for four years. Why not impose a no-fly zone, why not hold an
    international conference on Darfur, why not invite survivors to the
    White House for a photo-op, why not give a prime-time speech about
    Darfur?

    Perhaps the explanation for Mr. Bush’s passivity is the same as the
    explanation for Mr. Bashir’s brutality. Maybe Mr. Bush has made his
    calculations, looked at the number of calls and letters he gets about
    Darfur, weighed the pros and cons, and decided that Americans really
    don’t care enough about genocide to make him pay a major price for
    allowing it to continue.

Slings & Arrows / Shakespeare online

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Laura and I learned about Slings and Arrows from reading Fire up Netflix; you need to see the first two seasons of 'Slings and Arrows' before third starts.
We took up Tim Goodman's advice and have been working ourselves through
seasons 1 and 2. Watching the actors recite Shakespeare makes me want
to commit more texts to memory.

BTW, how does one link to a specific spot in Shakespeare's plays? I see
the use of an Act/Scene/line number reference system. Is that
prevalent? For instance, I see from Hamlet
that the beginning of Hamlet's "To be, or not to be: that is the
question:" is Act III, Scene i, line 64. What versions of Shakespeare's
text are in use? (In looking for ways to link directly to Hamlet, I
found main, which an image of the 2nd Folio of Hamlet, III.i.)