News You Can Bruise

I showed this cartoon to Kris and he vowed revenge. "Gil's goin' down," he says.

There's lots of Python code that pings weblogs.com, but I couldn't find a Python library for the other side of the equation; one that parses the big XML file of recent pings. That's why I developed the Ass-Kicking Laser Algorithm, which does that very thing. Even with the paucity of things you could conceivably do with the weblogs.com XML file, I think it has more options than are wise. Once I start actually using it I may trim it down. But like I say, one piece at a time.

The name is Kris'. He came up with it in 1998 when I was complaining that the algorithms I was learning about in class didn't live up to their cool names, like the gift wrapping algorithm and Graham's Scan. Since any interesting name I could give this library would set the user up for an anticlimax, I figured I'd go all the way. Thanks, Kris.

In retrospect, though, Graham's Scan is pretty cool.

This one's for Kris, who a long time ago pointed out that the headlines of "offbeat" news stories become orders of magnitude funnier if you shuffle the subjects and the predicates. Well, Kris has been feeling a little low lately so I thought I'd cheer him up by writing Dog Bites Dog (title a Sumana production), the script which does just that every five minutes. It's not as good as doing it by hand, but what did you expect?

I'm spookily intrigued by the possibility of applying this (very simple) algorithm to 'real' news headlines. But right now I'm more intrigued by the possibility of sleeping. Enjoy, all-night surfers and people on the other side of the world.

I was putting off mentioning the Checkerboard Nightmare that has a cartoon version of me in it, capping off the Leonard/Kris corporate food CN storyline, until I figured out what the heck kind of ugly Bill Cosby striped sweater Kris had my homunculus wearing. Then I figured out it was actually a T-shirt with the periodic table on it, so that's okay.

I don't really have a T-shirt with the periodic table on it, though I did tell Kris why the periodic table is shaped the way it is, in keeping with my recent role as person who tells his friends why weird-shaped things are shaped the way they are. In return for a similar service, Kevan provided me with the choice bit of information that it's very easy to inadvertently hang the Union Jack upside down.

My new filtered-through Kris Checkerboard Nightmare is probably the best one you'll get from my tenure as co-author. Caution: contains swearing. Interestingly enough, for once I wrote it without any swearing and Kris made it blue. I mean, he turned Chex into Adam here.

"Hmmm... refreshingly cool!" has been my mental catchphrase for a while now, but for some reason it never turns out to actually be refreshingly cool.

My first Checkerboard Nightmare guest/commissioned strip is up. I'm making Kris draw the one-off strips I've sent him over the years, and then will come a storyline we're collaborating on. The current strip is actually based on a joke Kris and Kurtis did many years ago, so technically I forced him to draw his own joke.

The other two one-offs are all mine, and will reveal my tragic, George Lucas-esque dramatic overdependence on mysterious cloaked figures.

Hurrah! I won the Checkerboard Nightmare contest, which means I get to control the content of Checkerboard Nightmare for a storyline's worth of strips. I may also be able to get Kris to draw some of the one-off strips for which I keep sending him scripts.

I'm surprised I wasn't disqualified for going to college with Kris, but since the 'contest' was actually just a thinly disguised auction there was little room for favoritism.

In college, Adam Kaplan and I had this running joke about Brian Kernighan as a sort of freelance Santa Claus. He'd break into your house on Christmas Eve and leave you UNIX source tapes or a Plan 9 installation. If you'd been bad, you'd get lumps of Windows NT.

Anyway, while we were having our little jokes, the real Brian Kernighan was riding high at Lucent, lording it over Kevin and giving interviews to fans. Years later, Adam sends a pointer to me and Kris as a reminder... of what could have been. Ach, it's a sad story, and one told for no apparent reason.

PS: confidential to Adam et al. Is it okay if I link to your Livejournals? You don't really advertise them and I know Kris has his own non-Live journal, but sometimes I'd like to link to something you write and I don't know if that's okay or if you want to keep them semi-private or if you even know I know about them, in which case, oops.

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.

Kris' hypothetical plot summary for the prequel to Breakin' 2; Electric Boogaloo: "Neighborhood kids help a small business owner become a wealthy developer."

Kris bows to popular demand and discusses Lucky Ducky.