WombatNation

If you’re traveling to Seattle, I highly recommend staying at the Mayflower Park hotel. They provide free wireless access to the Internet. We picked up a really strong signal in our room, even on Sandra’s Powerbook with the Apple Airport card.

Also, the hotel is in an extremely convenient location in downtown Seattle, the staff were friendly, the room rates were reasonable, and the restaurant Andaluca was excellent. If you do go to Andaluca, I definitely recommend trying the warm liquid chocolate cake that they pair with a Justin Obtuse late harvest cabernet. Both were delicious.

As Bolivian Miners Die, Boys Are Left to Toil

This sad story in the New York Times is a very accurate account of the life of the young Bolivian miners working Cerro Rico in Potosí. There are virtually no old miners, as almost all of them die of silicosis before reaching the age of 45. The highest paid miners earn US$6 per day, but they take the greatest risks.

I can attest to the story’s accuracy, as Sandra and I spent a haunting hour and a half being led through the mines by a guide in September 1999. Some day soon, I will write up a longer story on the entire, amazing experience. For now, here are some of the highlights.

On the way up the hill, the guide took us to a small market. We rented cheap yellow plastic jackets and pants, thin plastic helmets, boots, and primitive lanterns for us and we purchased hand-rolled cigarettes, bags of coca leaves, waxed paper cylinders of dynamite, a bag of ammonium nitrate, fuses, and detonating caps for the miners. On the way into the mine and later inside, we offered cigarettes, coca, and dynamite fixings to the miners as tribute. Before entering the mine, the miners spend an hour or two chewing coca leaves with lime alkali to ward off hunger and numb their senses before entering the mines for 8 hours or more straight with no food.

We entered the mine through an opening just over 2 meters high and 1 meter wide. Within 10 meters, the tunnel had narrowed to the point that I had to hunch over (I’m 5′ 9″, or 1.75 meters tall) and my shoulders nearly brushed the walls. We had to squat and crawl duck style through many passages. We also had to press up against the wall and inch past several holes in the muddy path that went down about ten meters to another level where miners were working. When we heard rumbling noises in front of us, we had to quickly step aside as boys, typically 13-16 years old, ran past us pushing wheelbarrows full of freshly mined ore. Other workers lifted leather bags full of ore from lower levels by ropes and pulleys and dumped the ore into the wheelbarrows. The only non-human powered tools we saw were the trucks outside the mine.

In any mine or cave, crawling around through narrow passages is hard work. However, the entrance to this mine is at about 4550 meters, or 15,000 feet, of altitude. The combination of physical exertion and the fine dust floating through the extremely thin air left us literally gasping to breathe at times.

While we were in the mine, we heard occasional loud thumps, as dynamite was set off in the levels just below us. The only ventilation in the entire mine was provided by long plastic pipes with a diameter slightly larger than the palm of my hand. The pipes didn’t have fans attached to them and reached only into the upper levels of the mines.

And all this time Sandra and I were carrying these small tin lanterns that have calcium carbide in the bottom and water or some other fluid in the top. Somehow, this causes a flammable gas to be given off, which then escapes through a small hole that opens in a metal cone pointing forward. After being lit, the flame shoots forward a couple inches. Other than the occasional headlamp of a miner, this was our only source of light.

Remember the dynamite? Yep, I was also carrying the Bolivian and Argentinean dynamite, a bag of ammonium nitrate, fuses, and detonating caps in my other hand. About thirty minutes into the adventure, I was pretty happy to unload those on a miner and get them away from the open flames we were carrying.

Bush and Blair lip sync in harmony. You have to see it to enjoy it.

Via This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow: March 16, 2003 - March 22, 2003 Archives

I released the first version of the PhoneBlogger source code last Monday on the PhoneBlogger SourceForge project site. As with SoccerPhone, I released it under the GNU GPL.

I haven’t changed much of the code since January, as I have been working on a couple other projects. I’ll probably start working on PhoneBlogger again in the next couple weeks. One of the main things I need to work on is simplifying the install. Other possible enhancements include:

• Movable Type category support
• Append audio link to previous post
• Dialog flow improvements
• Send email with the URL for the audio file instead of posting directly to a blog

I would really like to add Ogg Vorbis support as an alternative to MP3, but I have had a hard time getting the Ogg libraries working from SoX.

Jingo all the way, oh what fun it is to deride… (kottke.org)

Jason Kottke points out the silliness of the current protest by the Republicans that has resulted in french fries being rebranded as freedom fries in the House of Representatives’ cafeterias.

In addition to reminding me that our legislature is cursed with a majority of idiots, it also reminds me of many happy visits to the Vlaamse Frites shops in Amsterdam, including the one at Schiphol airport. They serve you a huge paper cone filled with delicious, golden fries and they top it with a generous dollop of mayonnaise, tomato sauce (slightly sweeter than American ketchup), or curry sauce. Now, I know mayo on fries may not sound appetizing, but it is surprisingly good, despite the fact that they squirt a huge glop of it from a device commonly used at sports stadiums in the States for dispensing glowing yellow cheese syrup onto tortilla chips for nachos.

I also love the little wooden forks for extracting mayo coated fries from inside the paper cone. The forks look kind of like the wooden spoons often served here with small cups of ice cream, except instead of having a rounded end with a slight depression, they have a forked end with two tines.

Marty Schwimmer over at The Trademark Blog also pointed out this great little history of french/flemish fries. Yet another reason I read The Trademark Blog every day. The only thing I didn’t like about the history of french fries was her dissing of chuños. Like the Incas, the current residents of the Andes dry potatoes in the sun, stomp on them to remove as much water as possible, and them leave them outside in the cold to freeze-dry. That technique provides them enough food to survive during the winter. Properly preserved, chuños can last for many years. When they Irish got hooked on potatoes, they should have asked for the chuños recipe.

New Scientist: Gauging Age by Smell of Urine

Wow. And all this time I had been using it only to gauge asparagus comsumption.

Okay, so I’ve now updated SoccerPhone to work with the new HTML layout for the live scores page at the MLS website. The cool thing is that I only had to update a few methods in the Python CGI scripts, mostly the regular expressions that I use to locate the game time, scores, elapsed time, and goal scorers. I also updated and enhanced the PyUnit automated tests that I use to convince myself that subsequent changes haven’t broken anything.

I didn’t make any changes to the VoiceXML code. The format of the XML document that the Python code sends back stayed the same, even though the source of the data changed quite a bit.

Although I like the new look of the MLS scores page and I like the fact that it updates every 3 minutes instead of 5, there are two changes from last year that I really don’t like. And not just because they are a pain in the ass for my program.

First, the end of a game is not indicated by ‘Final’. Some games ended with the time at 90:00, but one ended at 91:00. When I first checked the scores page, I thought I was catching a couple games in injury time. After they didn’t update for a couple minutes, I realized that they must be over.

Second, the scoring details are littered with the cumulative number of goals or assists for that person. If I want to know season-long stats, I’ll go look at the statistics page.

I finally got around to releasing the code for SoccerPhone on the SoccerPhone SourceForge project site. So, if you’re looking for code samples for using VoiceXML and Python CGI scripts to speech enable a web site, check it out. the code is licensed under the GPL.

Since MLS changed the HTML layout for their live scores page for 2003, the code only works with pages I saved from last year. I released the 0.1 version partly to freeze a copy of the code somewhere other than the hard drive of my computer and my web server, and also to quickly make some code samples available.

I will put out a new release that works with the 2003 scores page very soon. I’ve almost finished porting the code. It might take me another day to release it, though, since I’m also porting all the PyUnit automated tests and adding a couple additional tests.

Local Harvest is an awesome site for learning about options for obtaining locally grown organic food just about anywhere in the United States. Well, except in Mississippi, where I grew up.

Sandra and I do a bi-weekly pickup of organic produce from Terra Firm Farm, a 99 acre CCOF certified organic farm in Winters, California. The drop-off point where we get our box is at a house 1-2 miles from our house. Last week’s box included romaine lettuce, navel oranges, cauliflower (ugh), escarole, potatoes, green garlic, oroblanco grapefruit, chard, broccoli, and carrots. The blood oranges from the previous box were amazing. Although the rind was was only slightly darker than that of a navel orange, the inside flesh was a deep, deep purple and had a noticeable berry taste.

In addition to great recipes for the contents of the box they accompany, Terra Firma Farm’s newsletters are pretty informative. The last one talked about their annual cycles for both finances and harvesting. It also described the impact of the 50 percent increase from last year that they have to cover in their worker’s compensation premium.

[via snowdeal via rasterweb via aaronland]

In brief: 27 Feb 2003 [dive into mark]

While I’m going to try to add text transcription to PhoneBlogger, I don’t how successful it will be.

In one of the items in his Feb 27 blog entry, Mark suggests that when you are audio/phone blogging, “any audio content needs to be supplemented with a simultaneous text transcript.”

The problem with this in most cases is that speaker independent, natural language speech recognition is just not up to the challenge, yet. While you can buy dictation software that does a reasonably good job of creating transcripts, the really good stuff is too expensive and the training period is longer than most people are willing to endure, especially most of the casual audio blogging customers of a service like Audblog.

The type of speech recognition most people are familiar with is called directed dialog. This means that only a restricted grammar is available. For example, United Airline’s service at 1-800-824-6200 works well because it is listening only for words related to an airplane flight, like “arrival” or “departure”. Both PhoneBlogger and SoccerPhone use directed dialogs.

On top of this, the usable voice frequency for your regular PSTN-based phone call is about 300 Hz to 3400 Hz. Interestingly, while most vowel sounds are strongest below 3 kHz (including fundamentals and harmonics), consonants are usually more concentrated above 3 kHz. Since quite a bit of information in your voice signal can range up to around 5 kHz or so, especially for a child, the limited bandwidth available makes recognition over a phone call that much harder. And don’t even get me started on VoIP over the Internet.