tour de paris

In 24 hours, I did the following by Velib: http://j.mp/b2YeDj (22 miles) preceded by http://j.mp/b4bgPl (9 miles). That is what happens when you bike happily around the city, go to a restaurant in the southwest corner, lose your keys to your apartment in the west at some point during the night, spend the night in a friend's hotel room in the south, go back to the restaurant in a fruitless effort to find the key the next morning, and then get the spare from someone in the northeast corner.

Brooklyn

I went to "Nuit Brooklyn" last night -- 4 bands from Brooklyn who came specially to Lyon to perform for me, since I won't be back until the end of August. Thanks to Artem for bringing me. They were all pretty good -- we missed some of St. Vincent, but Dirty Projectors were great, The National was too, and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, while kind of a stylized genre thing, were as active as one can be without exploding. The trumpet player's shirt was translucent halfway through.

The National's singer left the stage at one point. Not to crowd-surf -- he just climbed halfway up the Roman amphitheatre that the performance was in, and sat on a step, singing, while a crowd of people held his mic cable aloft. Not to be outdone, Sharon Jones brought up a nattily-dressed young Frenchman out of the audience to sing a love song to, and to dance with (rather well, I must say). Must have made his month. Exemplary quotes:

From The National frontman: This next song is called Ohio, which is a nice place, a lot like this area. Lyon is a lot like this town in the song, this town Cincinnati.

If more of the audience had spoken English, it's possible he would have been lynched. As it was, the crowd was unnaturally silent. He probably didn't know there's a song called "Ohio" which starts "Je suis dans un État proche de l'Ohio//J'ai le moral à zéro". Or that the Lyonnais don't realize how provincial they are, although to be fair, I think that Boston is a better comparison.

From Sharon Jones, during a strange, somewhat racially charged discourse on how dancing was in her blood, speaking as a Native American: The white man has killed all our buffalo. The buffalo is our main source of protein!

useful to know

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/downloads/pdf/materials/ChecklistFlyer.pdf has no big surprises on what you can recycle, but it's good to know that you cannot recycle plastic things like caps & lids, cups, wrap, bags, yogurt containers, deli/salad bar containers, or paper (chinese) take-out containers. I think I've been cheating with caps for a while.

department of "really?"

From an NYT article:

Britain is particularly isolated because the country is cut off from continental land routes by the English Channel.

I think the word you're searching for is "island." Maybe "islands" if you want to be more careful, but honestly.

europe stranded

Major European airports are closed because of volcanic ash. What I don't get is why the planes can't fly under the ash, since they say it starts at 18,000 feet. Can't they fly at 10,000 feet until they're out of danger? Obviously not, since there are going to be a million passengers with canceled flights, but it seems weird.

why i never believed deborah tannen

She says, in http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/why-do-educated-people-use-bad-words/:

People who speak more than one language report that they always curse in their native tongue; they can say swear words in a second language but they don’t feel them — the gut link to emotions just isn’t there.

This is emphatically not true. Cursing, in my experience, is one of the easiest things to change. My father curses only in English (although he'll say it's only because he never cursed in Tamil). Lots of people curse in the language they happen to be speaking. Incidentally, Birbal was wrong about this too.

wow

From an article on China exporting rail technology:

China’s long-term vision calls for high-speed rail routes linking Shanghai to Singapore and New Delhi by way of Myanmar, and someday connecting Beijing and Shanghai to Moscow to the northwest and through Tehran to Prague and Berlin, according to a map that Mr. Zheng keeps on a bookshelf behind his desk. He cautioned that there were no plans to start construction yet outside China.

onion intern

The Onion's "Weekender" magazine's headline is "I'm Kinda Getting The Hang Of Filling Tori Spelling Up With Babies: We Chat With Dean McDermott." The image mouseover text (and page title) read instead "Babys" and "Dylan McDermott." If you're the kind of person who can't copy the word "babies" correctly, shouldn't you at least be the kind of person who knows which McDermott Tori Spelling is married to? Seems unfortunate to fail on both counts.

how many Americans have seen avatar?

Let's give up on that question and focus on a simpler one -- how many tickets have been sold in the U.S. to see Avatar? If you search for this online, you'll always come down to Box Office Mojo's numbers -- everyone just cites them. They say 93 million tickets, based on revenue of 709 million and an average ticket price of $7.61. This might work for most movies, but for Avatar it's obviously crap. The average ticket price for Avatar needs to be adjusted to include IMAX and 3d showings. Box Office Mojo, while not doing this, helpfully has an article about the breakdown of Avatar's ticket sales: around 64% 3D, 16% IMAX, and 20% 2D. The average price of an IMAX ticket is $14.58, and the article guesses that there's a $10 average price for 3D tickets. 709m/(.64*10+.16*14.58+.20*7.61) is around 69.1 million tickets. This puts it somewhere around Independence Day, Spider Man, and Love Story in number of tickets sold. Note that other movies' ticket totals on Box Office Mojo's list should be correctly calculated because they don't have these large 3D and IMAX components. For future reference, the "real" average price for an Avatar ticket, given Box Office Mojo's prices and breakdowns, is $10.25. So as a rough approximation, just divide Avatar's gross ticket sales revenue by 10 to get the actual number of tickets sold.

blindingly obvious

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/business/global/03toyota.html says that the U.S. may require that pressing the brake pedal make your car stop (even if you're stepping on the gas). Why hasn't this been a feature since, I don't know, forever, is baffling to me. If you don't have a stick shift, when do you ever want to brake and keep gas going to the engine at the same time? Even then, once you're moving there's no reason to brake and keep gas going.

navel-gazing

Paul Krugman posted http://gawker.com/5482309/stereotyping-people-by-their-favorite-new-york-times-writer, which is good, and funnier because he posted it. With some public figures, I routinely imagine them watching/reading the things about them that I do. For instance, I imagine Obama watching the Daily Show a lot. He doesn't. The nice thing about Krugman is, I think he actually does do a lot (though more) of the stuff I do, so he actually sees this stuff.

liberal elite

The Daily Show has diversified its correspondents to the point that there is now exactly one white American male on the show -- Jon Stewart. If you throw in Christian, zero. Impressive. Of course, it also points to the smaller number of correspondents in regular rotation. John Oliver does like 60% of the reporting, with Cenac, Mandvi, and Bee doing the rest, and Jones doing voiceovers. So it's still usually two white men talking.

Travesty of justice and statistics

In a development that boggles my mind, the U.S. court system is completely ignoring a basic tenet of statistics and (wrongly?) convicting people because of it. Police are running partial DNA samples through databases of millions of people, and claiming that the chances of anyone in the database matching is the same as the chance of one person matching. That's like saying that the chance that someone has hazel eyes is 1 in 20, so the chance that anyone in the world has hazel eyes is 1 in 20. A man was recently convicted of a 38-year-old rape-murder in San Francisco based on a degraded DNA sample. The jury was told only that the chance of a match was 1 in 1.1 million, and not that, given the size of the database, the chance of a random match was 1 in 3. The judge prevented the defense from challenging this number, and even from saying that the defendant was a suspect only because of this match. The Washington Monthly and LA Times have articles on it. The SF Chronicle apparently couldn't be bothered to do any research, just putting out the prosecutor's line. The Washington Monthly article even points out that someone was fingered using this technique for a crime she could not have committed, since she was in prison at the time. How the courts could so willfully misunderstand statistics, and how the FBI's scientists can have the gall to testify to false odds, really baffles and enrages me.

Lyon->Saint-Louis->BSL->SXF->TXL->CDG->ITM->KOJ

My friend suffers from being Russian. Mainly this manifests itself in soulful depression and occasional bouts of invading Georgia, but it's now causing him massive travel problems. He's currently on his way to Japan, via the above itinerary. His plan was to go to Berlin, settle some issues with his old landlord, then fly Berlin-Paris-Osaka-Kagoshima for a conference. Unfortunately, his Japanese visa only came through today, and his flight is tomorrow. From Berlin. As is bastardly policy, if you miss one leg of the trip, everything is canceled. So, while it's easy to get to Paris from Lyon, he had to get to Berlin. Moreover, while it's not clear, it seems possible that the university, which bought this ticket, might ask for its money from him if he misses the flight. There are no direct flights from Lyon to Berlin. He found a pretty cheap solution: take the train to Basel, fly Easyjet to Berlin, spend the night, and take his flight the next day. Unfortunately, the Basel airport is actually in French territory, and French air traffic controllers are on strike because there is a proposal to centralize European air traffic control. So his flight tonight was canceled. There's a flight early tomorrow morning, getting into Berlin at 8:40 am. His flight is at 9:55 from a different airport at least half an hour away. Online check-in not possible. The current plan is for his girlfriend (who lives in Berlin) to go to the other airport before him and attempt to check in at a kiosk, so that his boarding pass is ready even if the 9:25 check-in deadline has passed. He may also have to ditch his luggage, at the first airport if it's slow off the carousel, and probably at the second airport with his girlfriend in any case. Oh, and his phone is dead. And the flight to Berlin may be canceled. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion tomorrow!

Dreaming in French

I had a dream in French a few nights ago. This was supposed to be a big achievement. Thing is, though, there are different kinds of dreams. There are those weird dreams in which nothing makes much sense and it's clear that your brain is inventing everything. And there are stress dreams in which you dream about a situation before it happens because you're stressing about it. In this case, I hadn't yet made an appointment to see the doctor about my non-improving knee, so I dreamt that I was seeing her, and that I was reproaching her for not telling me to put my knee in a brace. Unfortunately, I didn't know the word for brace (attelle), and I wasn't thinking of the word for wrap, so my brain substituted "accrocher" (to hang) for "wrapping." Not what I think people mean when they talk about "dreaming in French." Things were slightly better a night or two later when I dreamt of saying "tu" to someone and then correcting myself and saying "vous." At least that was some weird dream. But I'm still making obvious grammatical errors, even in my own world.

Lyon taxis

Because of my knee, I've been taking a lot of taxis. I've learned recently that taxis in Lyon have a "minimum fare" of 6.10. I didn't believe it initially, but it's been confirmed by independent cabbies. However, 6.10 is not the initial fare on the meter, which makes the initial fare on the meter kind of silly. Why not just start with 6.10 and keep the meter constant for a while?

should i just had said "FIRST!!"?

One advantage of being up much earlier than everyone else is getting to comment before they get a chance. Thus, I was the first commenter for
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/disinflation/
I wrote a complimentary thing about how he was the most depressing voice since Cassandra, and then said "A minor typo -- *weak economy," because I'm anal like that. My comment was moderated for a while, and then when I check it now, I find that "week economy" has been corrected. Fine, I think. My comment was probably moderated out of existence, and he just changed the text. Fine. But then there are multiple comments just saying "weak not week"! All posted hours after mine! I want credit for my blog copy-editing!

security

It now takes a passport to go between Canada and the United States. This must cost an insane amount, in money and time. Wouldn't it be more efficient to establish a visa clearinghouse, where each country can screen the other's visa applications? Then anyone living in Canada would have a right to visit the U.S., and vice versa. No passport requirements anymore. It doesn't seem likely that it's easier to illegally immigrate into Canada, and since Canadian citizens can already legally enter the U.S. without a visa, requiring them to show a passport doesn't accomplish anything. The only reason for keeping the passport requirement is because the U.S. knows that its visa procedures are inadequate, so it might as well add on an extra layer of security where it can, even at the cost of millions of man-hours and dollars lost every year.

Unprofessional

From a New York Times article about the Michael Jackson doctor: "He is allowed to practice medicine, but cannot use anesthetics or otherwise put people under." And: "At least 24 television trucks and journalists yammering in a multitude of languages were awaiting his arrival . . ."

Put people under? Yammering? And this article already has a correction, so it's been mildly proofread. Standards, people!

nameplate

When I got back from my U.S. trip, I discovered that my crappy little pieces of paper with my name that were badly attached to my front door and my mailbox had been replaced by nice, standard plaques saying "J. RAMAKRISHNAN." This was supposed to happen shortly after I moved in, but it never did, and I never called the company in charge because from what I had understood, I would be charged for the name plate, and I figured why not let sleeping charges lie.

My two theories for this are that (a) the company finally put the name plates up, 1.5 years late, and I misunderstood that there was a charge, or (b) my downstairs neighbor, in an apology for having the fire department break my window, got me these plates during my absence and before her departure. Any other guesses?

Stealing

I saw that there were some grapes in the store today "sans pepins." I tried one (not allowed) -- not great, but I feel that I have to support seedless grapes in France, so I bought some. I tried some other grapes, also 5€/kilo, which were delicious. I shoved them all in the same plastic bag, and went to the register. The woman looked at the grapes and started to take one bunch out. I told her they were the same price, but she said she needed to ring them up separately. Then she informed me that the good grapes were 20€/kilo. I'm pretty sure she thought I was trying to steal them, as opposed to just being a dumb-ass who doesn't read the right sign.

Calling me for free (from the U.S.)

Because I signed up for an unreliable program called VoxOx, it appears that you can dial 818-495-2767 (an ordinary LA number), which will ring my cell phone in France. It appears to cost me $.02 per call, which is nothing. You can also send text messages to it, although I probably won't respond unless I'm near a computer, in which case why not gchat. You can also try calling my 415-680-3612 number, but it appears to have some problems forwarding to the 818 number. Go to it! But only between the hours of 5 am and 6 pm EST.

riding on the sidewalk

is a bad idea. I got bitten by a dog in San Francisco because of it, and yesterday evaded a suddenly-appeared child on a razor scooter by cleverly vaulting over my handlebars and onto my surgically-repaired knee. Time will tell which ends up being the more serious. I'm betting on the knee, but there's always the chance of rabies.

france, some benefits of living in:

Great pastries on every corner. A society in which a proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 provokes a huge fight, as opposed to a society in which a proposal to give some people health insurance provokes a huge fight. A legal website called Deezer that has free on-demand play-as-many-times-as-you-want popular music (I'm loving this one). Really fast, cheap internet/phone/TV service (also loving). And all the European livable cities/urban planning stuff too, I suppose.

consequences

I missed my train returning from Brussels to Lyon, and had to wait several hours for the next one. That experience was pretty bad, and I was still annoyed when it was over, because now that I had missed a train, I had to leave more time to get to the station in the future, to avoid a repeat.

So when I took my train to the Paris airport, I got to the train station 15 minutes ahead of time, feeling both virtuous and pissed off at the 15 minutes I could have spent sleeping. It was then that I remembered that I had no actual train ticket, and had to exchange my plane ticket for a train ticket at the window, a process that took 14.5 minutes. So in the end I made my train by (I think) the second-closest I've made a train by, and the first-closest without being fined.

fine in belgium

Returning to Brussels from a conference in Mons, Belgium, I was running frantically in order to catch the last train. I took a few wrong turns, then came to the station. After trying all the locked doors, I ran around the side, saw my train, barreled through the underpass and back up, and lunged for the door as I heard a woman yell wait, forced it open and got in. The woman kept on yelling, though, and eventually I exited the train to go up to her. She was the conductor, and very angry at me. We got on the train, through the non-closed door that she had (apparently) been telling me to go to, and she fined me 15.80 euro for boarding the train after the signal for depart. A Belgian colleague told me the next day that someone had boarded like this, then got into an fight with the conductor, and either fallen off the train or thrown the conductor off, and someone lost a limb, so they're very serious about this offense now. It wasn't clear to me how cracking down on this would help the limb-loss, but there you are.

glamorous, foxy foxy

I used the bathroom in economy while seated in first class. Why wasn't that a security risk? Why not say, "For security, please only use the bathrooms in cabins equal to or lower than your status." It's more honest, although I guess for full honesty they also need to drop the "for security."

lisbon

I assume everyone who reads this blog already knows this, but I've been offered a 3-year position in Lisbon, following a successful appeal of the decision not to offer me a 3-year position in Lisbon. Hopefully when I get back to Lyon there will be a contract in my mailbox.

ranking bike programs

I've now ridden bikes through sharing programs in Lyon, Paris, Barcelona, and Brussels. My thoughts:

Barcelona has by far the worst system. You can't choose which bike you want, if there's 1 good bike and 5 broken ones, you have to keep on taking out a random bike until you get the good one. The bikes are lighter, but their "baskets" are pretty useless. There are no temporary cards, which maybe is necessary because of the inevitable tourist onslaught. Worst of all, the system shuts down at midnight, which makes no sense. Points for cute name: "Bicing," playing off the BCN.

Paris, Lyon, and Brussels have largely the same setup, because JC Decaux runs all of them. Props to Paris for: maps on the kiosks, scrollable maps in the kiosks, tap-n-go bikes so you don't have to wait in line. Brussels has all those too, and its bikes have 7 gears (3 for Paris). Paris suffers because it's actually a little big to bike around in, and the ratio of stations to people and area is kind of low. Brussels has 2 nice aspects. First, the city has made almost all one-way streets two-way for bicycles, so bikes can go anywhere they want. Not sure how the cars feel about it, but I liked it. Second, the city is so small that the kiosk maps can be incredibly detailed and also cover most of the city, so you can avoid getting lost.

Lyon still wins in the end, for me, because it has so many stations -- 340 for a population of under a million, as opposed to 1000 for 10 million in Paris, or ~100 for a million in Brussels. There are a lot of bike lanes. Big downside -- the touch screens that make everything a pain.