July 2005

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Coca-Cola rots your teeth

11 July 2005 | No comments

My dentist spent the morning drilling into the bottom-left side of my mouth. One premolar and two molars.

Grind, grind, grind.

The drill is a little atomizer, and tooth bone-dust fills the air and you smell it and you breathe it in. You breathe your own bone. And it smells burnt. Flecks of tooth fly out of your mouth and land on your shirt.

His office is right next to the public garden in downtown Boston, on the sunny side of Beacon Street. Right next to Cheers, in fact.

After three hours of drilling, before he could affix the temporary plastic cap, I took a break to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. Three hours in the dentist chair is a long time. The bathroom had a mirror. Should I look? Can I look? I did.

And oh, the horror.

The gory sight of what remained of my mouth after the morning’s excavation will not soon leave me. There was blood, there was raw exposed gum, there were bone fragments and there was not much tooth. There were the remains of three teeth. Three devastated teeth. Three tooth corpses. Three little stumps. Three little mounts for porcelaine and gold. But they weren’t my teeth anymore.

It was like the worst tooth dream you’ve ever had.

The face staring back at me was the blood-and-bone-flecked face of a lunatic with terrible bedhead and bloody stumps for teeth. It was like staring at my own mortality. Looking extinction in the face.

After the novacaine wore off, the pain was blinding and unbearable, and neither acetaminophin nor ibuprofin nor oxycontin did a damn thing, and so I had to find an endodontist and get a root canal immediately.

That was pretty fascinating, and entirely painless. The premolar was the problem, and my root was 22 millimeters long. Tiny precise screws of steadily increasing diameter are used to progressively hollow out the pulpy interior of the tooth (or what remains of it), and the resulting cavity is filled with the exact same material used on the insides of golf balls. The whole process took about 20 minutes, and all the pain is gone.

All in all, a somewhat traumatizing day. I’ve been resisting the urge to lie on the floor in the fetal position most of the evening.

Burning Man

7 July 2005 | No comments

Last night I bought a ticket for this year’s burning man. I’ve seen so many amazing pictures and heard so many good things, I am pretty excited about checking it out (despite some of the bad things I’ve also heard).

I am pretty sure friends from various places are going to be there, but I’ve never kept track of who goes and who doesn’t. If you’re planning to attend and have any advice or want to meet up, please mail me!

(I’d always pictured that if I ever went to burning man, I’d parachute in, to see the place for the first time from the air. But ever since Chema died, that hasn’t really been a very appealing idea.)

NPR: Remembering the Scopes trial

5 July 2005 | No comments

NPR has a bit on Remembering the Scopes Trial today. A great song is referenced.

Scopes trial reenactment/BBQ

5 July 2005 | 4 comments

It was an interesting weekend…

From: Nat Friedman <nat@nat.org>
Subject: Scopes trial reenactment/BBQ.
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 02:26:25 -0400

You are cordially invited to attend our

FOURTH OF JULY SCOPES TRIAL REENACTMENT AND BARBECUE!

Starring:

Joe Shaw............as William Jennings Bryan
Rony Kubat..........as Clarence Darrow

In a gripping dramatic reenactment of the famous July 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial in my living room! Watch as science is pitted against religion in a court of law! Gasp as Darrow calls Bryan to the stand! Applaud uproariously when William Jennings Bryan does body shots off some girl from Somerville after the play is over!

For whatever reason, Rony and I decided to put on a reenactment of the famous Scopes/monkey trial of July 1925. We wanted to do something more like a realistic reenactment of the actual trial rather than simply using the Inherit the Wind script. Inherit is really campy and theatric, is designed to titillate more than to inform, and is slanted substantially toward the evolutionists. We felt it would be cooler to do something more realistic.

I spent all Sunday night reading the 270-page transcript and compiling it into a script. It was an eight-day trial, so of course much of the action had to be excised. In particular, all of the debate over expert testimony was removed. The defense’s strategy was to use the media circus surrounding the trial as a vehicle for educating the American public about biology and science. So they wanted to call a different expert witness to the stand every day and have the papers report a new set of interesting scientific findings. Zoologists, geologists, biologists, etc.

Over three days of objections, the prosecution managed to squash any hopes the defense had, and the judge struck from the record what little testimony they had managed to get. (They did end up convincing many journalists to republish written statements by the various experts, which were also submitted into the record, but not shown to the jury.) Also culled from the script was the bit where Darrow is held in contempt of court.

Other than that, however, I think we managed to hit the high points and tell the story pretty well. What people forget about Scopes, eighty-years later, when all we have to go on are the movies, is that the evolutionists lost the trial. And in fact, the trial was a setup from the beginning. Judge Haulston ordered the jury to rule only on whether or not the law had been violated, and not to question the validity of the law. He speaks extensively during the trial on the separation of powers in the US government.William Jennings Bryan gets the best lines, in my opinion.

The script is, in the end, mainly a cut-and-paste of the various parts of the transcript (which is in the public domain). This is harder than it sounds. And of course I did have to write some lines myself, to make it flow. And yes, to spice it up a little bit here or there (Bryan never actually says “October 23rd, at 9am” in the trial). But overall it’s a lot more documentary than Inherit the Wind. Whether it has any value for anyone else is highly questionable though :-).

The script is available here. Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

The cast and crew for our performance last night were as follows:

Joe Shaw........ as William Jennings Bryan
Rony Kubat...... as Clarence Darrow
Taylor Hayward.. as Judge Haulston
Peter Teichman.. as Atty-Gen Stewart
Robert Love..... as John T. Scopes
Me.............. as Narrator/Reverend
Emil Sit........ as the Bailiff

Everyone was, of course, amazing. I mean, for computer programmers. Joe Shaw especially, as the silver-tongued politician. Rony’s performance was spot on. And Peter Teichman has a wicked southern accent. Gentle and melodious. Peter and Lizzie also made a superb replica of the original “READ YOUR BIBLE” sign that hung over the jury for a portion of the actual trial.

Here are a few of my photos of the evening.

Also, of course, there were fireworks.

Car Bugs

2 July 2005 | No comments

Six weeks ago returning from some trip, I landed in Boston and went to the airport garage to find my car. It wouldn’t start. The entire electrical system was dead, and not even the remote key would work. So I had it towed home, jumped it off one of those handy portable battery units, drove it around for 45 minutes to let the alternator charge the battery and switched it off. And tried to switch it back on. Nothing.

So I figured either the alternator or battery was dead. I don’t drive very much, so for weeks the car just sat idle and lifeless behind my house. This weekend I finally got around to having it towed to the dealer to get repaired, and today I picked it up, fully working. The service receipt says:

CUSTOMER STATES VEHICLE HAD TO BE JUMPED AND AFTER DRIVING FOR AWHILE, THE VEHICLE DID NOT START. CUSTOMER ALREADY HAD A BATTERY REPLACE. HE THINKS IT IS THE ALTERNATOR. PERFORMED DIAG AND REPLACED FAULTY BATTERY. TESTED ALTERNATOR, NO PROBLEMS FOUND. FOUND LSZ DRAWING POWER. RECODED LSZ.

So it sounds like I had a bum battery, but that bit about “RECODED LSZ” at the end sounded interesting and so I decided to check it out.

It turns out that LSZ stands for the German equivalent of “Lamp Switching Center” and is one of the several software modules that control the various systems on a BMW. For example, the “ZKE” module controls the locks and power windows. The LSZ seems to control the various indicator lights inside the car, as well as some elements of the air conditioning and heating (which BMW calls the IHKA).

Well, it turns out that there was a bug in the BMW’s lamp control software program that can render your BMW useless. The official BMW service report states that

If two or more [heating or air conditioning] settings are modified during an ignition cycle (e.g. the temperature and blower setting), the result is an increase in closed circuit current of approximately 800 mA. This could cause a discharged battery when vehicle is not used for 2 to 3 days.”

You can read the entire bulletin here. Instructions for accessing the secret/diagnostic functions on the BMW on-board computer are here.

Concussion side effects?

1 July 2005 | No comments

This morning I left my building pass at home. The security guard at our office asked me where it was. “I’ve decided to operate only in the realm of the mind and of ideas.” I explained. “I am not burdened by physical possessions.”

“So why don’t you write a letter to the building management company and explain to them how you’re too special to carry a badge?” she retorted.

Filling in the log book, where it said “purpose of visit,” I wrote “truth, beauty, meaning.”

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