AMK's Journal

Gaming meetup: Bohnanza, Ninjaburger, Niagara

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:45:38 -0500

Today Barb and I went to our first gaming session with the Arlington/Alexandria Regional Gaming Group. Two of my co-workers are organizers, and this month's meeting was held in Matrix Group's offices. Barb and I played three different games:

Bohnanza is a card-trading game. You go through your hand in order, and have to plant rows of different kind of beans: red, green, blue, chili, coffee, cocoa, wax, etc. Once your row gets to a certain length, you can rip it up and earn a number of gold pieces. There are enough different kinds of beans that you can't win without trading with the other players.

Ninjaburger is something like a highly simplified role-playing game. The players are ninjas who carry out deliveries for a burger place. Initially you select a ninja character from a deck; the different characters have varying skills for combat, climbing, disguise, and so forth. Every round, the players draw a mission card that specifies the skill rolls you need to make, and can also draw fortune cards that can improve your skills or be played on other players to give them unfavorable modifiers. My favorite of the three games we played, though I think a full game would take a long time; each player's turn is fairly slow because there are several rolls to make and lots of options to consider.

Niagara is reminiscent of the waterfall-themed game Barb and I played on our cruise. Play is on a set of plastic discs arranged into a river. Players move their canoes up and down the river to collect crystals, and at the end of each round the river disc are moved downstream; don't get carried over the waterfall!

Quote of the day: Stan Guffey

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:50:26 -0500

"I am party to a scam," Guffey says. "The introduction begins with a nice, sweet little biography, then degenerates into intellectually lame, lazy distortions, selective reading of the literature, picking and choosing of facts, and misreadings of the historical record." He says Comfort "gently moves folks into the notion that they don’t want to read what comes after the introduction. He just wants his 50 pages read, 47 of which are anti-intellectual, dishonest drivel, the first three of which are pretty good because I wrote them."
-- Stan Guffey, quoted in "UT Professor Considers Legal Action Over Use Of Charles Darwin Bio" in the Knoxville Metro Pulse. Creationist Ray Comfort plagiarized a short biography of Darwin written by Guffy. (Referenced by Steve Mirsky in Scientific American.

Another good quotation from the same article:

"I would like to engage him in intellectual combat, but it wouldn’t be fair," Guffey says. "If he were to play by the rules of reason and logic, I would whoop his ass, but he’s not constrained by those rules, so it wouldn’t be fair to me."

Favorite books in 2009

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:25:38 -0500

Either my criteria for a recommended book are getting much easier to meet, or I had a really good year in reading. (Looking at the list below, I think my standards are getting easier.) 90 books total; here are my favorites:

Fiction

Declare, Tim Powers: an engrossing thriller that weaves the Cold War with a supernatural battle to control djinns and other entities.
The Bottoms, Joe R. Lansdale: A mystery with horror elements, narrated by a 10-year-old and set in 1934 Texas; when the body of a young black woman is found, was she murdered by the legendary Goat Man who haunts a local bridge?
The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross: Takes the technothriller genre and marries it with the Lovecraftian universe of alternate dimensions and alien menaces.
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, Michael Chabon: A lonely German refugee boy has his parrot stolen, attracting the interest of a retired detective whose solitary life now largely consists of keeping bees. Chabon's Holmes is in his 80s and has become a stately ruin, fitting into this poignant short novel.
Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years: The Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet, Jamyang Norbu: a respectful pastiche fleshing out Holmes's adventures in Tibet.
The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels From the Time of Sherlock Holmes: A great collection of detective fiction about criminals and rogues, written from the 1890s to the 1920s.
Tom's Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce: wistful and affectionate YA novel, in which the lonely Tom discovers that when the clock strikes thirteen, the back door leads to a beautiful garden that isn't there during the day.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks: Inspired by Studs Terkel's oral histories, a novel written as a series of interviews taken long after a plague of virus-created zombies.

Non-fiction

Degunking Your Home, Jodi Ballew: A guide to eliminating clutter from your home, with lots of suggestions, tips, and little padding.
The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong, Matthew Stewart: A skeptical look at the history of 20th-century business management theories.
Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, John Adams: the US's most respected living composer survey his life and career.
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries, Neil deGrasse Tyson: a collection of essays on astronomy and physics.
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell: tackles deep questions of US history with a light touch through exploring the Pilgrims.
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, Nick Reding: examines Oelwein, Iowa's struggles with methamphetamine and the resulting social stresses.
Columbine, Dave Cullen: a comprehensive book that assesses the killings and aims to dispel commonly held myths about them.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale: a page-turning historical mystery that's also an examination of the Victorian fascination with detectives.
Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan, Alex Kerr: argues that Japan is a society in decline, belying Western notions of it as a high-tech powerhouse.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, Daniel Stashower: combines a biography of Poe with an account of the Mary Rogers case; Poe turned the case into a story to present his own solution.
Going Broke: Why Americans Can't Hold on to Their Money, Stuart Vyse: Examines the steady increase in debt and decrease in savings by American households since the 1970s, and tries to diagnose the causes.

2010 resolutions

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:12:33 -0500

I've been considering what my goals for 2010 should be. Mostly they're focusing on improving the quality of our lives.

Leave work between 4 and 4:30. The extra hour or half hour per day doesn't make a lot of difference to my work productivity, because at the end of the day I'm not starting new tasks or doing anything significant; it's usually some minor thing. But whether I get home at 5:30 or at 6:30 makes a big difference to me; earlier means that I can cook supper, and have more time at home. It's not much time, but it makes a lot of difference to my mood.

Work from home two days a week. It would save a commute and give me some extra time during that week. Once per week would be better, but that may not be possible; still, it's worth trying for the less ambitious goal.

Focus more. I seem to spend a lot of time on distractions: aimless web browsing, TV, etc., time that I should be spending on more interesting and worthwhile projects. We're in the middle of renovating the basement to give me a cozy office to keep my books and stereo; I hope sitting in an office will be better for concentrating than sprawling across the living room.

Reduce my backlog of unread books. Unfortunately, this will probably entail reducing the number of books I read from the library, because it's very easy for me to walk in and leave with five or six books that will take two weeks to read, but I have stacks and stacks of books waiting at home. Many of these books will be read and then given away, making more space on my shelves. This goal will be easy, as long as I can resist the library's temptation.

Reboot the cello. There are actually several things I could work on reviving -- the cello, actual free software development, my still-decaying French skills -- but I always found the cello relaxing, which would be a nice outlet to have. It would be nice to do more work on projects such as Python, but I'll have to wait and see if the "focus more" goal is met.

Not on the list: Learning a new programming language. This was a 2009 goal (and probably a 2008 one too), but the end result was that I got about 5 chapters into O'Reilly's OCaML book. All of our software problems at work aren't fixable by whizzy new languages or technology; the problem is evolving our legacy code to be better without breaking old customizations or features, and a complete rewrite is not going to help.

Quote of the day: LWN commenter 'ncm'

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:39:45 -0500

A wanklage is most typically a language for which there is more enthusiasm in discussions of how it may be implemented than in what new programs and libraries can be written in it. (Well-known wanklages include Lisp and Haskell.) Enthusiasts of wanklages are frequently more interested in how cool various features are than in how useful they may be in writing real programs. Currying is one such feature. Another mark of a wanklage is long discussions of how to overcome its built-in impediments to solving simple problems. Use "wanklage" in a sentence today.
-- commenter 'ncm' on Linux Weekly News

Touring the U. of Minnesota's Sherlock Holmes collection

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:55:24 -0500

My lovely in-laws arranged a special treat for me on this visit. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran "Sherlock Holmes movie reinvigorates world's largest Holmes collection in Minnesota", triggered by the release of the new movie. The collection is at the University of Minnesota here in Minneapolis, so my father-in-law called Tim Johnson, curator of the collection, to arrange a visit.

I was doubtful when I first heard about this idea, worried that Johnson might be annoyed at the request, but he turned out to be really friendly and enthusiastic about showing us around, even coming into work despite being on vacation for this week. He took us down into the basement archive room that holds the collection.

Things we saw in the archive:

A bound copy of the 1887 Beeton's Annual, containing A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story published.
A manuscript page, in Conan Doyle's hand, from The Hound of the Baskervilles. He had astonishingly neat and pretty handwriting.
A few volumes of the stories, reputedly owned by the Czarina Alexandra.
A collection of photos of actors from various Sherlockian productions, including Leonard Nimoy as Holmes in a 1970s stage production (I was surprised to learn it was with the Royal Shakespeare Company).
Odd ephemera and trinkets: a set of Russian nesting dolls (from outermost to innermost: Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, Moriarty, and a friendly-looking Hound); an empty ice-cream container featuring a deerstalker-wearing cow; walking sticks; nursery wallpaper. There was an aisle of boxes holding such objects, including marionettes, 2 hand guns, and seemingly endless statues and figurines.

We then strolled through a maze of corridors to another building, where a library conference room contains a re-creation of the sitting room in 221B, assembled from period antiques by a collector. Like this sitting room, many of the holdings have come from the estates of various people with an interest in Sherlock Holmes who donated or willed their collections to the university. It was a wonderful morning for me, and it was a privilege to see even a tiny portion of it.

Concert: NSO Holiday Pops

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:13:23 -0500

It's becoming a tradition with us; we'll probably get a Pops subscription next year. Along with the usual medley of Christmas songs, the show also featured (YouTube links provided so you can watch/listen):

An excellent vocal jazz ensemble from Howard University called Afro Blue.
Nine-year-old flutist Emma Resmini; you can watch some of her recitals on YouTube.
Young ballroom dancers Alexandra Gutkovich and John Gaylan (the linked-to video is possibly the same mambo they danced this evening).
English tenor Jonathan Ansell, who was a winner on a UK reality show called The X-Factor.

Quote of the day: Daniel Radosh

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:11:58 -0500

According to the Barna Group, an evangelical polling firm, forty-seven per cent of Americans read the Bible every week. But other research has found that ninety-one per cent of American households own at least one Bible -- the average household owns four -- which means that Bible publishers manage to sell twenty-five million copies a year of a book that almost everybody already has.
-- Daniel Radosh, in "The Good Book Business", The New Yorker, Dec. 18 2006.

Finally, an explanation of Climategate

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 23:53:03 -0500

The news media and blogosphere has been consumed by e-mails stolen from a server at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. All sorts of things are said in private e-mails that would be embarrassing if widely published. The sentence that everyone is quoting is:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

It certainly looks very bad. I've been disappointed by the scientific response to this; their explanations and denials have not been very clear or easy to summarize, and it was only today that I came across a good explanation of what this sentence was talking about.

The use of the word "trick" is pretty easy to explain; lots of people use "trick" to mean "technique". Searching the web will find lots of examples, like this one:

There's also a little trick you can do with map. map(None, l, m, ... z) will return a list of tuples [(l[0], m[0], ... z[0]), (l[1], m[1]... z[1]), ...

"Hide the decline" is more worrying, since it smacks of covering something up. The whole thrust of climate change is that temperatures are increasing, so hiding a decline is suspicious. The e-mails were leaked two weeks ago, so I'm disappointed to have seen a good explanation of this aspect of Climategate only today, written by Dr Jeff Masters at his Weather Underground weblog:

Another area of concern is over a graph Dr. Jones helped construct in 1999 showing the "hockey stick" of Earth's surface temperature going back 1,000 years. This graph combined instrumental measurements made since the 1800s with older paleoclimate data (including data from tree rings) to show a continuous 1,000 year record of Earth's temperatures. The paleoclimate data after 1960 show a bogus decline in Earth's temperatures that does not agree with what modern thermometers have been measuring, due to a well-known variation in tree ring thickness as a function of time, referred to as "the decline". Thus, Jones elected to toss out the bogus paleoclimate data (using a "trick" to "hide the decline") rather than present it in the graph.

Dr Masters's entry also has a graph showing the reconstructed historical temperature graph, the instrumental graph of temperature, and the diverging line of the tree ring results. The initial discussion at realclimate.org also mentioned it, but the reference is very short, very dry, and just refers to the original papers. It would have been better for the original author to have written "to discard the recent erroneous data", but who among us is so careful in a private e-mail to co-workers?

I am curious about the hack. Was it carried out by some random hacker who was just poking around U. of East Anglia's servers? Or was it a targeted attack? Was it funded by someone? It would be very interesting to know, though it'll probably be impossible to track down who the intruder was.

Update: in a story in the National Post, a U. of Victoria researcher claims they've had hacking attempts, two physical break-ins and one computer stolen. This might not be anything special -- hacking attempts could just be the usual random script kiddy scans, and computers occasionally disappear in universities -- but it's more circumstantial evidence, and makes me more interested in seeing an investigation.

Renovations, day 3

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:13:20 -0500

Sealant today. I used a paintbrush to apply the sealant around the edge of the floor, and then Barb filled in the center using a roller. Today we covered about 75% of the floor; the remaining 25% is occupied by the furniture, including my overstuffed bookcases. Once the floor has dried, we'll shuffle around the furniture onto the floor we've already done and finish up the rest.

Once the floor is completely done, that will end the stuff we can do ourselves. Time to start looking for a contractor!

Concert: They Might Be Giants

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:08:37 -0500

This evening I went to see They Might Be Giants at the 9:30 Club. They performed 5-6 songs from their new album "Here Comes Science", and a selection of their other songs.

Here's a long review with lots of good photos; the review says pretty much everything I would have written.

Renovations, day 2

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:26:08 -0500

A short day today. The concrete floor dried nicely, so we set to work filling in the holes in the concrete created when we ripped out nails from the moldings. The filler material comes in a squeeze bottle, but it's really hard to get the material out after a while. Despite that, we got all of them done in only a few hours. Then we have to let the filler dry before applying sealant to the entire floor tomorrow.

Basement renovation, day 1

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:31:45 -0500

Over the long weekend for US Thanksgiving, we're doing some work in the basement of our house, which has gotten run-down while we've been in the house. The plan is to remove the carpeting, seal the underlying concrete, replace some drywall, and then hire a contractor to add some walls to what is currently one large space. The resulting new enclosed room would be used for storage. Today Barb suggested adding another wall that would create a new family room; it's a good idea that we'll certainly consider further.

Steps we took today:

Tore out most of the worn-out carpet.
Realized that we'll be ripping out lots of rusty nails, and neither of us could remember the date of our last tetanus shot. When we went out for lunch, we also stopped by the drugstore to get tetanus boosters.
Tore out a nailed-down molding that was beneath the carpet.
Removed the molding around the baseboard of roughly half the basement's perimeter.
Swept, vacuumed, mopped.

Next steps will be to fill in a zillion holes left from the nails from the molding, and then apply a sealant to the concrete floor.

Enso Quartet at the National Gallery

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:56:09 -0500

I haven't been to a concert in a while, but there are a number of them on my calendar for November and December. Today's concert was part of a small festival of American music at the National Gallery. I heard about the concert from the listing of events on Steve Reich's website, because his composition "Different Trains" was on the program.

Four pieces were played:

Pierre Jalbert's "Icefield Sonnets", inspired by a set of poems by Anthony Hawley, is a beautifully lean and cold set of three pieces. (I found an online excerpt from one of the poems, "Cold is a Cell".)
Paul Moravec's "Vince and Jan: 1945" was inspired by a photo of the composer's parents taken during WW2. It's a sweet piece, alternately nervous and sentimental, at times reminiscent of 1940s-era movie music.
John Corigliano's "Snapshot circa 1909" was also inspired by a photo, this time of the composer's father playing a violin as a boy, accompanied by an uncle on a guitar. The arrangement is interesting; the second violin plays a melody while the other three players strum chords. Then, after a while the first violin picks up another melody, and the two violins play together briefly before the strumming resumes.
Finally, Steve Reich's "Different Trains". I've heard the recording lots of times but never seen it live, and the live performance greatly clarified the structure of the piece. There's a backing track of voice recordings, train whistles and sirens, and repetitive a string quartet. In the first and second movements, the cello and viola take turns doubling the recorded voices on the backing track while the violins slashingly underline the train whistles or pick up the pulsing string backdrop. In the third movement all the instruments begin to double the voices at times. The backing track was played quite loudly at this performance, which gave the whole piece an appropriately overwhelming and oppressive feel.

A first-rate performance. I liked all the pieces, but my two definite favorites were the Jalbert (not available on a recording yet, apparently) and of course "Different Trains".

Losing our tree

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:12:29 -0500

The homeowner's association sent us a note requesting we trim the cedar tree in front of our house. We consulted some landscapers, and their consensus was that the tree was slowly dying, so it seemed best to just remove it.

Before:

After:

It's a pity the tree had to go, because it shaded the house and screened our bedroom window very nicely. If we're still living in the house next year, we'll probably get a replacement tree.