the tweney review

I’m sure Karen will soon have more pictures of the chaos going on here, but here’s a sample. The big project for the past few days has been stucco removal–like flaying the house alive, actually, since it leaves everything still standing and more or less intact, but … skinless. It’s creepy. And a bit scary, too, since we’re actually destroying a significant part of our home. There’s no going back now.

I helped with the skinning for one day. Stucco removal is a bitch. Fortunately for me it doesn’t take much intelligence. You just kind of bang and scrape and smash at the stuff with a two-foot crowbar until it comes off, in big chunks and in little pieces. And try not to hit yourself in the thigh or drop big pieces of masonry on your foot.

For all you neo-con mommies and your impressionable offspring: Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!

(thanks, Scot)

I recently started up Palm Desktop after 6 or more months of not using it at all, and was treated to this massive cascade of alarm dialogs. (Click the image to see the whole cascade in all its glory.)

Thank god for that “close all” button!

NPR had a chat earlier this week with the two fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. Interesting factoid from the interview: Cerf said that he is very hard of hearing, so that’s one of the reasons he welcomed the advent of email so eagerly.

Roughly half of Americans believe that extraterrestrial life exists–and that aliens are visiting the Earth, zooming around in saucers and secretly probing hapless human bodies. The Guardian has the entertaining details. The punchline comes in the author’s bio: Turns out he’s an astronomer at SETI. I don’t know why I find that so funny.

After months of work, Karen’s plans for our remodel finally got the green light from the planning department yesterday. We celebrated by sabering a bottle of champagne last night, and this morning Karen — together with a neighbor she hired — started stripping stucco off the outside walls of our house. Next: Lots of digging, then concrete pouring (to reinforce the foundation), nailing plywood onto the outside of the stucco-stripped walls (to provide “shear” reinforcement in case of earthquake), installing concrete footings underneath the house … and, eventually, framing a second story and new roof.

When it’s all done we will have added almost 900 square feet to our house (which is only 1,100 s.f. to begin with), including two bedrooms, two baths, and a laundry room. Clara’s especially interested in the new bathrooms. “When does Mommy start working on the new potties?”

Karen has a new moblog, called Chaos & Construction, which will chronicle the progress. Wish us luck.

Virginians riot over $50, 4-year-old iBooks:

Va. Laptop Sale Turns Into a Stampede
“I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, ‘Bam,’” the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station. “They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just,” he said.

Never saw this in his crystal ball…

Psychic’s crystal ball burns down his flat in unforeseen blaze

From Technology Review, a summary of an interesting study on how the brain works to identify words:

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in late June, 42 undergraduates followed instructions to click a mouse on one of two pictures on a computer monitor. Sometimes the images were different-sounding objects, such as “candle� and “jacket.� At other times, they were similar, such as “candle� and “candy.�

Researchers found that when the objects’ names were quite different, the mouse movements of the students followed a straight-line trajectory to the correct picture. When the words were similar, however, the trajectories were slower and arced. In the latter cases, Spivey hypothesized, subjects would begin processing a word at the first sound, then continued in an ambiguous state as they moved the mouse.

Musings from a Mouse