Other fandoms

There's a whole community of enthusiasts who like collecting information about roads and highway interchanges. That particular guy specializes in Connecticut roads, and American spur/connector/beltway interstates that have three-digit numbers.

I am not particularly a "roadgeek" myself, but I'm fascinated by this sort of thing when I stumble across it. There's a part of me that is drawn to vast, targeted collections of facts that I don't need to know about things I never thought about much. Other people seem to react violently negatively to this sort of thing; not only are they not interested, it seems to disturb them viscerally even to think that anybody is interested.

Graph paper

iayork's adventures in iTunes scripting inspired me to get around to doing something samantha2074 had suggested. She'd seen some cheeseball commercial program that printed out customizable graph paper, and she asked me, "You can do that, right?" Apparently this is sought after by knitters; it's rather expensive graph paper, but they like to be able to make it in any pitch, especially if they can specify, say, the number of boxes (representing stitches) per 4-inch or 10-centimeter interval.

I balked at the idea of actually learning to write a Windows application, or any kind of usable PC application for that matter (I have about one day's experience with Cocoa on the Mac), but then realized that I didn't have to do that. I could just write a very simple PostScript program with easy-to-customize parameters, which for reasons of my former employment I am actually able to do, and Sam was more than capable of editing it and running Ghostscript to print it out. This evening I spent a few minutes banging it out.

( In service to humanity, I present the Customizable Sheet of Graph Paper: )

Remastering

Via Scott Spiegelberg's Musical Perceptions blog: This Physics Today article describes how an optical technique used by particle physicists can be used to remaster old recordings nondestructively.