Ghosts of Pearl Harbor.

A trip to Hawaii may be in my future, after Death Valley. While looking at various parts of Oahu on Google Local, I found that you can actually see the remains of the battleship Arizona in this satellite photo. I think the large ship to the southwest must be the U.S.S. Missouri, site of the Japanese surrender.

Saturday night's all right for biking.

I joined some members of the Western Pennsylvania Wheelmen, a local bike club, for a easy ride around the bucolic town of Cecil, PA. I saw cows, I saw geese, I saw a loose dog that chased my rear wheel. Fortunately my sprint was better than his. The weather was supposed to be in the upper 60s. I think it probably reached maybe 62, and then it started raining shortly after we finished. Still better than tonight's gusting wind and driving snow, I admit.

"Interesting" would be one way to describe it . . .

Liz Seymour, 56 years old and newly divorced, turned her three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house into a seven-person anarchist collective. Hmmm. "Anarchist collective." Isn't that a bit of a contradiction in terms? Anyway:

So Justin and I entered a microeconomy in which it is possible to live not just comfortably, but well, on $500 a month. When we pooled our skills in our new household, we found that we had what we needed to design a Web page, paint a ceiling or install a car stereo. Sharing services and tools with people outside the house saved us thousands of dollars a year. If there is a historical model for the way we live, it is not the communes of the 60's or the utopian experiments of the 19th century, but the two-million-year prehistory of our hunting-and-gathering ancestors. Looked at through that lens, the life of our miniature tribe feels a lot like the way people were meant to live.

. . . .

As for produce, a typical evening of hunting and gathering in various grocery store Dumpsters brings in plenty of food: cartons of apples, oranges, potatoes, bananas and red onions, slightly soft or spotty perhaps, but still fresh and edible.

. . . .

For the most part, though, my memory keeps up a pretty sturdy firewall between the time I have come to think of as "before" and now. Where I live now is not utopia. What it is, though, is fun. It is fun to hear people laughing on the porch; it is fun to dance in the kitchen; it is fun to go out on a Wednesday evening Dumpster run. As messy as it is, to my mind it is a lot more interesting than utopia could ever be.

I don't want to nitpick her choice of metaphors, but I will point out that a "firewall" is a barrier that you erect to protect yourself from a massive out-of-control raging inferno. So there you are, safe on one side, and there's the fire, burning itself out on the other side. Which side does she think she's on now? Based on the article, I'm not too sure.

Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof.

My mileage from this past Sunday. Meager, I know, but the hills in Pittsburgh make it feel like twice as much. Two weeks before I went for a 46-mile ride. So I'm a little behind where I want to be with two months till Death Valley, but I'm confident I'll be able to "find my form," as the professionals say. "Where is that form of mine? I could swear it was here just a second ago. . ."

And if the whole biking-on-asphalt-roads thing doesn't work out. . .

There's always this:

As long as I hire a gang of laborers to lay track in advance (and pick it back up once I've passed), this solution has a lot of potential. Note to self: must remember to stay alert for road hazards like, uh, oncoming freight trains.

(Thanks, Make.)

My trusty steed.

She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts.

Words to live by.

"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Pittsburgh because it's always twenty years behind the times."

- attributed to Mark Twain. I say this with affection, as a proud citizen of the Steel City. (Actually, Twain supposedly said this about Cincinnati, but I figure it works about as well here.)

Two helicopters sit at the entrance.

Cueva del Fantasma, Venezuela.

He's here. He's Weir. Get used to it.

Weir, who finished fifth last week in the men's figure skating competition, showed up at the Russia House after midnight Tuesday, for his second consecutive night of partying with his favorite comrades.

This time, he wore a beaver-and-python jacket and True Religion jeans, blending in with the other men and women in fur and designer duds. In minutes, he had a leggy Russian woman in stilettos on each of his arms. The trio giggled as they skipped past the hors d'oeuvres.

"These are friends of the lawyer of the richest man in Moscow," Weir said in passing, as the women tossed their long hair. "These Russians know how to have a good time."

The women interrupt him: "C'mon, Johnny," one brunette said, in a heavy Russian accent. "We want to dance."

"Dve minuti!" he yelled out in Russian, telling them to wait two minutes before running off.

Link.

I guess the Infinite Improbability Drive is no longer fiction. . .

I've been trying to do this for years, but without any luck. A computer that can solve a problem without actually solving the problem:

Utilizing two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat's team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover's quantum search algorithm. "By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. "We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a 'chained Zeno' effect."

Link.