Howdy, pilgrim! No ads here — you're in the ^zhurnal (that's Russian for "journal") — see ZhurnalyWiki for a Wiki edition of individual items; see Zhurnal and Zhurnaly for quick clues as to what this is all about. Briefly, it's the diary of ^z = Mark Zimmermann ... previous volume = 0.67 ... complete list at bottom of page ... send comments & suggestions to "z (at) his (dot) com" ... click on a title link to go to that item in the ZhurnalyWiki where you can edit or comment on it ... thank you!
In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin describes his invention of an efficient stove. He declined the chance to patent it and gain huge profits because:
... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
(cf. GenomicBookshelves (2001-01-27), PublicDomain (2003-02-13), AntientCommons (2003-11-03), IntellectualHeirs (2005-05-27), ...)
- Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 21:17:46 (EDT)
A pair of mallard ducks, male and female, are paddling along Rock Creek Trail in front of me, traversing a mega-puddle (or mini-pond) left by early morning rains. I'm putting in a few extra miles on my way to a low-key footrace this Saturday morning. As I approach the ducks they lumber into flight, then glide around a curve out of view. When I round the corner I discover that they've landed in another small lake. This time they let me trot past, a few feet away from them on the soggy grass at one side of their temporary habitat. Notes on that run, plus other recent jog log entries:
2008-05-01 --- 3+ miles @ ~13 min/mi --- today I take off the afternoon, take Paulette shopping for plants at the nursery, pick up a couple of kids from UM, and decide to try the Purple Line jaunt, the same route as two days ago (cf. Sharp Focus) but this time in the opposite direction. I begin with the fantasy of taking five minutes off the 44 minute time it took me yesterday, but after quite an effort I return home only a little under 43 minutes after my departure. It's a warmer afternoon, but in compensation I know the course now and am wearing light ("Nike Free") slipper-shoes. Plants have almost overgrown the path in several places, significantly more than on Tuesday.
2008-05-03 — 4+ miles @ ~14-15 min/mi — Just after dawn a herd of whitetail deer eyes Caren and me with suspicion. We're jogging around Lake Bernard Frank; I more-or-less remember the route of the "Frozen Slopes" MCRRC race five months ago, with some emphasis on the word less. At about half of the intersections I make a wrong choice; we do a lot of backtracking. Nevertheless, the "Lakeside Trail" forms the majority of our counter-clockwise circuit. Two ladies going clockwise meet us about a mile into our journey, and again roughly at the three mile point. After losing the trail on the east side we leap between stones across a tributary creek and rejoin it, but head the wrong way and a quarter mile later recognize a wooden bridge we crossed early on our journey. We see more deer, probably the same ones who monitored our progress almost an hour earlier. Reversing course again we find a trail back to our starting point. ...
2008-05-04 — 3+ miles @ ~12 min/mi + ~7 miles @ 14-15 min/mi — A tricky tree root trips Christina halfway through this morning's MCRRC "Frozen Slopes" 5k cross-country race. We're running together when she goes down, fortunately in a not-too-rocky segment of the course; her scraped knee and bruised arm should soon heal. We finish, tend her injuries, and then I set off with Caren again down the Cabin John Stream Valley Trail, starting this time at the end of the parking lot. We get lost at Democracy Blvd trying to find the path, first directly across the road from the tennis courts and again on Seven Locks Rd — both times we turn back a little too soon to spy the blazes. But after doing an extra half mile or so we locate the trail and proceed downstream to Bradley Blvd, admire the old mill house, and trot back without all the detours.
2008-05-07 — ~5 miles @ ~10 min/mi (+ ~5 mile walk @ ~ 18 min/mi) — Christina Caravoulias & Pat Maloney invite me to walk the Bethesda Trolley 5 Miler course with them on Wednesday evening, in preparation for Saturday morning's race. I get home early enough to jog the five miles to our rendezvous point via Rock Creek Trail, and for unknown reasons feel quite good. Two middle miles along RCT flow by at 9:33 and 9:40, unusually fast for me (though of course, perhaps it was the coffee I drank earlier in the afternoon, or the level course, or the fact that I knew those measured miles were being timed!). At the Maplewood Alta Vista Community Center, where the MCRRC club race starts/finishes, I sit and take off my shoes to remove some pebbles and let my toes air out while I await Chris and Pat. The walk is pleasant and takes us about 95 minutes, including a brief side excursion when we take a wrong turn. We chat, joke about various running hazards, and see two good-sized rabbits as well as some architecturally interesting homes.
2008-05-10 — 4+ miles @ ~12 min/mi + 5- miles @ ~11 min/mi — My plan is to run on real trails in Rock Creek Park with Mary Ewell, but she wakes up ill, so after we chat at 6am it's time for Plan B-for-Bethesda: the MCRRC Bethesda Trolley Race. Like Wednesday I jog there from home to add some warm-up miles. Unlike Wednesday, today it's raining and I go at a comfortable pace, take all available short cuts, avoid flooded areas as much as feasible, and salute the ducks swimming along Rock Creek Trail. Approaching the start/finish area I spy a medium-sized rabbit on a neighborhood lawn. At 8am Christina Carvoulias and Don Libes and I line up together. We trot along, joking and having fun, with mile splits of 11:04 + 10:51 + 10:21 + 11:34 and then 9:56 for the final fraction, a total of about 53:45 for me.
2008-05-11 — 4 miles @ ~9 min/mi — Early this Mother's Day afternoon I take Paulette to a cello recital at the UM campus. My plan is speedwork on the track, but the gates to Kehoe Field are inexplicably locked, so I alternate "fast" and "slow" between half-mile markers along Paint Branch Trail, starting at milepost 1.5 and proceeding upstream to marker 3.5 and back. My first half mile is 3:33, much too fast for me to sustain. During that leg a big muskrat looks at me and shambles away toward the creek. The remaining outbound legs are 4:52, 3:55, and 5:07. I turn around and do 3:53, 5:15, 3:45, and a 5:06 cooldown. My intention to do a few more intervals fades as a cool drizzle begins and my legs become tired. This speedwork is tough!
(cf. Icy Half Marathon (2008-01-25), Thirteen Eagles (2008-01-28), Seneca Creek Stumble (2008-02-03), Comfortably Numb (2008-03-13), Sunrise Service at Seneca Creek (2008-03-24), Sharp Focus (2008-04-30), ...)
- Monday, May 12, 2008 at 18:07:49 (EDT)
Overcoming Bias is a well-written group blog that son Robin recently introduced me to. One of the technical topics currently under discussion there is a personal favorite of mine, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. If I'm mildly fixated on Many Worlds as a good theory, Eliezer Yudkowsky has eaten far too much red meat; his rants are quite entertaining. Here's the conclusion of the latest [1]:
The only reason why many-worlds is not universally acknowledged as a direct prediction of physics which requires magic to violate, is that a contingent accident of our Earth's scientific history gave an entrenched academic position to a phlogiston-like theory which had an unobservable faster-than-light magical "collapse" devouring all other worlds. And many academic physicists do not have a mathematical grasp of Occam's Razor, which is the usual method for ridding physics of invisible angels. So when they encounter many-worlds and it conflicts with their (undermined) intuition that only one world exists, they say, "Oh, that's multiplying entities" - which is just flatly wrong as probability theory - and go on about their daily lives.
I am not in academia. I am not constrained to bow and scrape to some senior physicist who hasn't grasped the obvious, but who will be reviewing my journal articles. I need have no fear that I will be rejected for tenure on account of scaring my students with "science-fiction tales of other Earths". If I can't speak plainly, who can?
So let me state then, very clearly, on behalf of any and all physicists out there who dare not say it themselves: Many-worlds wins outright given our current state of evidence. There is no more reason to postulate a single Earth, than there is to postulate that two colliding top quarks would decay in a way that violates conservation of energy. It takes more than an unknown fundamental law; it takes magic.
The debate should already be over. It should have been over fifty years ago. The state of evidence is too lopsided to justify further argument. There is no balance in this issue. There is no rational controversy to teach. The laws of probability theory are laws, not suggestions; there is no flexibility in the best guess given this evidence. Our children will look back at the fact that we were STILL ARGUING about this in the early 21st-century, and correctly deduce that we were nuts.
We have embarrassed our Earth long enough by failing to see the obvious. So for the honor of my Earth, I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is. The only question now is how long it will take for the people of this world to update.
(cf. Many Worlds Demystified (1999-10-29) and a host of other pages that allude to that concept — click to search for them ...) - ^z
- Sunday, May 11, 2008 at 09:06:30 (EDT)
If you were marooned on the proverbial desert island, what food would you crave most? Well, putting aside questions of nutritional completeness and long-term health, my answer would have to be:
| Hot & Sour Soup |
At its best, hot and sour soup has an absolutely unique combination of flavors, based on pepper oil and vinegar, that can't be beaten. When I eat it, the top of my head starts to sweat — it's that scrumptious!
- Saturday, May 10, 2008 at 21:59:18 (EDT)
Martha Nussbaum is one of my favorite philosophers; so is Colin McGinn. Both write brilliantly; both are often totally wrong; both are real people. Nussbaum runs marathons; McGinn body-surfs and plays video games. It goes without saying that I'm also a devout fan of Shakespeare. So when The New Republic recently offered a review ("Stages of Thought") by Nussbaum of three books on Shakespeare's philosophy, including one by McGinn ... well, who could resist?
But when I started reading I got stuck on the second paragraph, where another of my great addictions — lists — appears. Nussbaum, warming up her critical juices, raises three big hurdles:
To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle — rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare's plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?
Alas, Nussbaum feels that McGinn falls short. Is she wrong? Append yet another book (Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays) to my far-too-long queue ...
(cf. Universal Flourishing (2001-12-25), Upheavals of Thought (2002-06-29), Upheavals of Thought Revisited (2002-12-13), Colin McGinn (2003-10-30), Man of Mystery (2004-08-12), Inner Philosopher (2006-11-17), ...)
- Thursday, May 08, 2008 at 21:19:52 (EDT)
Another small world encounter: several years ago my family was invited to dinner at our friends' home a half mile up the street. We originally met them ca. 1990 via my chance conversation with another patient parent at a childrens' chess tournament in downtown DC — I mentioned that we were seeking a piano teacher, and an opponent's mother told me about her kids' lessons. Although her family lived far away they were going to an instructor in my neighborhood. So began a relationship, first as piano/harpsichord students, later as friends, for the past two decades.
Anyway, also visiting our friends that evening was Peter Neumann, a semi-celebrity in the world of computer science. Peter is most known for the RISKS forum, an online publication/scrapbook concerning the risks of computers in society. But for us, or at least for me, his real claim to fame occurred before that dinner when my son Robin played some ragtime piano for the visitor. As seems to always happen with young performers, Robin was blasting out a Scott Joplin piece as fast as he could tickle the ivories, or rather, slightly faster than he could play it accurately. Neumann, a musician himself, stopped my son and told him that piano rags must be played slowly! Don't ask me why, but it stuck in my mind ...
- Wednesday, May 07, 2008 at 06:14:47 (EDT)
The true origin of the word "blog": it's not an abbreviation of "web log" at all. Rather, it's simply a linguistically evolved version of the century-old word bloviate, meaning "to speak verbosely or windily"!
(many thanks to Angus Phillips (2007-11-26) whose use of "bloviating" in a recent essay and led me to this insight ... )
- Monday, May 05, 2008 at 19:08:24 (EDT)
The 1999 movie Mystery Men (written by Bob Burden and Neil Cuthbert) is a clever, funny, well-made parody of the superhero genre that also stands alone. Among dozens of quotable lines that have become catchphrases around our household, some samples:
And, in reference to a squeeze toy that, sort of, defuses an escalating situation: "That little sucker just saved your life."
- Sunday, May 04, 2008 at 05:59:19 (EDT)
Donald Knuth, now 70 years old, is one of the founding fathers of modern computer science; his The Art of Computer Programming series somehow manages to combine rigor and readability, deep analysis and nerdy humor. I first picked up a volume of TAoCP in 1975 — literally picked it up, since I was at the time shelving books in the Rice University's Fondren Library to help pay for my undergraduate education. (cf. CollegeCollage2) Someone had taken it out of its place and left it on a table, and in the course of putting it back I read a wee bit of it, and was immediately hooked.
Son Merle recently sent me a link to an interview with Donald Knuth, conducted by Andrew Binstock for InformIT, an information technology educational publisher. It's a fascinating conversation that raises excellent questions about the current tidal wave of parallel computer architectures. It also reminded me of Knuth's "Literate Programming" philosophy, which Knuth declares to be one of the most important things he has done, as well as something of a failure. As he describes it:
Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn't taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world's population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets.
Donald Knuth's self-effacing modesty is also striking, as when he observes:
... Literate programming is what you need to rise above the ordinary level of achievement. But I don't believe in forcing ideas on anybody. If literate programming isn't your style, please forget it and do what you like. If nobody likes it but me, let it die.
- Saturday, May 03, 2008 at 04:49:46 (EDT)
Apollo 13 is an exceptional movie, full of nerdy heroism and high-tension problem-solving. Not long ago when I rewatched it one line suddenly caught my ear. An engineer praises another with the words, "You, Sir, are a steely-eyed missile man!" The term appears in the book that was the basis of the movie, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. From Chapter 6:
Anyone who had been working at the Manned Spacecraft Center for even a few weeks quickly learned that John Aaron was the stuff of folk songs. Among the men in the Canaveral blockhouse and the Houston control room, there was no greater tribute a controller could be paid than to describe him, in the rough poetry of the rocketry community, as a "steely-eyed missile man." There weren't many steely-eyed missile men in the NASA family. Von Braun was certainly one, Kraft was certainly one, Kranz was probably one too. John Aaron, a twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind from Oklahoma, had recently become one as well.
What delightful "rough poetry"!
- Thursday, May 01, 2008 at 20:49:23 (EDT)
"Pike's Peek" is a play on words. It's also an annual Sunday morning scamper down Rockville Pike, a major suburban Maryland street that on weekdays is clogged with automotive traffic. I ran it once, in 2002 (see Soggy Jog). This year on 27 April I'm a volunteer race official for the Montgomery County Road Runners Club that puts on the event. Before dawn I'm at the finish line, taking photographs and helping set up the fences and banners and chairs. Upon telephoned signal we start the big display clocks. Less than half an hour later the leaders appear, blasting out 10 km at a sub-5 minute/mile pace.
The trickle soon grows into a flood, and after a few thousand runners have passed I'm startled to see friend Mary Ewell appear in my camera's viewfinder. Soon after comes comrade Christine Caravoulias. After they've caught their breath we visit, chat, and make plans for future runs. At home I scan through more than a thousand photos and upload the majority of them to the MCRRC photo server. Most are of little interest except to the runners depicted in them; a few, however, catch my eye as having some small artistic merit. I must study them and see what happened right in those rare cases. The key element, I think is sharp focus — of the light on the sensor, and of the subject on the moment.
Meanwhile, some recent recovery excursions since the Bull Run Run 2008 a fortnight ago:
(cf. Massanutten Mountain South Training Run (2008-01-22), Icy Half Marathon (2008-01-25), Thirteen Eagles (2008-01-28), Seneca Creek Stumble (2008-02-03), Comfortably Numb (2008-03-13), Sunrise Service at Seneca Creek (2008-03-24), ...)
- Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 22:37:38 (EDT)
Good biographies let you peek into another person's life. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (1996) is a good biography, full of love if not always rational, well-written if not always brilliant. McBride's mother was a deeply flawed person; some of what she did in raising her dozen kids could well be viewed today as child abuse. The family survived only via vast infusions of charity from family, friends, strangers, and society.
Chapter 8 ("Brothers and Sisters") offers a glimpse of their home. It begins:
Mommy's house was orchestrated chaos and as the eighth of twelve children, I was lost in the sauce, so to speak. I was neither the prettiest, nor the youngest, nor the brightest. In a house where there was little money and little food, your power was derived from who you could order around. I was what Mommy called a "Little Kid," one of five young'uns, microscopic dots on the power grid of the household, thus fit to be tied, tortured, tickled, tormented, ignored, and commanded to suffer all sorts of indignities at the hands of the "Big Kids," who didn't have to go to bed early, didn't believe in the tooth fairy, and were appointed denizens of power by Mommy, who of course wielded ultimate power.
My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my enemies. There were so many of us we were constantly hungry, scavenging for food in the empty refrigerator and cabinets. We would hide food from one another, squirreling away a precious grilled cheese or fried bologna sandwich, but the hiding places were known to all and foraged by all and the precious commodity was usually discovered and devoured before it got cold. Entire plots were hatched around swiping food, complete with double-crossing, backstabbing, intrigue, outright robbery, and gobbled evidence. Back in the projects in Red Hook, before we moved to Queens, Mommy would disappear in the morning and return later with huge cans of peanut butter which some benevolent agency had distributed from some basement area in the housing projects. We'd gather around the cans, open them, and spoon up the peanut butter like soup, giggling as our mouths stuck closed with the gooey stuff. When Mommy left for work, we dipped white bread in syrup for lunch, or ate brown sugar raw out of the box, which was a good hunger killer. We had a toaster that shocked you every time you touched it; we called our toast shocktoast and we got shocked so much our hair stood on end like Buckwheat's. Ma often lamented the fact that she could not afford to buy us fruit, sometimes for weeks at a time, but we didn't mind. We spent every penny we had on junk food. "If you eat that stuff your teeth will drop out, " Mommy warned. We ignored her. "If you chew gum and swallow it, your behind will close up," she said. We listened and never swallowed gum. We learned to eat standing up, sitting down, lying down, and half asleep, because there were never enough places at the table for everyone to sit, and there was always a mad scramble for Ma's purse when she showed up at two A.M. from work. The cafeteria at Chase Manhattan Bank where she worked served dinner to the employees for free, so she would load up with bologna sandwiches, cheese, cakes, whatever she could pillage, and bring it home for the hordes to devour. If you were the first to grab the purse when she got home, you ate. If you missed it, well, sleep tight.
The food she brought from work was delicious, particularly when compared to the food she cooked. Mommy could not cook to save her life. Her grits tasted like sand and butter, with big lumps inside that caught in your teeth and stuck in your gums. Her pancakes had white goo and egg shells in them. Her stew would send my little brother Henry upstairs in disgust. "Prison stew," he'd sniff, coming back a few minutes later to help himself before the masses devoured it. She had little time to cook anyway. When she got home from work she was exhausted. We'd come downstairs in the morning to find her still dressed and fast asleep at the kitchen table, her head resting on the pages of someone's homework, a cold cup of coffee next to her sleeping head. Her housework rivaled her cooking. "I'm the worst housekeeper I've ever seen," she declared, and that was no lie. Our house looked like a hurricane hit it. Books, papers, shoes, football helmets, baseball bats, dolls, trucks, bicycles, musical instruments, lay everywhere and were used by everyone. All the boys slept in one room, girls slept in another but the labels "boys' room" and "girls' room" meant nothing. We snuck into each other's rooms by night to trade secrets, argue, commiserate, spy, and continue chess games and monopoly games that had begun days earlier. Four of us played the same clarinet, handing it off to one another in the hallway at school like halfbacks on a football field. Same with coats, hats, sneakers, clean socks, and gym uniforms. One washcloth was used by all. We all swore it belonged to us personally. ...
Ruth (Rachel Deborah) Shilsky McBride Jordan drove her children (at times violently) to become educated and self-reliant in a way that she herself never managed to achieve. James McBride credits her with the accomplishment, and mentions religion in a supporting rôle. The real engine of their success was, however, more likely the social welfare system — almost invisible in this book — that predominantly fed and housed and clothed and schooled her family. The success enjoyed now by the next generation of McBrides and Jordans speaks well for their mother, but it speaks better for the civilization that really brought them up.
- Monday, April 28, 2008 at 21:25:17 (EDT)
A Gaussian, aka normal distribution or bell curve, is what most statistical averages converge toward. The "Square Root of N" rule-of-thumb says that if you toss 100 coins you'll get half heads, plus or minus 10 or so (since 10 = √100). Toss a million coins and you can expect half a million heads, plus or minus maybe 1,000 (= √1,000,000). Getting a little more precise: the standard deviation σ of N events, each of which is 50% likely, is half the square root of N. In general for probability p it's √(N * p * (1-p)).
How often does something happen more than a few standard deviations away from expectations? Worth remembering are the first few values: 68% of the time the result is within 1σ, 95% of the time it's within 2σ, and 99.7% of the time it's within 3σ. So for a thousand coins, or in a typical polling sample of a thousand evenly-split voters, about two-thirds of the time the result is within ~15 of the halfway point, 95% of the time it's within ~30 (= √N), and 99.7% of the time it's within ~45. The "Square Root of N" is thus a 95% guideline.
Beyond a few σ it's easier to look at how infrequently things happen — how often something occurs outside the window of that many sigma:
| σ | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| outside | 3 * 10-1 | 5 * 10-2 | 3 * 10-3 | 6 * 10-5 | 6 * 10-7 | 2 * 10-9 | 3 * 10-12 | 1 * 10-15 | 2 * 10-19 |
Events therefore fall within 3σ more than "two nines" (0.99+ of the time), 4σ more than "four nines" (0.9999+), 5σ more than "six nines" (0.999999+), and 6σ more than "eight nines" (0.99999999+). (Then the pattern in the exponents breaks down: rare events are even rarer than that.) Note also that "six sigma", a popular quality-control mantra in some industrial circles, isn't the usually cited value of 3.4 failures per million; it's more like a few chances per billion. But "4.5 sigma" doesn't have the alliterative ring to it that sells management advice books!
(cf. Human Diffusion (2000-01-19), Square Root of Baseball (2005-05-13), ...)
- Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 20:15:35 (EDT)
Most people are basically sane. For the majority of their lives, they support themselves and interact peacefully with others. Their beliefs track reasonably well with reality. They make a net positive contribution to society.
Or so I used to think; now I'm less sure. There are so many folks nowadays, it seems, who can't or won't take care of themselves, who break down when things don't go precisely as they wish, and who can't make a decision (and who won't admit that not-deciding is often a bad implicit decision).
But maybe it's not just a phenomenon of post-post-industrial civilization; maybe it has always been this way. The crazy cousin who lives in the attic ... the perpetual drifter ... the lazy kid who won't help in the fields, who wanders off rather than fetch water or participate in the hunt ....
My other optimistic belief in human nature remains solid: most people are basically good. At least, I hope so!
- Thursday, April 24, 2008 at 21:20:38 (EDT)
Earlier this week Joan Benoit Samuelson achieved a personal goal: she ran a marathon (the US Olympic Team trials) in under 2 hours 50 minutes after her 50th birthday. She says it may not be her last marathon, but it may be her last hard-run competitive one. Many years ago in her autobiography Running Tide she observed, in Chapter 8:
[Hitting the wall] taught me a lesson. Two lessons, in fact: you cannot go into a marathon unprepared, and anything can happen in such a long race.
The second lesson is one you learn at your peril, because once you're afraid of the marathon you have to develop ways of channeling the fear. I feel about marathons the way my parents taught me to feel about the ocean: it is a mighty thing and very beautiful, but don't underestimate its capacity to hurt you. ...
- Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 22:24:25 (EDT)
For back issues of the ^zhurnal see Volumes v.01 (April-May 1999), v.02 (May-July 1999), v.03 (July-September 1999), v.04 (September-November 1999), v.05 (November 1999 - January 2000), v.06 (January-March 2000), v.07 (March-May 2000), v.08 (May-June 2000), v.09 (June-July 2000), v.10 (August-October 2000), v.11 (October-December 2000), v.12 (December 2000 - February 2001), v.13 (February-April 2001), v.14 (April-June 2001), 0.15 (June-August 2001), 0.16 (August-September 2001), 0.17 (September-November 2001), 0.18 (November-December 2001), 0.19 (December 2001 - February 2002), 0.20 (February-April 2002), 0.21 (April-May 2002), 0.22 (May-July 2002), 0.23 (July-September 2002), 0.24 (September-October 2002), 0.25 (October-November 2002), 0.26 (November 2002 - January 2003), 0.27 (January-February 2003), 0.28 (February-April 2003), 0.29 (April-June 2003), 0.30 (June-July 2003), 0.31 (July-September 2003), 0.32 (September-October 2003), 0.33 (October-November 2003), 0.34 (November 2003 - January 2004), 0.35 (January-February 2004), 0.36 (February-March 2004), 0.37 (March-April 2004), 0.38 (April-June 2004), 0.39 (June-July 2004), 0.40 (July-August 2004), 0.41 (August-September 2004), 0.42 (September-November 2004), 0.43 (November-December 2004), 0.44 (December 2004 - February 2005), 0.45 (February-March 2005), 0.46 (March-May 2005), 0.47 (May-June 2005), 0.48 (June-August 2005), 0.49 (August-September 2005), 0.50 (September-November 2005), 0.51 (November 2005 - January 2006), 0.52 (January-February 2006), 0.53 (February-April 2006), 0.54 (April-June 2006), 0.55 (June-July 2006), 0.56 (July-September 2006), 0.57 (September-November 2006), 0.58 (November-December 2006), 0.59 (December 2006 - February 2007), 0.60 (February-May 2007), 0.61 (April-May 2007), 0.62 (May-July 2007), 0.63 (July-September 2007), 0.64 (September-November 2007), 0.65 (November 2007 - January 2008), 0.66 (January-March 2008), 0.67 (March-April 2008), ... Current Volume. Send comments and suggestions to z (at) his.com. Thank you! (Copyright © 1999-2008 by Mark Zimmermann.)