overstated

In David Cross’ recent stand up album, Shut up you fucking baby, he talks about his childhood in Atlanta, being the only Jew on the block, and most importantly about the misconception that hicks are actually from the south. This past weekend, I tested his hypothesis, and went with a few new friends to the Dixie Speedway weekend races in Woodstock, GA (a.k.a. Home of the Champions). Here are some photos I brought home with me:

White trash outing: the Dixie Speedway road trip

I grew up in the small town of Yreka in very far Northern California (the term we have to use to disinguish ourselves from those Northern Californians from central California), which might be labeled podunk, hick, or even white trash by some. Going to Woodstock, GA was almost like taking a trip home, given the style of dress, social norms, racial diversity and manner of speech that we found there, even though these two towns are 3,000 miles apart. Truth be told, for anyone from rural America to feel comfortable, all they need to do is drive for an hour outside the city and they’ll find themselves among friends.

We all share the common bond of bucking ranch animals, cheap beer, and cars demolishing each other. We hicks hold these joys to be self-evident.

I’ve heard of these shenanigans before, but never been so lucky as to be personally involved. I just received an official looking email with return address service@paypal.com asking people to verify their account information to cut down on fraud:

Of course the barely-trained eye notices that the link points to the site exme.us, and not the assumed paypal.com. The horror! Who is responsible for this preposterous event? The WHOIS database points the finger at some guy named Tim Carey from Wisconsin:

Of course it’s suspicious that a person whose homepage links to friends in lithuania (.lt = lithuania) would also have a lithuanian email address and live in Appleton, WI. Googling this email address returns one webpage (I’m feeling lucky), which is to a user account on an IRC scripts website. Oh my lord, what a surprise! Our friend isn’t actually from Appleton, WI, but in fact from Lithuania, and a ripe 17 years old he is. Doing a reverse DNS lookup on his IRC server of choice (212.122.68.56) gives the hostname exme.skynet.lt, some sort of media network as far as I can tell.. my Lithuanian is a bit shaky. Likely story: our friend here works for skynet.lt, or has friends who do.

Our friend’s guestbook shows that other people are doing their own sleuthing. What’s the point of this whole exercise? I’m interested in how long it will take PayPal to recognize this idiot and silence him. I’m putting my money on less than 5 days. But how many PayPal accounts must die in the process?

Update: Less than 12 hours later, the site is down and PayPal has responded to my inquiries. Read the comments for the details.

In the past week I made my way down to Atlanta for a summer position at the CDC (more on that later). It was an arrangement of amazing serendipity that came together at the last minute, and I’m very thankful for the opportunity. Everyone needs a regular influx of ideas as well as breaks from the monotony of living in one place. Last year was New York, this year is the ATL

I’ve been a bit off the weblogging tip for the past week because I’ve been busy acclimating myself to the ATL lifestyle. One cannot assume to understand the state of being crunk overnight. I’ve finally started to decypher the meandering side-streets and confusing sprawl that is my drive to work. At the risk of sounding like a hick away from home, it’s quite different here, and it takes some getting used to. Let me share one of my first observations here in the city:

Shortly after arriving and unpacking my rental car (which fits nicely in the 40 car parking lot behind my apartment building), I sat down to take a load off in the “sun room” (which is an enclosed porch on the front of my apartment). Looking out at the coutyard that separates my building from the next, I noticed another tenant walking out of his building, Blockbuster DVD in hand. He then proceeded to enter his car (a shiny gold Saturn), drive 0.75 blocks to the local Blockbuster, return the DVD, then drive 0.75 blocks back to his parking space. It’s quite different here.

Besides the peculiar geography and pervasive car culture, Atlanta is a great place to live. My neighborhood (Virginia-Highlands) is full of commercial distraction and interesting people, and everywhere you turn there are lush parks and neat old buildings. Beware: my weblog posts might be less frequent, longer winded, and more meandering for the next 2.5 months, but that’s the South just taking hold of my mind.

In his keynote at the JupiTerZ conference on weblog strategy, David Weinberger revealed that he tends to scale everything by a factor of 2.5. Not surprisingly, this is the original calculated value of the cameronfactor, first observed by Jonah Peretti in 2001. It begs the question: the cameronfactor is either a universal human constant or spreading like wildfire.

A story I posted last year purported that wine experts were easily hornswoggled into thinking white wine is red. This seems to confirm many peoples’ suspicions that wine tasting is an entirely subjective experience, or at least that the visual component is much more important than we would predict.

A recent study shows that wine actually attacks more parts of the brain than just those used for taste and smell. In a connoisseur, wine tasting triggers mid-frontal cortex activity, the same area used for language and recognition. For those in the trade, this adds to the argument that tasting can be a highly objective experience:

My mother works for a winery in Carmel Valley (Bernardus, for those interested), which along with every other wine company is pandering to the results cast down by the Wine Spectator. Until recently, it was believed that their scores were highly subjective and political even. But a company by the name of Enologix has taken the process of score prediction to a scientific front.

Using chemical data from past wines and their complementary Wine Spectator scores, Enologix has trained some machine learning system to predict the outcome of new wines. They claim upwards of 90% accuracy in scoring any wine sample, which suggests, along the recent psychological study, that the tasters at the Spectator are recognizing good wine based on some objective measures. Wine makers use the Enologix system to score their wines while still in the barrel, allowing them to optimally blend for the best possible score.

Ananova: Wine experts fooled into thinking white wine is red
Nature: Wine tasting takes brains
Enologix: QMS Reports

I recently became aware of an interesting debate over what I thought was common sense. Until I started asking around, I never would have thought this was so contentious (i.e. I thought I was right, goddammit). The question is over which spice goes in which shaker. Here’s the beef:

Flavor Camp: Salt goes in the shaker with more holes because people use salt more often, and in greater amounts. This equalizes the need, making one shake roughly the same for either spice.

Flow Camp: Pepper goes in the shaker with more holes because it consists of larger chunks than salt. This equalizes the flow, making one shake roughly the same for either spice.

I have always been in the flow camp, and assumed it to be a tautology, but perhaps this is like the great soda/pop/coke debacle, reflecting regional preference. No one I have talked to (including chefs, cooking store clerks, and moms) has been able to provide a convincing answer for either, and have been roughly divided between the two camps. Help?

I was asked by Adam Kalsey to participate in his project Newly Digital, a distributed anthology of stories about early experiences with technology. The following story describes my first truly virtual communication.

Other essayists: Andre Torrez, Anders Jacobson, Andy Baio, Jeff Nichols, Steven Garrity, Chris Pirillo, Dan James, Adam Kalsey, Brad Choate, Bill Zeller

Back before the Internet, geeks sought out communication with other geeks through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS’s). These were naive times, when phone calls were free to those with red boxes and having a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook meant you thought information was powerful, not explosives. Back in those days I was a dorky high school student who ran his very own BBS, a local spot for the younger, marginal geek crowd in Monterey, California.

Continue reading “Newly Digital”