Do Svidaniya, Tchaikovsky and the Year 1893

Maria de Jesus of Portugal died earlier this year, relinquishing the title of world's oldest known person at 115 years and 114 days. Born Sept. 10, 1893, de Jesus was a farm worker from age 12 who never learned to read or write, ate a vegeterian diet and outlived her husband by 57 years. Perhaps the most amazing facet of her longevity was that she got to know six great-great-grandchildren.

The death of de Jesus makes the oldest person Gertrude Baines, an American supercentenarian living in a Los Angeles nursing home. It also moves the line of oblivion, the starting date for the living history of the world, forward to Baines' birthday on April 6, 1894.

With the death of de Jesus, we've lost the last person who was alive when New Zealand became the first modern country to grant women the right to vote (Sept. 19, 1893) and Colorado became the second U.S. state to do the same (Nov. 7). She was also the last who could have remembered the first drive of a gas-powered automobile in the U.S. by Charles and Frank Duryea (Sept. 21) and the first sale of bottled Coca-Cola (March 12, 1894).

There's no longer anybody who could have shared a Coke with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky (died Nov. 6, 1893), saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax (Feb. 4, 1894), German physicist Heinrich Hertz (Jan. 1, 1894), English painter Ford Madox Brown (Oct. 6, 1893), or baseball player Ned Williamson (March 3, 1893), who hit 27 home runs in a single season, a record that stood until 1919 when it was broken by that young upstart Babe Ruth.

If you think my interest in this subject is obsessive, every day somebody on Wikipedia edits the entry for Baines to indicate her age down to the day. At 115 years and 35 days as of today, Baines is the 25th oldest person ever. She's the African-American daughter of a man born into slavery who's only voted twice for president in 115 years, first for John F. Kennedy and second for Barack Obama.

History · Wikipedia · Oblivion · 2009/05/11 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Bloglines Offline for Hours (and Outsourced to China)

Things aren't looking good today at Bloglines, the popular web-based service I've been using for years to read RSS feeds. The site has been offline for at least eight hours and isn't even responding to web requests with an error. Instead, requests time out with the error "The server at bloglines.com is taking too long to respond" (in Mozilla Firefox) or "cannot display the webpage" (Internet Explorer). Apparently, the Bloglines plumber who appears whenever there's a system outage has been laid off.

Some people are getting the error "Port 80 says: Bad Gateway ... proxy server received invalid response from upstream server," which suggests that there's a load-balancing problem with the site.

The Next Web reported in October that the owner of Bloglines, Ask.Com, tried unsuccessfully to sell the site and has outsourced the operation to China. An unofficial Twitter account, bloglines, has been tracking the site for a while and claims that it's now being run strictly "in maintenance mode."

I am a member of the RSS Advisory Board with Bloglines engineer Paul Querna. After I sent him an email to see what's up, I found out he's not the right person to ask either. He left Ask.Com in January to join Joost, not long after writing this on Twitter:

Ask.com has effectively killed Bloglines, and barely maintain it. I love the beta UI, but I'm tired of being abused by Ask.

Even if Bloglines comes back, it's clearly time to export my OPML subscription list and move to a new service. It's a shame that Ask.Com hasn't been able to make the service commercially viable. Querna and the other developers made it one of the best web-based readers, with full support for RSS and many of the RSS namespaces. We used Bloglines as one of the targets for the RSS Best Practices Profile. I am surprised there was no buyer, since it appears to me that the site has archived millions of RSS items it served over the years. That archive alone is valuable, and Bloglines also has a large user base. Deja News, an archive of USENET group posts dating back to the network's founding in 1979, was sold to Google in 2001 and became Google Groups.

I tried to ask Jeeves what's wrong with Bloglines? He's out of the loop too.

Update: There's a chance Google might have a cached copy of your Bloglines OPML subscriptions (the public ones, not the ones you've marked private). Search Google for the URL http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=rcade, changing rcade to your Bloglines username.

Rss · Bloglines · 2009/05/09 · 29 COMMENTS · Link

Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick!

I wish I could've been present at the meeting where they came up with Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick, a frozen microwaveable foodlike product that's also a great euphemism to yell when expressing vexation. The next time I hammer my thumb or your team beats my team in a sporting event -- a possibility which is, of course, unlikely -- I will exclaim "Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick!" instead of "Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick!"

The Chocolate Chip flavor of Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick weighs in at 13 grams of fat, 220 calories and 350 milligrams of sodium per stick (15 percent of your daily allowance). You could get two days worth of sodium from a single box.

Food · Health · Nutrition · 2009/05/04 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Comics.Com Builds Community Around Comic Strips

United Feature Syndicate offers a bunch of social features with the comic strips on Comics.Com. There's support for comments, tags, embedding strips in blogs, and sharing them on Reddit, Facebook, Digg and elsewhere.

The site has managed to find an audience, judging by the number of comments posted each day by readers of Greg Evans' Luann. In the strip above, Toni has fallen off a wet ladder and is being caught by Brad, the title character's brother, a former slacker who became a firefighter after 9/11.

One commenter, HalfWreck, analyzed the physics of the fall:

The higher Toni begins her fall, the more time she accelerates, increasing speed, thus momentum. If Toni is 3 meters up (the height of a one story roof), she will be going around 5 m/s when she hits Brad. If she and her fire fighter gear has a mass of 60 kilos (a low end estimate), she has developed 300 kg-m/s of momentum. If it takes Brad 0.1 second to stop her, the resulting impulse is 3000 kg-m/sec ^2. Apply this force to the small area of her air tank, say .03 m^2, and Brad feels the same as if a narrow, 300 kg (660 lb) anvil is at rest on his chest, if he falls on his back. If he somehow stays on his feet, I pity the fibia/tibia that takes the stress. If Toni was up two stories, double the effect. This is way I could never watch the $6 Million Man without wondering what kept his "original equipment" spine from snapping.

Ignoring that gratuitous slam against the Six Million Dollar Man -- Oscar Goldman had mad engineering skills, dude -- HalfWreck was on the right track. Brad was knocked out and rushed to the hospital.

Comic Strips · 2009/05/02 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Supreme Court Justice Anita Hill

In December Vanity Fair writer Nell Scovell asked Anita Hill, currently a law professor at Brandeis University, whether she had considered the notion of being appointed to the Supreme Court.

Hill, much to my surprise, responded to the question:

Dear Ms. Scovell:

My mother would have warned me against answering your e-mail and participating in the kind of "devilment" you are up to. Last month I was speaking in Maine and was asked about being appointed to the Court. I responded, "That would be awkward, don't you think?" After all, there ought to be some level of civility, if not camaraderie, among The Nine. I'm very excited about Barack Obama's presidency and its potential for healing, but I don't think this is one that he can, or should try to, pull off.

Not that you asked, but high on my list of people Obama ought to consider for the Supreme Court are Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School (international law specialist) and Lani Guinier at Harvard. (She never had her chance to prove herself before the Judiciary Committee.) I'd also like for him to go outside the Northeast corridor and Ivy League Schools for someone who has been on a state supreme court deciding significant social/economic issues.

Best,
Anita Hill

I don't think that President Obama would consider appointing Hill -- Robert Bork has a better shot -- but it's an amusing line of thought. If anyone deserves to endure an uncomfortable workplace ...

Politics · Law · 2009/05/01 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Magicians with Syphillis Need Not Apply

The estate of science fiction and film collector Forrest J. Ackerman is being auctioned off this week by LiveAuctioneers.Com, and among the items up for bid tomorrow is a 1926 membership card from the Society of American Magicians signed by Harry Houdini, the president of the organization. The group offered the following "hospital benefit":

If a MEMBER IN GOOD STANDING is compelled to undergo hospital treatment as a result of accident or disease (other than venereal or chronic and incurable) he shall notify the Secretary of the Parent Assembly in New York City; whereupon the society will pay any hospital for a period not exceeding five (5) weeks within one year, a total sum not to exceed thirty-five (35) dollars for such treatment. If any member is obliged to pay in advance for such hospital treatment, he may, by presenting the receipted bill, reclaim one (1) dollar for each day not exceeding thirty-five (35) days within one year, provided such payment has not been made direct to the hospital by the society. This card must bear the signature of the member and all vouchers for payment must be signed by the member and by the hospital physician in the presence of each other. Payments for treatment will be allowed from the date of the postmark on the envelope or card addressed to the Secretary at the New York Headquarters.

The same year this card was issued, Houdini died of perotinitis after his appendix ruptured. He "had apparently been suffering from appendicitis for several days prior and yet refused medical treatment," according to his Wikipedia entry. The society is still around and continues to offer some health assistance to magicians in financial need.

Magic · Health · Insurance · 2009/04/29 · Comment · Link

Virology Blog Offers Level-Headed Take on Swine Flu

If you're looking for solid information on swine flu from sources who haven't lapsed into hysterics, Professor Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University Medical Center, who has studied viruses for 30 years, publishes an excellent Virology Blog that's heavy on facts and short on panic.

Racaniello believes the flu will stop spreading soon in the U.S. for the same reason that ordinary seasonal flus fade every year around this time, but it could come back stronger in the fall:

Flu season is basically over in the US, and with the increasing heat and humidity (over 90° today in NYC) virus transmission should soon stop. However, if A/California/07/2009 (H1N1) takes hold in the southern hemisphere in the coming months - their flu season is still beginning - it is likely to return to the northern hemisphere in the fall. Unfortunately, by then extensive antiviral use in the southern hemisphere is likely to have produced drug-resistant variants.

I wish the media did a better job putting this flu in perspective. Around 250,000 to 500,000 people die each year around the world because of ordinary flus. Some of the deaths and illnesses in Mexico may still prove to be regular flus or other causes for respiratory distress -- Mexico City has extremely polluted air. Racaniello reports that only seven deaths in Mexico have been confirmed to be swine flu cases thus far.

Though this could become a pandemic, the same was true of SARS, bird flu (influenza A virus subtype H5N1) and many other bugs over the 40 years since the last one. Emerging viruses are a fact of life, whether or not the media's losing its collective mind. Wash your hands, get flu shots every fall, see a doctor when you get the flu, and don't be one of those dopes who goes to work or school when you're sick. There's nothing admirable or virtuous about toughing it out and exposing others to contagious illness. The only exception to this rule was game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals.

Health · Media · Swine Flu · 2009/04/28 · 1 COMMENT · Link

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