News You Can Bruise for 2006 April

That can't be a good use of my time.

Also, I think this is the first review of my music not written by someone who knows me.

There are some twisted songs out on the net, and if you search for the good stuff, you're bound to come across a couple that, bad as they are, they're really catchy, and you laugh everytime you even think about the song.

Bad but catchy: that's me.

Incidentally, my gee-tars were delivered the other day, so once the book is done and I'm in the post-book era I can resume recording my new album.

There once was a man from Peru
This limerick ends on page 2.

It's in the book. I've got all kinds of silly stuff in this book. I had an earlier limerick and cut it, but this one's in there.

In the first two to three days of a stick Spam wave therefore the applied shares rise over up to two per cent. Afterwards the course consolidates, in order to sink in the consequence strongly. Apparently this is in all rule frequently the case if those coat the Spam clients their profit. This behavior is statistically significant in each case, avowed Rainer Boehme.

He avows it! It must be a real effect! But not drastic enough to see just by looking at graphs.

Actually I just gave the stock spam code to another German guy (a Ph.D student), but he's not one of the ones who did this report. And last July I gave the data to yet another researcher, but he was at U Penn. So this is a previously unknown use of my data.

Everyone has relativity and genetics and evolutionary biology and quantum physics and plate tectonics, but only the US has creationism (similarly for intelligent design, or as I call it, c******nism). Only the USSR under Stalin has Lysenko-style evolutionary biology. Everyone has astrology and alchemy, but everyone's astrology and alchemy is different. And only the UK has this special newspaper-based "formula for the perfect x" branch of science.

This is where you take something vague, dissect it into a bunch of vague contributing factors, assemble them back into a vague equation, and claim that it represents perfection. This gets you in all the papers and nowadays the weblogs as well. As far as I know only one article two years ago has ever dared to point out the ridiculousness, and it's still going on.

Oddly, NYCB has previously encountered Len Fisher, unwitting founder of this particular branch of pseudoscience. He's the one who started it with his measurements of liquid absorption in biscuits, and his use of a real, preexisting equation to describe it. I think he deserves some kind of meta-Ignobel for the monster he's created.

Entering the realm of speculation, there's also an indication that stock spam actually destroys wealth by reducing the capitalization of the spammed companies over the long-term (though maybe the wealth just leaves the stock market and goes into the spammers' pockets). Also includes a movie-plot scenario where spammers use the techniques of stock spam to start runs on banks. An entertaining paper. And it mentions me, which is awesome.

Inspired by Kevan. The stress of the replaced words is often wrong, and sometimes the result just doesn't scan, but it's sufficient for the secret also-Kevan-inspired project for which I wrote it. It works especially well on cadences that have been drummed into your head for years.

A: Leave your rabbit alone!

Not only does it find great pictures but it links to things like this summary of really old travel books (summary contains durian), a genre that has always fascinated me. As you travel further, your reports back home get less accurate.

• The first line of dialogue should be taken from a recent entry in a weblog you've read today. This was a very difficult constraint because it was so wide-ranging. In the end I just picked a recent sentence from Kevan's weblog.
• The strip should contain a complete recipe (simplified as much as you like, but enough that someone could reasonably prepare it from those instructions).
• Neither Cat nor Girl should appear visibly in the comic.

Sumana

We see love between others thousands of times but only participate in it a few times. Can we hope to find a new kind of love? How would we know it if we did? The best we can do is to explore the deeps of one great love, always finding new aspects of it.

Five years ago I stumbled upon a vast love which my lamp and map have still not charted. This is where I want to live, Sumana, among the crystals, the faraway noise of an underground city, the glimmering lights in the ceiling, with you. Marry me, Sumana.

But the success of 24 proves that you can get people to incorporate crazy political ideas into their worldview by presenting those ideas in story form. So I had an idea for a political thriller TV show. The elevator pitch is 24 meets the last season of The West Wing. It starts with a third party senator (like Jesse Ventura, but more politically savvy) who decides to run for president. He starts out wanting to act as a spoiler, but then he meets a programmer who works for the company that makes the voting machines, and he decides to win.

At the end of the pilot, you've got got two overlapping stories. The senator tries to make his spoiler campaign look like something that could really win the election, and the programmer works to form a conspiracy within the voting machine company. Not only does the conspiracy have to cover their tracks, they must form an ad hoc political organization, changing their voting machine hacks to deal with downticket races and otherwise make the voting results look realistic, without having any contact with the real campaign.

This can go for half a season or a full season. There are twists and turns but the two teams win/steal the election. Then the real fun begins. The conspiracy is discovered and publicised, but it's too late.

This will never be made into a TV show, mainly because nothing I ever say will be made into a TV show, but also because all American TV shows seem to have a premise that can extend, in theory, for five seasons. I don't see any way to make a presidential election and a constitutional crisis run more than two seasons.

We got married in the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park. Nandini, Andy, and Camille were there. The officiant was the Reverend Tony Johnson. We read our weblog proposals to each other, and also poems. I read Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, and Sumana read Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "Colors".

Then we were married! It was awesome. We devoured snacks that I brought: pears, pear-based muffins, and brownies. Camille left to go to work, but Nandini, Andy, Sumana and I went to Belvedere Castle and looked down at the turtles in the turtle pond.

So far we've gotten two gifts! (But don't send us more gifts; see below). Andy's family gave us a great new Shun knife with a caricature of Alton Brown's face on it--a knife that claims to be dishwasher safe! And Brendan and Maria sent us a bamboo steamer, in reference to when they were in New York and I went with them and a friend to Joe's Shanghai in Flushing and ate juicy dumplings.

So, instead of gifts, we would like you to send us advice about marriage. And nice letters. Sumana says that if you want to spend money, you should give to one of the charities Steve and Alice listed when they got married, starting here. Also, Sumana needs a new Brita pitcher and a bookcase that folds up--but don't tell her I said so!

Nandini and Camille took pictures, so soon you'll be able to see pictures.

The other major new feature is that you can now rip out a chunk from the parse tree with the extract method. You can use the chunk and abandon the rest of the tree, or vice versa. This is especially useful because the data structures you abandoned can now be garbage-collected: in current Beautiful Soup, the whole tree stays in memory forever because every Tag and NavigableText is connected to every other Tag and NavigableText through an intricate web of lies. And by "lies", I mean "instance variables".

There are some more new features, but I have to take a shower now to go and meet Pete Peterson II for dinner. Test it out; I'll be rewriting the documentation over the next month or so, and hopefully by then I'll have gotten enough feedback to release it.

I heard from Michael that the Ruby cookbook is in the neighborhood of 900 pages. That's as big as the second editions of the Perl and Python Cookbooks, which makes sense because it's got about as many recipes. We just didn't know before because the wiki doesn't automatically generate the Docbook output that gets printed on pages.

900 pages! I wrote a Neal Stephenson book! (Sumana: "Does it have an ending?" Me: "No, it just kind of ends." Sumana: "Yup.")