News You Can Bruise

MOLA! via Sumana.

Mike Popovic wrote a poem with a mola mola and a calypso beat.

Not, as would be cooler, "Frog of the Century". Today I went with Sumana and Riana to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There were awesome jellies and a sea turtle and huge sharks and huge tuna and penguins and bat rays that you could touch (they feel so soft!), but the real reason we went was to see the awesome mola mola (mola mola), king of the open seas. And indeed there was a big tank containing lots of fish and surrounded by drawings of the mola. But there were no molas in the tank! The gift shop had postcards of that tank which distinctly showed two molas, so the molas must have died or gone on vacation and been removed from the exhibit. I bought a poster of the postcard but that was as close as I got to a mola today. Big disappointment.

We did see a guy who works at the aquarium and was a college friend of Pete Peterson II, and the jellies were incredible. They were illuminated from within the tanks, and in one of the tanks you could push a button to turn off the light and see the jellies become nearly invisible.

Coming soon: sea creature nomenclature prescriptivism: exposed!

Jake Berendes, who's been making stuffed animals, made a mola mola stuffed animal--before I asked him to!

At last, there's a band called "mola-mola"!

I'm sure this comes as a surprise to no one, but frozen green beans are no good. I've been making green beans recently from the fresh ones you have to trim and it's been time-consuming but the green beans are great. Last night I was lazy and used frozen beans and they were soggy like the grave. Well, they were soggy like the ones I hated when I was a kid, the ones that come in a pack with tasteless corn and lima beans that get stuck in your molars (but not your molas) when you chew.

Also, I just noticed that Daily Kos is using my old Clark Community Network rolling open thread code for sites where people love to have huge random conversations. I assume it's my code because the wording is almost exactly the same. Neat.

My readers exact a heavy toll for their (no doubt forthcoming) advice on the dilemma expounded upon in my previous entry, by... giving me stuff to post. First we have two reader-submitted Google Memewatches (Google Memeswatch?). * don't * people from Kevan, who informs me that the actual, far-too-precious name for a Google Memewatch is a "snowclone"; and will the real * please stand up, from the usual gang of idiots.

Second: I have been overwhelmed with links to this story, reinforcing my delusion that NYCB is the preeminent mola mola weblog, when the fact is that I am just the preeminent mola mola obsessive. A huge mola mola has washed up on the shores of New Zealand. Why? Perhaps because of Joe Mahoney's dark secret. I don't know; maybe it was a bodyboarding accident.

I have a brilliant plan to make money off of the ideas I'm going to synthesize in this entry, but others are catching up to me on the basics and I still haven't done anything with my alleged plan that's so great. So this is kind of my admission of defeat; I'm going to try to formalize and make obvious the part that's about to become well-known anyway.

Let's think about recipes. Every time you make a recipe you perform a ritual corresponding to the recipe. A recipe is generally written as a narrative, but except in very simple cases you never make the recipe simply by reenacting the narrative. If you want to get it done in a reasonable time (and, if heat is involved, if you want it to work at all), you have to set multiple things going simultaneously, the ordering merely hinted at by the use of words like "meanwhile" in the recipe.

Even when the recipe is divided into sub-recipes, you need to read the recipe as a whole and figure out how best to use your time, what the prerequisites are, and how the recipe will take shape. The idea of mise en place is, in my opinion, partially a hueristic to make this step easier by moving a lot of the decisions to the front so you don't have to place them elsewhere.

That's the state of the art. Now imagine writing a recipe for a hypothetical cooking robot, something that knows about ingredients and cooking techniques but lacks planning skills. You'd get a representation similar to one you'd find in an MMORPG cheat-sheet. This representation describes the recipe in terms of the ritual, depicting a series of steps in which you combine and transform old items to get new items. I bumped into this idea a year ago, the way a ship might bump into a mola mola, but didn't actually understand that it could be used to represent real recipes until I played Kingdom of Loathing.

These recipes look like trees. The vertices of the tree are items of food. The leaves are the ingredients, and at the root lives the finished dish. The edges of the tree are operations. Some of them are unary (melt the butter), some are binary (brush the dough with butter).

This is the cool part. You can do all sorts of things with a tree representation of a recipe. Some of them have to do with the fact that your representation represents the cooking ritual, and some have to do with the fact that the ritual is now computer-parsable.

The more complicated actions now naturally correspond to a longer branch of the tree, making it easier to get a feel for how the recipe ritual is going to go. If you have times associated with each operation, you can calculate which actions you need to start first. You can, if you know enough about ingredients and their properties, perform a transformation on the recipe. (This is the part I am really excited about.)

As far as I can tell, this idea originated in Computerized Cooking, a gloriously cranky but un-ignorable document from the '80s which reminds me of Ted Nelson's stuff. Recently it found new life in insta-hit weblog Cooking for Engineers, which does a lovely tree presentation that is a tree but doesn't look like a tree, or RPN, or have a lot of internal cross-references. The ugliness of the recipes was my main problem with Computerized Cooking, and I really admire the way CfE solved it.

So that is how, in my opinion, you should think about recipes if you want to make money from recipes (as opposed to food) in the twenty-first century. On a higher level of abstraction lives the meta-recipe of the culinary design pattern, which I think looks like a templatized recipe. And above it in a different direction you have the meta-recipe of the meal, which I still have no clue about. I think it would look like a set of recipes with interconnected techniques and ingredients, but I'm starting to sound like Frank Chu so I'll leave that alone until I figure it out.

Apropos my longstanding quest for games in which you can play a mola mola, I have it on good authority that Parodius 2 lets you play a mola, and that a mola is a recurring character in the annoying Kirby series of Nintendo games for various platforms. I welcome this development, and hope that molas will infiltrate more games in the future. Now, stay tuned, as we bring you a Special Report You Can Bruise:

Parodius 2: An Unlikely Champion. Tonight, we'll trace this mild-mannered Gradius parody from its obscure origins, through development, to its current height of fake fame caused by its exploitation of the cheap button-pushing trick of letting you play as a mola mola. And whose idea was it to create a hagiographic documentary for a video game? Not even one anyone's ever heard of?! We pull no punches as we investigate our own sorry selves!

Coming up next: Kirby Kirby Kirby: An Unlikely Runner-Up.

Ok, back to fixing that NewsBruiser comment bug.

"What animal are you?"

"Human."

[GLARE]

It turns out I am actually a sheep. I was thinking it would be nice to vary the Chinese lunar calendar to give other organisms a chance. We would have cool years like the year of the elephant, year of the saber-tooth tiger, year of the mola mola, year of the E. coli, etc. Just another idea from Leonard Labs, where we're always working orthogonal to your best interests.

Yeah, yeah.

Other origami sea creatures include sperm whale and lobster.

A wealth of mola mola pictures, including some great schools of molas and basking molas. Warning: not all of these pictures are pleasant. Some depict molas subject to ectoparasites, a dead mola being preyed upon by starfish, and molas in every condition being menaced by huge, translucent copyright symbols.

Have you seen a sunfish? Fill out the Sunfish Sighting Report Form!

Kevan sent me a screenshot of what is, as far as I know, the only appearance of a mola mola in a video game (thanks, Kevan!). Kevan cites as his source the 1993 Capcom comic book license "The Punisher". How long until a video game is released that actually stars a mola mola? It's intuitively obvious that that would be the greatest game ever.

I'm just mad about sunfish
They're just mad about me
I'm just mad about sunfish
They're just mad about me
They call it mola mola...

Fisherman, spare that mola mola!
Touch not its snout or dorsal!
Instead, try some granola
Or other tasty morsel.

Disturbing Search Requests:

• "frank zappa" mormon
• free bakersfield telemarketing list
• pussy whipping instructions
• Can I be thrown out of school if I am kicked out of my home?

Remember, if you've enjoyed this edition of Disturbing Search Requests, please support our sponsors by clicking on the banner ad below. Without the puny ad revenues thus received, we would have no incentive to bother trawling through a new day's search requests.

After various tribulations I've finally gotten hold of the pictures that were on my camera. This includes pictures from Adam's wedding as well as the whale watch. The whale watch pictures turned out okay; there are two cool pictures of dolphins swimming near the boat, and several pictures with visible whale (including at least one whale fluke picture), but I couldn't even tell which picture was supposed to be of the humpack breach, and of course I totally botched my chance to get an awesome picture of the basking mola mola (I had the perfect opportunity, but my camera was set to 'review' mode instead of to 'take pictures' mode).

News flash! Mola mola sighted in Walla Walla!

Sumana: the Paul Conrad cartoon is a reference to a joke in which a guy quits his job to join the circus. When the circus next comes to town, his friend comes to see him, but it turns out he's not a clown or a tightrope walker or anything; he's the guy who cleans up the elephant crap. His friend says "Why don't you quit this awful job and come back to your real job?" He says, "What, and quit show business?"

Even though I get the joke, that's not enough when dealing with Conrad, and I have no clue what the cartoon means. That Bush is stuck cleaning up the messes of an indifferent GOP? It makes no sense (bah-dah!). There are two elephants; is that significant, or did Conrad realize that he could depict two elephants but only have to draw one and part of another one?

All told, wouldn't you rather get your scatalogical humor from the world-famous Love Lab? They have a picture of a mola mola defecating.

Excellent picture of a mola mola at mola.org, the site that asks, "Why would you look any further? This site has an excellent picture of the Mola."

Papa's got a brand new bag, but Leonard's got a brand new T-shirt. It's courtesy of our new hosted site, Helix Community, which you may have heard of (you may have also heard of the similarly-named but entirely unrelated Helix Code). It has a little green DNA helix to the right of the logo which on inspection appears to be the DNA of some sea creature, possibly a mola mola. It is the second, I think, in the line of T-shirt editions of our hosted sites that I posess (the other being OpenOffice.org).

The real-life "friend you extend" is most likely dumont, the IRC infobot for the #tron IRC channel (incorrectly labeled in this entry as the #Crackmonkey IRC channel). Those in the know (Pete Peterson II) say dumont is male, but I always think dumont is female. In fact, I always think dumont is Margaret Dumont, and expect to see things like the following on the occasions when I pay #tron a visit:

<dumont> CAP-tain SPAUL-ding!

The conceit of an IRC infobot is that it hangs out on an IRC channel as a user, dispensing definitions of terms and engaging in limited social interaction with the human users. Dumont knows nearly 100,000 facts, including such old standbys as the entire Jargon File[0] and airport and area codes. She He also contains various handy features such as the ability to do Google searches and domain lookups, not to mention clickolinko the automatic weblog. Dumont was written by Walter M. Gibbs.

Random example of dumont interaction (thanks, Pete):

<pedro> mola mola?
<Dumont> mola mola is The Mola mola (ocean sunfish) is the world's largest known bony fish. At least one estimate over 3000 lb. has been recorded and fish reaching 3m from fin tip to fin tip have been seen. It is found in all oceans in tropical and temperate climes. It eats jellyfish and small fishes and algae. In the eastern Pacific, Mola mola is normally found from B.C. to South America, although in El Nino events it has been recorded as far north as Alaska.

[0] I used "entire" there to make it sound more impressive, but there's really nothing that interesting about loading an ASCII file into a computer program; the interest lies entirely in which file you choose. The metaphor is taken from reference to human memory, where memorizing the entire Jargon File would be an actual feat. I don't really know where this footnote is going, so... aaah! It's fallen off the edge of the Internet!

Ideas For Robotfindskittenlike Games: Second In A Series If You Start Counting From Zero And Count This Entry, Or If You Don't And Start Counting From One: Response has been whelming for this idea. Pete Peterson II offers robotfoundkitten, "not so much a game as it is an 80x25 flat text file of a # next to a ? in the middle of the screen." A. Cairns suggests robotfindskittens, in which "robot doesn't know how many kittens there are and has to bump into everything on the screen." There's also the tragic prequel, robotloseskitten.

While good ideas (keep sending them in!), all of these require costly development effort and changes to the game mechanics, which would need to be focus-grouped at enormous expense. The easy money lies in simply rebranding the existing game with superficial changes that don't really change anything. For instance, robotfindskitten: special edition would have gold-plated non-kitten-items and be suitable for display on a coffee-table (well, those coffee table video game consoles, anyway). The personalized edition, code-named robotfindsyou, will give you the thrill of actually being found by robot! (Note: for purposes of the game, you will be a kitten). And we can use PayPal to support the pay-per-kitten model of robotfindskitten premium.

We should also go the Super Mario Bros. route and have various 'themed' robotfindskitten levels, such as the 'jungle' level (robotfindsmonkey) and the 'water' level (robotfindsmolamola). And on a very special episode, it's robotfindsrobot.

Late night FreeCiv game with Manoj and the two Andrews. We saved and went our separate ways around 2 AM, after a few years of everyone declaring war on me and trying to whittle down my massive empire of mail-order shoe stores and fusion cuisine restaurants. The carnage will resume later this week.

Another great thing about playing FreeCiv with humans is that you can give your cities silly names and not be the only one who appreciates them. I marked my triumphs over enemy cities by renaming them to the names of fusion cuisine restaurants like "Big Ken's Sushi Burrito Hut".

Speaking of silly names, today's entries will be reverse liponymic in "mola mola". I did not name a FreeCiv city Mola Mola, but I should have.

Back from the whale watch. I saw several blue whales, a few humpback whales (including a spectacular humpback breach!), a lot of Risso's dolphins, an awesome mola mola (aka sunfish, but "mola mola" sounds cooler), which I didn't realize before how interesting (and large!) they were, some jellyfish, some obnoxious sea lions, and a fur seal. I took a lot of pictures, which I'm afraid are of one second after the cool thing happened (the humpback breach, the dolphins swimming under the boat), but I'll find out once I finally get my camera working with this computer.