My girlfriend mentioned to me that she used to drive around her hometown with her car windows down blasting music, as so many others do, only she picked something lovely by Bach or Beethoven instead of more modern fare (as a sort of counter-cultural comment). While I am a tentative supporter of restrictions on excessive volume (a la Kovacs v. Cooper), this always serves as a reminder to me that silence and softness are not unalloyed goods.

Anyway, as I was driving along blasting Dave Brubeck's Take Five (from my 3rd DC Jazz CD) at a near-excessive volume, I was reminded of this lovely email a reader sent a while back, which I never got around to posting. Since I think anti-comment bloggers like myself should make more of an effort to post emailed gems, here it is:

I first heard Take Five in an undergrad robotics course, as the soundtrack to two films that came from the Stanford AI group, which built a pair of robots called "Shakey" and "Flakey" respectively. These projects were undertaken some time in the eighties, as I recall, and neither the processors nor the mechanical systems of these robots were adequate for very fast responses. Consequently, there was a lot of footage of the robots sitting still and pondering, moving slowly across a room to encounter an unexpected obstacle, and then sitting still again. With the robots proceeding at such a leisurely pace, there was plenty of time for those of us watching the film to enjoy the soundtrack, and it subsequently became a sort of theme for the class. Hearing it still brings back memories of the smell of smoke from an overloaded H-bridge, and of eating "hint of lime" chips while working on the Lego chassis for one of our robots.

A quick web search turned up the Shakey and Flakey videos:

http://www.ai.sri.com/videos/

I can only recommend the Shakey video if you have half an hour, a high-speed network connection, and an intense interest in robotics or in the antics of Charlie the Gremlin.

I was partly mistaken in my recollection of the project timelines: the Shakey project actually ran 1966-1972, though the Flakey project was in the 1980s.

I've long been meaning to update my old Battle of the Bourbons post, which is now made hopefully obsolete by changes of heart and experience. But for now I just wish to note that my father and I experimented with making a Manhattan (roughly 2 parts bourbon, 1 part vermouth, dash bitters, and a Marrasca cherry) last night using some high-end Maker's Mark rather than our usual Knob Creek. The result was nearly undrinkable, with a heavy medicinal tang. Adding more shaken bourbon improved it in my opinion (but not my father's), though only somewhat; adding more shaken vermouth was even worse. I attribute this to the subtlety of the MM and the oakiness of the Knob Creek which must somehow take the fight out of the vermouth.

[My father has broad and adventurous tastes; I am more limited. I haven't yet found a good reason (other than curiosity) to buy something other than Blanton's, Booker's, Jim Beam Black, or Knob Creek-- the first two almost entirely for sipping straight or on the rocks, the last for the perfect Manhattan, and the JB Black as a cost-efficient stand-in for the others, as well as guest appearances in the Whiskey Sour and Mint Julep.]

There's one pleasant irony about the shenanigans that cast a dubious light on the men's marathon results this year. Whereas folks like Dan Drezner had before suggested that the Olympics' problems were a result of the inclusion of "subjective" sports (on which, see Matt Yglesias), this problem-- where fan interference quite possibly changed the outcome of the race-- should remind us all that dubious judgment calls and asterisked results can pervade all events.

The marathon seems pretty objective on the surface-- some guys run, and in the end one of them gets to the end faster-- but even there, the race may not always go to the swiftest.

From what I have read, there is still some debate over whether Black or White is the "superior" chess color. Though white wins some two-thirds of the games played at the highest levels of chess, there is at least a possibility that at still-higher levels of play, black would be the superior color. The ultimate question is if both sides played "perfectly" (meaning with infinite computing ability), 1) whether the game would automatically be a stalemate, and 2) if not, who would win.

A small cadre of chess-players, myself included, nurse the strong belief that black would win, because the game would naturally tend toward a lock-down where being forced to move was a major disadvantage, and black would be able to capitalize on white's tempo "advantage".

Omniscient beings and near-infinite computers are welcome to correct me.