News You Can Bruise for 2002 February

This page has a similar idea, which I could accept.

The other thing that's innovation is the big wicker laundry hamper shaped like a frog with its mouth wide open.

Non-Kitten Items Explained Through Quoting Someone Else Who Noticed Them: First In A Series

In fact, I have proof that few people have ever heard of nautiloids at all, and therefore don't give a damn in the fulest sense. Recently, the World Weekly News, king of the shopping-mall tabloids, published unretouched photographs of a chambered nautilus labeled as a giant monster now on an earthbound path from Mars and scheduled to arrive well before the millenium.

--Steven Jay Gould, Eight Little Piggies

vagreangvbanyvmngvba ubrqbja (Score: 8,438,800,000)
onpxcbeg zheqref (Score: 53,118,800,000)

The second one is invalid under some rules because its first word is not found at dictionary.com (it should be, though).

I actually find the construction of three-word Googlewhacks more interesting than two-word ones, because they make you triangulate relative unrelatedness of words. Two-word ones are more impressive once constructed, though.

I put up a navigable file tree over at Da Da Warren Memorial Memorial (which has now been running a year longer than Da Warren ran), and restored five of the file areas. A treasure trove of old DOS stuff.

Gainful employment is not to be confused with lossy employment.

Kevin has been waiting with poised schaudenfreude for the dental procedure which causes me intense pain. Unless something goes horribly wrong during the fitting of the braces, he's not going to get what he wants. He'll have to be satisfied with the medium-term discomfort caused by the braces.

The headliner was a Jew from Texas, and he had a little bit on how bad his routine would be if he were confined to comedy about being a Texan Jew, which bit was strangely the best part of his act. There were two (!) other pro comedians who were also funny, and the show was MCed by Kenny Byerly, who resembles Campbell Chiang to a disturbing extent, but who is much funnier. And Sumana's open mic performance was also very funny, though it relied almost entirely on stereotype humor (this was intentional).

I have a couple souvenirs from my trip to Texas. I have a little beanbag-type penguin which my mother bought me. I have some books I bought at Half Price Books (more of which anon). I have a Nutra-Grain bar Andy's mother gave me which I still haven't eaten (not technically a souvenir). I have a garter which I caught at Kristin's wedding (it was the second garter they threw; they kept shucking garters off of Kristin's leg and throwing them into the crowd, which was pretty funny).

I also have a reciept from HEB (a Texas supermarket) which I've been hanging on to solely to mention it here. Our first day in Texas we were at a hotel which offered a not very impressive continental breakfast, so we went across the corner to HEB, bought a bunch of food, and invited the aunts and cousins over to partake. I fed about 10 people for $33, which was pretty good. Reproduced below is the list of food from the receipt:

QUAKR GRANOLA BR CHOC PNT
DANNON LA CREME STRAWBERR
HEB HEAVY WT. CUTLERY COM
*B* HEB PRINTED PLATE 6 7
TROPICANA PURE PEMIUM WIT
PHILLY SFT CRM CHEESE REG
PHILLY SOFT CREAM CHEESE
MICKELBERRY HAM 8OZ PKG
SMOKED TURKEY BREAST 8OZ
INGLEHOFF MUSTARD SWEET H
HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR
205 BAGELS TX ONION 2953_
BABY SWISS DELICO SLICED
LARGE BUTTER CROISSANTS 6

In particular, I would like to draw your attention to this item:

HEB TEXAS SHAPED CHEDDAR

It was a block of cheddar cheese. It cost $1.95. It was shaped like the state of Texas. My mother decided that she had to have it, so I bought it for her. For all I know she has it still.

Robert had earlier expounded his hypothesis that Texas is the only state in the union in which the citizens think of themselves primarily as citizens of their state (as opposed to American citizens or citizens of a particular city). He siezed upon the Texas cheese as evidence of this. Yup, everyone wants a piece of the Texas cheese to bolster his or her own personal argument. Not for any other reason, though--it's mild cheddar, and what fun is mild cheddar?

Palladium has a lot of interesting features. It comes with a campaign setting which looks fun and full of variety. The alignment system is really great; it captures the way people act a lot better than the AD&D system does.

The book describes about five different magic systems; they're all pretty interesting, though most of them seem not to be very powerful. The main one (generic RPG wizard/priest magic) looks really well designed, and the instructions indulge in some great bashing of the annoying AD&D magic system:

Nor does the wizard forget a spell upon casting it. This is his life, spell magic and study... To forget a spell could mena his death and is a fairly ludicrous idea. This is his occupation, his livelihood, he is no longer an apprentice... To suggest that he would forget a spell is like saying a soldier might forget how to use his sword.

Most of my complaints have to do with the book itself rather than the game system. The sections are organized haphazardly, as though the book were written as hypertext and then the hypertext were automatically traversed to create a book.

The writing style is florid, sometimes, hilariously so, as in this masterpiece of redundancy:

"Generally, dwarves and elves treat each other with an air that is so cold that it could freeze an iceberg."

And the Tonight's Episode-y:

"The assassin, like the mercenary fighter, is a sword for hire; their specialty: death."

There's a new edition of the Palladium rulebook out, which allegedly fixes the stylistic problems; if that's so then my main complaints would be the paucity of supplied monsters and the seeming weakness of most of the magic systems. But no one's making you play a diabolist.

1. I remember, but cannot find, an instance in which a CGI interface to the United States Code was used as an example in the code-as-speech debate. Now, some of the laws in the United States Code criminalize the distribution of certain types of information. I don't think these laws are automatically bad, though I think that most of them are. But since you could break one of those laws just by making an HTTP request and getting data in response, you could write a program which had the same CGI interface as the USC program, but instead of returning the text of a law, returned some data which would cause you to violate that law. It would only work for a very small subset of the US Code, though: it would be difficult indeed to violate Section 1821 just by making an HTTP request that said "section=1821" and getting data back.

2. FreeCiv is played on a cylindrical projection of a planetary map. but surely the people in the FreeCiv world have the right to live on a round planet like the rest of us. So change FreeCiv so that the map wraps around on itself in all directions. I think this would drastically change the game for the better, though in general it would leave people more open to attack (since there would be more ways of approaching someone's city, such as across a pole).

Game update: I have a title, plot and (lame) cosmology for my game. I know how a couple of the puzzles will work (because I already wrote code for them). I have an interesting main character for whom I will enjoy writing interior monologue. I'm feeling some ennui about the project in general but I think it will dissipate once a few more pieces fall into place and I start writing code.

The sad thing is, someone working for General Mills probably thought of that in 1986 and it probably made it through one or two rounds of focus groups.

The thing that disturbs me is that apparently 1/3 of the test-takers have an internally inconsistent idea of personal identity. I can only hold out hope that most of those were people trying different responses to questions to see what would happen.

"Hey, that is really cool!"

"By the time you actually need something like that, there will be something ten times cooler available for half the price."

"Oh yeah. I'll wait."

Also: I also went to the dentist today for a cleaning. During the cleaning the dentist found a cavity that had previously escaped him. I have to go in on Friday and get it filled. Bah.

Fortunately, and hopefully, today will not be insane as Monday and Tuesday were.

Everything I do is more than it appears
A coded message reaching out a hundred million years

--Alien Nature Documentary

• "Eh-xcellent..."
• "Look at me! I'm the president!" "Hey, I thought I was the president!"
• "Hot damn, I get to meet Kofi Annan!"

I got junk mail from Time offering me "a special offer for senior citizens".

• The cute kitten picture... OF EVIL SOULLESS MAD SCIENCE!
• The cute elephant picture.... OF CUTENESS!
• And now, Deep Thoughts with Slobodan Milosevic
• "I can't believe I get to meet all these famous people!" (This is going to get old, but I love Dubya's photo op face! I'd make that same face!)

* I just realized that it's not the AP photo ticker, it's Reuters. So unless "AP" is allowable as a general term for "news wire" in a way similar to kleenex or xerox, "AP Photo Roundup" is innacurate (though it sounds good).

I'm not cutting a release yet because 1) it's not 'productized', as we would say at work (you can't turn it off on a per-notebook basis and you can't choose what to display; it's always that little ball), and 2) it's a big pain for me to cut a NewsBruiser release, so I like to let changes add up.

I'm uncertain about the ball, if only because it adds an element of graphicality to the previously austere NewsBruiser. I thought about having a linked "x" or other character, but I think the graphic looks better. I may change my mind.

I didn't know what a dream catcher did. Sumana told me and claimed that I should have known, since I'm part Native American. However, the dream catcher is of Lakota origin and I am not, so how could I be an expert on Lakota technology? Fallacious!

Sumana also came up with a great idea for my game. Thanks, Sumana!

I should mention that Greg Knauss recently informed me that Paul Conrad is a stroke victim, so it's not really politically correct to take the sort of lime-and-salt pleasure in his cartoons that Kris/Leonard/Sumana take. Greg also passed along the following touching story:

[Conrad came to] speak at my high-school, seven million years ago, when I was a freshman. After doing his spiel, he took questions, and someone asked where his ideas came from. He, of course, said everywhere -- the newspaper, conversations, even high-school kids. Did anybody in the audience have an idea?

So I raised my hand, he liked it, and it was in the LA Times the next day. He framed the original and sent it to me.

I thought that was pretty cool.

Addendum: Ouch!

Of course, the real puzzle is just figuring out what is going on, so maybe that's what they meant.

Next time I will use some non-changable amount like $24.

There is, but it's not very interesting.

Unfortunately, I can't change the little message up there until I can actually ssh in again, which won't be for a while because I'm farms? in Berkeley? and my ssh key is in San Francisco.

The other thing that got me thinking about this is my realisation that for years I've been using this stuff, when all along I should have been saving it in airtight containers for later sale on eBay. Sure, right now it's just Enron swag that gets the big bucks, but how much would my eToys pen be worth in ten years if I hadn't been all along using, compulsively dis- and re-assembling, and losing it? This is the realization an earlier generation had about its Star Wars action figures.

Also, wouldn't it be faster and cheaper (and better, for that matter) to just bring some hydrobots along, just in case?

Tell me, did you sail across the sun
Did you make it to the Milky Way?

You're already in the Milky Way!

I never mentioned that the last time I was in Bakersfield (for Christmas) I took Sumana on a tour of Arvin, where I grew up, and also showed her the house way out in the grape fields where I used to live. That house is apparently now owned by one of Rachel's elementary school teachers.

Rachel sent her immediate family an email detailing her current set of plans. As she says, "i seem to have a habit of throwing one complicated life plan out the window every other week in exchange for another, slightly more complicated". She still refuses to have a weblog, but one of the classes she's taking is Bio 30, Human Sexual Behavior, known to the student body as "Dirty 30".

Fourthly in the list of items pertaining in some way to my family, my mother sent me a link to The Sugar Beet, a very funny Mormon satirical newspaper which achieves the ultimate Onion-alike goal of never making you want to click on a link to get more of a particular story.

I'm the king of rock, there is none higher
Sucka MCs should call me sire
But should not circumvent my copy control mechanism
Lest they face up to a $500,000 fine or up to five years imprisonment for a first offense, and up to a $1,000,000 fine or up to ten years imprisonment for subsequent offenses

I'm pretty nervous about getting braces, especially this late in life, but two years is not that long a time, and my bad teeth have really started to bother me; it's not uncommon for me to cut my lip while chewing food, for instance.

I bought a bunch of books, a CD of Morton Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna, which has haunted me ever since I heard it on KUSC back in the 1900s, and the Diablo II Battle Chest ("Buying proprietary software on amazon.com!" gasped a shocked Sumana), which I purchased because I'm still obsessed with Diablo II even though I don't really have any way to play it once I get it--my current thinking is that the Windows laptop upstairs that Leonard uses might be fast enough to run it.

I'm quite excited about this. I can click on links and cause foolish people to send me packages containing objects! Of course, there is the exchange of money involved, but what good is money if you never spend it?

That was a rhetorical question.

• Alan Greenspan reenacts the second scene from 2001.
• Prize-giving time at Market Snodsbury
• Possibly the largest disconnect ever between someone's hand gesture and what the caption has that hand gesture conveying.

<leonardr> wait, i know what you could do
<leonardr> use a strongly typed language!

Update: Chris DiBona is going to find out tomorrow.