With the above in mind, knowing that the audience is general, arguments cannot be made willy-nilly and opinions on controversial subjects cannot be made without defense. With the OWS protests I have been wondering about collective moral responsibility, ethics, and economics lately. My standard for a post on the matter would require a fair amount of research, and I do not have the time. Such is the life of a medical student. Consequently the blog has been somewhat lifeless.

In other news, biochemistry does not consume less time the second time around, and gross anatomy has been the highlight of my life for the last three months. I am not sure how one measures happiness, but I have been somewhere near the top end of my scale lately. Or perhaps I just had two cups of coffee and my memory is distorted. It is hard to trust your own emotions and memories the more you read what science has to say about them. I recommend Steven Pinker, Antonio Damasio, and Michael Gazzaniga for those looking for literature on neuroscience directed at a lay audience.

More importantly, my decision to purchase an E-ink device reduced to 2 points: 1) physical books are physical entities that take up space and have mass; 2) non fiction books are [for now] more expensive than electronic editions. The convenience of being able to hear about a book through some form of media and read it in the next moment was a subsequent surprise, but now also an important part of my current infatuation.

Then the misfortune came. At the beginning of this month, I turn it on one morning and the screen only partially updates. I called Amazon that day and within minutes the representative had set in motion an overnight of the replacement at no cost to me. All I had to do was mail back the broken Kindle in the box they sent the new on in, using the label they emailed me. A rather painless process, except that the UPS pick up location in Boston is miserably out of the way (Silver line down Summer St. followed by a non-negligible walk). All in all, I experienced a 4 day delay at chapter 7 of A Woman Among Warlords, my 5th or 6th kindle book since January.

I treated this replacement so gingerly, now believing the device was incredibly fragile. I made it to chapter 9 the next day before I dropped my kindle as I was trying to put it into my jacket pocket (I never dropped the first). It no longer refreshed the screen. I had not yet even returned the first kindle. Over the next few days I deliberated if I wanted to keep investing in books via the kindle service. Thus far in my life, I have not much history of re-reading books. So I did not weigh the accessibility of my collection very heavily. On the other hand my kindle has been so addicting. I called Amazon again. Again they shipped me a replacement. Incredible service. Fragile device.

I would not mind a far heavier device, and I would be the first in line (not really; those people are crazy) for the Kindle: Durable Edition. Until then I will hope my experience was merely a collision of two black swans (doesn’t that previous expression bring to mind something cosmic and thus sound unduly hyperbolic?).

I took most of the following pictures following a 6ish inch storm (I cannot quite remember how much it was.). I waited for some fresh stuff because a) the snow by the road starts to look dirty and gross the longer it sits and b) people have not had time to clear it from things. I did not take that many pictures as I have a capacitive touch phone for a camera, and my fingers ended up freezing. In addition, I was not really motivated to wander around places too far from my normal route given the temperature.

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The pictures are taken with a Galaxy S Vibrant. Mostly I took pictures of buildings, as (sorry music lovers) architecture is the pinnacle of human art. Unfortunately I can not name all of the buildings, and it may become obvious from the captions I do not know anything about cities in general. Those that I do name, I likely learned from Google Maps, so do not blame me if they are wrong.

Also, do not worry. You did not miss Batch A. He is an empty set, as he ruins my alliteration.

[View with PicLens]

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People were right. It feels like a much larger Charleston. While Charleston has many historic houses, Boston has many massive “historic-style” buildings (I am not sure if the majority of the buildings are actually old or just built with an older looking architectural motif). Moreover, there are a billion colleges here, and it is visible in the street side demographic–similar to Charleston. I am told it gets much worse in the next two weeks when classes start.

Overall, the city is beautiful and very approachable. While there are a lot of people, it does not feel crowded.

And now for some terrible iPhone pictures from the Cambridge side of the Mass Ave bridge. These pictures do not capture the feel at all. (Try to pretend it is a panorama.)

An unexpected consequence of my purchase is I am now the number one Google result for the “fletcher moore” query. fletchermoore.me is at the end of page 3. I do not know if this is a due to existent page rank on the .com domain or if Google just prioritizes .coms.

In any case, since there is nothing on that page–not even a link–I feel somewhat guilty. At the same time I would like to keep fletchermoore.com distinct from my personal blog (which you are currently reading) as I feel .com should be used for commercial purposes.

Incidently, fletchermoore.me is the number one Bing result for the “fletcher moore” query. Perhaps I do not give MS enough credit (or perhaps Bing reads my browser history or somesuch.) On Yahoo! I find my meager sourceforge profile before either of my domains.

When I moved in last spring, a little black bird made a nest under the stairs in such a way that I could pause and look at it every time I left the apartment (I am on the second story of three). The nest was only about one meter out of reach. It was really close. So I got to watch as some baby birds grew up over the course of a few week. I do not remember much about it.

However, this year the bird (or a squatter) came back and laid more eggs in the same nest. Eventually four little guys were peeping for food to be delivered right to their gaping mouths. I really wanted to see them fly and leave the nest for the first time. Last week they looked just like adult birds, and I knew they would be gone any day. When I woke up at 5am two days ago to run, two of the four were missing. And when I came back for lunch I watched the remaining two for a fair bit before deciding the probability of them electing to fly right when I arrive home was slim.

After work I came back to see some guy with a pressure wash had blasted the nest away. Given its position, it was certainly an intentional act. He did not even do a good job cleaning off the bird poo. I did not see any dead birds, but I saw the nest’s wiring on the ground. It was still in nest shape, though all the mud coating was gone. It reminded me of the burned frame of a house after a fire.

I changed clothes and then came outside for a second look. I heard someone peeping in the bush and went over to look at him. It was definitely one of the juveniles, sitting on a bush branch. He did not seem to care that I was in arms reach. I wanted to see if he could “really” fly, so I poked at him slowly. When I was very close to touching him, he flew off. Well, that’s that. No more birds, I thought.

This morning two of them were huddled together sleeping where their nest used to be.

“the length property of an associative array in JavaScript is not incremented for arrays with non-numeric keys and must otherwise be explicitly assigned.” [Ref] I was making a cache by dynamically adding keys in this manner: myArray[newKey] = data. Later in the code I was trying to control the cache based on its size using myArray.length. Hours of confusion ensued.

We are drifting from the outdated notion of a web sites to web daemons (for ignorance of a better word) which expose HTTP APIs. The owner of the data typically implements their own client, but this is peripheral to the service. Facebook and Twitter are prime examples. Their respective websites are at this point merely official browser-based clients applications. This model allows websites to expand to new niches (and apparently everywhere) by simply leveraging their fame. Popularity attracts third party developers who want to harness some of it for their own ends. And so a symbiotic relationship is formed. Moreover, this successful model seems contagious, as I am seeing smaller services adopt or incorporate it. As a developer and user, I find this exciting because it gives me much more flexibility and control over my web experience.