Shannon went to the opening of the NowHouse in San Francisco yesterday morning. Being stuck with a deadline at work, I couldn’t attend, but we went back this morning. I brought my camera along. [!](https://web.archive.org/web/20051027113150/http://www.serpentine.com:80/gallery/NowHouse) [!](https://web.archive.org/web/20051027113150/http://www.serpentine.com:80/gallery/NowHouse) [!](https://web.archive.org/web/20051027113150/http://www.serpentine.com:80/gallery/NowHouse) The October morning weather provided a uniformly dreary light, so it’s very difficult to tell from the photos that the NowHouse is in fact extremely attractive. Naturally, the weather improved as soon as we left. ...

I have a Python application in which, for my sins, I decided to use XML as an on-disk storage format. Unfortunately, when I made this decision, I neglected to measure the performance of the available Python XML processing implementations. Bad, bad, bad mistake. I expected that I was going to trade a little saved work for some performance, but when I finally got around to profiling my app today, to see why it was so slow, I was shocked. ...

!!

Another album that I picked up during my Borders trip last week was M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. After I bought it and played it, I was stunned by the warm reception this album received at places like Amazon’s customer reviews and Pitchfork Media. At least I had my curiosity piqued: What else do the people who like this enjoy? Do they have any friends? Have they left the house since 1987? ...

I went to Borders the other day, to replenish my stock of commute music. I get restless when I have to rotate the same few discs more than a few times when driving up and down the Peninsula, and NPR is currently so focused on election politics that I can’t listen. Oliver Sacks had a wonderful vignette in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about a roomful of aphasics laughing at what, to them, were the obvious lies in a Ronald Reagan speech (even though they couldn’t understand the words); I have a similar reaction to every word from Bush’s mouth, save that his words turn my stomach. ...

Tom Jenkinson has been recording as Squarepusher for years. He started out with genre-defining drill-and-bass albums, then moved on to his own peculiar interpretation of jazz. His latest, Ultravisitor, is a part-live, part-studio album, about evenly split between d’n’b and jazz. The album as a whole is disappointing to me. The drill-and-bass tracks are either stuck in a stale late-90s groove or so harsh as to have me diving for the “skip past this track” button. The jazz tracks are standard middlebrow fare-not unpleasant, but they don’t have any stick-in-your head quality either. Most of the album strikes me as either reprises of earlier fare or obvious derivations of work by newer artists, most obviously Prefuse 73. ...

While driving home from the climbing gym last night, I listened to some of British Jihad, a public radio documentary about the rise of radical Islam in Britain. While most of the show was unsurprising, it was utterly bizarre to hear one of Michael Goldfarb’s interviewees introduced as Khalid Kelly, a Dubliner who had converted to Wahabbist Islam while working in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Kelly is something of a quotable media figure, having shown up in both the Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle a few months ago. ...

I just noticed that Geoff Pullum contributes frequently to Language Log. One of the first books I read after coming to the US was his The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which is fabulously entertaining. My lasting impression was a goggle-eyed “gee, Pullum must be smart, and stuff.” Until tonight. Pullum wonders where the phrase “this isn’t rocket science” comes from. He claims that rockets are simple, but they’re really not. A simple rocket is (self-evidently) simple, but an even slightly interesting (read “predictable”) one requires an astonishing amount of work to design and build. Well, blind hero worship was overrated all along. ...

At Zeitgeist last night with Nat, Rael, Cory, James and Bill, I regurgitated a quip to the effect of “I, for one, welcome our robot masters.” Cory offered the corrected version with “I, for one, welcome our new robot masters.” Which got me to thinking a typically inane thought: why was this phrase stuck in my head? A Google search for “for one” “welcome our new” yielded not just the phrase, but its memetic phylogeny. The original is a Simpsons quote, and it seems to have gotten lodged (albeit loosely) in several million skulls. Oh, and surprise, I’m about two years late to the memetic party.