News You Can Bruise

I told Sumana: "The fifth anniversary is the wooden anniversary, so I got you Minecraft." She got this joke, but I don't think she appreciated it, so I'm throwing it out there for you.

Three other weblogs I subscribed to recently:

• The Game Developer Research Institute is devoted to digging up the most obscure information about the video game business as it used to be: most notably, who did coding work for whom, and who ripped whom off.
• Similarly, Hardcore Gaming 101 not only has insanely detailed essays about specific game series, it now has a weblog that digs up more general retro tidbits, compares American and Japanese versions of games, etc. Less obscure stuff here than at the GDRI, since it focuses on the games rather than on the software companies that make them.
• The great thing about the Internet is that you can get access to cutting-edge scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of those papers are incomprehensible. Until now, the public was forced to resort to print science-popularization magazines with their long lead times. But now, there's the physics arXiv blog, presenting understandable summaries of the arXiv's most interesting or sensationalistic papers, as they're pre-published.

Uh, and a Wii Fit update: I've lost 6±1 pounds since I started my maniacal jogging a couple months ago. Not a whole lot, but it's the first time in my life my weight has gone down instead of up, and I haven't really made any other lifestyle changes.

Planespotting geeks have been instrumental in breaking the CIA secret prisons story. This doesn't endear them to the military:

A few months later, Ray learned through "back channels" that his post about the Base Camp planes had caused heads to roll somewhere in the shadowy world of military "black ops." Apparently, someone, somewhere, had lost a job because of Ray's photos. At a desert bar, one of his friends -- a man with an unspecified connection to Base Camp -- warned him over beers to "stop messing with those Base Camp guys or you'll wind up dead in the desert with two bullets in the back of your head."

"Wouldn't one bullet be enough?" asked Ray.

Leonard suggests that even the Lone Gunmen would not have said anything so nerdy. I find in Ray's response a kinship to the old joke about the lawyer, the doctor, and the engineer about to be guillotined. The blade doesn't drop on the first two, so they're freed. Then the engineer lies down and says, "Well, there's your problem...."

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.

We shared two great appetizers; southwestern bean cakes and a "spring sampler" with walnut bread, bleu goat cheese, walnuts, and dates. I had a great polenta-in-soupy-stuff entree, and Sumana had shish kebobs which she didn't like as much. I ordered a chocolate mousse torte for dessert, which I haven't eaten yet. (I couldn't eat it yesterday due to my new "jam every other day" diet.)

Total cost of meal was $60, which I think is pretty good for an upscale dinner in San Francisco. That $60 does not include the enormously expensive cookbook I bought. I'm going to end up one of those people with a bookcase full of cookbooks. A cookbookcase.

"I had that 'hip deer in the headlights' look."

"Yeah, I know that one. 'Oh, I'm too cool to--[whump] Aaah! My trucker hat!'"

Then I realized: these were the real tortillas. Tortillas are now the designated low[er]-carb alternative to bread. It's only a matter of time until someone sees Dr. Atkins' face scorched into a tortilla.

PS: Confidential to everyone. Who do you and I both know who looks exactly like Florian Lukas?

PS Update: Jarno, was it the guy from Denmark we met at EuroPython whose name I don't remember?

Sumana loves this, as you might expect. Almost as good is the fact that the automatic ad at the bottom of the page tells you to make out your will. Because next week, Law and Order is all new, ripped from the headlines--and YOU'RE the body!

Why do peacocks have the run of every zoo I've ever been to? Are they good filler birds?

• Valley girl voice (absolutely prohibited)
• Voice of the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons (only allowed when making fun of something a la the pothead techie joke)

I can also do a Steve Ballmer and a Bill Gates, but it honestly doesn't sound like them anymore. It's more fun to do charicatures of their voices that only denote them if you're in on the joke.

What voices can you imitate well?

What is there to do in Little Rock? Sumana and I were there last weekend and there was not much besides a farmer's market and a Red Bull promotional event. This makes me feel as though the people in charge of my Truman Show-style simulated life were caught unprepared by my sudden excursion, and that when I come back it will be bustling.

I've complained in the past about the practice of including famous people in works of fiction (Sumana analyzed this as a projected Mary Sue impulse in reality fan fiction), but it turns out that, like all mankind, I am flawed. I think it is really cool that Samuel Pepys has a non-trivial part in Quicksilver. I thought I had a principled objection to this practice, but it was merely that no author had yet met my price. My price is apparently measured in some form of indie-cred economy units, since really famous people like Newton aggravate me when they show up, but I throw the door wide for less famous people like Pepys. Let's try some thought experiments. Robert E. Lee: blah. Hyman Rickover: sure, I'd read that. Einstein: waaay overdone. PGP author Phil Zimmerman: cool! Lewis Carroll: only if the story did not involve fairies.

Sumana: Is this a semantic web thing?
Leonard: Nooo...
Sumana: You know I can tell when you do something with the semantic web.
Leonard: Yes, dear.

• The happy couple
• Secret Agent Rachel (possibly the best picture I've ever taken).
• A scene from the "Popeye the Sailor Man" debacle, where instead of writing a song like we usually do, KAL made up style parodies of every band in the world doing Popeye's theme. My favorite was the Dave Matthews Band version where I plunked away on the guitar while Kris rambled "Up, down, and all around, I'm Popeye, the sailor man..." Also: all through college, Kris and I aspired to be as cool as Adam. I think this picture demonstrates that Kris has caught up, while I'm left in the dust.
• My doomed attempt at a photo op to create a surge of populism for my gubernatorial campaign. How was I supposed to know most people don't wear tuxedos all the time?
• Great picture of Sumana. Sumana saw the filename and said "Are you trying to sell these?" She prefers this picture.
• The cake photos weren't going as well as Susanna had hoped, so she took matters into her own hands.
• Jon's mother and Susanna's mother (aka my mother)
• Susanna and Rachel hug.

Very few people came to Sumana's birthday party yesterday, which is fine because it was not really her birthday party. Let me switch gears here and talk about poker.

The best part of poker is that when you are the dealer, you have the opportunity to make up some bizarre variant of poker. One variant I came up with that I liked a lot, but which needs some refinement, is one in which instead of drawing cards you designate a rank of card to be wild. I have not playtested this, but I would like to try some combination of poker and blackjack in which you can combine two or more cards to get one virtual card of higher rank. I am sort of tempted to search for a big database of poker variants, but most of the fun is in coming up with the variants (and stupid names for them) during play, so I will abstain.

What goes into a stir-fry? Two things: cooked rice and stir-fried vegetables. Cooking rice is easy enough if you have a rice cooker: just put x amount of rice and 2x+y amount of water in the rice cooker, and push the "cook" button. Because I have an obsession with putting more stuff in than is neccessary (qv. still-unwritten entry), I also added some salt and chopped parsley.

That's easy enough. Now, the stir-fried vegetables. When other people make stir-fry they put in disgusting vegetables like water chestnuts, those loathsome pickpockets of the briny deep. Ships pick them up in ballast water off the coast of Hong Kong and they come as stowaways to the bustling port cities of the world, where they infiltrate bags of frozen stir-fry vegetables and lie in wait, seeking to trap unwary eaters with their fingernails-on-chalkboard texture. Because of this, and because I am cranky, there could be no bagged stir-fry vegetables for this stir-fry. I would do it with fresh vegetables.

I could not find any baby corn (possibly my favorite vegetable of all time, and a great addition to stir-fry) at the store, so I did without. I got a bag of baby carrots, a head of broccoli, and some Chinese snap peas. I also got an onion and some ginger (the ginger cost only eight cents! Such a deal!).

I grated the ginger and chopped up the onion, carrots and broccoli. Then I prepared the stir-fry sauce, not to be confused with fry sauce, which consisted of... olive oil. Wait! I'll get to the other stuff later. I dropped in the onion and the ginger, let that saute a bit, then put in the carrots. Carrots contain carrotene, a fibrous substance that makes the vegetable take forever to cook. This is why I chopped up the carrots very finely and put them in first. After a few minutes I put in the broccoli. You must constantly be swishing the food around the wok or skillet, or instead of "stir fry" you will have "leave alone fry".

Then it was time to add my flavorings. I keep a variety of liquids on hand for just such an occasion. Today I used rice vinegar, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Just dump it in and let it form a puddle for the vegetables to pass through as you stir.

This went on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, until I tasted a carrot and it was acceptably tender. At the last minute I added the snap peas. The high surface area of snap peas means they cook very quickly. Also, I am just making all this stuff up. I dressed with some sesame seeds (courtesy of Sumana) and voila: great stir-fry!

My only mistakes: the rice was a tiny bit undercooked because I was starving and unwilling to wait for it to finish cooking. I should have put in the ginger at the very end so the taste would be more noticeable. Also, despite hours of drudgery in my youth, I forgot that pea pods have to be peeled before they're cooked or you'll be stuck peeling them afterwards. This does, however, have the cool side effect that while cooking the pea pods fill with hot air and expand like Girl Genius-esque dirigible balloons.

[0] I actually asked Sumana for advice, but her advice confirmed what I thought was right, so technically I still did it from first principles.

This is not mentioned in the article (I saw it in the New York Times), but there is also a cool-looking documentary show on Japanese television called "Project X", which has episode titles like "Battle For The Soul Of HONDA" and which talks about the engineers and managers who brought prosperity to postwar Japan and who now, presumably, sit around in karaoke bars watching "Project X". It looks like you could see Project X with English subtitles if you live in LA. It took me a while to find those links, because there are 2.1 jillion things in the universe called "Project X" and restricting the search to Japan doesn't help much.

Speaking of which, keep those fanboy Star Trek rebuttals coming so I can keep justifying the delay in posting them.

Also speaking of which, if you're a cheapskate you can get your Salon Premium subscription for only $23 instead of $35. You see, when you subscribe you can sign up for a free subscription to Wired. Wired then gives you a chance to revoke your subscription and get a $12 refund. You could probably also do this with the other magazine subscriptions as well, which would mean your Salon viewing was completely subsidized by other companies... wait, that's what most people already have.

Sumana: Can I come in? I promise not to talk about The Great Gatsby anymore.
Leonard: Okay.
...
...
Sumana: You know how sometimes you promise not to do X, and then all you can think about is X?

Then I started thinking about all those stupid chess sets where the pieces look like Simpsons characters or Civil War soldiers or Wizard Of Oz commemorative plates and it doesn't make any sense. I thought, "I want in on this not-making-sense action!". So I decided to bring the game of chess into the modern world by changing the pieces to depict a political battle between two parties in a constitutional monarchy.

The chessboard is a country with a thirty-member parliament. There are two parties, the Social Democrats (white) and the Democratic Socialists (black).

The purpose of the game is to get the king to put his support behind your platform. Each side has a piece representing one of the positions the king could take, and you must corner your opponent's representation so that the king has no choice but to accept your side's position.

Each player controls eight non-cabinet members of parliament (the Pawns) and a seven-member cabinet or shadow cabinet (depending on whether or not they are the party in power).

The King, as previously discussed, is the king (more precisely, your party's wish as to the political position the king would take). The Queen is the prime minister or shadow prime minister. The cabinet positions are:

• Minister for Finance (prime minister's side Rook)
• Minister for Defence (prime minister's side Knight)
• Minister for Foreign Affairs (prime minister's side Bishop)
• Minister for Internal Affairs (king's side Bishop)
• Minister for Agriculture (king's side Knight)
• Minister for Education (king's side Rook)

If you have more pieces on the board than your opponent, your party is in power and your ministers are actual ministers; otherwise you are in opposition and your ministers are shadow ministers. In the event of a tie, as in the beginning of the game, the Social Democrats are in power. This is because the king breaks ties and he is a Social Democrat. Unfortunately, none of this has any direct effect on the game.

Let's consider an example to see how Constitutional Monarchy Chess livens up the dull chess notation. "Qg7" would instead be "PMg7" or "SPMg7". The unspeakably boring "Bxe5" might become "SMfFAxe5". Now that's excitement!

I also forsee doing a brisk business in my specialized Constitutional Monarchy Chess pieces, which depict people in black and gray suits and dresses who can only be told apart by the ministerial logos on their briefcases.

The Canadian government wanted to create a province for the indigenous peoples of Canada, but they would have Nunavut.

They went their separate ways, but the laws of statistics entwined their fates as tightly as if they knew each other. They formed an equation in one hundred variables, a cross-section of humanity sent on a rocket ship into the future, each filling a niche as surely as does the cold woman scientist who'd be beautiful if she only removed her zero-gee glasses. To look under the covers of causality and say, this hundred people, this one of the hundred people--this is the power that we want, forever out of our reach. For this reason I cannot tell you their names, or give you faces to put with the names; the group made sense only as a group.

As spring became summer their numbers began to dwindle. The 25-year-olds celebrated birthdays and moved into other groups of a hundred, a thousand. By autumn the group was no longer statistically viable, and its members' behavior became erratic and unpredictable. And when March (or perhaps April) came around again, the group contained only a single unmodellable member, his behavior and circumstances defining the norm for the set containing only himself.

It's not very good, but believe me, it's better than the story in the brochure.

I didn't want to struggle anymore! lp scg

And one for the "tepid irony" department, "choked on a tin of spinach" subdepartment:

I chose life instead of fat nhiwaxzgxpk lyhotz

Those were from Sumana. Kevan sends in "Speech Therapy Spam"

Do You Say: "I Wish I Knew How To Be A Seller On E B A Y" qybaygdswxhc m

Anyway, rather than making the warnings so big that no one can tell what brand of cigarette they're buying, I think anti-spam filter mechanisms could be employed to make more people read the warnings: SPAMMER GENERAL'S WARNING: leonardr, Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks To Your Health onkaecpjrmzddw

Q: What has four legs and is a dog?
A: A dog.

1. Kick-spinning tripod of death
2. Technology enabling "Post-Feudal Ninja Industrialists" to be the first movie filmed in NINJA-VISION!
3. Neighbor to the Temple Mount

Update: Sumana's suggestions, in helpful outline form:

1. You know that it has been through a factory at some point, and that it is not plain tap.
   1. prestige
   2. safety, quality of water (my hypothesis on why Russians want their bottled water carbonated)
2. Costs more (prestige).
3. Flavors. Like an Italian soda without the calories.
4. More "festive" so teetotalers can fit in at a party.

Update #2: A. Cairns writes on the topic "Why I drink sparkling water":

It's like drinking deadly, alkaline poison -- without all the messy dying!

It calms my fears of mortality.

The candidates will need to be CORGI registered...

• I Was A Teenage Hyphen
• Semicolon Without A Cause
• Forbidden Comma

Update: Sumana says, "Semicolon Without A Clause!". Wah wah.

I say "Madness" because the movie-watching is not yet over. Tonight Sumana and I will be watching The Seven Samurai.

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.