MemeMachineGo!

A new calendar for the forthcoming year can set you back $10-$20. As soon as the new year rolls around, one Berkeley bookstore is dumping them 3 for $10. They continue to drop during the year, reaching nearly “we pay you” prices.

When Pocahontas brought up needing a new calendar, and I mentioned that I could print them myself using pcal, she was excited. So, yesterday, we wrote a configuration file including my work days, the birthdays and anniversaries of our friends and family, our neighborhood’s yard waste pick-up days, and more and printed them out. She taped one copy over a 2004 collie calendar; I taped the other over a 1999 Colors of Nature calendar I received as a premium for being an Exploratorium member — the pictures were so nice, I’d saved it.

Pcal had gotten hard to find a few years ago. It’s nice to see that it has a new maintainer and a Sourceforge site. It’s very flexible — it can identify anything from Ash Wednesday to a Blue Moon, as well as repeating events like my plant debris pickup — every other Thursday all year except Thanksgiving week, when it’s Friday. (It only does the Gregorian calendar though; events based on another calendar, like Hebrew or Chinese, would have to be specified manually.)

7th Wed before Easter          Ash Wednesday
2nd full_moon in all           Blue Moon
odd Thursday in year           Plant Debris Pick-up
delete 4th Thursday in Nov     Plant Debris Pick-up
Friday after fourth Thu in Nov Plant Debris Pick-up

I found a couple of interesting calendar sites while looking up holidays: Time and Date and Earth Calendar.

One Amazon user is shocked, shocked at the pornography available on the Internet. So he’s lovingly prepared a guide to the pornography available on Amazon — from books to magazines to a sheer t-shirt.

Must have taken him hours. (I never fail to get a kick out of this, though Paul Cameron was even funnier.)

We saw Peter Jackson’s King Kong over the holiday break. Overall I’d say: bravo, go see it, but don’t drink too much soda or you may find yourself needing to run for the restroom before the 187-minute running time is over.

The best thing about the film is Kong himself. The ape is the real star of the story, Jackson knew it, and he portrays it brilliantly. Although a few liberties are taken for dramatic license, Kong is played very much like a real gorilla. And despite that, you still understand all of his motivations and emotions.

Some other bits of the film, though, provoked a strong “you gotta be kidding me” reaction. Now, I know some folks don’t like spoilers, and some don’t like people who nitpick films, so if either or both of those descriptions apply to you, consider this your fair warning and skip the rest of this entry. Otherwise, to see my beefs with an otherwise excellent popcorn flick, read on…

The myth of a Christian nation:

The Religious Right’s prevailing myth that our country was founded as a Christian nation has always been just that a myth, a lie, a fable, a story in the same company as George Washington’s cutting down the cherry tree. So I thought I would share some great quotes from our “founding fathers” that ought to dispell such sillyness. There are many more like the following but these make the point well enough I think.

“The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” - Thomas Jefferson […]

“Every new and successful example, therefore, of a perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance; and I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together” - James Madison […]

“I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book [the Bible].” - Thomas Paine […]

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.” - John Adams

I suspect these folks will be unpersuaded. Then again, they also say that 93% of Americans are Christian and cite as their source a reference that says 76% of American adults identify as Christian, so what’re you going to do?

Apropos of nothing: some of my favorite poetry/music.

Cannons roared, in the valley they thundered, while the guns lit up the night.
Then it rained and both sides wondered who is wrong and who is right.

What a night though it’s one of seven; what a night for the dancing dead.

What a night to be called to heaven — what a picture to fill your head.

“Call to Heaven” from Patty Smyth’s album Never Enough, 1987

Lyrics by Tony Clarkin

I’m pleased to see that a friend of mine and Jimcat’s from dear ol’ RPI, Mark-Jason Dominus, raconteur, coding guru, and wit, has started a blog, The Universe of Discourse. Right now its contents will probably scare off anyone who’s not into math or programming.

I’ve been meaning to link to Dominus’ story about one of his most successful Perl programs ever.¹

Around 1994 I started dating a woman who was a quilter. […] There are many traditional designs for quilt blocks, with colorful names like Flying Geese, Corn and Beans, Broken Dishes, Log Cabin, Courthouse Steps, Underground Railroad, Bear Claw, and so on. But after seeing a lot of quilts and pictures of quilts, it occurred to me that there might be a lot of block designs that nobody used, and that perhaps had never been seen.

I was curious about this, and also I wanted to impress my new girlfriend, so I wrote a suite of Perl programs to generate all the quilt blocks of a certain type: sixteen “half-square triangle” patches arranged into a square with 90-degree rotational symmetry, and printed out the result.

I was delighted, because the results confirmed my suspicions: there are a lot of excellent but rarely-seen quilt blocks. […] I was even more delighted when the quilter and I got married. She made the program output into a real quilt and gave it to me as a wedding present. […]

Since my original goal in writing the programs was to impress my girlfriend, the cover pictures [they’re on the cover of his recent book, Higher Order Perl — Zed] are therefore part of the output of the most successful Perl programs I’ve ever written. I wish all my programs achieved their design goals so spectacularly.

Follow the link for pictures.

¹ I looked it up — I had a draft entry from 2004 with an older link to the story, noting that it was more on using Perl to impress women.

I’ve been lusting after a modern laptop. (I have an archaic 233 MHz Pentium laptop that strains under Emacs in console mode.) HP has been collaborating with Ubuntu to ensure it works well on (one line of) their business notebooks (though they won’t ship it that way in the US.) When I saw one of those laptops, the nx6110, for $550 after rebates, I took the plunge and ordered one.

The website said of that item, “In Stock. Ships Tomorrow.” The next day, my order status said “Back-ordered.” The website still said of that item, “In Stock. Ships Tomorrow.” I called their Customer Support to see if they could explain this.

The first person I spoke to promptly claimed there was a credit card problem, and shifted me to someone in credit card processing. That person verified there was no credit card issue, making clear the first person just didn’t want to deal with me. She investigated and explained that the machines they had in stock were being used to satisfy existing back-orders (thus, “in stock” was misleading at best, and “ships tomorrow” was wholly a fiction.)

I cancelled the order and don’t plan to do business with PC Connection again.

Oh well. Now I can wait to see if Yonah and whatever Steve Jobs announces today drive down prices of existing machines. (And besides, what I’m really lusting for is the ultralight HP nc4200.)

James Frey’s book A Million Little Pieces has been getting a lot of press lately. It seems that someone did some detective work and discovered that the author’s account of his involvement in a schoolmate’s car crash death was highly exaggerated.

I read the book shortly after it was published, and even back then, I was pretty sure that at least some of the events as releated in the book were a bit outside the bounds of credibility. I’ve never been in a rehab facility, or had extensive contact with the types of hard-core addicts and criminals that Frey describes in his book. Nor do I have the insatiable dirt-digging investigative urge that drives the contributors to The Smoking Gun. But brother, I can smell a big hunk of baloney when it’s shoved in my face.

I wrote a review of the book on Amazon; pardon me as I recycle some of my words and ideas from that review.

A lot of the details in this book seem far too good to be true. The narrator constantly and openly defies the rules of the treatment center, but instead of kicking him out as per policy, the authorities decide to keep him in treatment, because, well, he’s such a wonderful guy. He becomes friends with a Mafia don and a Federal judge, and they support him in everything he decides to do, even the potentially self-destructive actions, again because he’s just such an inherently lovable person. When the Mafioso says that he wants to adopt the narrator as his son (the narrator already has two loving parents who have made a tremendous effort to come to terms with his condition), my “B.S. Meter” overloaded.

There’s a character in the book named Bobby, who elicits a sort of contemptuous amusement from his fellow addicts for telling “entertaining lies”. I suspect that the real James Frey is a lot like Bobby.

Frey has recently said that he embellished some details for “obvious dramatic reasons”. I can relate to this, and won’t condemn him for that per se. I enjoy telling stories about my own adventures, and, well, sometimes the truth just falls a little bit short. In order to entertain the audience as much as possible, somethimes it’s better to tell what should have happened, instead of what did.

The problem comes from Frey’s labeling his book as a “memoir” instead of a “novel”. There’s a differnce between being a raconteur and an author, and people expect a certain level of truth in labeling on their books. And, to no one’s surprise, it turns out that Frey tried unsuccessfully to sell his book to several publishers as a novel.

Frey maintains that, whether it’s strictly true or not, the book retains its essential message and “emotional truth”. And a lot of readers, including Oprah Winfrey, have spoken up to defend the book’s value regardless of the strict truth, or lack thereof, of the story.

What’s ironic and frustrating is that the book needn’t have lost any of its impact if it had been initially published with a “fiction” label. A powerful illustration of this point can be found in another rehab story: Barry B. Longyear’s Saint Mary Blue.

Alcoholism and substance abuse exist just as much in the science fiction community as in any other subgroup of society. And they’re hushed up and swept under the table there just as anywhere else. So, as a young fan in 1988, it was quite an eye-opener to read Longyear’s story of an award-winning science fiction author who happened to be an addict, and his stint in rehab.

Longyear said quite openly that the book was based on his own experiences. But at the same time, he wrote it as a novel. It’s a well-written, realistic novel. But if you happen to run across some parts where you think, “I’ll bet it didn’t really happen like that”, then the natural response is, “So maybe it didn’t. It’s a novel, after all.”

With a central character who’s an author, Longyear indulges in some meta-references about writing professionally and stretching the truth. When a hard-as-nails biker comes up with a wildly exaggerated catalog of his drug abuse, the protagonist demolishes it by pointing out all the factual errors, inconsistencies, and implausibilities. Lying has its place, and some people make a good living telling lies. Many people enjoy reading well-told lies, as long as they know that’s what they are. The trouble comes when you try to pass off those lies as truth.

Saint Mary Blue shows what can be accomplished with a novel about addiction and rehab. It bears a powerful message for those who’ve been through the experience and for those who haven’t. Its central character rebels against the notion of putting his life in the hands of a “higher power”, because he’s never believed in any higher power that can influence his life. But in the end he finds that something as simple and close to hand as a group of people who care about you can be enough of a higher power, and can help you tackle the problems that you can’t solve yourself.

A Million Little Pieces, despite its problems, also has a powerful message. Its protagonist, too, questions the “higher power” concept, and reaches a different conclusion. He is determined to see himself through the experience without any help, relying on his own strength rather than a higher power. I think that this is also a worthwhile message, and deserves to be heard. There are some challenges in life that we can overcome through sheer self-reliance, and it strenghtens us to do so.

I find the two themes to be complementary rather than contradictory. Within each of us, there is a boundary between those things that we can solve on our own, and those for which we have to admit we need help. It would be foolish and self-defeating to assume that we need a “higher power” to solve every problem in our lives. But it would be equally harmful to assume that we’d never need such assistance. Having good illustrations of both options,as exemplified by those two books, is a positive thing in the long run.

So in the final analysis, I’ve got a lot more respect for A Million Little Pieces than for its author. I’d still recommend reading it; it’s a great story. Just remember the emphasis on “story”. And I’d also recommend reading Saint Mary Blue, and other works by Barry Longyear. And Longyear is an author for whom I have a great deal of respect.

In a great failing as a blogger, I haven’t written much about my cats. Since Pocahontas and I moved into our house in August 2003, I’ve been living with the two cats she brought with her. When Pocahontas went to a pound some seven years ago, she planned to get two females. When she saw a part-Siamese litter in one cage, there were three flame-point Siamese kittens, and, sleeping curled up together, one all-black male kitten (Pepper) and one all-white female (Salt.) And they went home with her.*

Pepper is the sweetest of cats. Salt is… challenging. Both of them were hanging out in the cute department when God was ladling out brains. They’re low-maintenance in many of the ways some cats are high-maintenance. They don’t overeat, so we can just put food in their bowl whenever it’s low, and not worry about a feeding schedule. We can leave the cat food bag out, because they don’t tear into it. They prefer the great outdoors to their litter box, so we rarely have to clean it.

But they’re emotionally needy. They regularly follow us around the house demanding attention.

Of course, we worried about them a lot while we were recently away for more than a week. Though we were exhausted when we got home, we sat on the couch to give Pepper lap, and to let Salt walk back and forth in front of us to be sure we knew she was snubbing us.

And on the way out to get groceries the next morning, I found a dead mouse on our welcome mat. Pocahontas must have missed it in the dark, and I had used a different door. We suspect it was Pepper’s doing — he’s slightly more of a hunter.

They have never left a kill on the mat before. I wonder if the “thought” running through Pepper’s little kitty brain was: “They must have left because I’m bad. Maybe if I’m better, they’ll come back.”

Given that it worked, from his perspective, I wonder if we’ll be coming home to dead rodent every time now.

* Names changed to protect their privacy.

Practical lessons in mathematics: division is not commutative. A Japanese stock market trader made a small error last month.

Japan’s government rebuked the Tokyo Stock Exchange and one of the country’s biggest brokerage firms Friday after a typing error caused Mizuho Securities Co. to lose at least 27 billion yen ($225 million) on a stock trade. […] The trouble began Thursday morning, when a trader at Mizuho Securities tried to sell 610,000 shares at 1 yen (less than a penny) apiece in a job recruiting company called J-Com Co., which was having its public debut on the exchange. It had intended to sell 1 share at 610,000 yen ($5,041). Worse still, the number of shares in Mizuho’s order was 41 times that of J-Com’s true outstanding amount, but the Tokyo Stock Exchange processed the order anyway.

I’m thinking this guy has a promising career ahead of him as a financial consultant for Brownie’s emergency planning firm.

If you’ve tried commenting or searching in the past couple of days, you may have noticed some problems. Those should be sorted, now.

A while ago, I mentioned that I’d registered Movable Type 3.2. I was having a lot of problems with 2.661, so I finally upgraded, and moved from using Berkeley DB to PostgreSQL for the database.

Well, that was a pain in the butt. But it’s mostly over with.

The worst casualty is that every link to an individual MemeMachineGo! entry ever is now broken. I’ll write something over the weekend to generate symbolic links to the entries’ new homes. I’ll also need to do some work to recover Free Range Memes.

The archive templates are a mess now, but everything seems to be working. There’s no more RSS 1.0 link. Right now, comments are moderated and need approval. I have to figure out what my options are regarding commenting and spamfighting.

In the transition, I lost the most recent comment, from Gary Farber, which he’d tried to post several times, falling afoul of the aforementioned problems. Sorry about that, Gary.

Many thanks to Scanner, MemeMachineGo!’s generous host, for all his help in the transition.

Please let me know if you see any problems.

San Francisco’s hardest-working street crazy is Frank Chu. He commutes from Oakland to San Francisco every day, and protests with a professionally printed picket sign (paid for by advertising on its reverse.) He has a complicated set of complaints involving the 12 Galaxies:

Frank Chu holds Bill Clinton responsible for directing the CIA to withhold payment to him for being the star of something called “The Richest Family” during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. His protests frequently call for the impeachment of Clinton although Clinton is no longer in office. Bill Clinton and various other US Presidents are frequently accused by Mr. Chu of cooperating with the 12 Galaxies to commit crimes and treasons. Mr. Chu is strongly interested in television reporters and newscasters, who will bring him the publicity he requires to inform the world of the injustices committed against him. This wave of publicity will cause a public outcry, which will result in the impeachment of various US Presidents and the awarding of “$20 billions” in compensation to Frank for the damages he and his family have suffered.

Chu’s 12 Galaxies are the eponym of a San Francisco night club; they give him free drinks.

They don’t believe that someone has named a nightclub after this man’s strange vernacular, and they certainly don’t believe that that nightclub throws the occasional party celebrating said man, that it donates a portion of the proceeds from the art auction to him, that it lets him eat and drink for free whenever he wants. But it does. Still, that doesn’t stop some people from suspecting that 12 Galaxies is exploiting Chu. Adam Bergerson, the club’s co-owner, doesn’t see it that way. “It’s a fine line,” he says. “I’m constantly fighting the public perception of, ‘You’re making fun of him.’ But I just dig the dude. We’re good to him; he’s good to us.”

(I’ve previously mentioned Chu’s predecessor, Emperor Norton here and here.)

The legend of the Burmese Cat:

Thai monks who were in training to be priests were each given a Burmese with this single instruction: “Please the cat.” Through centuries of this, the Burmese lost much of their cat behaviour. For instance, they are extremely trusting of anyone and everything, so they let you carry them around. The downside to this is that they can never be let outside; they’d walk right up to a dog and try to chat it up. Or beat it up.

That does seem like it would be a good way to teach humility.

When an aquarium moved an octopus into a tank with some sharks, they hoped the octopus would be okay.

They didn’t think to worry about the sharks.

=v= After seeing "Vive le [sic] Difference" one time too many, I decided to see just how many sexual reassignment operations this noun has gone through. According to el Goog, there are about 1,200,000 instances of "la difference" on the web, and about 45,100 instance of "le difference."

This seems like a lot, and it is. After all, according to the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, only 2-3% of the population is transgendered, and many of those are pre-op. So this noun is getting a sex change at about twice the prevailing rate. I think it has something to do with endocrine disruptors.

=v= The New York Sun — which nobody in NYC reads unless they've got a hankering for dense, pompous, viewpoints in dense, pompous, prose — broke a story about an alleged shipment of WMDs from Iraq to Syria:

Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including "yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel."

Sadly, No! absolutely made my day with their additional investigative report on the matter:

Then on the Syrian side, government agents gave the Republican Guard big sacks marked '$' and everyone drank from a clay jug with 'XXX' on it.

(Via Sadly, No!)

Yesterday, January 29, was the Lunar New Year in the traditional Chinese calendar, marking the start of the Year of the Dog.

The Chinese Zodiac begins with Rat and ends with Pig. There are a couple of legends accounting for this order. Here’s one version of one of them:

A long, long time ago the Jade Emperor wanted to find a means of measuring time, and so he organised a race, and invited all the animals to take part. When they had all lined up on the bank of the river the Emperor explained that to win the big prize — a permanent place in the Zodiac — they would have to be one of the first twelve to cross the swiftly flowing river and reach a designated spot on the opposite shore. Their order in the cycle would be decided by the order in which they finished the race. And so the race began. […]

Though such highly reputable sources as Chinese restaurant place mats assert that the animals’ years map evenly to Gregorian years, they don’t. The Chinese years begin at a New Moon in late January or early February by the Gregorian calendar. If you were born around then and you’ve been taking place mats as the source of your Chinese astrological animal, you may have been living a lie. (Chinese astrology predicts that the other animals most compatible with you are four years up or down from you. If you married based on fraudulent information from place mats, and subsequently divorced, you may have the basis for a class action law suit.)

The calendar is lunisolar, very much like the Hebrew calendar. The obvious question, of course, is: is there a correlation between using a lunisolar calendar and knowing where to find good Chinese food?

One of my Lunar New Year’s resolutions¹: new MMG! entries every weekday.

¹ There are many traditions associated with the Lunar New Year. Making resolutions is not one of them.

Pocahontas and I have had a coffee habit for a few months now. We get our grounds at Peet’s; we brewed them in a French press, according to this somewhat labor-intensive method, — letting it steep a minute, stirring it, letting it steep another 90 seconds. It made a nice cup of coffee, the grounds at the bottom of the cup (an inevitable consequence of using a French press) notwithstanding.

I was intrigued when I heard about the Aeropress coffee maker on Digg and MeFi. After dithering for a day, I decided to get it. I was afraid the web exposure could mean it would be back-ordered everywhere, but Locals Only Coffee’s order system gave me a mid-3-digit customer ID and a very-low-4-digit order number.

Some of the serious coffee geeks at, um, Coffee Geeks describe being pleasantly surprised; one reviewer at Locals Only Coffee says:

How in the world can something so simple work so well? In one minute flat we have the sweetest espresso or American cup anyone in this house has ever tasted. Our $1,100 espresso machine and our $150 drip machine have been moved out to the garage.

I don’t know anything about home espresso machines for comparison, but I am thrilled with my Aeropress. It’s faster than making coffee in the French press, makes better-tasting, incredibly smooth coffee, and is trivially easy to clean. I was bothered by the idea of disposable paper filters, but they’re just flat circles two inches across and can be used multiple times — the inventor says he uses his 21 times.

Now I’ve bought decaf grounds so I can have a cup in the evening without being up all night. I’ve already brought it with me on a trip — it’s small, and travels well. I’ll probably get another to keep one at work.

The Aeropress: I’m for it.