DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I booked my room for Etech at the Westin several weeks ago. As previously noted, the price was ridiculous ($215/night including tax), but I thought it would be important to stay at the site of the conference so I wouldn’t lose any schmooze time commuting to a cheaper hotel or that dry spot beneath the overpass.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay at the Westin for the entire conference, because the Wednesday night of that week was already sold out. I booked a room at a Best Western that charged a third less even though it included breakfast and in-room Wifi. (To my dismay it smelled strongly of disenfectant, about which the only nice thing I can say is that at least it didn’t still smell like whatever it smelled like before being hosed down with Lysol.)

On the final day of the conference, I cabbed back to the Westin with my 1000-lb duffle in tow. I dragged it painfully to the bell desk and asked to stow it for the day. “Only for hotel guests, sir,” said the bellperson with an irritatingly dismissive air. I explained that I had, until very recently, been a hotel guest, that in fact I’d checked out the day prior against my will and was returning for the final day of a conference on the second floor. Exercising iron-fisted control over his domain (by which I mean the luggage closet) the bellperson refused, citing the extreme number of check-ins and check-outs that day, although how that was relevant he didn’t deign to elucidate.

At that point the front-desk clerk, sensing conflict, came over to see if she should help with the public rejection of what I thought was a pretty reasonable customer-service request. The bellperson said something along the lines of “He says he stayed here the previous night.” I didn’t see him roll his eyes but it wouldn’t have surprised me. The clerk then returned to her terminal to do something I found both fascinating and insulting: to verify whether I’d really been a guest! As if people who attend expensive conferences and spend $200+/night on hotel rooms routinely lie about it to the staff.

But, hell, maybe they do. This is only my first conference. Who knows what fun I’ve been missing?

In a discussion of the origins of names, my brother pointed out that the suffix -el, as found at the end of some Hebrew names, means “God.” For example, the name Raphael means “God has healed.” Just for fun we made a list of all the other -el names we could think of. Not having a copy of a Hebrew-English dictionary handy, we had to speculate as to some of the names’ meanings.

Following is an excerpt of a journal entry I attempted to write late last December, about a trip to St. Louis the previous week for my little sister’s wedding.

The rest of the weekend happened meal-to-meal. The only moments we weren’t eating, we were waiting for appetizers. We did take a long walk on Friday, but we were walking to a restaurant.

Here’s a typical fancy dinner entree in St. Louis: eighteen ounces of meat, and an asparagus spear. Vegetables are simply a garnish. I felt like I was back in Germany. Or, worse, Cincinnati.

My family, knowing my self-imposed dietary restrictions, made arrangements for vegetarian and vegan entrees whenever possible. Their good intentions were filtered through the limited capacity of local commercial kitchens: St. Louis chefs don’t know how to cook vegetarian meals. Wedding guests were served poached salmon and a pork chop, two small potatoes, and two or three pieces of garnish. My vegan plate, mercifully free of cheese sauce or other secretions of livestock, consisted of a scoop of bland white rice, a row of bland steamed garnish, and — salvation! — a grilled portobello. I’m not that fond of portobellos, but it was the best thing on the plate. Any portobello in a storm.

Ask Jeeves announced some keen new search technologies at Etech. The main new innovation, which comes from the founder of Teoma (which Ask.com acquired several years ago) won’t be online for two weeks, but it’s compelling: basing relevance rankings on clusters of expert communities rather than on inbound link-count (aka PageRank). It’s a mouthful of buzzwords but it may mean their results are better. Certainly it’s likely to mean the results for ambiguous queries are more diverse, e.g. a search for ‘apple’ should turn up both Apples and apples — which is not the case at Google today.

Jeeves’ new technology can’t be seen for a couple weeks on their text search, but can be seen on their image search. Compare Ask Jeeves’ image search results for John with Google’s image search results for John. The Google results shows a bunch of people you’ve never heard of, with one exception; the Jeeves results page shows Travolta, Elton, Wayne, Kennedy, Cassavettes, etc.

But this may be a corner case. I tried numerous other searches, both ambiguous (bread, cardinals) and not (herman miller aeron chair). Results in all cases were similar. Neither engine showed a picture of a shrub in a search for ‘bush.’

The promise is there, even if the implementation doesn’t yet fulfill the promise. It’s worth watching.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has prepared a print ad in response to the Auto Alliance’s recent ridiculous claim that modern cars are “virtually emissions free”, which I deconstructed last Wednesday.

The UCS weighs in with additional objections to the automakers’ misleading ad on their new Automakers vs. the People campaign.

Unfortunately, the UCS doesn’t have the budget of the big auto makers. Pronounce “money” as “reach.” Throw a few dollars their way by following the link at the bottom of the campaign page.