Lawrence Lessig is kind of a hero to me. He's working to change congress by shining a light on the influence of money on legislation. His approach seems to be to find obvious examples where a reasonable person would conclude the trade of campaign money for legislation and then raise money to run an ad campaign in the politician's district with convincing evidence that the politician in question both ignored the best interest of his or her constituents and made a decision to benefit those who donated to him or her. The nice thing about this approach is that, as Lessig has pointed out, it is not required to prove corruption. It is only required to show examples of the possibility of corruption, because that possibility of corruption erodes the possibility of trust.

Recently, John Campbell (R-CA) introduced legislation to exempt used car dealers from laws designed to protect consumers from predatory lending practices. John Campbell both personally benefits from the profits of used car dealers as well as being a recipient of about $170k in campaign donations from used car dealers. Check out Lessig's video about it, and sign the petition there, if you want to.

A "pro-test" is apparently a protest in favor of biomedical research. On April 22nd, 2009 at 11:30, scientists, students and patients are being invited to one such protest at UCLA. More information is available at the UCLA pro-test website.

UCLA scientists have been the targets of a campaign of violence aimed at ending animal research. UCLA has an official statement that summarizes the history of this movement. This campaign, while violent, and in at least one case effective (one research actually resigned after his family was threatened), seems very poorly run. A molotov cocktail intended for a UCLA professor was left on the doorstep of a house some number of blocks away from the researcher's home. Cars in the Palms area of Los Angles (not too far from UCLA) were firebombed, but didn't actually belong to anyone having to do with research. A bomb intended to kill another researcher was poorly made and never actually went off.

I don't know if we should be more or less frightened of incompetent anti-science extremists. I do know, however, that there is absolutely no defensible reason to use violence to halt animal research. There are many peaceful, legal ways to provide input to the system. There is a debate to be had as to when it is appropriate to use animal research subjects and when it is not, and there are plenty of extreme examples to be found on both sides. Unfortunately, the ethics of animal research debate almost always devolves into an irrational shouting match, and even violence, which certainly won't get us anywhere.

I have modernized! I may or may not stick with the new look.

My brother-in-law,Robert is illustrating a series of books about dinosaurs. One of the images shows that a particular dino is about the length of two cars. Here's the image in question:

The car on the right is based on my car, and the driver is me! The one on the left is my sister driving Robert's car. As a lover of dinosaurs, it's really exciting to imagine driving on the highway with some dinosaurs. He also sent me a detail of my face for the purposes of using as an icon, which, if all is well, should be showing up on this very blog.

We just had an earthquake, which, being in California isn't that big a deal, except the epicenter was maybe 6 miles from our place. Here's the USGS link. (Edit: the link broke. I guess the USGS site only keeps info about quakes up for a short time.) It wasn't huge, but being so close made it feel a lot more intense.

I guess UPS filmed a commercial in the driveway of the building in which I work this morning. Apparently it will air on ESPN prior to and during the upcoming NASCAR season. That basically makes me famous, right?

I wrote this up elsewhere, but I figure I'd better get as much exposure as possible if my career as a food critic is going to take off. So without further ado, my review of uWink at Hollywood and Highland center.

Nikki and I went to uWink in Hollywood to meet some friends for a birthday celebration. Being our friends, they were about an hour late, so we had ample time to hang out at the bar and observe two separate teen/tween birthday parties show up.

The servers fell all over themselves to take orders and such from us rather than letting us interact with the consoles for anything other than the handful of available games. My guess was that the more diners interact with the servers, the more they tip. An alternative may be that the system doesn't work that well and is slower and less efficient.

Our group eventually showed up and we went to a table. The kind of food on offer as well as the prices felt kind of incompatible with the atmosphere. The decor seemed to be aiming for a sort of night-club chic, the music was aimed at those of us in our late 20s, but the consoles and the clientele felt more like the local late-night diner after a high-school dance. I think everyone got a hamburger of one sort or another; I couldn't really imagine anyone ordering a fancy $30 entree at a place like this.

We sent in our drink orders first, under the strict instructions from our server that we shouldn't hit 'send' until we'd all chosen. This meant all our drinks would come out at once. All at once is nice for the servers, but not really the point of the "order whenever and we'll bring it right out" promise of the consoles. After carefully entering our names, and making sure each drink was matched to the correct name, and wrestling with the machine to convince it we really were all 21 or over, the order went in. A while later, the servers came out, and just started yelling each drink out so we could claim them. Except the server didn't actually pay attention. I had to wave my hand and yell to get my drink.

The same basic thing happened with the food. Twice the server came out to apologize for not having any turkey burger patties (nobody had ordered one). I opted for the sun-dried tomato aioli and balsamic reduction for the sauces on my burger. It arrived with ketchup. The burger was pretty good, although given the rigmarole we went through to precisely specify the food we wanted, it was weird that the food was so imprecise. Again, it was decent, although better burgers are available for less money.

Of course, the food isn't really the main draw of uWink. The digital entertainment was a mixed bag. The touch-screens worked, and weren't greasy or gross or anything. There were a couple games that worked for four people: One Pictionary clone and a Taboo-like game. The Pictionary clone had some bugs. The system transmitted the strokes of the drawing player to the guessing player with some network latency and with a surprising lack of fidelity. At one point I leaned accross the table, and the image seen by the person drawing didn't look much like the image presented to the guesser. The Taboo-like didn't actually show a list of taboo words, so you could say anything at all to get your partner to say the secret word.

Restaurant-wide games were a bit better. Trivia, picture memorization, and find the difference in the two similar picture games were all a hit. As a bonus, the score was projected on the wall so we could see how things were going.

So overall, the experience was novel but nothing I would drive to Hollywood again to repeat. The slick appearance couldn't really make up for the sloppy underpinnings, and the servers obviously didn't buy in to the concept. The concept of the place is pretty cool: A slick, hip spot for nice food and a bit of digital entertainment thrown in. The execution of the concept, however, still could use a lot of work.