Original Cin

The word of the day? Spoony. The band website I just happened to be looking at in another browser tab when I found out? The Spoony Bards.

You’ll need Love to play this trippy Hello World animation.
Hello World

I’ll post the story behind this pic sometime after I wake up “tomorrow.” The short version: It’s a screenshot of a tech demo for a game engine called “Love” that I found online.

While looking for information on Japanese names, I found this:

Looking Good in a Big Brown Bathrobe - Jedi Training
The true test of a real Jedi is not whether she can blow up starships, or kill evil overlords, or refrain from giggling at Yoda’s Fozzie Bear voice. The true test is how good she looks in a big brown bathrobe.

The aspiring novice does not merely don the big brown bathrobe and suffer in it until she finally looks good. She advances through a number of stages, each time pitting herself against successively greater sartorial challenges. Her master guides her carefully, avoiding both allowing her to rest on her laurels and forcing her beyond endurance until her fashion sense breaks and she refuses to shop anywhere but at the Gap.

I wrote another 500+ words for the second “People Have Value.” I know how I want to end the series, and I knew how I wanted to start the story, but until today, I was having a lot of trouble with the setting in this particular part. I basically had a serious problem with believability. Rob — the oldest son in the family — has disappeared. I need his family to go looking for him in order to write the ending I want. I originally just had them follow him in right away, but the dialog I wrote to justify this decision seemed… well, boneheaded:

Brian scanned his surroundings and straightened his mustache, lost in thought. “It doesn’t look like a military base. That’s good as far as it goes. If we get in there and explain what’s happened…”

Erm, no. That’s just stupid. When confronted with a giant, mysterious pyramid of unknown origin, how many people would say “not a military base, must be safe?” I have, fortunately, figured a way to get the family inside the pyramid without turning them into brain-dead idiots.

Found while I was searching for something completely different: Disk Clock - A new conception of time for the OS X Dashboard. Be sure to look at the online demo in Firefox; the clocks are pretty, if confusing, and you don’t need a Mac.

From News Flash: Money Does Buy Happiness:

If you start every morning with a bottle of whiskey and a slice of chocolate cake, you might be pretty happy all day too.

The lyrics to Sarah McLachlan’s song, “Oridinary Miracle” are not what I’m talking about when I say that the world is strange and mysterious:

Sun comes up and shines so bright
And disappears again at night.
It’s just another ordinary miracle today.

What’s strange and really inspiring? What if I told I had personally been in a place where the sun didn’t set? And it just happened to be near the foot of 23000+ ft high mountain?

Pirate ships had checks and balances on power.

“Someday I want to be so powerful that I can defeat myself in a single blow.” - Scott, commenting on a character in Prism Ark who says that they want to be stronger.

This got a chuckle out of me:

…by meeting a huge(!) danger with a playful attitude it became a moment of fun instead of violence.

I think this can work often in life. It’s not the way you meet an oncoming, jackknifed tanker truck - they don’t respond well to a playful attitude.

-Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer, “Playing with Danger“

So true, so true.

I’m quite pleased at how my latest programming project is going. Here’s the output of this little application. I’m learning the ins and outs of Java (I have no formal training in it, much as when I started working with PHP), but I’m as happy as a clam about how things are going. Despite the appearance, it actually does something quite useful.

Cat Bread Java Output

I’ve been reading the Hyperreality article at Wikipedia:

 Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as “reality by proxy.” For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of “sex” becomes something non-existent. Some examples are simpler: the McDonald’s “M” arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in “reality” the “M” represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.

I’m reminded a bit of some Eliezer Yudkowsky’s recent posts on Overcoming Bias on phlogiston: “Hyperreality” seems more like a politically-minded observation-sounding stop than anything… um… real. It seems nebulously defined at best. Nonetheless, based on the examples given, I’m puzzled by why clothing is not considered a hyperreality.

It isn’t natural by means. Most clothing is arbitrarily symbolic to a greater or lesser degree. It’s ubiquitous. So, isn’t a general argument against hyperreality an argument for nudism?

For some reason beyond my understanding, Yuki Kajiura’s song “Winter” always reminds me of The King of Town.

Someone left a direct-mail “subscribe now” pamphlet for Ladies’ Home Journal lying around, and one of the stories mentioned in it caught my attention.

It has often been remarked that people consider themselves above average regardless of actual standing. Yet, in a normally distributed population, half the people have to be above the average, and half must be below. So, I was somewhat surprised by this “survey says” factoid:

26% [of women surveyed] said their sex life was above average and 22% said it was great!

In other words, as we would expect from a realistic evaluation of the quality of women’s sex lives, half said that they were above average. In fact, the total that said they were above average was actually slightly less than half (48%).

Now, mind you, there are all sorts of things this doesn’t tell us.

• This doesn’t tell us what men think of their sex lives, so no comparison is possible just from this.
• We don’t know anything about the sample size or how the survey was conducted. Given the publication, it probably wasn’t all that formal. Also, surveys about sex are famously prone to all sorts of biases.
• The survey included only Ladies’ Home Journal readers. They might be atypical in some way that would allow them to better compare their sex lives to those of other women (maybe they’re using LHJ itself as a reference to judge their own relationships - the back of the same mailing has “spice it up now” hints and tips).
• We don’t know (and probably can’t reasonably measure) how womens’ sex lives really compare to one another - that is, if Alice really has a better thing going for her with her husband Alfred than her friend Barbra has with her boyfriend Barry, or if Alice just thinks her relationship is better.

A conversation, edited for space, between Silence and myself during a game of chess online. He had just told me that the software prevented him from making an illegal move:

RedWordSmith: Don’t tell me you tried to move your queen to e6!?
Silence: no
RedWordSmith: Good. That would have been weird.
Silence: I tried to move it to e8 :p

The always witty, opinionated, and intelligent LummoxJR has announced that he will once again be critiquing ads and recognizing the worst of the worst. I have fond memories of the original Ad-Schlocks, and look forward to this.

Spelled it right this time, and did it on purpose as well:

What is 666 in base 6? 3030! Proof that the Anti-Christ will appear in exactly 1023 years.
</prediction type=”not serious”>

What got me going on this is that I was thinking of how API keys are generated for online services. Ideally, you’d have an API key that’s short, but not too short, and compact but still portable and human-readable. Expressing the key in base 36, perhaps with a few additional symbols thrown in as “punctuation”, seems like the best balance here.

Now, suppose you wanted to group these keys by series; say, by year. What’s 2007 in base 36? I went to get the answer, but accidentally typed “32″ instead, which reveals that 2007 is year 1UN in base 32 (It’s 1JR in base 36, but 1RR in base 33 - maybe we’ll see a resurgence in the popularity of railroads before December rolls around?).

Oh, and prepare yourselves: the year 2047 is 11111111111 in binary.

I was posting at the Spacebattles forum, and just happened to run into this! I’m not sure what to make of these post counts.

Weird postcounts on Spacebattles