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.)

How we learn

A theory. Which I have, and that is mine. A-hem.

Yesterday I happened upon another paper about how infant learning takes place...it has long seemed to me that those who write about this didn't have kids. So they're inventing some kind of explanation. This particular paper was about learning language. Are we born with the ability to process or language, or is that a learned thing? (i.e., the classic "nature vs nurture" argument).

What I think we are born with is a pattern-matching feedback system. That's all.

In fact, I think that's all you need. Well, plus some chemical enjoyment feedback when patterns are matched and repeated, for positive reinforcement.

Think of it this way: what do babies do? They watch things. They wave their arms and feet a lot. They put things in the mouth (because the first thing that goes in their mouth makes them happy--getting fed). Imagine an audio and video pattern matcher, completely untrained, just receiving a huge amount of input all the time. Mostly it's junk, but it's not random junk--it's the parents, and the rooms in the house. Not much changes there, so there's lots of time for reinforcing imagery and sound.

Imagine that the waving of arms and feet is all essentially random motion--random neural firings (what else can it be, really?). But the mid-brain is aware of the nerve-firings that cause the arms to move, and the eyes will eventually see the motion, and the feedback connection will be made that leads to awareness of causality: "these nerves and thoughts lead to this visible motion". Patterns will match, reinforcement occurs, and thus memory.

Recall why it is that a deaf person doesn't learn to speak: the feedback loop for the pattern-matching is broken. No feedback, no learning, because the muscular control can't be tested.

Learning is all about pattern-matching. Learning something new is usually based on matching an existing pattern. Otherwise it takes a lot longer, because you have to generate new base patterns. Thus we always start with simple things.

Analogical reasoning is all about matching a pattern, and extending it.

So why haven't we used this approach to teach a computer to speak like we do? Beats me. Probably because it would take just as long as teaching a baby--years. So we have tended to take different approaches that go from zero to sixty in one leap, rather than zero to one to two to three...

We learn things when we are ready to learn them. Which means that we have to have enough base patterns to correlate against.

Some people are better about doing this pattern-match than others. They learn faster and earlier. We learn most things by watching others. I have personally observed this in action a couple of places: #1 being the DC Metro subway system. Watch someone who wasn't born here and doesn't read/speak english try to figure out how to use a farecard machine. Can only be done by watching what others do to get one--because you can't get through the turnstile without it. You observe what someone else does, then you try to do it too. Receiving a farecard = success, you are happy because you have the card, so there is positive reinforcement. Next time, you might have to watch again, but that is reinforcing a pattern, not creating one, so it goes faster.

When you hear someone speak and you don't understand them, you want them to go slower, or talk louder, because your learned patterns aren't being matched. If that person has an accent, you might have to hear unusual words (or words that match the sound but not the context) more than once in order to match the sound AND the context.

You'd think that this is an experimentally verifiable behavior. No one seems to have done (far as I've read, which hasn't covered this topic for a while).

How hard could it be to do it?

Hamas and terrorism

So this latest attack by Hamas was entirely predictable. So is the next one. Hamas's legitimacy and public approval had dimished quite a bit in recent months, so they allowed the cease-fire to expire, and starting shooting rockets again. The Israelis did the predictable thing and fired back, quite a bit stronger, and now Hamas gets the benefit of sympathy for dead civilians. The locals is Gaza will have to stand behind their "elected government". Hamas is only legitimized by opposing/attacking Israel, so it had to do it. And it will do it again.

Make no mistake about this: Hamas has no intention of EVER concluding any peace deal with Israel. Not going to happen, any more than Arafat was going to. It's not what they want. Arafat's existence and continuation as PLO leader was permanently predicated on the ongoing suffering and victimization of the Palestinians.

Granted, Israel is being very heavy-handed about some things, like the blockade Hamas wants halted. That could be done differently--of course Israel is worried about the importation of weapons, which would inevitably happen, but then again it's already happening, isn't it?

By the endless self-victimization practiced by Hamas and the PLO, the Palestinians manage to be permanently the target of sympathy by the rest of the Arab world, and Israel continues to be hated. This is their goal.

But of course the rest of the Arab world is equally vested in this arrangement; witness the land blockade of Gaza by Egypt--that border is closed--if the Egyptians wanted to actually *help* the people of Gaza, it'd be trivial to do so. In some larger political sense, that's not in Egypt's interest, it'd look too much like peace with Israel, assimilation of Gaza, and the permanent existence of Gaza as separate from a Palestinian return--i.e., a separate nation-state--and the end of a good reason to continually harangue Israel about Gaza.

So the person quoted in the Wash Post yesterday: "why were my children killed? did they have AK-47s?" No, they were killed because the adults failed to report the presence of terrorists among them, and when those terrorists attacked Israel, Israel hit back. So I say to the people of Gaza: you want peace, stop shooting rockets at Israel. Report to appropriate authorities (by which I mean not Hamas) others in the population who would undermine or prevent that peace.

And be glad that it's not me in charge of the Israeli army--I would have been on tv saying "for every rocket launched at Israel, we will immediately flatten 3 buildings in Gaza. And the bulldozing of the rest will start after one week." I would raze Gaza to the ground, leaving nothing larger than a basketball standing. Push everyone out, into Egypt. Once Gaza is cleared, shoot at anything that moves. Turn Gaza into a live-fire bombing target practice zone, permanently.

another computer fix story...

A longish one again.

A few days ago the machine starting making the clicking noise that disks make when they are about to go bad. This noise indicates that the moving head spindle stepper motor is having problems engaging for some reason. O/S blocks while waiting for the disk to engage, position, and read. It had been happening every couple of weeks, in particular when the disks had been idle for some hours, for months.

Then all of a sudden it was ever minute, or every few seconds...pending disaster. Worst thing--it was the boot disk doing it, although I didn't know that right away.

So I went looking for a NAS unit that I could configure as RAID 1 (the mirroring approach, for fault tolerance). Figured I'd just start moving all the files that aren't part of booting onto the NAS. Cost of a RAID 1 NAS unit looked like it would be$300-$350, incl a pair of 500GB drives.

Best to get one with hardware RAID, if possible, and that has passworded control over access. Otherwise it's going to be open on my wireless net (well, not completely open, of course, I do have acess control set, and MAC-address limiting, but that stuff is spoofable/crackable).

So I evolved a plan whereby I would start with a 1 TB drive, use that as part of the copying shuffle, and order a RAID NAS. Then I discovered it was the boot drive that was failing.

This is a far harder problem--you can't just drag files around to make a copy of a boot disk. You also need the deep hidden things like the Master Boot Record, and some other low-level stuff that Windows Explorer can't get at. In addition, Windows Explorer can't copy files that are somehow in use (there are several things in your home-dir that are un-copyable that way).

So I used the new 1TB drive as a holder for data needing to be copied. At first I thought I'd just move drive E: content onto the 1 TB disk (ultimately this was right), and then clone C: onto E:.

I had plenty of space to shuffle things around...the real issue, and the centerpiece of this blog, is how do you clone a disk? What I want is to essentially make a new/different disk look exactly like the boot disk, then remove the boot disk and be back to where I was.

Earlier in the year I did it several times on my Mac G5. There's a nice convenient, easy to use tool for OSX that does this one thing: Carbon Copy Cloner. That's what it does. I did several disks this way, because I wanted to migrate from the original 160 GB disks (which were nearly full, because of MP3s and DVR) to 500 GBs, AND I wanted to install Leopard as well. So I figured I'd clone the boot disk, then install Leopard on the boot disk, and if I had to go backwards, that'd be easy. This whole process went just fine. Have had zero trouble with it, the clone was bootable, etc.

Windows is not so simple about this.

Well, ultimately, it kinda is, although not trivial. There appear to be two competing products for this, and some also-rans. And some freebies.

The big two are Acronis True Image Echo Workstation, and Norton Ghost. I also came across Paragon Disk Copy, which appears to be third.

What'd be ideal is if I could take the 1 TB disk, partition in two, with a smaller partition matching the boot disk, and have that regularly re-image the boot disk, and my old drive E: stuff on the bigger partition. That way I'd always have a safe partition I could use as emergency boot.

That doesn't seem to be one of the possibilities.

I downloaded the Paragon demo, but it doesn't actually work. Well, it does, sort of. You can walk through the mouse-clicks, see the dialogs, etc, but then it doesn't complete the task. You have to buy the thing to find out if it's going to work for you. So I uninstalled that immediately.

This is an odd issue here...online reading suggests that not all tools work for all people.

This URL provides a decent list of the available tools, but it's not complete (altho it did list things I didn't find earlier).

I did the acronis download, and knowing that Ghost was in use at the corporate office, I blasted an email there to see who used what, and how well it had worked. Responses mentioned Ghost and Acronis.

Acronis is a 15-day trial period...more than adequate for me to test-drive and see if it does what I need.

Answer is: yes, it did what I wanted, it went pretty fast...with one weird glitch that I didn't understand at first. My machine has motherboard onboard video, which it turns out is display 0, i.e., first in line for video, like the power-on self-test startup stuff you see. Acronis images your drive by a special reboot that then does the copying...which you can only see on display 0. Which meant that I was seeing nothing, because I didn't have the 2nd monitor plugged in. I could hear the disk activity (and the undesirable clicking), but I didn't know about progress. Or when it was done. This was getting alarming after a while.

Then during a phone call to a coworker who'd recommended Acronis, after he did his own separate test run and saw the right stuff, I realized that I would have too if I'd had the other monitor plugged in...too late at that point, I was already rebooting.

Anyway, it all went well, although it did take me nearly five days to get it resolved.

So: recommended tool: Acronis True Image Echo Workstation. Did the job for me.


I maybe still ought to do the RAID NAS thing...

great quote

it's political...from Talking Points Memo, referring to the Blagojevich issue this week.

"What could be more patriotic than to distract a presidency from its first attempts at fixing a damaged nation?"

What do you bet there will be no Republicans who come out saying it is not ok to criticize the [new] President on a wartime footing. They certainly said it about Bush--will they say it about Obama?

It's ok to criticize the President anytime. Has to be.

That said...it needs to be a valid criticism. Distractions are dangerous time-wasters. This attempt to smear Obama with some of the Blagojevich crap is just that. I'd be willing to bet that the guy doing it, apparently Mike Duncan, head of the RNC, would be unable to be so obnoxious and strident if he actually had to say the words to Obama's face.

Economics

I had a shitty economics class in college. Engineering econ, it was called. Textbook written by the prof; class was Sept 27 to Dec 17 or some such, book did not actually get printed and to the Univ until Thanksgiving.

and on top of that, what it covered was essentially useless. Only thing I got out of that class was the trivial knowledge of how to calculate compound interest. We're talking 1978 (or was it 79?), so this was before advanced math calculators could to that, and before Excel or 1-2-3.

Class *could* have covered real valuable content, like how to cost and budget a engineering proposal, estimate manpower needs for a project, how to manage costs over time. But no.

and now it's 2008. Dec 2008. The economy is in a slump. Big time. Well, the economy was in a slump when I graduated from college. So it will come back.

But what's the deal? There's a really simple explanation you won't ever hear.

Economics, the world economy, our capitalist model, is basically a pyramid scheme. It requires that there be new products and new customers ALL THE TIME.

ok, so as long as the population is growing, there are new customers. But businesses have to keep growing lest the competition take their customers away. Which leads to the need to borrow money--and if there's a hiccup in that, the pyramid turns out to be a house of cards, and starts to collapse.

In addition to the greed. This is the essential flaw in Greenspan's thinking: it doesn't account for criminal behavior by the participants. Like this: when someone thinks up the "derivative" idea of bundling mortgages into a package that can then be "securitized" and resold to investors, the thing you most want to do is resell quickly--i.e., fast turnaround, with a sliver of profit in the sale. You can claim that the risk is low, because the securities are backed by real estate, which always has solid value. But there isn't anyone in the chain, other than the homeowner, who actually *wants* to own the property. The problem there is that once you put enough distance between the homeowner and the ultimate holder of the securitized loan bundle, the investor doesn't know whether the homeowners can actually pay the loans. What's worst is that the mortgage maker who originated the loan doesn't care, ultimately. Said maker wants to make loans, and resell bundles of loans, the fast the better. So you make it as easy as possible to get a mortgage loan, which leads to more people bidding on houses, prices going up, and eventually people being unable to really afford their houses, but have them anyway. The mortgage maker makes a little money from originating the loan, and more when it is resold. The faster that can be done, the better--and they can make new loans as soon as previous ones have been sold. So much for needing due diligence on the buyer's being able to afford the thing, why do you care? You're going to pass the risk on to someone else, that someone isn't likely to investigate the buyer.

But there is going to be a sort of ceiling in prices on houses. They can only go so far upwards before people just can't buy.

As soon as there's a hiccup...those loans turn out to be non-performing. Then you have to wonder about the value of the thing. Housing prices being cyclic, at some point they will be going back down, and maybe then you have the value inversion.

Which is why the screwup in how Treasury and Congress are handling this is happening. They aren't dealing with the loans issue. Banks have asked for money, but are paying operating expenses with it.

And this happens this way because it's a pyramid scheme. As soon as there stop being new customers (or customers able to pay), things start back downward.

A way to solve this for the future: require that mortgage originators hold the loan for a minimum of three years before they can sell it. You know that if the originator knows it has to hold the loan, it is going to be very careful about knowing the buyer can pay. As opposed to recent years, where that absolutely did not matter.

Spellforce update

started a round of this again...was suddenly feeling curious about whether playing the game from the beginning without making bases and armies was a winning strategy...

Yes.

In fact, on several of the maps ("islands"), you can run the table without ever activating one of the elf/human/dwarf monuments. You probably always want to do your heroes, but they don't attract attention, unlike the other monuments.

In fact, there was one map where I had a really hard time because I started building an army immediately, last time, that turned out to be pretty simple if I ran it by myself. You have to destroy five commanders, which opens the gate into the big enemy base; there's already an army in there, which you cannot take on, and there's no need to try. That army goes hunting around for you, but the cool thing is that as soon as that army leaves the base, you can stroll in behind it, and destroy the entire place. Solo.

The other thing I decided to do this time is play it from first-person view the whole time. Well, almost the whole time. Turns out that's not effective for certain things, like placing your base buildings, or click-n-drag-select an army team; yeah, you do have to have them sometimes, but generally you can do all the hard work yourself, making it a lot simpler to build an army without being continuously attacked along the way.

Science Fiction novels

I encountered this again this past week...having begun reading David Weber's "Off Armageddon Reef" -- it's clear where an author's real knowledge/experience are, and usually clear where it's not. His seems to be nautical, and naval, in the time-frame of 1400-1850...that era of human naval battles and tech advances plays heavily in the middle of the book.

What's also clearly NOT his expertise is at the beginning. Book starts in roughly 2430 AD. i.e., just over 400 years from now. Tech advances between now and then are only vaguely imaginable right now. Think backwards 400 years. Jamestown has just been colonized the year before. Shakespeare is still writing. Galileo has NOT yet published his round-earth and heliocentric writings--the earth is still flat, in essence. Electronics, computing, nanotech--all inconceivable and unexplainable. What tech will exist 400 years from now?

At one point Weber says something along the lines of "they couldn't smuggle a computer out because it was too big". I'm sorry, in 400 years computers won't exist the way we think of them now, and they darned sure won't be big. My guess is that long before then computers will have evolved into nanites that essentially exist everywhere, in unimaginable quantities. They will run through your veins. They will BE your clothes, and will dynamically change color/style/shape. Your nanites will be DNA-reconfiguring, protective. The internet won't exist as this separate thing we now have, it will be ubiquitous.

But his book is predicated on things not happening like that...which leads to my central complaint. If you are an author, but not a tech expert, HIRE someone who IS a tech expert, and have that person read your book from early on, so you don't write something that is so far off-target.

Weber's book is enjoyable enough, kind of a Hornblower-on-another-planet story. and the premise is totally dependent on things being pre-steam-era low-tech. So the story is really about post-Renaissance but still feudal politics and religion. You've read THAT before...

But the main character turns out to have to be a recorded personality installed in a very strong robot...if such robots exist, why did they not fight the battle against the aliens that's in chapter one? Said robots don't need O2, don't need food, don't sleep. So they don't need spaceships anything like what people would need...so they could be fairly bizarre looking, incorporate much funkier designs, no worry about things like life support, radiation shielding, low-gravity propulsion...your largest issue would be micro-particles ripping holes in spaceships.

So if you can't get the tech details straight, LEAVE THEM OUT! and don't base the story on premises that couldn't possible be true...this one: the aliens nearly wiped out humanity, and will be around to finish the job if they detect any RF signals from far far away. So I expect that by 2432 AD, or 3200 AD, there probably won't be any more RF anyway. What would be the point? Networks will have evolved from copper to fiber to quantum long before...broadcast will have gone from RF to cable to fiber to __? Satellite comm will be burst-mode laser soon, and quantum eventually. So no RF to detect anyway. Sorry--premise doesn't hold water from the get-go.

On buying a Jaguar...

Mind you, that's a 3-syllable word. Jag-u-ar. Said with british accent.

Went and got the car last weekend, drove it home. $20k.

It is British Racing Green, of course. Not the original color, it turns out, which was a light blue. (See Jeff Dunham's comments on that color, on youtube).

I have a variety of things to do with the car, some percentage of which have to be done before I can register it for driving. Turns out, here in VA (and elsewhere, apparently), I can register a car as an antique, and it doesn't have to be safety inspected. Just by being 25 years old, it doesn't get emissions inspection. So I can work on it until it can pass safety, then I can have it be for regular driving.

So I've been making a list of what all to do. None of which is likely to be *cheap*, per se, but some things at least won't have to be TOO expensive. I hope.

something about religion...

on SEB, I found this interesting...

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/why_would_god_bother_at_all/

I'd have a different/related take on the idea...I have to disagree with the notion that God knows everything past, present and future...life would be uninteresting...he'd be overmuch like Dr Bloody Bernofski.

Likelier: suppose you were God, and you *could* create the universe, why would you do it? I imagine that you'd do it because it would be an interesting experiment, and you'd do it in such a way that you *couldn't* know how it would go in advance...thus the laws of physics and chemistry that include creation-flavored processes, and entropy, and lots of randomness to prevent perfect prediction.

You'd create the universe with the explicit intention of having intelligent life evolve in it, even if that takes a while, and you'd watch what happened. You probably wouldn't take direct interest in any single individual life, you'd just watch things in general, see what they invent.

And you'd design/create the universe in such a way that life would be reasonably common. Not ridiculously so, but interestingly so. What would be the point of making a universe with a gazillion galaxies, each with a gazillion stars, if you were only going to have life on one planet?

I imagine that being the case because that's what I would do. In fact, I've thought about creating a "universe" of sorts, or rather a simulation of a tiny subset, as a computer program. It'd be some like Spore (computer game), but not identical, because I'd be in tinkering with various aspects (not being omniscient like God, I'd have to be changing the underlying "physics" of the simulation to cause more things to happen; i.e., more life, more variable life...let's face it, rocks orbiting/spinning around is not too exciting).

Life and evolution are so much more interesting than total predestination.

Health-related humor

You know the question: which is more painful, a root canal, or a trip to the DMV?

I recently had the opportunity to do both on the same day, which turned out to be a Friday.

The root canal is worse.

On a Saturday, it might be the other way around.

Time for some politics

It should be clear to anyone who thought about it hard that the North Koreans really had/have no intention of actually shutting down and dismantling/destroying the Yongbyon nuclear plant. The only reason I can think of that they would agree to allow the inspectors in etc is because they had already removed everything that they cared about that was portable...i.e., nothing to see remained behind.

And therefore bringing it all back would be relatively simple, as soon as it was appropriate to do so. Which it now seems to be...

You can figure the same will be true in Iran as well. Excepting that at the moment, they are busy bragging about all their centrifuges, when the time comes that they have to allow inspections, it will probably turn out that they tell us they were lying about how many they had...but that will be a lie too.

So don't be surprised by what's going on in North Korea. It was always going to happen this way. They have no intention of not having nuclear fuel processing capability, and will lie about it every time.

Personally, I think we should have gone with the invasion route a few years ago. You don't seriously think we couldn't invade NK and pound the crap out of them, do you? Station two carrier battle groups offshore, there's plenty of space there between NK and Japan, start the air assault, drop HARM missiles on their radar installations, continuous targeting of the DMZ, Patriot batteries to protect SK (because you know that NK's #1 target is Seoul (#2 targets are in Japan), not us, as in "if you attack us we'll hit your friends"), continuous air assault on all the military installations across the country (which, in fact, isn't all that big), a few diversionary sea landings along the eastern coast (also with close air support), and of course the final ground assault across the DMZ once it and all the troops on the north side have been pounded into rubble.

i.e., no land war until physical installations have been pounded flat.

You also have to figure that NK has left a few goodies behind that are going to blow up later, so we don't want to be standing around waiting at the DMZ.

Of course, what would actually happen would be that as soon as the first CBG started to get close, NK would go all crazy and launch missiles at SK, and probably throw some of their experimental stuff at us. We'd want to begin with a number of Patriot counter-missile batteries, brought in quietly. Then the CBGs. and eventually pound Yongbyon into rubble no large than peas.

iPods

Apple announced a new round of iPods last week. Annette wants the new silver 16GB nano. I got the old 160GB classic, since it was discontinued and it sounds like they won't do another high-capacity unit again.

I have about 100GB of stuff on it at this point, so I have 60GB available...I probably won't ever fill that all the way...I'm not into video on the ipod, although I do have most of Strongbad on it (*that* is why you get a video-ipod).

This is my 3rd one. First I had a 20, then a 60, both of which got filled a little too easily...now, everything I have in terms of music will go to about the 3/4-full point.

Nice.

Jade Empire

Having done an upgrade (well, to Win XP) on the older PC, it turned out that Jade Empire installed ok and played. My son already ran through the game, in roughly a week.

Seems overly linear to me, and I have not figured out the combat system. Don't like it, though...I can't tell whether I am supposed to continue clicking on targets or what.

The voice acting is pretty good, but despite it supposedly being chinese people, they have clearly no accent whatsoever.

Otherwise, it's kinda a Crouching Tiger appearance...

Travel

What is it with women and travel?

You know the story...retirement comes around, and they want to travel.

*I* want to have retirement be my home time--where I can have plenty of hours to work my projects that don't get enough time now, and read, and so on. Travel prevents most all of that.

Travel via driving isn't so bad as travel via flying--I *really* don't like flying. Airports have become such a hassle. If I never fly anywhere again, that's fine with me. Driving, altho slower, I'm ok with.

What I don't know yet is how much she wants to travel when the time comes...part of the problem, I think, is that when at home they can't relax, really let go...gotta worry about laundry, dishes, phone calls, etc.

Gotta learn to let go.

Getting Old, and what to do

I'm going to turn 50 shortly...already got the letter to join AARP a month ago (and sent it back with the $, so I'm official)...and then, last week, when Annette asked me "what do you want for your birthday (besides sex)? You're turning 50, don't you want something special?"

and suddenly it struck me: The XKE! It's time for the mid-life-crisis sports car! And I've wanted one since I was about 10. Click here for a gazillion photos.

So I've been investigating them online...there's a fair amount of interesting info, history, tales of restorations, plenty of photos, and apparently plenty for sale, from junkers that were literally "found in a barn" to immaculate restorations that are probably *better* than they were when they left the factory; and of course the prices reflect all that, too.

And fortuitously, just this past weekend was the local Jaguar Club annual meet (with judging). About 10 XKEs were there, including the (apparently) #2 show car in the US (VERY nice looking).

It did come in a variety of colors, but British Racing Green is, imho, the only one to have; red, and a pale yellow seem next-most common; I'd be ok with the yellow, or a silver-gray. More convertibles ("OTS") were made, but I have never liked them as well, so I'm getting the hardtop ("FHC" or "2+2").

I'll be getting the series two (68-70) model, probably a 69.

One good reason to get a car like this: evidence that women are turned on by them

I'd probably go for a series 3 (the ones with the V12 engine) except that I really don't like the bumpers on them, those are stupid bumpers. The wire wheels are best, too.

Jags have a rep for problems and breakdowns. Not looking forward to that sort of thing, so it'll be important to start upgrading parts pretty soon.

I've found one this is almost exactly what I want...BRG exterior, but black leather interior (hot!) and no A/C (hot!). If I still lived in Texas, no way I'd buy this one. My first car, when I moved to TX, had black vinyl interior (Dad's fault), and no A/C (my fault). Never again down there.

A little higher-priced than I'd have preferred, but I think I won't have any issues with it right away, which is critical.

Plenty of new stuff to learn...fortunately, with an engineering degree, and some experience in car repairs on another car from '73, I have some existing knowledge...

Should be interesting.

an interesting blog by someone else...

Here it is (yeah, that's the guy with the goofy-looking beard/hair inversion I wrote about last week)

Pointing out some amazingly ridiculous things. Dangerous things.

Like this


and this

although that graph is clever, if you compared it against which party controlled congress, it'd be different...Dems controlled Congress while Reagan and Bush 1 were prez...and the President does NOT write budget bills--Congress does. An awful lot of people seem not to remember this (there was a fabulous ObviousMan cartoon on this topic ("The president can't make tax law!"); click here for the homepage)

Facial hair

Can someone explain to me why it is that so many guys grow a beard when they lose it up top?

http://stupidevilbastard.com/graphics/seblogo.jpg