One of the things I most dislike about the GPA system is the incentives that it creates, because it doesn't measure the real variables that we want to measure, which are latent (some statisticians call this phenomenon "mismeasurement").
Right now I'm hesitating to take a excellent class that is very interesting (and ReallyHard, because I'm missing a semester-long prerequisite), because I can tell that getting a good grade would take away too much away from my research and/or mental health. And the consequences of a single bad grade could be fatal for my academic ambitions... would anybody read an explanation for bad grades without muttering to themselves "excuses, excuses!"?
Once I'm enrolled in a PhD, this hopefully won't matter so much anymore. Fingers crossed.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
Right now I'm hesitating to take a excellent class that is very interesting (and ReallyHard, because I'm missing a semester-long prerequisite), because I can tell that getting a good grade would take away too much away from my research and/or mental health. And the consequences of a single bad grade could be fatal for my academic ambitions... would anybody read an explanation for bad grades without muttering to themselves "excuses, excuses!"?
Once I'm enrolled in a PhD, this hopefully won't matter so much anymore. Fingers crossed.
Winter is generally a miserable part of the year - the sun doesn't exist, the cold is painful to joints (I'm not even old yet!), the air is very dry and heaters make it worse, it's even lonlier, and I live in a very drafty apartment (where ill-fitting doors and misdesigned windows require me to plug them with small and large objects to lessen warm-stealing leaks). Yesterday was my first faceplant due to slippery sidewalks, and today our campus building lacks drinking water due to a leak. That said, there are a few upsides.
( Read more... )
I would happily trade winter for more of the other seasons, but it's not all bad
< ntan1> the dollar to yen exchange rate almost got to 95 (from 91 a day ago) because the japanese finance minister said he wanted the yen to weaken
< ntan1> but he backtracked on his remarks :(
< joshua_> ntan1, maybe further in the search he hit a failure
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
< ntan1> but he backtracked on his remarks :(
< joshua_> ntan1, maybe further in the search he hit a failure
Attempted the Dutch Baby test. Short version: I'm calling it a success.
I took a look at these recipes and compared it to the many-serving version I am used to making. Theirs is proportionally way more eggy; 6:1 eggs-to-cups-of-milk-or-flour, rather than 10:3. I compromised by going 4:1 and mixed 2 eggs, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup milk. Melted a few tablespoons of butter in the skillet on the stove, then poured in the batter and cooked at 400 for about 10 minutes.
Finer analysis.
Pro: Basically tasted right, didn't stick to pan at all.
Con: Didn't puff up as much in the middle, maybe due to lack of baking powder. Flavor just slightly plain, maybe due to lack of salt (?), and/or lack of separate addition of tbs of butter in the mix rather than in the pan. In fact, probably didn't need quite so much butter in the pan. Edges not as browned as they could have been, but I could have let it cook longer.
Also I have no idea what the whatscookingamerica.net people are talking about with their "2-4 servings" at this scale. I would have still eaten the whole thing myself if there was another egg in there.
I took a look at these recipes and compared it to the many-serving version I am used to making. Theirs is proportionally way more eggy; 6:1 eggs-to-cups-of-milk-or-flour, rather than 10:3. I compromised by going 4:1 and mixed 2 eggs, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup milk. Melted a few tablespoons of butter in the skillet on the stove, then poured in the batter and cooked at 400 for about 10 minutes.
Finer analysis.
Pro: Basically tasted right, didn't stick to pan at all.
Con: Didn't puff up as much in the middle, maybe due to lack of baking powder. Flavor just slightly plain, maybe due to lack of salt (?), and/or lack of separate addition of tbs of butter in the mix rather than in the pan. In fact, probably didn't need quite so much butter in the pan. Edges not as browned as they could have been, but I could have let it cook longer.
Also I have no idea what the whatscookingamerica.net people are talking about with their "2-4 servings" at this scale. I would have still eaten the whole thing myself if there was another egg in there.
Try this. Go to the American version of Google Maps, and don't pan anywhere, just zoom in. Keep zooming. At about zoom level 5 (by which I mean there are four dots of zoom left), we see that McAuslan Brewing, which we all know is in Montreal, has moved to rural southeastern Kansas.
Zoom in again and we find that the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum of Crosbyton, Texas (motto: "Digging up the facts of God's Creation: One fossil at a time") has opened a satellite branch at the same spot! I guess the school board fight rages on.
Zoom in again, and we learn that the entirety of the Nigerien village of Tezirzaït has pulled up stakes and homesteaded next to the fundamentalists and the craft brewers. I know who I'd hang out with if I were a Tezirzaïtian...
I'd be curious to learn if your browser also reveals these amazing facts.
Zoom in again and we find that the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum of Crosbyton, Texas (motto: "Digging up the facts of God's Creation: One fossil at a time") has opened a satellite branch at the same spot! I guess the school board fight rages on.
Zoom in again, and we learn that the entirety of the Nigerien village of Tezirzaït has pulled up stakes and homesteaded next to the fundamentalists and the craft brewers. I know who I'd hang out with if I were a Tezirzaïtian...
I'd be curious to learn if your browser also reveals these amazing facts.
Over the break I read the first 5 chapters of Alberts et al, which I felt gave me a good grasp of biochemistry... but didn't really improve my understanding of genetics much. However, today, going to 3 classes, a lecture and a conversation, I have learned a lot.
A long long time ago (like 2008), I used to think that a gene was a letter in the {A,C,T,G} alphabet. But the scientific name for them is nucleotides (or bases).
A long time ago (like, yesterday), I used to think of genes as sequences of bases (or alternatively, of codons), demarcated by a start and a stop codon, sort of like quotation marks (I thought it would be trivial to have genes highlighted with the appropriate emacs mode).
This morning I learned about reading frames (set by the start codon), and mused that life might be funnier if the start and stop codons were inverse complements of each other, for this would mean that for every gene, there would be another gene that is its inverse complement and, if symmetry weren't broken, the same would happen to proteins too.
I can now see 2 ways in which this was wrong:
(a)
This afternoon, I learned that to be a gene you need to function as one, i.e. be eventually expressed into (one or more) proteins. I learned that you can fail to be a gene at many levels on the expression chain (e.g. the aminoacids won't fold into a stable configuration, mRNA won't get produced, etc), and these failures aren't always fully understood. This is why genes need to be annotated, and even then gene prediction isn't a solved problem (?).
Each level of failure corresponds to a notion of pseudogene. (Wikipedia says they are ex-genes, but wouldn't an accidental mutation into start and stop codons count as pseudogene too? How much function do you need to qualify as a pseudogene?)
(b)
Although both strands of DNA have a direction (from the 5' to the 3'), the 180-degree rotation isn't really a symmetry (even if the bases are). See: sense strand vs antisense strand. It's unclear what the physical basis of this is, and whether a given strand is sense or antisense is context-dependent rather than a constant for any given cell/organism/species.
I also learned that introns are more common the more complex the organism, enabling a larger splice-to-gene ratio (each splice produces a different mRNA). In humans, the average gene has 6 ways of splicing, with a huge amount of variation). Prokaryote genomes have no introns (?).
Misconception: I naively thought that stop codons signaled the beginning of introns, since they both signal the beginning of non-coding regions. I was immediately corrected.
A long long time ago (like 2008), I used to think that a gene was a letter in the {A,C,T,G} alphabet. But the scientific name for them is nucleotides (or bases).
A long time ago (like, yesterday), I used to think of genes as sequences of bases (or alternatively, of codons), demarcated by a start and a stop codon, sort of like quotation marks (I thought it would be trivial to have genes highlighted with the appropriate emacs mode).
This morning I learned about reading frames (set by the start codon), and mused that life might be funnier if the start and stop codons were inverse complements of each other, for this would mean that for every gene, there would be another gene that is its inverse complement and, if symmetry weren't broken, the same would happen to proteins too.
I can now see 2 ways in which this was wrong:
(a)
This afternoon, I learned that to be a gene you need to function as one, i.e. be eventually expressed into (one or more) proteins. I learned that you can fail to be a gene at many levels on the expression chain (e.g. the aminoacids won't fold into a stable configuration, mRNA won't get produced, etc), and these failures aren't always fully understood. This is why genes need to be annotated, and even then gene prediction isn't a solved problem (?).
Each level of failure corresponds to a notion of pseudogene. (Wikipedia says they are ex-genes, but wouldn't an accidental mutation into start and stop codons count as pseudogene too? How much function do you need to qualify as a pseudogene?)
(b)
Although both strands of DNA have a direction (from the 5' to the 3'), the 180-degree rotation isn't really a symmetry (even if the bases are). See: sense strand vs antisense strand. It's unclear what the physical basis of this is, and whether a given strand is sense or antisense is context-dependent rather than a constant for any given cell/organism/species.
I also learned that introns are more common the more complex the organism, enabling a larger splice-to-gene ratio (each splice produces a different mRNA). In humans, the average gene has 6 ways of splicing, with a huge amount of variation). Prokaryote genomes have no introns (?).
Misconception: I naively thought that stop codons signaled the beginning of introns, since they both signal the beginning of non-coding regions. I was immediately corrected.
People are different than cats. ( Read more... )
So, specifically trying to counteract my lifelong tendency towards grumpiness about cooking, I pulled what may have been a very bone-headed move and purchased a ~10" cast-iron skillet. Now of course I know very little about cooking, and I know it's a risk in any endeavour to think you are going to succeed just because you bought the right equipment, but it seemed from basic internet research like a very appealing sort of one-size-fits-many tool, rather inexpensive ($20) for being so, which favors (through the "seasoning" process) cooking with a lot of oils and fats, which though I am not necessarily expert in executing, aligns well at least with the sort of foods I like eating. Also I get kind of a perverse luddite thrill from it being so heavy, clunky, and dangerous, inasmuch as you can burn yourself on the handle really easily.
I "tried" cooking a simple scrambled egg to give it a "I actually know this is going to fail" sort of initial test run, and it did utterly fail. A mass of burnt butter and burnt egg.
Somewhat surprisingly, the second attempt yielded results both fluffy and delicious. Internet advice insisted that you are supposed to wait a certain amount of time before pushing the egg around, but somehow it got to the stage depicted by their "wait until it looks like this" pictures in a matter of seconds. Maybe I just had it on super high heat, but it was at the middle of the dial. Dunno how "low heat", "medium heat", "high heat" mean much of anything consistently across different people's stoves anyhow but I'm sure I'm not the first to observe that.
Anyway, tossing some eggs, butter, and a bit of milk into a hot iron thing yielded Tasty Food. Hopefully I will not soon get sick from rust poisoning, salmonella, or rancid butter from improper cleaning. Barring that, I'll next attempt the dish that was the major ulterior motive for having this thing: it is just about the right size I think for a single-serv version of the one ever-so-slightly-nontrivial recipe I've always been able to manage well, namely Dutch Baby.
I "tried" cooking a simple scrambled egg to give it a "I actually know this is going to fail" sort of initial test run, and it did utterly fail. A mass of burnt butter and burnt egg.
Somewhat surprisingly, the second attempt yielded results both fluffy and delicious. Internet advice insisted that you are supposed to wait a certain amount of time before pushing the egg around, but somehow it got to the stage depicted by their "wait until it looks like this" pictures in a matter of seconds. Maybe I just had it on super high heat, but it was at the middle of the dial. Dunno how "low heat", "medium heat", "high heat" mean much of anything consistently across different people's stoves anyhow but I'm sure I'm not the first to observe that.
Anyway, tossing some eggs, butter, and a bit of milk into a hot iron thing yielded Tasty Food. Hopefully I will not soon get sick from rust poisoning, salmonella, or rancid butter from improper cleaning. Barring that, I'll next attempt the dish that was the major ulterior motive for having this thing: it is just about the right size I think for a single-serv version of the one ever-so-slightly-nontrivial recipe I've always been able to manage well, namely Dutch Baby.
![[info]](http://pics.livejournal.com/marta/pic/000gzfga){kind=small}
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif){kind=small}
It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.
Stuff you liked
- Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif)
lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work. - We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
- Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
- Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
- After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
- Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.
You got your fix
- We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
- In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
- At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.
Paid features you enjoyed
- In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
- This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
- When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
- How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted.
We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry inpaidmembers or check out the FAQ.
Mixed reviews
- The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
- This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
- We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
- We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.
Missing Inaction
- We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.
Stumbling points
- Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
- A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
- That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.
Full steam ahead!
As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!
<kempy> and sully has a girlfriend and is bangng me
<kempy> :D
<kempy> :D
There is a light switch in the Hagia Sophia. It is a normal flick switch with a three inch square white bezel around it. The panel is embedded in a stone wall about fifteen hundred years old. They tell you in school that history is a living breathing animal, but they don't explain that it is an animal with strange scars.
Our first day, we went to the Blue Mosque since the Hagia Sophia was closed. The Blue Mosque is enormous. When it was built, with its six minarets, they had to build another minaret on the Mosque of the Kaaba in Mecca so that it could continue to have more minarets than any other mosque. The Blue Mosque is beautiful with its huge intricate dome and stained glass windows, but what I remember most are the four twenty foot thick columns that hold it up. It is a titanic structure. I was completely blown away.
A few days later we made it to the Hagia Sophia. Compared to it, the Blue Mosque indeed all the mosques of the city, large and impressive though they are, are but pale imitations. This is literally true, not just by virtue of being buildings with domes and minarets, but by having the same smaller, lower domes around a big one, looking almost like a city in one building. Where the mosques have outer walls of gray stone, the Hagia Sophia is a dark faded red, almost like dried blood. In addition to the windows and tiles and calligraphy common to all the mosques, it has giant paintings of winged seraphim and unparalleled mosaics gleaming in the sun. Its main hall was the largest enclosed structure for a thousand years.
I think of the sixth century as the dark ages. In Europe they were tooling around in little castles forgetting science and throwing rocks at each other. Rome was long since fallen. Civilization was dead. Yet, this building from the sixth century, granting it was aided by renovations through the centuries, is utterly majestic even with modern eyes.
History lives in the Hagia Sophia and it is nonlinear. A crusader's tomb is off in one corner of the gallery. Long hidden mosaics are partly revealed while others still lurk uncovered. There is a sultan's gallery not built until the mid 1800s. Giant discs covered in arabic calligraphy hang against tall columns. A circle of stone is set in the floor where the Empress used to sit. Scaffolding covers a quarter of the floor running all the way up to the top of the dome. It seemed oddly like it is supposed to be there.
Our first day, we went to the Blue Mosque since the Hagia Sophia was closed. The Blue Mosque is enormous. When it was built, with its six minarets, they had to build another minaret on the Mosque of the Kaaba in Mecca so that it could continue to have more minarets than any other mosque. The Blue Mosque is beautiful with its huge intricate dome and stained glass windows, but what I remember most are the four twenty foot thick columns that hold it up. It is a titanic structure. I was completely blown away.
A few days later we made it to the Hagia Sophia. Compared to it, the Blue Mosque indeed all the mosques of the city, large and impressive though they are, are but pale imitations. This is literally true, not just by virtue of being buildings with domes and minarets, but by having the same smaller, lower domes around a big one, looking almost like a city in one building. Where the mosques have outer walls of gray stone, the Hagia Sophia is a dark faded red, almost like dried blood. In addition to the windows and tiles and calligraphy common to all the mosques, it has giant paintings of winged seraphim and unparalleled mosaics gleaming in the sun. Its main hall was the largest enclosed structure for a thousand years.
I think of the sixth century as the dark ages. In Europe they were tooling around in little castles forgetting science and throwing rocks at each other. Rome was long since fallen. Civilization was dead. Yet, this building from the sixth century, granting it was aided by renovations through the centuries, is utterly majestic even with modern eyes.
History lives in the Hagia Sophia and it is nonlinear. A crusader's tomb is off in one corner of the gallery. Long hidden mosaics are partly revealed while others still lurk uncovered. There is a sultan's gallery not built until the mid 1800s. Giant discs covered in arabic calligraphy hang against tall columns. A circle of stone is set in the floor where the Empress used to sit. Scaffolding covers a quarter of the floor running all the way up to the top of the dome. It seemed oddly like it is supposed to be there.
Hm, I made a hotel reservation for POPL, and they said it was made, and then they retracted their claim and said they can do me for all but the last couple days. Guess I have to look around again, grr.
There is an inner child that is amazed that in theory I could arrange to be in Miquelon, ( Read more... )
Pregnancy diary, week 11: Yesterday, while hanging over the toilet in between vomits, I found myself whistling the tune that had been going around my head. I think you've officially spent too much time vomiting when you can absentmindedly whistle at the same time.
Also, despite the fact that I'm still down several kilos from my pre-pregnancy weight, I'm already getting stretch marks on my belly. How does that work?!
Also, despite the fact that I'm still down several kilos from my pre-pregnancy weight, I'm already getting stretch marks on my belly. How does that work?!
To briefly revisit a limited issue with postmodernism (spoiler: I think postmodernism is rubbish and the wrong direction to go from the fundamentally right challenges posed by relativism) and "X studies" fields (where X is gender, feminist, black, latino, or a few other things), I have a better criticism of Stanley Fish's criticism of Alan Sokal's prank. ( Read more... )
On a personal note, whenever we see papers, books, and similar that connect radically disparate ideas, we should be very skeptical, even if these ideas are fascinating or the authors brilliant/funny/nice. Yes, perhaps marxist theory and queer theory can tell us something about media consolidation, but more likely we have a few tame observations that cultural creation is becoming more open dressed up in very fancy clothes (if so, Lawrence Lessig says it better and with less questionability). Yes, perhaps cellular automata are teh sekkrit path to understanding all of reality, but more likely we have a bright guy with a few neat ideas who doesn't have enough people around him telling him when he's full of shit or unoriginal.
A further personal note - it's important to tell people when they're full of shit (or unoriginal, or both). It's too easy for people to decide "I will be original and brilliant", write their manifestos/books/etc, and not realise that their foundations lead them to reinvent the wheel for the 57th time, badly, and that there are also some rather well established criticisms for what they're trying to do if only they would look. I've had this happen a few times in my life - where I had to say "dude, go look up anarchoprimitivism", "libertarianism", "christian socialism", "turtle logo", "lisp", to someone who had essentially synthesised it themself (I've also had a number of "original" ideas that turned out to be not so original).
(note that saying "I disagree", "I disagree and find your ideas disturbing", "you're only half-right", "your criticisms are fine but your conclusions are poor", "you're full of shit", and "you reinvented the wheel" are all different things you might say - be sure it's clear in your mind which of these you're actually saying)
Largely unrelated, I am happy to see that Howard Dean is making a comeback. ( Read more... )
Fighting generalized bitrot today again by seeing if I could get sketchup working on my desktop machine. This is in principle harder than getting fontforge working again because (a) it's not open-source, and (b) there is no linux version at all.
So I tried running it under wine. Somewhat impressively, it worked, and pretty acceptably fast, even though I have no hardware GL acceleration on this machine under linux.
...except around every cursor there is an ugly white box, obscuring what you are trying to work on.
Obviously then I dug into the wine source and determined that the following patch suffices to fix the problem:
though I'm still slightly confused which piece of software is to blame for the problem. It seems like the Xcursor library thinks that "white with alpha 0x00" means "ha ha just kidding completely opaque white" and so what the patch is doing is just forcibly rewriting "transparent white" to "transparent black" which Xcursor will honor as transparent. But I have this sneaking suspicion that maybe a "add brightness" or "screen" sort of transfer mode got invoked somewhere, as that would explain some of the other mysterious experimental results I got on fully transparent colors other than white.
Oh, and the other broken thing is COLLADA export. It spews some errors at me about XML libraries not being found, and hell if I know how to fix that on the windows-side of things. In the meantime I found a Ruby script to be run inside sketchup itself which seems to export DXF okay, but I tried getting Blender to import it and it just choked and gave me silent failcess.
---
Turns out: blender just doesn't accept DXF files without a proper header. Easy enough to add that.
So I tried running it under wine. Somewhat impressively, it worked, and pretty acceptably fast, even though I have no hardware GL acceleration on this machine under linux.
...except around every cursor there is an ugly white box, obscuring what you are trying to work on.
Obviously then I dug into the wine source and determined that the following patch suffices to fix the problem:
*** wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
--- wine-1.1.33/dlls/winex11.drv/mouse.c
***************
*** 518,527 ****
{
case 32:
/* BGRA, 8 bits each */
! *pixel_ptr = *xor_ptr++;
! *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 8;
! *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 16;
! *pixel_ptr |= *xor_ptr++ << 24;
break;
case 24:
--- 521,540 ----
{
case 32:
/* BGRA, 8 bits each */
! {
! char red = *xor_ptr++;
! char green = *xor_ptr++;
! char blue = *xor_ptr++;
! char alpha = *xor_ptr++;
!
! if (alpha == 0 && !alpha_zero) {
! red = 0;
! green = 0;
! blue = 0;
! }
!
! *pixel_ptr = (alpha << 24) + (blue << 16) + (green << 8) + red;
! }
break;
case 24:
though I'm still slightly confused which piece of software is to blame for the problem. It seems like the Xcursor library thinks that "white with alpha 0x00" means "ha ha just kidding completely opaque white" and so what the patch is doing is just forcibly rewriting "transparent white" to "transparent black" which Xcursor will honor as transparent. But I have this sneaking suspicion that maybe a "add brightness" or "screen" sort of transfer mode got invoked somewhere, as that would explain some of the other mysterious experimental results I got on fully transparent colors other than white.
Oh, and the other broken thing is COLLADA export. It spews some errors at me about XML libraries not being found, and hell if I know how to fix that on the windows-side of things. In the meantime I found a Ruby script to be run inside sketchup itself which seems to export DXF okay, but I tried getting Blender to import it and it just choked and gave me silent failcess.
---
Turns out: blender just doesn't accept DXF files without a proper header. Easy enough to add that.
You write one zombie story (or two or a half dozen), express a fondness for zombie movies like Day of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead and read zombie-themed books like Christopher Moore's The Stupidest Angel, and suddenly you have a reputation as a zombie head.I had a zombie themed Christmas and birthday this year. From the remote control zombie (pictured to the left and available at Think Geek if you're interested) I received from Jennifer's parents to the pile of zombie books that I received from Jennifer (wrapped in zombie wrapping paper that Jennifer found, also available at Think Geek) to the two zombie board games (one from Jennifer and one from my sister Caitlyn), I'd say the holidays for me were all about the zombies.
Of course, I am into the zombies. I'm not as into them as some folks I know who dedicate a weekly podcast to reviewing zombie films (and it's a good podcast, I recommend it) but I'd say I'm more interested in zombies than the average person.
The question, though, is why? I've been trying to figure out the allure that zombies have not just for myself but for popular culture at large. One of the biggest feature films of 2009 was Zombieland, after all, and before that Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead both did respectably well at the box office. And, of course, there are hundreds of direct-to-DVD and made-for-TV zombie movies, with at least half a dozen more coming out each month. And there are plenty of books out there as well; the afore-mentioned Stupidest Angel as well as the more recent Breathers: A Zombie's Lament (not to mention Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) are just among a growing number of zombie enhanced novels. And, of course, zombies are a mainstay of just about every video game out there.
Zombies are the new vampires, it was recently said (though even more recently it's been said that "vampires are the new zombies", which sort of implies that vampires had ever gone out of vogue).
So what is it about zombies, anyway? Why our society's interest in them? Why our interest in a zombie apocalypse? Why is it okay to kill zombies and not other groups of people? And why my own interest in them?
Well, with regards to the zombie apocalypse, I suspect that a large part of that has to do with the fact that a zombie apocalypse, while horrifying to contemplate -- all those flesh-eating ghouls running around (or shambling around, depending on which version of zombies you're contemplating), eating the living and causing general havoc, as well as the knowledge that being bitten by one will turn you into a zombie like them -- just isn't going to happen. It's a "safe" apocalypse, as it were. I remember when I was growing up in the 80s, when everyone was terrified of a nuclear apocalypse; these days, worrying about the nuclear apocalypse is passe, while contemplating a zombie apocalypse is cool. And yet, the nuclear apocalypse had such a sense of possibility; at any moment, we all thought, some Soviet madman or some American idiot was going to start to Final War, and everyone would die. We don't feel similarly about the zombie apocalypse. In our imagination, the zombie apocalypse is an out of control situation, but really it's a situation that completely under our control, simply because we do imagine it and because it just isn't going to happen. This may simply be a reflection of the more ironic and sarcastic age that we live in these days; we've gotten bored of contemplating apocalypses that are too plausible (nuclear war, global famine, pandemic, etc.) and that are out of our control, so we've started contemplating apocalypses that are fundamentally absurd (more on this point in a bit). It's flipping the bird to the real terrors of the world.
And why is it okay to kill zombies, but not other groups of people? When I asked this question on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, someone suggested that it was okay to kill zombies because they're already dead. I think, though, it goes a bit deeper than that; zombies, by their very nature, are the ultimate in dehumanized humans. It's not just that they're dead, therefore, it's that they're inhuman. More than that: they're antihuman, the antithesis of everything that a human being is. They are unintelligent, inarticulate, and they consume living human flesh, the ultimate taboo. Because they're so offensive in that regard, they're okay to kill. We've moved past a point where it's okay to dehumanize and therefore mass slaughter our human enemies (perhaps we've grown to appreciate that even terrorists can be human beings as well?), so we focus on our inhuman enemies. That's the germ of my theory at least. I'd like to see what a sociologist or social psychologist has to say about this subject.
But there's an element of zombies which is fundamentally absurd. Zombies are menacing, to be sure, but plenty of comedy has been built up around zombies as well. The original Return of the Living Dead is as much a comedy as it is a horror film; Shaun of the Dead is, at heart, a romantic comedy; and Zombieland, of course, is equal parts comedy and adventure. Even the venerable George Romero incorporated some comedic elements in the original Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder's remake did not have much comedy in this regard). Many of the zombie representations that we see these days, including remote control zombies and zombie wrapping paper, are just goofy. What's up with that? I suspect that by making the zombie an object of ridicule, by laughing at the shambling creature that wants to eat our flesh (or our brains, again depending on which subset of the zombie genre you're looking at), we're sort of whistling past the graveyard. It goes back to the notion of the zombie apocalypse as the controllable, imaginary apocalypse; here, it becomes a symbol of every apocalypse that can happen, and so we laugh it off in order to show that we're not afraid.
Either that, or zombies, with their shambling and their moaning, are just plain funny.
Actually, it occurs to me, reading this over, that I really have no idea what I'm talking about. I find zombies interesting and I enjoy zombie movies and stories about the zombie apocalypse, but I know that if I ever saw a zombie in real life, I'd scream like a little girl and run as fast as I could in the other direction.
I invite your comments.
Aw dude the contractor dudes that were here a few weeks ago and told me they'd fix the huge (like nearly 0.5in at their widest) air-gaps in my street-facing windows totally just did today. My livingroom is so toasty-warm now.
