interesting artwork

actually, amazing is more like it. You have probably never seen anything this before in your life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

(and note that there are other vids of her work--I gotta get these onto my ipod)

here's the background (as I rec'd it from a friend):


Dont dare to miss this amazing Video Clip . . first read it properly..

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine’s Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.


Kseniya Simonova says:
"I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment."


Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art.

click on the link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

on being a geek

This little top-ten list describes me a little too well...

http://www.gk2gk.com/topten/waystotell.asp

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words copied here in case that link goes bad. apologies for the cut-n-paste, but I'm not claiming I created this:

Top 10 Reasons Why Geeks Make the Best Catch

It’s not generally realized that geeks (male and female) are the best catches. Americans focus on the glamour of the good-looking, the male jock and the statuesque female, and tend to make fun of second banana characters like Urkel. Yet, geeks (a.k.a. nerds, etc.) provide the opportunity to have much longer, more stable, and happy relationships. Here are the top ten reasons:

1. Geeks don't cheat. Geeks know that the grass only seems greener on the other side. They instinctively stay devotedly loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair.

2. Geeks appreciate their mates. Since you are likely to be one of the first persons a geek has ever had a significant relationship with, you will be treated well. A geek knows that there aren’t a whole lot of other possibilities. Frankly, geeks aren't quite sure how they ended up with the person they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know that geek will be yours for as long as you wish.

3. Geeks haven't formed bad relationship habits. After years of dating other people, the socially successful have become too confident to be intimate, think of partners as being only for their self-gratification, and focus on making themselves happy. None of this is true of a geek. The lack of past romantic partners allows the geek to approach lovers with the zest of a neophyte. Geeks are not full of romantic confidence. However, once encouraged, they are eager to please and enjoy their relationship.

4. Geeks are good at the things they try. Every geek has skills passionately developed over a long period of time. It could be role playing, chess, hacking, playing video games, or the ability to properly assemble a computer. So you know that geeks won't quit until they have learned how to make their relationship the best.

5. Geeks are not interested in status. Geeks became geeks because they chose to spend their time doing things that would not necessarily make them popular with everyone else in school, like sports and fashion. The ability to resist peer pressure is important to geeks. This means that a geek is more interested in your happiness than in looking good to others.

6. Geeks have imagination. Boredom is important to avoid to the game playing geek. A geek will seek new and creative ways to play, and this translates to relationships as well.

7. Geeks are happy and successful in their chosen field. No matter what their education level, geeks are able to make good incomes doing work that they enjoy. That eliminates one of the most frequent causes of relationship problems, since people who don’t like their jobs may take it out on their significant other.

8. Geeks are analytical. If they don’t get it right the first time, they look at what they did and figure out what to change. And when they DO get it right, they still keep finding ways to improve on it.

9. Geeks can concentrate. Geeks can focus their energy on one task with total intensity. Granted, the task they are focusing on may have more to do with writing new software for their Blackberry, but the fact remains that a geek, once set upon a task, tirelessly sets about to achieving a goal.

All of which means that…

10. Geeks want to be the best at what they do. So they try harder. And they never stop trying.

© 2004-2007 by Geek 2 Geek. www.gk2gk.com Not to be used without permission and attribution

building a new compy again

So about the time I got Torchlight, there was also the announcement about the new 3D zero-gravity space shooter game (Shattered Horizon [shadoobie]) that is Win7/Vista/DX10-only. Arrgg!

The PC I built in early 2006 is not going to get the job done, without a lot of upgrade, in which case I might as well build a new one. Is that even going to be possible? I have some requirements: AMD Phenom II quad-core cpu, 3+GHz, min 4GB DDR2 RAM possible, PCI Ex 2.0, DX10 possible, micro ATX-size case.

Turns out that is just now doable, with caveats. Shuttle is now making a case/mobo combo that will take a Phenom II, but only certain ones: those needing < 100 watts of power. There's a sticker on the cpu socket that warns you about this...so the highest-end cpus can't go in there (940, 955, 965) because they are either 125 or 140 watts. I only found this out by reading some of the user comments at Newegg. I'd have found out when I opened the case, of course, but if I'd already bought the 965 I'd have been unhappy. Newegg offers those two as a bundle, but that's kinda stupid given that that cpu can't go on the mobo. I went with the 945, 3 GHz quad-core, 95 watts.

In addition, Windows 7 is available as a free beta for the next 5 months. I don't know what happens after that, probably they want money or it shuts down. Well, it's Win7 Ultimate, which is actually more than I really want; Pro is what I want...but for test-drive purposes, this is ok.

Bought some of the new pieces in person at MicroCenter, and mail-ordered the case/cpu pair from Newegg.

Things went together like a breeze, which was great. Win7 installed with ZERO hassles, and nearly zero personal involvement. Other drivers went in super-quick/simple, also good, and it ran the first game I tried out...which was, interestingly, Bioshock, which does not run properly on my XP box. Works great, so I need to try some other things out, too, like UT04 which has quit working on my XP box. Need to try out Oblivion (and when the hell is Elder Scrolls 5 coming out?).

Case/mobo comes with two monitor sockets on-board, and the video card (ATI 4670) has two more, so i could put four monitors on this. Think I'll see about getting another 24" one...four monitors. That's what I'm talkin' about!

Gotta put a carrying handle on top of this one, too.

Win 7 boots pretty damn fast, and the wake from sleep is damn fast, too. Hooray!

The trick will be to not install so much stuff that if I have to do a complete wipe/reinstall it won't be too hard...

A month or so ago I got a dual 1TB raid unit set to mirroring. I have pushed all the mp3 stuff from the old pc onto the raid unit. It's not real fast, but does ok to play music. And all the machines can see it. (actually this "not too fast" issue is alarming/weird--should be at least 100T ethernet going in the back, but it seems like no more than 10T at best)

See you again in 3 years or so on this same topic.

----

Bioshock has behaved weirdly for me...Oblivion has been great, except when i was trying to run bioshock, which was having/causing some really weird audio problems. So long as I steer clear of BioS, everything else seems ok...which won't be hard to do, because I've reached a point in BioS where I literally cannot continue, there's some bug I'm hitting.

Oblivion plays quite fine on this system, even with a bunch of the graphics aspects near maximum (which, btw, are pretty but unhelpful: if you turn on nearby grass, there will be plenty of cases where an outdoor opponent drops a weapon and you can't find it).

I've been playing with some different techniques this time: You can run sneak to 100 on the very first guy in the tutorial, there's a sweet spot where, as reported before, you can set a weight on an arrow key and just walk away. You can do something similar with most of the magic schools, too, which is also interesting. I'm level 35 now, have done very little fighting overall, and I am absurdly easy to kill. I went with being a Khajiit, which is a weak character to begin with, so I'm mostly having to play by letting summoned things do the work. The reason I went ahead an leveled up is that I being so weak I needed to get to the point where I could kill/soul-trap grand-level souls (aiming at chameleon 100), and you can't even encounter them at level 2 (well, excepting that you kill some necromancers and get black soul gems). But I'm level 35, and I haven't even started the main story line, or gone very far with Mages Guild, or even the first task for fighters guild.

In addition to being a weak character, my armor and blade skill levels are low, which contributes to my being easily killed. Turns out that "fortify blade on self 100 pts for 30 sec" spell is far better than "fortify strength 100 pts".

Oh...the other reason I'm easily killed is that I set the difficulty to max, which makes for a really different game experience. At least until I got to chameleon 100, I got killed entirely too often. At normal difficulty, with sneak 100, you can sneak in the day without being seen...not even remotely possible at max difficulty.

So it's been interesting again...

TorchLight game

I have a Steam account, but I mostly have Steam not running...for other reasons, I had it on last week, and up popped one of their infomercial windows (a key reason why I don't run it), and the top thing was "TorchLight", and there was a free demo.

Steam is actually pretty slick overall, although it didn't start out that way. Now it's excellent.

Anyway.

I played the TorchLight demo...this is basically Diablo 2.5, or Diablo 2 with Warcraft graphics. So I bought the full game.

Pretty Nice. Many identical names for things, there's a good merchant system, each one has a brand-new load of stuff for sale when you return to town (a la Dungeon Siege). There are Town Portal Scrolls, Identify Scrolls, a nearly infinite qty of merch items with lots of recombination and predefined things (although their definition of "unique" is slightly different from mine...at one point I actually *did* have 2 of the same "unique" item). There are some health-recovery gems, you can fuse them for higher value, and pop them off to reuse.

There's a near infinite amount of play possible, because one of the things you can do is buy a scroll that will open a portal to another map--one not connect with anything else in the story--and it will be instanced to about your current performance level. Or you can buy them and hold them for a while, until they become easy walk-throughs.

The monster at the tail end is REALLY difficult. I think I got killed like 6 times while working him over. A key thing to have learned before going in there is how to summon a lot of helpers (Skel 6 seems best), and the Level 30 spell for seismic shock, which has this interesting advantage of being usable multiple times with no wait in-between (although you will run out of mana). It can take down a lot of opponents at once. [my son also played TL, and did the mage character and boosted his various summon skills to the point where he had a squad of 15 or so summoned things, meaning he didn't have to actually get close to directly fighting anything]

I think the idea of needing "Identify Scrolls" is stupid/pointless..

You have a sidekick/pet, which can help fight, but won't be as good as the skels, and is best used as pack mule...with one added bonus: when the pet is full up, you can send it to town to sell everything it is carrying, and it will come back with the cash. That's what I'm talkin' about!

The various map levels will reload with opposition creatures, if they don't have some special relationship to the main story line. This allows you to redo a level for more points or goodies.

I did have a couple of problems, one task just isn't completing for me...I think I did it, but it still registers as not done, which means I can't move on with the supplier of it (who probably has other tasks).

Apparently levels dynamically generate, so they should be different for a game restart...didn't look like that was true, though. Diablo 2 did do this--if you started over, levels were fairly different, other than some set locations that were quest-specific, but you could redo the entirety of all of them.

I thought the game was too short. I played the entire thing in just over a weekend. You can play as one of 3 character types, so I probably should go do one of the others...and it turns out that you can give a bunch af items to your other selves via the "shared items chest" which is a huge deal in your favor, if you actually know this. Too bad you can't give $. Still, it does argue in favor of keeping a variety of items on hand to pass on, covering a range of levels.

Taxes and government

It continues to amaze me how poorly so many people understand economics and government.

Where I live, as with very nearly every other state, we have budget problems. We have things that need money spent on them, and the state doesn't have the money to do so.

Services cost money. Plain and simple. We need road work. We need police. We need fire/emergency help. We want good schools. We want a working court system. These things cost money.

There are groups which advocate more government-run activities, and groups which oppose such.

I am in neither. Government should do some things, and not others. Government should do things where all citizens need exactly the same thing at all times, or as close as is feasible to provide. (By "do" here, I could mean "regulate", as well, where the actuality is performed by some other organization, like your electricity supplier).

If you want, for example, snow removal service during the winter...that costs money. That could be commercially provided, but how would that get done? I want all the roads I am likely to use to be plowed right away. And my driveway. I don't care about other people's driveways, nor do I care about roads I don't use...Except that maybe I need for others to be able to use those roads in order to make deliveries I will need access to, like the grocery store. "Stock up in advance" you might say...and that certainly works to an extent, given that where I live snow generally doesn't last too long (although it has been known for one single snowfall--a blizzard--to last a couple of weeks). But there was a time when I lived in Massachusetts, in 1994, and there was 9 (yes, nine) feet of snow that winter (two years later it was ten). That snow didn't all melt away for four months. Not really feasible for me to "stock up" (although the Pilgrims must have done so somehow). I can't get to work without plowed streets, so that blizzard here in 1996, which the county did not deal with effectively, kept me stuck at home for a week.

So I am willing to have some tax dollars go to providing this service. Lacking a county-funded provider of snow removal, I'd have to get all my neighborhood together, and we'd have to pool to hire someone, or buy the plows ourselves to fit the pickup trucks of those who live in the neighborhood. The question then is what do you do about the people who live in your neighborhood who don't want to pay for this? The government has some measure of coercion it can apply, but you do not. Do you just pile up the snow in front of their driveway? Suppose they need an ambulance?

So this is a thing that government should do, or regulate. It will work best if there's a single provider, for uniform results.

In contrast, trash collection is done differently. There are county-gov sanctioned providers of collection service, I pay the provider directly, there is competition, it's not too expensive, and I could change providers if I wished. What I can't really do is let trash pile up, if I wished to not pay for it at all, although that's mostly because I don't *want* it to pile up. I recycle a lot of stuff, but that's the same service provider there. I could take recyclables to the center, for free, and if I could keep my packaging-materials limited to paper, I could probably go without the trash service; paper I could burn, or compost to an extent. Could snow removal work the same way? Maybe...it's an expensive business to be in, you only need it a few times/year, whereas trash service is every week. I'd be willing to do some plowing of the neighborhood, and maybe bit beyond, but no way I'm plowing the highways. I think that could work, except for those folks who would want it done but not pay for it.

Government needs to do other things, too, but plenty of folks don't want to pay for those things.

So what I'd like to see...recall how we keep hearing that the "states are little experimental test areas where ideas can be tried out" ?

Let's try out the idea of zero government.

No taxes. No laws. No police. No courts. No water/sewer service (unless you dig well, septic). No electricity (except self generated). No roads except those you create yourself. No trash collection, no snow removal. No regulated businesses. What would that really look like? Who would live there?

Partly it would look a lot like "the wild west": the guy with the biggest gun and greatest willingness to do grievous harm to others will be in control. Most people would get along with each other ok, I expect, but they'd also become victims.

But it'd be an interesting experiment. Could it work?

This idea was triggered by a couple of things: one was some interviews with protesters in DC a week ago, and there was this one woman who said she wanted government out of her life completely. The guy with the mike/camera didn't pursue that far enough, but I suspect she doesn't *really* want government entirely out of her life, because she does want water, sewer, trash, snow, electricity, police, etc. She might want her taxes to be zero (who doesn't?) but she probably doesn't understand what all those taxes actually pay for. My impression is that most folks don't.

And of course going along with the "pay for it" issue, you also hear "waste, fraud and abuse". I really think that's a euphemism for "fire people", but since we can't seem to figure out who to fire, let's just fire them all.

Java 3D software

Was trying to do the 3D thing again a few weeks ago. It's got to be possible.

I was trying to get my wireframe globe working (actually, someone else's code).

So it turns out not to be too hard, but there are a couple of subtle parts, and I did not find the right explanation on-line anywhere.

There are four parts involved:

1. Your code
2. JOGL.jar
3. libjobl.jnilib
4. the O/S libraries

The online help doesn't mention those .jnilib files, despite their presence in the library downloads. Your java command-line has to mention the jar files, of course, but NOT the jnilib files, but the jnilib files have to be in $CWD, or the same folder as jogl.jar

So it's really not very hard, but I spent a lot of time not getting that figured out.

On windows/linux, there are also some .dll or .so files that appear relevant.

On my mac, just things in the list above. Works great, and instantly.


I also found this, http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/, which is like google earth (except older)... Except that there's a java version, with Swing and AWT versions of an embeddable panel that you can pop into your app. Works great!

So now I have NASA World Wind in an app. This is the other reason why I needed to figure out the 3D library files. It does, of course, use NASA's servers, but hey--NASA owns a lot of imagery n stuff, like the Blue Marble pix...have a look at the demos page. Lovely stuff.

That said, I don't like how part of it works...the part about making my own layer. I ought to be able to create a layer, populate with the items I want drawn, and it should draw them. That seems not to even be part of the concept. GAK! It appears that you have to serve results from a Web Feature Service, and connect a layer to that. NOT what I want, at all.

I have some other things I want to do in 3D, so I need to go back to the wireframe globe and start there...the first thing I have discovered is that OpenGL *still* can't draw a general filled polygon properly. This is fargin' horrifying. That is a solved problem, people. Use it!

recent reading, again

Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove.

It's one of those alternate history things. Actually this is "MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE" redux. This is pretty detailed on the historical accuracy...imagine what might have happened if someone had time-traveled from 2010 back to 1864 and given Gen Robert E Lee 100 thousand AK-47s and unlimited ammo. Would the south have won?

Damn right. Those guns, while not 2010 state of the art, were 100 years in advance of the standard single-shot manual-load rifles of the 1860s.

So I found this book offensive...not the part about the south winning...given the AK-47 premise, that was inevitable. This seemed overmuch like "how to write a book in 1992 in which you get to use all those words and ideas from 1864 that are clearly offensive now, like the infamous 'N-word'".

It of course opens with some history, although not enough of the history that you remember what the fight was really about, from both sides. This is more just about the battles (quite lopsided with the arrival of AK-47, which was superior to hand-loaded single-shot Enfields/etc in every way you can think of, and not manufacturable anywhere in the world at that time (the south had insufficient manufacturing to make weapons/etc as it was, so there really was no way they were going to win). The suppliers of these guns are some unhappy white folks from South Africa, who are so resentful of the black takeover there, that they think altering history will help them. They pay in gold, which has serious value, as opposed to Confederate money, which, as the saying goes, "wasn't worth the paper it was printed on".

The author clearly doesn't understand time-travel paradox well enough to explain that part. He also misses the relevant background history (Missouri compromise [1820], Dred Scott[1857], etc); it's not like that info is hard to come by.

He also mostly bypasses the "why" of confederate secession. It was, from the southern side, presented as "those people can't tell us what to do", and "the federal government cannot tell the states what [not] to do"...the one thing the federal government was trying to do was tell the southern states they couldn't allow/continue/expand slavery.

(look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War, for the Wikipedia pages on this whole thing)

So: the south: "it's all about states' rights", the north: "it's all about slavery"

Really: it was both, of course. It was all about the right of southern states to sanction (and tax) the ownership of one human being by another.

Don't kid yourself, blacks weren't liked up north. They just weren't slaves.

So at the end of the book, the confederate government, now with Robert E Lee as president, learns how they have been manipulated by the South Africans, and learns a good bit about the future, decides that slavery must be eliminated. (That seems unlikely, to me, given that the elimination of slavery occurred because the South lost the fight. Dramatic military superiority would change the equation quite a bit--the military's strength is more or less untouchable.)

Like this is really somehow different from what the north had been arguing for some decades? "It's ok to eliminate slavery if WE decide to do it, not if THEY tell us to do it". So what happens when one of the southern states decides to secede from the confederacy? All the same arguments could be made over again ("we don't want some other states telling us what we can/can't do"). The southern states were not terribly unified amongst themselves; if you're willing to secede once, you're willing to do it again.

Author does cleverly manage to work in a variation of the infamous "battle of the crater" near the end. That was amusing...it's a little different, of course, because in the story the "civil war" is over by this time, so this battle is against the South Africans. Who, despite the radically superior technology (i.e., things more advanced than an AK-47), are numerically too small to win a war with any attrition. I actually thought this the best part of the book.

'twere better all around had no slaves ever been brought here. The real problem is that a lot of people are lazy enough want others to do their work.

Of course, the situation in the Confederacy wasn't nearly as simple as you were taught it in school. There were plenty of "Unionists" in the south who opposed the secession, and some actually fought against the South while living there.

And apparently there was something known as the "Twenty Negro Law" whereby one military-age male was exempted from serving in the Confederate Army for every twenty slaves owned on a plantation. Of course it was only the wealthier who owned slaves, and they tended to be those in state legislatures, too, and therefore could vote themselves these kinds of exemptions...resulting in the actual conscription being the poor, fighting for the rich, to preserve the rich folks' way of life of owning slaves. (see HERE, and HERE for the exact wording, which is a bit obtuse)

An excellent bit of humor

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Cowbell

The Philosophy of Engineering (part 2)

What does it take to motivate engineers? (Or anyone, for that matter)

I.e., what can I do to motivate engineers?

Will it take an Advanced Degree (TM) to figure this out?

Let's start with: what motivates me?

Me: interesting problems to solve. I like solving problems, I like making things. Things I like making have included some of my furniture (actually quite a few pieces), computer programs, electronics, model railroad stuff...there have been other things as well (deck outside house in Dallas).

I got started down the engineering path by about age six because I watched my dad fix things, and I was intrigued at the insides of things. At age 14, I found out that engineering pays better than most other jobs, which certainly clinched that.

So let's speculate that most engineers are motivated by having interesting problems to solve. A good team has an interesting large problem to solve, and many smaller ones that can be handled on an individual basis. A problem that *can* be understood, and a solution that *can* be found without it taking forever, materials and tools to go from the beginning to the end, and the satisfaction of having succeeded and producing a final widget--one that people actually use and like.

What of other folks, for whom the challenge of the problem is not sufficient? Do they need a $ incentive? What other incentives might there be? Formal recognition?

Here's a reference that covers similar territory. Actually, it *really* covers the same territory, except they left out problem challenge (unless you say challenge=creativity, then it's "internal"). Here's the detail.

Another link HERE has a really good first comment:

"People also get motivated when they are working for a leader who has the following traits:

1. Good memory
2. Genuine interest in people
3. Integrity
4. The ability to communicate effectively
5. Decisiveness
6. The ability to relax
7. Genuine enthusiasm."

This is about teamwork and good leadership. Good management. I can't argue with that, having had both good and bad (which is separate from experience, although there is a correlation). More detail can be found HERE.

There are probably some other ones...More are listed HERE.

Why do you/I/we care?

"Employees who are motivated are willing to invest discretionary effort to go above and beyond the call of duty." (HERE)

That's something you want.

But different people have different motivations, and need different incentives. From some recent reading on this (related to above links), money appears to be one that doesn't work too well. I can't say that a tiny amount of money would get my attention...you'd have to offer at least $50k to even get my attention, and more like $100k to get my participation. Maybe if I had some debt issues...but $1000 doesn't do it for me.

Getting one's paycheck is a motivator, of course, but you really need to like your work to go beyond that. What makes that happen?

Probably you want a suite of incentives, to get folks going. Recognition for performance. Influence over what gets done. Money. "Internal" reasons (see that first link above; this includes a number of factors, I think, good mgmt, good team, creative challenge...).

So how to do you define those incentives? Recognition could be as simple as a thank-you from the boss...but that could be pretty hollow, too. A private thank you for something that no one else even knows about, and then nothing...why bother? I want something a little more serious than that.

The Philosophy of Engineering (part 1)

A year or two after I joined my current employer, I became interested in what I now call the "Philosophy of Engineering".

What is that exactly? Let me offer an example...

In 1992/3, I worked on a health-care project. It was 10-20 years ahead of its time then, and still is, although the concepts behind a little of it are now being talked about, and some of the associated hardware has come to exist since then...

That project was a team effort--the best team I have worked in ever.

Immediately upon joining my current employer, I was in a new team. One which I have since described as "five guys with the same charge number"; not really a *team*, as I had just experienced it. I was the latecomer, and I ended up with the largest responsibility: integration and delivery and support...

I don't recall that this second team ate lunch together more than 3 times over 20 months. I don't recall that we ever held anything resembling a design meeting/discussion, or really anything I associate with a good team. So that was the worst team I've ever worked on.

I've been on various in-between ones since then, or solo. All have their little problems, none are perfect.

So what is it that makes for a good team? Does it take an Advanced Degree (TM) to figure this out?

Crucial elements:

You need someone (at least one, but not very many) who is the keeper of the vision. That person is often (around here) known as a "Principal Investigator", which is not necessarily the same as a System Engineer, although it could be the same person. The PI should do things like define the concept being attempted, create/locate/define/refine examples like "use cases", make presentations to existing/potential customers, and could offer implementation suggestions. I've never quite had exactly that kind of PI, yet.

You need a System Engineer, who can figure out exactly how to implement the vision. This has often been my role.

You need an implementation team. These folks are not keepers of the vision, and they are not decision makers about system block diagram kinds of things (although they might be); these folks are the ones who create what the SE decides should be created. I've been this person too, although most commonly I am a combination of SE and implementor.

You need a good Program Manager. This guy deals with the financial aspects, meetings with customers, marketing, personnel...all that mgmt jazz. The PM should not be the SE, probably should not be the PI (although that is common).

The last actual team I worked on (2004/5) had a decent PM, a not-so-great PI (only did about half the job), myself as SE, and one implementor guy (so of course I did a lot of implementation). That was actually going well until the PM found himself unable to continue in that role (he commuted in from a ways off, and then his wife got pregnant with triplets). The new PM was a jerk, really unsuited to the role, not interested in the project, obnoxious in meetings. I had tried to get someone else to take the role, but that person was not yet interested/ready to do that. My involvement faded out, and the project died within a year after I wasn't working it any more.

Mind you, that really cool health-care project got killed, too, although that was because too many managers wanted control of it, not because it wasn't going anywhere.

So I'm thinking next time I'm in at the beginning, I'm going to specify exactly who/what I get on my team, else I'm not getting on it myself.

The cutting edge is in my rear-view mirror (TM)

I needed a motto, and that one came to me 30 mins ago. I like to think of myself as doing programming few others are doing; examples available upon request.

a few months ago came this one: Cloud Computing: not as scary as you might think.

that one was intended as humor...

politics 2

so Sen (R) Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, doesn't like Sonya Sotomayor, a non-white, non-rich non-male as a Supreme Court candidate.

born in Selma, Alabama, according to his wikipedia page...you'd think he'd have a better appreciation...but...

is anyone surprised? The guy's an insensitive jerk. Why is he still in office? Why did he ever GET into office?

Star Trek movie 2009

OMG was this good. Better than I was expecting, really. I was afraid it was going to be "Star Trek kids".

They did of course have to show the one and only Starfleet Academy episode of Kirk's of any significance: Kobayashi Maru. Really, no way to do this timeframe in his life without it, that would have really been ripping off the audience. I did think he was a little smug about it, though, eating the apple...there should have been a point at which he say something more like "when faced with that kind of impossible situation, change the rules".

Only complaint: they missed a couple of opportunities for the various characters to say a phrase permanently associated with them: "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a ___" -- Bones did *not* say a variation of that in the movie, and he should have...and Spock should have said "Fascinating" or "indeed" or "that would not be logical" at some point. Scottie did at least say "I'm givin her all she's got, captain"...[later: upon watching DVD, Bones *does* say it: "I'm a doctor, not a physicist"]

Otherwise, damn near perfect. Except for being a parallel-universe Starfleet...I mean, Spock's mom dead? Vulcan destroyed? How will there be the "Amok Time" episode now? I thought for sure the movie denouement was going to be the time-travel-to-set-things-back-on-track sort of thing...[apparently, from an interview, this change was deliberate, allowing a retread of some familiar things, with a different approach]

But nonetheless...this bodes well for a sequel working out well...and I cried at the end when Nimoy said the opening words: "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages..."

Monty Python

a personal favorite for years...my son is properly fond of them as well...spouse too.

this is hilarious:

click here for MP game fun

this is a hilarious YouTube piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc

and this is another one...it starts slow, but just you wait:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlyHAJfwyI

recent reading...

Julie Czerneda's "Stratification" trilogy 1-3, which are actually 1-3 of 9, where 4-6 were published some years ago...and she's working 7 now...kinda like Star Wars, eh?

These were pretty good...I don't remember 4-6, so I guess I'm going to have to go read those again...

computer games on Steam

Steam is of course the service from Valve (Half-life)...this seems to be working pretty well overall.

I snagged some of the game demos, which weren't too bad. I punted one or two right away for being too short, but others were ok.

There's this one series you can get all of for $15, and the demos are decent, called "Alien Shooter" in which have to eliminate aliens from an underground facility or two. Alien Shooter Revisited is the original with newer artwork, AS 2 has a bit more interesting "inventory" system, and Zombie Shooter is essentially the same game except with Zombies. How much better can a game get than whacking umpty-thousand zombies with nifty weapons?

however...Alien Shooter Revisited has flaws...one of which is disastrous...on level 5, near the end, there's this yellow forklift, and if you run to it, you can get math-locked onto it. No way off, which means there's a serious path-finding error combined with what is probably a 3D-model-positioning error, so that you go through a tiny little gap that the path-finding can't get out of. Has happened to me twice now, I've sent a msg to the devs, and I am done playing that one.

Had the same problem with AS 2, got math-trapped in an odd spot. I can't even allow a monster to kill me, their "AI" is too stupid to path-find closer to me.

Apparently AS 1 has a couple more expansion packs, and Zombie Shooter 2 is due out soon.

Jason Bourne...

Robert Ludlum is one of my all-time favorite writers...he was a master of the conspiracy story...

The Bourne Identity was perhaps the most intense story I've ever read...

So I was excited when my wife came home with the "new" Jason Bourne story, "The Bourne Legacy", by Eric van Lustbader. Pretty sure I've read some of EVL's scifi/fantasy stuff at some point, but I don't own any...suggesting it was short stuff, or uninteresting.

Well, this book stars Bourne...but it's not Ludlum, it's not a Ludlum-style conspiracy...it's really more like a recent James Bond (hm...note the initials on both of them) film. Other than the lack of explosions at the end of the book, it really felt like Bond movie with fewer overall scene locations.

I thought Bourne got into too many fights where he got hurt a bit more than I thought appropriate. He seemed more fight-savvy in the Ludlum books.

It is based on the very early Bourne history, as David Webb, prior to his training that turned him into Bourne. Some of that didn't hang toegether as well as it needed to...

Apparently EVL has written several more Bourne books since this one...well, this story was ok, just not RL. Maybe I'll read the next one, but only as a used pb, not a new one. And maybe not any time soon, I have A LOT of other stuff to read already on a shelf here.

Stephanie Plum...pt 2

Plum book #15 was just published last month...got it and read it last week.

Classic goodness, and this time Stephanie's car blows up again. Twice...well, actually it's Ranger's car each time, but still...that was a signature event in the first 10 books, and then it stopped for a while...I emailed and got a rather stupid reply from some worker-bee who wasn't the author. But it's back.

I definitely recommend this, although if you haven't read the others, don't start with this one, you need the character background, and don't worry, the used bookstore has plenty of copies.

Oh frabjous day! Calloo callay!

(look that up if you don't know it)

So this year I paid more attention to the April calendar and certain "events".

Why?

Well, I think I wrote about this before...apparently in this area (I don't know about elsewhere), beginning about 2 weeks before Passover, and probably for a week or so after, you can actually get what is colloquially (and probably somewhat pejoratively) known as "jewish coke"...

Which is to say, Coke made with sugar.

OMG is that good. I went home and promptly over-caffeinated myself and was awake most of the night (apparently caffeine doesn't pass through me quite so well as it did when I was a lot younger :)

I bought about 45 bottles (it's only available in the 2-liter). Same price. Why can't Coke just go back to that? I called on the phone several years ago to ask about this, but whoever I talked to didn't know anything about the annual recipe change, and I hadn't heard of it yet.

NOT telling you where I got it, I don't need competition next year.

Presidential dining

Apparently when Obama went to Ray's Hell Burger there last week he wanted some Dijon mustard on his burger. Probably been even worse if he'd wanted the foie gras on it. (I happen to like some funky mustards, and have been known to put dijon on one)

And has since caught A LOT of flack about that, at least from the standard bunch of tired old conservative/republican talking heads. You can tell that their lives are pretty feeble if this is what they need to complain about.

Of course, you can tell this is all out-of-town chatter, because whoever wrote about it couldn't manage to get the restaurant name correct. This is probably the same bunch that thought "Freedom Fries" was a good idea.

---

I haven't been to Ray's HB, which is because I'm not much at my company office the past 3 years...Ray's HB is just up the road a tiny bit. Ray's The Steaks is even closer, and I have been to that, shortly after it opened; it's probably better now, I thought it a shade high-priced and under-good right at the beginning. [later: it IS better now]

Gimme that old-time religion

Oh, the irony.

Can you believe this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8041421.stm

Well, the Catholic Church is certainly an expert at mixing religion and politics--been at it longer than any other organization you can name.

Fallout 3 followup

Have played a decent ways into this...

recall the earlier I wrote that it seemed jerky at times...turns out that my machine has other stuff going on that causes it...not sure what, but as an example, if I let NAV run (which it generally does, overnight), that just about kills F3...even if nothing else is running.

F3 runs ok after a fresh reboot, but of course that's only good for a few hours before it's bedtime and NAV runs. Gad.

And as noted the terrain is kinda boring. There are two flavors: southwest US badlands-looking desert-with-rocks, and bombed-out buildings.

The other thing that is really bothering me right now is that a number of areas are only reachable by going through the subway tunnels...because they are actually separate maps that get loaded. You cannot just walk everywhere, from anyplace to any other place, as you could in Oblivion. This means that if the map marker you have to travel to is on one of those other map areas, you are going to have to figure out what combination of underground travel is going to get you to the right place (GNR is the first one where this is a hassle).

And you can't "noclip" to just fly over the buildings, that doesn't work. Bummer. I'm losing interest...I can't be more than halfway through the main quest, and that's after accidentally short-circuiting some of the early stages.

I wish Starcraft 2 was coming out sooner.

playing Fallout 3

I think I reported earlier how Fallout 3 installs ok, starts up ok, and plays ok *until* you get to this point early where your gf has just told you the cops are coming to arrest you. As soon as you exit your room, some script is triggered and the game crashes to the desktop for me.

So I let my son run it a bit on his computer (32-bit) and do some saves, so I could try to run from one of his early saves...which worked just fine.

In one sense, F3 is "Oblivion with guns". Except that I don't think it's as interesting...and my son has already finished the game, in just a few days...apparently when you complete the central quest sequence, the game terminates. Not interesting.

Have had some trouble with it, in terms of mouse-responsiveness, etc. It feels a little jerky in comparison with Big O.

I don't really/yet like the skill-leveling approach. Big O did this well...I.e., if you spend time sneaking, your sneak skill goes up. In F3, you have to get XP in order to level up, and then have skill points to spend to level-up individual skills. So there's little value to sneaking very much.

Son says you can read multiple copies of a skill-book and increase that skill multiple times.

I haven't gone very far yet, but it's not as interesting as Oblivion. It does have a lot of similarities, but the terrain isn't as interesting or variable (at least as far as I've gone). Looks like burned-out wasteland. Which of course it should, but that's all there is. I'd have definitely gone for more of the Wash DC buildings. It's not like that would be hard to do, since you could go photograph the outsides, and paint those results onto the models as wall textures...and a work acquaintance is telling me he knows how to extract a 3D point cloud from an image sequence taken as you drive past a bldg...instant-3D model!

Idiocy in Pakistan

Today is April 28, 2009. For reference.

What do you think the likelihood is of the Taliban taking over Pakistan this year? How about next year?

Personally, I won't be surprised if it happens this summer.

It *IS* going to happen. Soon. Not enough people there with a clue how bad that is going to be. Or how undifficult to solve. Hard to feel sorry for them...the only really bad part about this is that they'll probably have something in the way of a nuclear device.

Maybe I need to start a pool at work. That'd be interesting.

conservative writers

I do find it amusing reading the editorials in the Wash Post. Not sure if I've ever really changed my mind about anything based on them...Some are better than others.

in the Post, there are several conservative writers who appear regularly. Krauthammer and George Will are the most "prominent".

George Will wants to be William F Buckley the 2nd. You can tell this because he uses a lot of "buckley words" -- you know, the ones that cost $20. Buckley loved them. George does too.

So much so that you can measure the pomposity of Will's columns in "buckleys" -- i.e., how many buckley words he uses.

George Will is at his best when he writes about either baseball or First Amendment issues. The rest of the time, he's just a pompous, unhappy conservative.

But occasionally he's unintentionally funny, like a couple of days ago...when he wrote a column in effect showing what a geezer he has become, because he doesn't like the fact that so many people don't dress the way he wants them to, i.e., too many folks wear denim too often. And then he complains that too many people over 18 play computer/video games (probably would prefer that they listen to him pontificate [ooohhh, I used a buckley word]).

This reminds me SO much of the classic quote attributed to Socrates (approx 400 BC) about how the young people of "today" don't respect their elders and behave like their elders wish them to:

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

(the full quote is better, but seems hard to find online?!)

Socrates was pompous, too.

Old people

What is it with old people and sticker bushes?

You know what I'm talking about. If you are older, let's say past 50-something, live in a single-family detached house, eventually you are doing gardening in your yard. At some point you decide that what would look good is a sticker-bush, so you plant one. Or two. Or more...

This has a pleasant side-effect: kids will now avoid your yard, so you don't have to go out and yell "get out of my yard!" at them.

But still...I hate sticker bushes. Partly because I remember being a kid having to go through yards where there were sticker bushes...

So a few years ago my mom decided she had to have a couple of sticker bushes. Guess who had to trim them when they got too big? They're gone now, thank you.

But still...am *I* going to want a sticker bush in my yard in 10 years? Kill me now.

another brilliant statement in the Wash Post

"Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them."

The authors on this are a former SOCOM cmdr, former CNO, former SAC cmdr, former assistant USMC cmdr.

Who is being referred to here? Care to guess? When was this written?

----

Can't have women in the military, can we? Troops might get distracted.

But this one is about gays in the military. Any real difference between the two groups in this case?

News reporting n such

Loved the Jon Stewart new-A ripping on Jim Cramer. (As I recall, the last time Stewart really took someone to task a week later they didn't have a show any more.)

So there's this local nitwit, Richard Cohen, who writes for the Wash Post, who complains about Stewart's having done this...and goes on to prove he didn't actually watch the episode. And it all feels like whiny-boy stuff, and "how come my newspaper's not doing so well?"

Which of course is because newspapers are in the process of ceasing to exist. ALL of them.

Which is kinda sad, but probably inevitable.

More about the Jag

Spring is here, and I'm getting itchy to get the Jag fixed up and drive it.

Finally got a replacement (not new) alternator to try out (hope that's all that is wrong).

Just ordered new inner tubes for the wheels, so I can get the tires all replaced too. Then I can get out and really wind it up!

Having it out of commission the past few months has been painful...going past it in the garage, knowing I can't do anything but look.

Last I fiddled with it a few weekends back when there was some actual warmth outside, I took the non-functional A/C off, and the old ALT. With luck, this new(er) one...

O/S basics

I don't know why this is, the solution seems absurdly obvious...Only recently did calendar and address book functionality become part of the operating system, but it's so basic you have to wonder why it took so long.

It's not like that kind of info is difficult to store and make available...

I was back on this issue because of getting the new MacBook (17") at the beginning of the month (3/09). I wanted to get it set to read the calendars on my G5 and wife's Mini. But I had lost how to publish those other ones, in the Leopard upgrade a year ago. So we hadn't been sharing calendars for months. And that extended to our PDAs.

The problem has several aspects: #1--I don't want my calendars out on the web. I put things in it that are only for her to know about. #2--I'm not buying Leopard Server for another umpty-hundred $ (apparently "LS" has built-in assistance for managing this). #3--I wasn't remembering the correct name for what I wanted to do; I kept thinking it was CalDAV, which it would be for "LS".

What I needed was WebDAV for iCal. Regrettably there doesn't seem to be any helper tool around to get you through the awkward need to use Terminal (cmd-line). Not that I can't, been a unix user for nearly 20 years...but there are more than a few tiny details.

Turned out that I still had the old setup properly in place, I just needed to do the Apache parts, which are about creating a userid/password and a httpd config block. Of course, this means YAPTR (yet another password to remember), which really means it has to get written down somewhere...

I'm still migrating from the old Powerbook onto the new one...there's built-in help for something that complex...why not for WebDAV? Mostly done, except for things like my old address book, the keychain, mail archive, and probably something else I don't remember. I did the manual drag/drop so far, haven't run the migration tool. (Why not? Because I had to completely reconfigure my home network again. Seems I have to start over every single time I add a new wireless device, because I don't remember how I did it before. Even after writing it down. Too many passwords.)

Spelling check should have been part of the O/S years ago, too. Why wasn't it? It's not like that is hard either...granted, a big dictionary is a good-sized file, which would have been problematic >20 years ago, but now? Should be a standard function so that any app can use it.

Built-in general-purpose database, too. That, too, would have been a problem in the 80s...but it ain't now. Granted, there is no shortage of free databases around, but they take a lot of work to do anything, even something simple.

Which is why Excel became the defacto database for an awful lot of information. I mostly use Filemaker for that sort of thing, for my own personal data. It's pretty friendly.

But a built-in database would be the right kind of place to store all kinds of stuff...you could argue that the filesystem IS a database, and in a very loose sense, that's true, inasmuch as you can store anything. But it doesn't really have any built-in organizing capabilities; limited sorting; usually doesn't handle large quantities of files in a single folder very well...

What other things should be O/S built-in capabilities?

Text Processing etc, part 2

Been continuing on with another text processing tool. This one will be able to read in a story, and spit back the top several topics in that story.

Actually this is 3 tools. First is the training input creator. Second is the model creator. Third is the runtime document processor.

Training creator shows you an input doc (web-p, text file, etc; simple things), allows you to mark it with topics, and save the result. Hmm...just occurred to me: should I allow PDF as input? that's not actually too hard to accomplish, with a PDF ripper front-end.

Model Creator takes the training input and creates a recognition model. It's not a statistical model. I was thinking about using SVM (Support Vector Machine) in this, but that kinda wants actual percent probabilities, which I don't have. I probably could if I think of a way to normalize values.

Runtime processor receives the story you want to know about, and returns some topics.

I also use an english word dictionary in this (although I don't there's any requirement to do that). You'd think that finding a good one wouldn't be that hard...I thought that. But we are wrong! Finding dictionary files is not that hard, I have several. The biggest one I could find online had over 200K words, but you'd be amazed at the basic words that were missing... "cat", for example. And "horse"? You'd be likewise amazed at the really unusual words it DOES have: "catachrestically" -- what the heck is that? And why is "catawampously" in there? Have you ever even seen those two before?

This is a bizarre dictionary. And it's WAY bigger than the others I found...although it seems likely that the others have a lot more of the basic/common stuff and not so much the exotic words. Maybe I just need to merge them all...

But this weirdness has forced me to track unknown words, since a lot of them are fairly common.

Why can't we have a good, pretty complete, free dictionary word list? i.e., one that is better than the ones I've found recently...

Related to that: ever looked at WordNet? An interesting project. If you look around, you can find a number of browser-based WN viewers: enter a word, get a view of the words or phrases that are nearby in terms of some flavor of semantics. You also get use-type (noun, verb, etc). And some more exotic aspects that I don't quite know what they are.

What you don't get is also interesting, because I went looking for this. You don't get the root word for your word. E.g., if your word is "catawampously", the root word for that is "catawampous". So who cares about root words? Well, the topic-ID software would have a better model if I could convert training words and runtime-doc words into their root/stemmed form.

So I do of course know about the Porter Stemmer, I grabbed the java version, and have integrated that...problem is that it overstems, in my opinion. (I have read some of the more formal study work that compares stemmers; Porter is really good--for english--and really bad--for other languages. Porter is entirely suffix-based, and only knows english suffixes. (You could do the same thing for other languages, I'm sure.) Porter will make an error like stemming "heading" into "head"--where "heading" most likely means "direction" and "head" most likely means "part of your body where your brain is", although I suspect that both have less common usage that is exactly reversed. The formal comparisons suggest this is a small problem. So I don't know. It'd be easy enough to insert the Porter stemmer into the pipeline and try it out--except that I don't know how I'd tell if it was better...

Leads you to wonder why there's no serious dictionary-based stemmer...I've read about them, too, and what you seem to get is a hybrid that does a little of the Porter style, and more table-lookup.

So why isn't there a pure dictionary-based table-lookup stemmer? You'd base it off a really large dictionary (you see where this has been going now). That would not be perfect, you'd get some errors where the stem is different depending on noun/verb usage. You'd only need a hash-table to implement this. If you needed to be fancier, you could deal with the noun-verb-etc aspect, but figuring that out in the first place is probably more expensive than the error (and is itself an imperfect process, so you'd be introducing a different flavor of error into the answer).

This doesn't make sense to me...a pure dictionary-based stemmer would be time-consuming to create, but trivial to use. And it would work for all languages where root words exist (i.e., not chinese/japanese/etc). It'd be a little large, a complete english dictionary is a few megabytes, whereas the Porter stemmer code is a few kilobytes.

---

Further notes: this weird dictionary, "unabr.dict", appears to be associated with password-cracking...which might explain the missing common words. Might. Assoc with crossword puzzles, too?

This URL:

http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=solving:wordlists:about:start

seems to say a lot more about word lists, and "unabr.dict" especially. I downloaded all the word lists mentioned there. Should produce a better set than "unabr.dict".

Should also point out that when I have written "dictionary" here, I really mean "word list", not a dictionary-with-definitions-n-stuff. That probably explains why I found "unabr.dict" early on.

Also to be noted: these lists aren't going to contain names, excepting when names are other words. Vaguely annoying, if you're doing what I'm doing with word lists, because "Bernanke" and "Greenspan" are going to correspond to several money/gov't topics, and probably nothing else.

New computes

Had a rare opportunity yesterday...buy a brand-new Macintosh at a seriously discounted price. MicroCenter sent me a sale flyer last week, special pricing starting yesterday. Mac Powerbook Pro was $1799, 17", 2.5 GHz, 2GB RAM, 250 GB disk. Intel dual-core processor. Nice machine.

Deal too good to pass up, like when I got my refurb G5 in 2004. Only problem is that NONE of my existing Mac software will run on this machine...going to have to download entirely new versions of the freebies, and pay for a couple of others. At least I can do it piecemeal, unlike if I replaced my G5. Dreading that day...

So I got it home just in time to find out that my internet access is dead for the next 18 hours...sob!

Stephanie Plum...

my favorite funniest book character...new book "Plum Spooky" came out in Jan...why not before Xmas I don't know...that seems poor timing by the publisher.

Anyway...this is one of those "between the numbers" books. Previously they were a little different, there was more character development in them, and less going on. This one is actually a Number book sans the boyfriends, and with this "Diesel" guy instead.

Which is just fine, it is just a screamingly funny as the numbered ones, which the other "Betweens" were not.

Looking at the length of it: 300pp, just like the numbers books, and twice the thickness of the other "betweens" titles. I got it for 30% off at Borders Express at the mall, and read it over the next 48 hours...great fun.

You really gotta wonder why Stephanie hasn't been turned into a movie. (yes, Grafton hasn't either, and V.I. Warshawski was more like VI wash-out-ski, so maybe that's it--except that Plum would be a lot funnier than those others)

found a free game...

called NEXUIZ

it's a pretty serious download, 380MB for the zip file...it's basically a deathmatch FPS game. runs well on my XP-64 box. (whereas UT04 has gone bad for some reason)

get it here

I've only played it a tiny bit...it's based on DarkPlaces, a Q1-source-derived engine.

and I am stuck at a seemingly simple low-grav level. It's instagib, which is not my fave, and I'm doing badly...and this is an early level. Have not figured out the rest of the weapons, so previously I've mostly been lucky.

some online animation

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/movies/

in particular you want to look at Big Buck Bunny (8min) and Murnau the Vampire (27 min). BBB was an easy download. Murnau was not; apparently there are torrents, but that seems to not work for me any more...despite a brand-new BT. Which is too bad, this is an exceptional bit of animation; not available in hi-def, tho.

fwiw, F W Murnau was the director of Nosferatu, the first, silent, vampire movie. Apparently you can see it online HERE.

XML software

Can someone explain to me why it is that org.w3c.dom.Document (java api) does NOT have a method something like "writeToStream(OutputStream os)" which will dump the entire document to some stream (i.e., a file)?

Why? If the corresponding class "DocumentBuilder" can read a file (or URL), why can we not have a method to write?

I wrote one about 8 years ago, I know I can go find it, but sheesh...why?

(continuing here with man's favorite activity)

My computers...

Being unorthodox in most things...

I have a day job at an interesting company, which can remain nameless...I get to do some exotic stuff. And some pedestrian stuff, that's often a need too.

I mostly get to do things I like, which is great.

One of the things I get to do (because I choose to): I have my own computer. Well, really, all the engineers do. The diff is that I build my own from pieces. Everyone else: std config whatever the company is buying (well, with some variations, but not much).

Mine: completely different. This way I get what I want (which is NOT a generic Dell, which has gone from best to pretty sucky in recent years), when I want, and can upgrade when/how I want.

So I have this:



It takes an AMD Athlon x64 X2, 2GB RAM. On-board video plus a good PCI-Ex card means three monitors, which is pretty dang cool. And it is *quiet*. It's now 3 yrs old, so what was hot at the time is less so now; this doesn't really bother me a lot, except that now I am doing some work where more power would be helpful. (At the least I want a quad core, and 4GB RAM.)

I'm also thinking about a touch-screen, having played with those new HP units a little. Touch-position precision is weaker than I'd prefer there...but a touch-screen would be a nifty thing to do some UI work with, and there seem to be some < $1000 in the 25-inch range.

The process at work for getting a computer is kinda broken, inasmuch as I could get the Dell, but not something as slick as what I have. So I bought/built it myself. Replaced a drive when the original boot-drive started doing that bad clicking thing (see blog late 08 on this), got a video card aimed at decent game perf, just the right RAM (2GB dual-channel). My preferred kbd and mouse combos. My preferred monitors. Etc. I buy my own software, too, so I get what I want when I want.

New machine coming probably a year from now. If I can get something in roughly the same form-factor. With a 4-core or better CPU, at least 50% faster clock-rate.

This is the machine I do all my programming on. And nearly all my game-playing. And not much else.

My Macintosh G5 is where I do all the other stuff, like music, photos, video, database, taxes, personal info--the non-game fun stuff...that's had a chunk of upgrade, too, but less. RAM (5GB) and disk (1TB).

another Jaguar XKE note

having bought the car, I find myself noticing how many others ripped it off back in the 60s and 70s.

The original (this is mine):



It looks like nearly every sports car in the 60s was a rip-off of the style...without managing to look as good.

Felt like a blog on this, having seen the trailer for The Graduate go by last night on TCM. Didn't quite recognize Dustin Hoffman's car...it's an Alpha Romeo Duetto:

a little less curvy than the Jag, but clearly derivative.



As was the Corvette tear-drop:

which was clearly the previous body style updated to look like the Jag.

and the Datsun 240Z:

which did at least have a price advantage over the Jag (about half, actually).



Even the classic 1964 Aston Martin (the Bond car of all time):



which shows up briefly in the recent Bond film Casino Royale.

and of course the late 70s Mazda RX-7:

Computer gadgets

I had the Logitech wireless kbd/mouse combo...I really liked the kbd feel. the mouse was ok, the good part about the pair was that they worked together off the same wireless, and the mouse had a recharging dock...but the mouse had not been working too well in the dock for a while now, so when wife and I went to Circuit City, I got the last Logitech Dinovo Edge they had, for windows.



This is a nifty kbd, has its own dock for recharging (which is going to cause a problem when it can't hold a charge any longer). I'd like it a little better if the arrow-keys combo was shifted to the right about an inch. It's not, and the home/end/del/insert combo is now vertical instead of horiz, which means my game custom keys are out of whack...

It's a bluetooth kbd, which means it comes with a BT/USB adapter, and therefore I could get a BT mouse now...but I have this nice Logitech Nano wireless mouse I like...the one with the micro-transmitter unit.

So my wife now wants the same kbd for her Mac...I probably do, too, for that matter...except that I don't have bt on my mac; I think she does, but turned off.

Software errors

Nothing worse than having a bizarre error creep into someone else's software that you have to use, and it's too complex for you to fix...

take this example: google for "eclipse ioconsole updater error" and see what you get. I just moved to eclipse 3.4 yesterday, because it looks like I'm going to have to do some C code soon (feh!).

tweaked an older program today, to try out an enhancement (from a friend), and suddenly I've got the below error. This is something that has gone wrong in eclipse, has to do with your doing too much System.out typeout. Most of the complaints (man's favorite activity) you find in google on this subject suggest it's something about line length, but it's not. It's just total typeout.

Here's the actual error:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2009-02-08 17:43:10.270
!MESSAGE Unhandled event loop exception
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3777)
at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(SWT.java:3695)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:136)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Display.java:3800)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Display.java:3425)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runEventLoop(Workbench.java:2382)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.runUI(Workbench.java:2346)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.access$4(Workbench.java:2198)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench$5.run(Workbench.java:493)
at org.eclipse.core.databinding.observable.Realm.runWithDefault(Realm.java:288)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.Workbench.createAndRunWorkbench(Workbench.java:488)
at org.eclipse.ui.PlatformUI.createAndRunWorkbench(PlatformUI.java:149)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.ide.application.IDEApplication.start(IDEApplication.java:113)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppHandle.run(EclipseAppHandle.java:193)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:386)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:549)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:504)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1236)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledTextRenderer.textChanging(StyledTextRenderer.java:1295)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText.handleTextChanging(StyledText.java:5467)
at org.eclipse.swt.custom.StyledText$6.textChanging(StyledText.java:4850)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocumentAdapter.documentAboutToBeChanged(ConsoleDocumentAdapter.java:302)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.fireDocumentAboutToBeChanged(AbstractDocument.java:645)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1148)
at org.eclipse.jface.text.AbstractDocument.replace(AbstractDocument.java:1176)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.ConsoleDocument.replace(ConsoleDocument.java:82)
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.console.IOConsolePartitioner$QueueProcessingJob.runInUIThread(IOConsolePartitioner.java:533)
at org.eclipse.ui.progress.UIJob$1.run(UIJob.java:94)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(RunnableLock.java:35)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Synchronizer.java:133)
... 22 more


So it's just an array OOB problem. It arrived in 3.3, and is still present in 3.4, which I just started using yesterday.

Looking at the reported msgs and responses, it seems to be a problem in more than one place in the eclipse source code.

Gad.

Looks like I'm going back to 3.2, I can't live with this. Will only do the C dev with 3.4. Not worth my time to try to fix it for them.

Man's favorite activity

not sex...just as well, we'd have overpopulated ourselves to death.

not tv, although we do spend a lot of time on that...

no, it's complaining.

That's right...complaining. Came to this conclusion a couple of years ago...

look at my other post about How We Learn, that was the genesis. We complain about things that have made us unhappy. Why? Because when we are babies, when we complain (i.e., cry), we get made happy pretty quick--fed, diaper changed, whatever. I suspect that folks who complain a lot probably cried a lot as babies.

Oblivion, redux

Started a replay of Oblivion. Yes, I already put in over 1000 (yes, thousand) hours on this before...thought I would try out some alternate strategies.

1) How far can you level up in the training area? Well, sneak can be at 100. Block can be over 25. Other things can be in the 20s. How to get sneak that high: when you first encounter the "sneak" goblin, he never turns around, so you can level-up on that behind him. Thing to do is go to 25, so you get the damage bonus, then whack it and take the loot, and go into the next room, where there are the 4 goblins, incl the one on patrol. Wait until the patrol goblin passes by, then follow to find a stalagmite pair in the dark that you can get stuck behind. Now, put a weight on the forward key, and you can walk away for a while (this is going to take several hours). Come back when you need to approve the 50,75,100 level dialogs, and zowie! You are the Expert of Sneak. Unfortunately, you can't get Athletics up at the same time, you actually have to change position. For Block, you stand and let the rats attack you one at a time, and hold out your shield. This isn't fast, but it's effective. Heal yourself along the way, and kill the rats when you can't recover. Move on to the next one, perhaps with new armor. You'll want to repeat this routine again later, when you need to level-up on armor.

Bonus: pick a character type where Sneak is a major skill. This way when you leave the training area, you can go sleep somewhere and level-up 10-12 times immediately. (Course that might be dangerous, as the opposition is suddenly a chunk better than you, and you only have a punky weapon). If I could, I'd want to design a character type where all the things you can level-up on fastest/soonest are primary skills: Sneak, Block, Alteration,

2) Go straight for the Mages Guild, and do their tasks. Practice on some low-level spells that are not attack, while standing around. Your aim is to get to Alteration Level 50, because that is when you can use Chameleon--and you can enchant your armor with it. Along the way you have to either capture some souls, or find some loaded soul gems. IIRC, with Common souls, you can enchant Chameleon at 14%, Greater Souls at 17%, and Grand souls are 20%. You'll have to sleep-level-up along the way so you have enough Magicka to do the enchanting, but once you can, with Chameleon > 100%, you are undetectable by anyone, which pretty much makes you invincible. I found a couple of Grand Soul gems with grand souls in them, which is great, because you aren't going to encounter any for a while.

3) Good loot and interesting opponents don't really show up until about Level 10. Recall all the squawk when the game originally came out about how the opponents level'd up with you? i.e., the game does not ever get easier in terms of fighting...well, true enough, until you learn the trick about Chameleon. But the real problem is that you do need some money for buying things, but that's really only at the beginning, when you need to buy spells; you're going to find adequate armor on opponents. And excepting when you attack a clannfear which reflects damage, you don't even need armor when you have 100% Chameleon (other than needing to wear enough charmed items to reach that 100%).

4) Fast travel does nothing for your skill increases...but it lets you join Mages Guild sooner, and Chameleon.

5) Do the task about the missing brother in Chorrol/Cheydinhall, and then the follow-on about the missing sword, but DO NOT turn in the sword--you want to keep it and use it. This is the best sword you can get for a long time.

6) Clear out any relevant caves/etc BEFORE taking on any kind of escort assignment. NPCs all operate via Artifical Stupidity, so they are going to run into fights they can't win. Granted, official escorts can't usually be killed, but there's that one "take weapons to cave X and clear the goblins out" where they CAN be, and if one of them IS, later rumors mention your failure. Whats-er-name the orc and the Black Bow Bandits task, she can be killed too, but she does at least wait for you to say it's ok to tag along...and when you have Sneak 100 and Chameleon 100, you can kill anything anytime anywhere without taking any damage, so you don't want anyone else getting in your way.

7) Avoid starting the main story/quest line until you have Chameleon = 100. Fast travel around Kvatch to make certain...because once you start it, the Oblivion gates start appearing. They're fairly dangerous, but if you have Chameleon 100, you don't care.

8) Let summoned chars do your fighting. Until you have chameleon 100, this is important. Otoh, it does mean that your weapon attack skills atrophy.

9) When you go to Leyawiin, go to Rowena Galentius' house, and whack Everscamps to your heart's content. They won't attack you until you attack them, and even then only one at a time. I shot arrows into them for 10 Marksman levels. I whacked a bunch for ten Blunt levels. I punched a bunch for 20 Hand-to-hand levels.

10) Begin the game with "Bag of Holding" plug-in. This lets you carry an emormous amount of stuff, as opposed to going back and forth hauling loot to the merchants (which would otherwise be infuriating, and ultimately something you stop doing).

11) Do the paid training once you start having money. Granted, this is only 5 skill levels per major level, but you want to pay-train the major levels.

-----

Largely good strategies. I've played 120 hours, am level 12, Master of the Fighters Guild (didn't do that first time), near the top of Mages Guild, skill level ~50 on most (100 on sneak), Chameleon 100, have NOT begun the main story line so no Oblivion Gates yet, and I have not traveled too far or done too much yet. And I can continue to major-level-up for a while yet, probably at lest 5 more, maybe 10. MANY places to visit and explore.

Text processing concepts and tools

In the past 15 years, I have worked on text-processing software tools more than once, and I'm doing it again here of late.

While it doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to understand *most* of it, some aspects do get pretty exotic.

How I started way back when I've used several of the mentioned tools. Most don't really meet my needs or wants.

I participated in some of the MUC episodes (6 and 7, I think), and have known about the MET and ACE episodes.

There are others, of course.

There are other tools around that do the named-entity job. I wrote one myself, because the one I had used most a lot had some flaws I didn't care for (one of which was occasionally a show-stopper), and some experimental purposes.

What I would consider an interesting set of text-processing capabilities:

Tokenizer (separate words from each other and non-words)
Reconstitutor (re-assemble words or other things from separate tokens)
Stemmer (separate root words from their suffixes; Porter Stemmer is the standard)
Pattern matcher (match word sequences)
Name lists (annotated/typed names of whatever)
Dictionaries
Topic Finding
WordNet

----

Other related tools whose value I'm not convinced of:

POS tagging
Sentence splitting/parsing

-----

Why are these tools of interest or value?

There is a lot of text/words content on the Web, and in databases. No possible way to read it all, and nearly no way to even find out what you might *want* to read. How do you find all the stuff you *should* read? Or stories that mention things of interest? How do you find stories that are on topics of interest but didn't happen to use the words you expected (i.e., defeating google)? What if it was in a foreign language--which REALLY defeats Google..?

You need some help.

Which leads to the two tools of interest.

1) Named-entity recognition. Find various reasonably-unique-meaning words/phrases
2) Topic recognition. Stories on any given topic are likely to use a lot of the same words.

A third tool of interest would do this: recognize relationships between words in the stories; this could include the simple concept of pronoun-references, but could also be more complex relationships, like "Barack Obama is the President of the United States" would have a person name, a location name, a job title, and the relationship between all of them. In the MUC bake-offs this was known as Template Entity Recog. It's dramatically much harder than the others.

Name recog is important because you can use it to mark up stories as being about that particular name, without necessarily having seen that name before. Topic recog is valuable because you can then find stories "about" something-or-other, without having to know any of the right keywords. Of course the list of topics isn't going to be tiny, so choosing the right topic is not necessarily trivial.

-----

Peculiarities:

There are a few, but not many, human language families. One group are the "Romance" languages, which are derived from Latin. Many european languages are this type. There are the pictogram languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. There are a few oddments, like Thai, which has no related languages (IIRC). Arabic languages are another family.

Writing direction: left to right, right to left, top to bottom...likewise varies, but probably corresponds closely to origin.

Use of an alphabet, and whitespace. The pictogram languages don't have an alphabet in the same way that Latin languages do, nor do they use white space as word separators. I'd argue that these are fundamental flaws in the languages' written form.

All these things complicate computing, because they lead to language-specific solutions.

-----

Words are important. Without them you cannot express concepts, and you can't really invent new concepts. Language has to be mutable. But let's have the computer do some of the work.

Jaguar XKE notes

Have you seen this?

http://jaguar-xke.blogspot.com/2009/01/jaguar-xke-sports-car-have-you-ever.html

"You will pay less amount of money for second hand cars than for new cars. The difference in cost or price can going up to over ten thousand dollars. If you are thinking about buying a second hand car make sure to check the cost of a new car of the same type and see how much you can save."

(looks like ESL)

While that first sentence is generally true, it really isn't for an XKE. Not that you can buy a new XKE. You could certainly buy a different used Jaguar model, for a lot less. But a used XKE is *not* cheaper than a new car...cheaper than *some* new cars, but not many. OK, a cheap XKE might be more cheaper, but then it may well not be one worth getting, because you're going to have to do a chunk of work on it.

The rest of the blog entry is comparably off-target.

On Dying

Turned 50 last year. The end of my life is closer than the beginning. I have two grandparents who lived to be 90+, but I am certainly past the halfway point.

Feels like my health started downhill 5 years ago, beginning with the kidney stone. Actually maybe it began a couple years earlier with some kind of bronchitis attack. Throat hasn't been the same since. May be having the occasional heart murmur trouble the past few years.

Leads you to wonder...but that's not what this blog post is about.

I'd prefer to die pretty quick, rather than gradually deteriorate. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's, that's a slow degeneration. Alzheimer's is too; dementia, etc...and you're not allowed to decide to just die, and by the time you really need to be able to, you don't even have the ability to make the decision.

My dad died of pancreatic cancer. Gradual deterioration for six+ months, and then fairly quick the last 30 days. (I have the feeling he had some Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.)

Is this life all there is? Is there an after? What happens after? Should I want whatever it is? What would we be "reborn" as? Am I reborn as a human-shaped being? At what age? (i.e., am I reborn at age 25, or the same age as when I died?) Am I a more/less-likable person? Better looking? Am I still "me" physically and mentally? What about everyone else? Will I have to worry about job/income/housing/food etc? Just like now? Will I have to deal with the same amount of obnoxious other people? The same ones?

Read the comics enough, and the impression you get (at least from Family Circus) is that once dead and living in heaven, that is all about standing around on the clouds, talking. OK, that's not the daily struggle for food and shelter. But what happens when the obnoxious person decides he wants the cloud you're on?

If the afterlife is just like this one, I'm not too interested. I'm not going to be interested in fighting the same kinds of battles for all eternity. But I don't want to just stand around and talk. Reading on some religious-based websites you can readily find that heaven is not going to be much like this, but in ways that we cannot imagine, and that we shall all be made perfect. Which really means that a lot of us are not going to be the same person. Wants won't be the same, either, so one expects less inter-personal conflicts. Or maybe they are just different ones?

All unknowable. But you gotta wonder...

Artificial Stupidity

I started through Spellforce 1 again, as mentioned last month. Played as a fighter, did maximum FPS before doing any RTS on any level--it's like a different game. Started on the first expansion. It does look good on a 24" monitor.

And then I got hammered by the NPC's Artificial Stupidity again.

I started this expansion as a wizard this time. Never played as that char before, because it seems too hard--primarily because you run out of mana, whereas a fighter never runs out of sword. Useful to have such in the group, but not to BE such. I don't remember how I played this one level before; it has some scripted behaviors I can't control properly.

I'm at this point where I have to escort a group of refugees. They don't move very fast, but they will fight; and they're weak. So they are probably going to get killed. A couple of levels back I had a team of Dark Elves, one class of which can summon things, and another can revive dead as skeletons. So you really have a lot of extra fighters.

It should always be the case that when you have an escort mission, you should be able to tell the escortee(s) "Wait here!" because you are going to go clear a path. And then you should be able to go back and say "Follow me!" and have that happen.

I start a new map with these refugees, it's an ice/snow location. As soon as I move, they start heading towards this locked gate. The key to the gate is on some giant wolves nearby. So I have to kill the wolves. I have some ice elf archers, but the group of us is not strong enough to swarm the wolves. I have to do the whole rope-a-dope routine in order to stay alive. This means that the wolves will get close enough to get the refugees to attack, meaning I lose half the refugees.

If I could have told the refugees to stay put a ways back, wolf problem can be solved. (ok , alternative: only send my archers forward, me and the refugees stay behind until wolves are dead.)

So on we go through the gate. The refugees slog onward, we encounter additional opposition, but I can deal with that, until we pass the ice-elemental-spawner. They start to attack, and while they are up ahead, the refugees halt and wait for me to kill the elemental spawner. Well, I'm too weak for that, and the refugees will NOT follow me to the next gate. Which is going to mean we are all going to die.

This is because of unrealistic behavior. Artificial Stupidity. "Let's attack the giant wolves with our bare hands! They're only five levels stronger than we are!"

Is our President read?

Just a week ago, Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, reacts to an op-ed piece by Karl Rove some days earlier that I didn't see, asserting that apparently George W Bush reads A LOT. Apparently something like 100 books per year.

That's two per week. Really? Shouldn't take an Advanced Degree to figure this out...

For comparison:

I have been a heavy reader since about 1972 or so. Prior to that I just didn't have enough access. About 1970 or so I began to have enough of my own books that I was re-reading them a lot, in addition to new ones. Mom took us to the library fairly often, as she was a heavy reader too (from having been stuck in bed for a year as a child, apparently with TB, although apparently decades later that was debunked).

Since 1972 I've read about 3000 books. I still have most of them. That's almost two per week. The shortest ones are probably 125 pages. The longest, over a thousand pages.

I read fast. Damn fast.

In 5th grade I had a nearly unique experience in school--all the 5th-graders took speed-reading. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968/69, not a location you connect with advanced thinking like this...I'm not aware of this happening anywhere else, really. i was only there for a year, but this was almost unimaginably valuable. (I was back there in 10th grade, and took typing, comparably valuable.)

The scoop: we learn to read by reading aloud. (Think back on your earliest years in school, and before.) So we read at the same speed we talk. On average, this is about 150 words per minute. Everyone in my class started speed-reading training at 150 words a minute. The trick to going faster, in your brain, is that you have to decouple reading and speaking. This is doable by most folks, and pretty much everyone can progress to about 300 words a minute. This is roughly one page in a novel every minute (a page in a printed book usually has about 300 words, I've counted this a number of times in the past; it varies with font-size, but 300 is a good approx). I think I remember everyone in my class being at least at 300 by the end of the school year.

(Lacking speed-reading training, you don't read faster than you talk, and I don't mean the "Evelyn Wood" noise, that isn't really speed reading, but it too requires you to decouple from your speech.)

How was this done? They had a film-strip-like machine that would move a sliding box across a line of text, L to R, then repeat with a new line of text. (There's a computer program that more or less duplicates this, called "Ace Reader"; the sliding box motion is jerky rather than smooth, I found it jarring to try to read that way.) You have to move your eyes to follow the box, so you begin to separate eye movement and subconscious vocalizing. The complete text was a story. You'd take a quiz at the end. High enough score on the quiz, and you moved ahead 25 words/min the next week. The machine's speed incremented in 25 words/minute quanta. So we only did the jumps once a week. At the beginning of the training everyone is at 150. Next week, some still are, some have moved on. By the end of the school year, the spread has increased, and there are kids at most speeds. Nearly everyone has moved beyond 150. I am in the fastest group, at 625, along with 2 or 3 others. Yes--I read 4X faster than I did before.

Damn fast. I still read pretty fast now, but it's variable, depending on the content. A technical manual is a slow read; Janet Evanovich is fast, maybe even faster than 600...

Which means that most novels unfold for me at the pace of a theatrical movie. AND, it means that reading 100 in a year isn't that hard or unlikely. Altho these days I'm busy enough with other things that I don't read that many. Suppose you read one page/min. Suppose the average book is 300 pages, so Bush reads 600 pp/week. Roughly 100 per day, or 100 minutes per day. Does he actually have that kind of time?

But apparently in this Karl Rove article they've been keeping a list of them (which sounds a bit artificial to being with). I haven't seen the list, apparently Cohen has. Apparently the list content has its own interesting features, but that's his discussion. My blog entry argues against his even having done the reading, regardless of what it was.

I don't even have a list of what books I've *bought* in the last year, much less read.

But wait...what did Rove mean by "read"? Did Bush read every word? Or just the first paragraph in the chapters? Skim the chapters? If we assume he reads at 150, then he didn't read 600 pp/week. The President just would not have that kind of time, that's about 3 hours per day. Any more, *I* don't manage to have 3 hours/day for it (although 100 pp takes me < 1 hour).

Cohen's article is about the books themselves. Apparently they are biographies, and their thematic content is such that they would be reinforcing Bush's self-image, and offering some personal vindication for his actions as President. Are there in fact 500+ books like that so that one *could* read that many? That too strikes me as unlikely--but I can imagine it, and if there's really a list...

My conclusion: the mechanics of it indicate that Bush does not, and has not, read 100 books per year. (Of course, if he's had that same speed-reading training I have, well, maybe he did.)


(Aside: why I think this reading machine does this well: our eyes/brains are attracted to motion. Why? I think it's probably ancient racial memory--things that are moving could be predators, so we need to focus on them. There's an interesting bit of imagery/video I'm thinking of here; it begins with a still photo, mostly of non-uniform vertical lines, but when you see part of it move you are able to resolve that it is a tiger (vertical stripes) obscured by nearly-vertical vegetation leaves; no motion = no danger, motion means the tiger (danger) needs to be watched.)