The Tedder P. Schoenhopfer Policy Exchange

Click on the photo to go to Randy’s website. He’s living in Boston and took photos by hooking up a camera to a kite!

if the blog looks weird it’s because I”m trying to fix something else

it should be back to normal soon

Here’s a cool clip I just pulled off of slashdot (with the link):

“For less than $200 and a cheek-swiped cotton swab, you will soon be able to add DNA results to family tree Web sites. Ancestry.com plans to launch the DNA testing product by the end of summer, offering customers the possibility of finding DNA matches in the site’s 24,000 genealogical databases. By taking a simple cheek-swab test and comparing results against DNA profiles in a test-results database, virtually anyone can uncover genealogical associations unimaginable just a few years ago. Users can easily connect with and discover lost or unknown relatives within a few generations, as well as gain insight into where their families originated thousands of years ago.”

I wonder how many people actually do this, and whether it will kick off later. I guess most families won’t be willing to spend $200 on this, but if a lot of people did it, it would have the potential to be really cool.

Here is a link to the FCC website comment, thanks to Uncle Mike. I tried to find this before but couldn’t.

Also from Uncle Mike, article about it from Wired Magazine. IF anyone has time to add more information to this, please do!

Here is a sample comment:

Feel free to adapt. I wrote: “I believe that commercializing the bandwith of the Internet will be destructive of free expression and will concentrate wealth and power in a way that will be a detriment to the structure of American society.

The Internet must remain neutral with regards to access so that everyone has an equal chance at accessing the public. Never in our history has one communication firm granted access to another firm in accordance with the law without a court battle. To grant the sort of power that those opposing net neutrality wish to turn over to corporate interests would, in my opinion, be destructive of an open and democratic society.”

Ok, I’ll give a quick rundown of how things have been in Boston sinced I moved in last Sunday.

I’m living on Fairmount St, which is practically right on Tufts camps. It’s a one-block one-way street with about a 30 degree incline (it’s super steep). When I moved in there were two roommates, both asian 19 year old Tufts undergrads who are pretty quiet and more or less keep to themselves, play guitar hero, watch TV, and go to class. But we all get along. A few days ago a third roommate moved in, some guy from Sweden (I don’t remember his name) who’s also 19, but he seems cool as well. So there won’t be any fights at my place at least. There’s a big kitchen, TV room (small, I never go in there), a bathroom, and 4 bedrooms. My room’s pretty big, I”d say 15 x 20 ft with a big walk-in closet and two windows, came fully furnished, etc. You probably don’t care about my room though.

I’m working at a Tufts lab in the psychology department for a professor named Dr. Cook, who works with the pigeon visual system. In the lab are about 50 pigeons kept in cages, along with another “experiment room” with 8 boxes, each of which has a little window with a touch-screen. Images pop up and the pigeons have to peck, and data’s recorded about how they do. Right now I’m writing a program for the next experiment, which will test whether pigeons can piece together two pieces of an object occluded by something in the middle (i.e. when we see a car through a bush, we know it’s a car even though we can’t see the whole thing). I usually work 9-5, unless I open up (2-3 days a week) when I come in at 8. I’m pretty used to it though.
There’s another girl named Ya’el working in my lab from Israel (even though she looks American and has no accent, you’d think she grew up here). She’s about my age, but only comes in M-W, but she seems cool. There’s also two grad students, a guy Matt who’s kind of our mentor, and a girl named Angie. The professor in charge is super chill, which makes working here much more pleasant. The lab is located about half a mile away, so I just walk here, and walk back and forth for lunch.

The T stop is about one mile south…I spent a while checking every path of gmap-pedometer.com and there’s no good straight line to the T stop, so it takes about 20 minutes to walk at a good pace. There’s a map on the right–the green arrow is my apt, the red dot is where I work, and the blue dot is the T stop. I’m 7 stops North West from the boston commons, which is a 20-25 minute ride, so it’s not bad.

Sunday night Aaron helped move me in (he’s living in Brighton, about 30 minutes West) of the commons. It’s a 5 mile drive but takes about 30 minutes to get there because Boston traffic SUCKS (don’t get me started). The drivers are complete wusses, take a minute to start up at a green light, and drive 10mph under the speed limit. It’s pretty frustrating. Anyway, Cambridge is right between Medford and Brighton, so I drive through Harvard. It seems like it might be a cool place to hang out, but I haven’t been there yet.

Monday night we went down to Back Bay (an area north of Boston that was man-made over the water), and met up at a bar with my friend Ted (who does economic consulting) and Jen Freedman, who was in town for the night, and Aaron. The next few days were just driving around learning the area, and learning how to do stuff at my lab, hanging out in the Commons with people, etc. Friday night I met up with Aaron, Ted, Will, Cecilia, and Isaac (all friends from U of R) and some other people that they tagged along with and had a fun night. Saturday night was similar, Sam came down from NH because he had just turned 21.

Sunday we walked the Freedom Trail on a beautiful day, which is about 3-4 miles long and stops through all the famous historic sites in Boston, including the State House (seen left), Paul Revere’s house (we couldn’t go in, so I took a picture of a brick from the wall to say I had a picture of his house), the USS Constitution, a graveyard with soldiers who died in the Boston Massacre, etc. Surprisingly, the USS Constitution (commissioned in 1797) is still fully operational. There’s US Navy marines on it at all times, and every morning they fire each of the cannons on board as a test; he said they could be called out to seas at any time. Of course, if the US did this the citizens would be pretty mad, and the sailors on board would be pretty dead (21st century torpedo > 18th century cannon).

Since last Friday we haven’t had hot water at the apartment because of some confusion with the oil company (some other guy in the apt was taking care of it), and it hopefully got fixed this morning–if it did, they came after I left. I felt too dirty (after having not showered), so I took an ice cold shower this morning and it was miserable. It feels great when you’re burning up after a run in 90 degree heat, but at 7am it really sucks.

Anyway, that’s Boston. I’m having a good time so far, even though it’s only been one week so it’s hard to say exactly. Oh, for Princeton people: I ran into Phil Santiago the other day, apparently he works here. I don’t know how to end these posts…uh, bye.

I’ll write a post on the fun I’m having in Boston when I get home tonight. For now, something interesting I finally figured out today.

I’ve always sneezed when a bright light shines in my eyes. It’s most noticeable when I leave a building and emerge into bright sunlight; seconds later I usually sneeze 2-3 times. Some people think I’m crazy when I tell them this, others have said it happens to them too. Well, I finally looked it up, and lo and behold, it’s a condition called the Photic Sneeze Reflex (PSR). Here’s a wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

Basically, the nerves for sneezing and the optic nerve are kind of crammed together and leak information…so bright lights, which overload your optic nerve, can “leak” into the sneeze reflex and cause you to sneeze. Turns out about 20% of the population has this condition, and one study said that 40% of light-sneezers had at least one light-sneezing parent (it also says “two nonsneezers never produced a sneezer”, which seems to contradict the 40%–it should be 100%). Mom or Dad, does this happen to you? How about anybody else in the family?

Here are a bunch of links about the recent mayoral campaign in Princeton Borough. If you have a comment it’s probably best to send it in email or IM since it’s a sensitive subject locally.

Mean editorial on Friday before election.

Nice article in Trenton Times about campaign money Saturday before election

Most recent letters to editor page two letters at bottom about campaign.

Other letters to the editor

Trenton Times article after election day about campaign

Trenton Times article announcing victory