Is Alzheimer’s really diabetes of the brain?

An interesting project over at UW, to map weather conditions to geographical route information and webcams, for instance on US highway 2 across Stevens Pass.

I’d love to be able to plot a route and get road conditions mapped this way for my route. One could also include travel time… So go to Leavenworth, spend the night, and then the weather condition forecast picks up at, say, 10 AM that day. One image would show you altitude gained, weather forecasts, distance to next destination and whatever else you could cram in there.

I wonder how you get ahold of specific NWS forecast data…. HACK THE WEATHER!

I got to the above page via WSDOT’s travel routes page. WSDOT’s statewide travel info page doesn’t hold a candle to Oregon DOT’s TripCheck.com. WSDOT has different pages for webcams, construction, and warnings, but ORDOT puts it all on the same page, with regional alerts and some webcam images in a right-hand column.

Not shrill at all.

If you wondered what American Fascism would look like, well… Here we are.

Happy peak oil day!

There’s a dream I have sometimes. Sometimes images from it come to consciousness when I’m awake.

It’s a huge building, maybe a library or a museum, not really a shopping mall though sometimes it seems that way. The floor and walls are made of a slate-colored marble, but somehow warm to the touch. There’s a mist in the air so all the light falling in leaves a trail.

The place is open to the outside world. It’s almost like walls without a building, in fact. And there are plants growing through it. Vines and trees. Sometimes it’s almost a forest, sometimes it’s empty of all life but my own.

It’s a huge round atrium. Sometimes the center of the atrium is filled by a column of solid marble, leaving something of a hallway around it. Sometimes it’s an open space, and a cedar tree grows out of the center, like an ironically oversized bonsai. It’s nature shifts and flows to a rhythm I have yet to understand.

Often, this area acts as a meeting place for dreamers. It dwarfs them, it’s high roof evaporating into the misted light. They meet and discuss where they’ll meet later. It’s an agora where they plan their next move together.

Have you been there?

From the FEMA website:

[..]

11. Top FY05 DHS Accomplishments: FEMA

DHS Today will highlight FY05 Accomplishments in this column over the next several weeks. This week’s focus is on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The top FY05 FEMA accomplishments included:

Hurricane Katrina: The response to Hurricane Katrina was FEMA’s largest response in its history. The aid given within six weeks of landfall included almost $3.8 billion for more than 1.24 million households. More than half a million people visited 100 Disaster Recovery Centers that had been quickly created across the Gulf Coast. Working through the American Red Cross, FEMA supported the nation’s largest-ever sheltering operation, with more than 273,000 evacuees at the peak. In addition, again working with the Red Cross, FEMA paid to house more than 600,000 people in emergency hotel housing. Almost 70,000 temporary roofs had been put on damaged homes through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, more than 16,000 manufactured homes or travel trailers had been placed on site, and 20 million cubic yards of debris had been picked up.

[..]

(via TPM)

Requiem For A Hat

Yesterday I went to the thrift store to get a hat. I didn’t find one.

Those who know me know the hat. The pork-pie wool hat. The one I’ve had for about 8 years… It’s gone. Vanished without a trace. No clue. I’ve been wearing a fleece ski hat I have, and it looks really dorky.

Now, the wool hat looked dorky, too, but it was an impressive kind of dorky. The ski hat makes me look like I’m too poor to wear anything else. The wool hat made me look like the sort of person you’d see and think, “What is that guy thinking wearing that thing?”

When you see generic-looking pictures of Arab terrorists, they’re often wearing wool hats like the one I had. (This isn’t to say that Arabs are generically terrorists, just that Americans might very well see someone wearing such a hat as, well… You get the idea.) Mine was made in Afghanistan. It’s called a ‘pakol.’ Looking for an image of one on the internet, I found this, which is quite surreal:

Once when I was walking down the street, a guy looked at my hat and smiled and said, “Northern Alliance, right?” I said, “Hard to tell, isn’t it?” He laughed. That was the only time anyone ever commented on it.

It was really really warm, and I could roll it up to be more like a skullcap that would fit under the hood of my rain jacket. I could unroll it to carry things in like a small sack. I’d also unroll it to come down over my eyes so I could get to sleep if there was too much light.

Ah well. My pakol is gone. I hope whoever finds it gets some use from it…

I’d like to point out that tomorrow is my birthday, and a couple people have asked me what I want for my birthday. The obvious ‘world peace’ answer makes it sound like I’m trying to get the coveted Miss America crown, so I’ll merely point those interested to the Flickr.com give-a-gift-subscription page. Enter ‘mile23′ into the ‘Screen Name:’ field. (I’ll update this ‘blog post if someone actually does it… No use duplicating. I can beg again next year if need be… )

There’s also a wish list over on Amazon.com. Just FYI. (Yes, I want a freakin’ lens cap that says ‘Tamron’ on it. Sue me.)

It’s a gray thanksgiving day.

I’m going to have to go to my storage unit today (if it’s open) and get the electric heater. I’m thankful to have central heating, but I’d be more thankful if this house weren’t designed for warmer weather and/or ’60s-era heating costs.

Yesterday was full of golden sunlight, and I’m thankful for that. Today… Not so much.

A few days ago I drove up to North Bend, high enough to be out of the foggy inversion layer that’s plagued the area for the past few weeks. I wanted to drive until I could see through to the sky. Thankfully, it was only as far as North Bend. I decided not to take the Middle Fork Road, because it was getting dark.

My family in Houston is meeting at (I think) my sister’s. I decided not to try and get down there for Turkey Day because I spent a month there not too long ago. Xmas, maybe.

Over the years, I’ve gone down there for Thanksgiving and ended up staying for Christmas, and maybe even New Year’s. For me, the month of December is Thanksmas. But this year I got a head start on being computer tech support for my parents, which might tide them over for a while.

Basically, I’m sitting here trying to think of things for which I’m thankful. It’s a task one shouldn’t really attempt having not finished the first cup of coffee for the day. I’m thankful for coffee… My housemate gifted me with some beans a couple weeks ago, and I’m thankful for that.

As I lay here in bed trying to get to sleep, there’s something that keep rolling around in my mind.

I’m trying to coin a term. It might already exist, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe there’s a term in theater for it, or politics. What i’m trying to describe is this: The sense of embodiment that comes from inhabiting a costume. The costume can be literal or figurative; occupying a powerful office, as in the Presidency, can be a form of costume.

I was thinking about this because I was remembering back in 1978, when I was a wee tot of 12. It was Halloween, and I was Darth Vader. My friend Dee was Luke, and Joe Cheavens was Han Solo, a costume completely appropriate for him. I had worked really hard on my Darth Vader costume. I crafted a mask out of cardboard glued to an old Halloween mask we had in the attic. Same for a play army helmet, transformed into Vader’s no-really-it’s-not-a-Nazi-helmet helmet. Some black spray paint, a long flowing cape, a chest plate made from Legos… I thought my costume was completely badass.

Being Luke or Han was easy. Vader, though, required construction.

The three of us went around the neighborhood, but we ended up at the Halloween fest held every year at the elementary school near where we lived. We went through the ‘haunted house,’ which was actually two classrooms’-worth of maze with occasional scary scene. The final scene, however, was being chased out of the ‘house’ by… Darth Vader.

Darth Vader was portrayed by a really tall, imposing figure, who I learned later was the parent of one of the kids in our class. I wasn’t exactly scared of him… I knew he was just as much a fraud as I was, in a very literal sense. But being frightened of Darth Vader was just so much fun. It was the point of the exercise, after all, and that costume he had was so excellent. Having spent a lot of time constructing mine, I could appreciate his. He had even figured out how to make the breathing sound, maybe from a tape recorder.

I stood there in the hallway for a while just staring at him through my sunglasses-lensed mask. After a few seconds he abandoned his menacing pose and stood up normally, like just a guy in a Darth Vader suit. Then he waved a friendly wave.

And my reaction is what I’m trying to coin a term to describe: I felt a kind of joy, a kind of creepy joy that came from the disconnect between the literal appearance of Darth Vader at my old elementary school, and the sure knowledge that someone was inside that formal appearance who didn’t really have anything to do with it, other than wearing it for a night. The disconnect between complete similarity (two people dressed up like Darth Vader) and utter difference (he actually managed to make it work). If this experience had happened at a later age, I’d have gone over and introduced myself to a fellow hard-core nerd. But because I was 12, I ran to catch up with my friends who were long gone.

But this experience… The moment when your suspicions about the man behind the mask are revealed as true, but you’re still playing along. When the humanity reveals itself despite every effort at concealment… What’s that called?