News You Can Bruise

Sumana bought me an issue of G-Fan magazine, the periodical devoted to Godzilla and Japanese special-effects movies in general. I don't think I would subscribe to it, but one issue is fun to go through. For instance, I discovered "A Dinosaur Paleontologist's View of Godzilla." Which, in turn, told me about Mononykus, a dinosaur with one finger on each hand. Creepy!

Riana and I went to see a preview of Godzilla: Final Wars, but it was sold out, so no Godzilla for us. Instead we watched a DVD of Kiki's Delivery Service, which was great.

Working on a little project which is fun and which you might like when I'm done. Also trying to get my sci-fi story done before someone actually implements the idea and it becomes pointless New Yorker fiction instead of sci-fi. My next article isn't due until the end of the month so I have a little time to do other things.

Here's a first stab at my ideal Monopoly game, based on an idea of Kevan's. This version makes a couple small changes, all in the spirit of the existing rules, and evens the game out a little by making the endgame less depressing and hopeless for the players who aren't winning. However it does not inject any additional element of skill into the game, so it's not perfect.

Basically you add Godzilla(tm), or my non-licensed, freely-usable character Freezilla... uh-oh, let's call him Lizardbeast and get rid of the spikes on his back. There, we're perfectly safe! Anyway, as I was saying. you add the loveable and completely original character Lizardbeast as a player in your Monopoly game (tiny metal Lizardbeast tokens sold separately). When the first building is placed he is placed across the board diametrically opposite that building. For instance, if you build a house on New York he is placed on Boardwalk. Subsequently he rolls the dice (actually, the banker rolls for him) and moves as any other player, after the last player has moved. The only differences between him and a human player are:

• He does not collect or spend money, because he favors the gold standard and is against the use of fiat money. For him it is a matter of principle.
• He does not draw cards, because his hands are too big.
• He cannot go to jail, because, and I hesitate to point this out because you may have noticed this already, he is an enormous radioactivityfire-breathing lizard.

If Lizardbeast lands on a square that makes you do one of these things, he stays on that square and does not do them. When he passes Go, he does not collect $200.

If Lizardbeast rolls doubles he gets to move again, just like a human. If he rolls three doubles in a row, he does not move the third time, but neither does he go to jail. How is that supposed to work anyway? "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the facts are clear. The puppy dog you see before you rolled two threes. Then he rolled two ones. Then, in the presence of numerous witnesses, he rolled two sixes. The state rests." Anyway.

If Lizardbeast should ever land on your property, woe betide you! He will crush one building on your property. If your property has no buildings on it, nothing will happen. You may collect rent as usual while Lizardbeast is on your property.

"I noticed you said 'one building'," you say tenatively. "Does that mean--" Yes! Build a hotel, if you dare, in your hubris! When Lizardbeast checks in, your hotel does not check out! He will stomp it as easily as he would a single house!

Should Lizardbeast succeed in destroying all buildings on the board, he becomes bored (so you don't become bored moving him around all the time when he can't do anything) and leaves until such time as someone once again dares to develop their property. At that point he is reintroduced opposite the first erected building, as before.

Discussion: This variant alleviates some of the rich-get-richer that makes a Monopoly endgame infuriating if you're losing and boring if you're winning. However it does this by simply disrupting the endgame at random and moving you back into the middle game. It doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the endgame where it turns into a stochastic grind and you just want to make the computer finish it, but you're not playing on the computer. My current thinking involves buying Lizardbeast bait to leave on your opponents' properties, but it is as yet unformed.

Crap, I forgot to change the name of the game.

In the future, guidebooks will only have things you're interested in. (From Sumana).

PBS used to have a morbid web page that would show you the blast radii of various types of nuclear weapon superimposed over a map of your hometown, provided by the aptly-named MapBlast. Now it's just a bunch of static HTML with descriptions of how you really don't want to be anywhere near a nuclear blast. The sample map image is the only thing thing that proves I wasn't hallucinating it all.

Kris figured they took down the interactive portion because of 9/11, which makes total sense. Previously, terrorists would only have had to obtain a nuclear device if they wanted to blow up a city. Now, they have to obtain a nuclear device and a map and compass! But what about other methods of horrible destruction, as yet out of human control? Are there convenient, non-terror-enabling online forms that show you how dead you will be? I decided to do some searching and find out.

• Earthquake: You can find out when you felt the tremors from past earthquakes, but that doesn't do you much good. However, see Asteroid Strike below. Update!: If you live in the SF Bay Area, Adam Parrish has a deal for you! Maps and everything!.
• Volcano Eruption: All I could find was this distance calculator to volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest. If you don't mind doing a little web browsing, you can locate volcanoes in your area at this Smithsonian site or this USGS site, which is less comprehensive but has maps and other volcano freebies.
• Tsunami: Nothing I could find.
• Asteroid Strike: Here's what I'm talking about. Takes projectile characteristics and calculates all types of damage: crater ejecta, shock wave, thermal radiation, etc.

  Plus, since an asteroid strike causes an earthquake, you can work out a rough correspondence of impact criteria to Richter scale magnitude and simulate any kind of earthquake that way.

  My only complaint: With the right asteroid you can create an impact crater bigger than the earth. Indeed, you can specify an asteroid much bigger than the earth and it doesn't, as it should, treat the collision as a minor inconvenience to the asteroid.

• Tornado: Well, if you know the windspeed of a particular tornado, you can plug it in here and it will give you an index on the meaningless-except-to-tornado-geeks "Fujita Scale". But it will also give you wiseacre Midwestern comments, a decent proxy for "How dead will you be?" (Eg. "Too late to head for the cellar!")
• Flood: Well, this is pretty interesting. It's not a calculator per se, but a tutorial and script for simulating flooding in a GIS system. The reason I say it's interesting was I've been wondering how to do the same thing on a grand scale: see what the world would look like if the sea level were to rise or fall.
• Godzilla attack: Nothing. Not even a damage table you can roll on.

Well, I think that covers most of the SimCity disasters. Maybe the raw power of a nuclear explosion or an asteroid strike are what let you make a calculator that doesn't get hung up on the topography of the landscape or the size of a particular volcano.

I Tivoed this and ended up skipping through a lot of it because it thinks it's a spy movie (this was a common failing of Godzilla movies made in the 1970s). You could do a good spy movie involving Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, but it would be called "The Godzilla Operation" or "Code Name: Mechagodzilla", rather than having a title that implies that the movie is about Godzilla engaged in some sort of dispute or combat vis-a-vis Mechagodzilla. (That reminds me; I need to finish my serialized postmodern Godzilla fanfic so that I can implement my plan of running an installment each Saturday for three Saturdays.)

There is a Godzilla/Mechagodzilla fight in the last twenty minutes, which is pretty good, albeit burdened with fake spurting Godzilla blood. On balance, I think that every other Mechagodzilla movie I've ever seen was better than this one. Heck, I think Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla was better than this movie, if only because Space Godzilla looked neat and had a cool mutant roar, and that movie contained Akira Emoto. For me, if there is to be a monster movie the monsters must have a lot of screen time, and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla came up short on this count.

The other memorable thing about this movie is that the bad guys have a secret hideout and demand that you repeat a codephrase before entering so that they can keep girls and Interpol agents out of their fort. But the only times we see the challenge/response in use, it's being used by people who are infiltrating the hideout, so it's not a very good challenge/response. Maybe they should choose something harder to guess, like "Mecha/Godzilla".

Sumana and my mother both pointed me to this cartoon.

I don't know if a European audience will get the jokes in my Europython configuration talk (not all jokes present in the online version). Eg. do Europeans know enough about Godzilla that they will realize my little Godzilla skit is a) a skit, and b) funny? I need new jokes. Maybe I should just do without jokes, or come up with them while in Belgium.

Also, what has the same sort of semiarbitrary, dependency-ridden semantics as a ZIP code, but Europeans know what it is?

I know you've been wondering about Godzilla's Guitar. (Found via Incoming Signals.)

There's also a Chinese Restaurant Name Generator which comes up with better names than the one I wrote for my PyCon paper, but it's some weird Javascript thing that only works once, like the guy's variety act in that Warner Brothers cartoon.

One great use for Downhill is finding new weblogs. That's also a great use for writing Downhill and having people link to it. Once the buzz dies down, an Eater-style postmortem where I talk about new weblogs I found (also coming soon: the not-really-that-shocking results of an ad hoc experiment I ran against the readers of pyblagg). I hope the announcement that I'll do a postmortem won't affect the way people link to me.

Here's Sushicam, a cool photo-heavy journal from Japan. This segues nicely into the thing which has almost nothing to do with that, which is that I've convinced Ed to bring me back those copies of those Godzilla movies when he returns from Japan. I have no way of watching the DVDs, and they probably won't have English subtitles, but I remain confident that Providence will... provide.

There's a new Godzilla/Mechagodzilla movie! They keep making worse and worse design decisions in building Mechagodzillas; this time, he's got "the skeleton of the original Godzilla that attacked Japan in 1954". Do they think Godzilla isn't tougher than his own fifty-year-old skeleton? Here's the official site, which includes photos from a press conference at which Godzilla wields a baseball bat for some reason.

What's more, last year there was another Godzilla movie that hasn't made it over here yet. The list of release dates for both movies stop abruptly in South Korea. Stop hogging Godzilla, South Korea! (Never mind that I'm so lazy that I haven't yet seen Godzilla 2000.)

From The Google Weblog (which also picked up my silly Legalese Edge Case (check out the cool new link format!)), it's the voyeuristic escapades of The First Week at Google.

As with so many others, my dream job would be something for the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center. My dream job that actually exists (again, as with many others) would be doing cool things for Google. (Today I actually thought of a cool thing to run against Google, of which possibly more anon, but it won't work without angering Google because it won't work within the rather limited Google API).

Phidgets are single-purpose peripherals that take computer action based on sensor data and/or take real-life action based on the computer or network environment. A gallery of whimsical phidgets brings to physical manifestation the little X toys, the load monitors and IRC notification agents and the like. My favorite is the physical biff implementation Marble Mail.

It's all pretty useless, of course, but my cube at work is full of useless stuff that isn't connected to the computer, so why not (for example) make my Godzilla action figure stomp around whenever someone assigns me an issue?

QOTD, and IOTD 3/19/02; 3:15:37 PM

"It's actually pretty fun to be really tall in the Far East, because you feel a little like Godzilla." -- Robert Bennefield, our 7'-ish director of Ops.

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There's software that will determine whether two pieces of code are similar, for purposes of detecting plagiarism in class assignments. But let's say you had software that could detect 'similarity' between two pieces of software. You could also run it on two different parts of the same program to automatically find places where you could benefit from factorization. Shazam! It's like a reduce-to-the-halting-problem proof, only it gives you something good instead of something bad!

Of course, 'similar' for purposes of detecting plagiarism is a much easier concept than 'similar' for purposes of detecting factorability, so you probably can't use existing software similarity software for this purpose. But software to do that would be a very useful tool, especially if you're like me and find it boring to inspect code for factorability.

I bought Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II last weekend and still haven't watched it. I'm tempted to watch it now, but I'm trying to set up Tigris on my laptop (because the lag to the dev machine at work is intolerable) and that requires my full attention.

Mechagodzilla is really the coolest Godzilla monster ever, apart from the G man himself. He's the poster boy for government waste. "Gentlemen, once again an immense kaiju threatens our shores. The only solution is to build a full-scale replica of Godzilla out of dully-gleaming, plastic-like metal."

OK, my huge download of the tarball of RPMS containing the Tigris runtime environment is done. Back at it.

Aaaaaah! Godzilla 2000 is attacking the city!

I love that site because THEY PICK VITAL STATISTICS FOR GODZILLA AND STICK WITH THEM!!! Something that the Americans never figured out how to do.

Great blurbs from the producer and directors on that site as well, such as: "I want people to leave the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed by Godzilla's invincibility." But the very best thing is that it looks like this Godzilla story brings back the Gamera thing where Godzilla destroys everything but it's somehow okay and he's our friend. I can't get enough of that.

When can I see this movie, you ask? Not until summer, unless you live in Japan. (I got that from IMDB, it's not on the Godzilla site that I could see)

I gotta see what else is on this site.