| The Sun now rose upon the right: |
[Jan. 30th, 2009|03:57 pm] |
I haven't posted here for a while, and some people may have noticed I made some big changes to my friends list. I've decided not to really use livejournal any more. I'm going to keep my account around so that I can read friends-only posts, but otherwise I'm reading public journals via RSS and I'll be posting new stuff over at my blog, http://arctangential.com. I've replicated all of the content from here over to there, but I probably won't bother deleting the stuff here for a while.
I may actually post a new entry there at some point in the future, too. Life is exciting. |
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| This erring mortals levity may call |
[Dec. 31st, 2008|04:58 pm] |
Well, there goes 2008. I did manage to meet my reading goal for the year; 120 books with an average page count of 300 per book. Actually 300.04, but who's counting? I almost didn't make it; I do most of my reading on the bus to and from work, and with the terrible weather and the holidays, I haven't been on a bus in weeks. It was close going up to today, but this morning I inexplicably woke up at 4:30 and sat down to read. I finished Straight over lunch this afternoon, bringing me right to the finish line. Here's my final stats for 2008:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 120
Pages: 36005
I hope everybody has a good New Year's Eve and a productive 2009! |
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| Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|06:25 am] |
I haven't done a book status post for a while, and since I'm snowed in this morning, I figured I might as well. I was also holding off making this post until I finished Michael Moorcock's The Vengeance of Rome, the last in a 4-book series called "Between the Wars". I've been waiting to read these books for something like 15 years; I bought the first two books, Byzantium Endures and The Laughter of Carthage from the remainder table of the Border's in Framingham, MA when I was in high school. I waited something like 3 more years until I was able to find a copy of the third book, Jerusalem Commands, which I thought at the time was the past book. It turns out, of course, that there was a fourth book, and Moorcock didn't finish it until last year.
I could write pages and pages about these books. They're like nothing I've ever read before and I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with a concise description for them. They follow the life of a man born on January 1st, 1900. His name is always unclear; we meet him as Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, or Pyat, but he changes his name on a regular basis as it most benefits him. The books follow his life from the age of 18 (at the end of WWI) to the age of 36 (at the beginning of WWII). He travels all over the western world, starting in the Ukraine, moving all over Europe and then on to the USA, then to northern Africa and then back to Europe. He works as a movie star, invents a laser beam to fight the reds in the siege of Odessa, ends up as a sex slave to a mad hermaphrodite in the Sahara, works to build Mussolini an air force and even dresses up like a woman to be Hitler's dominatrix.
Part of the joy of these books is Pyat's complete self-involvement and inability to see the reality of any person other than himself. He lies almost constantly through the books; he invents not only new names, but entirly new personas for himself as they're needed. He pretends to be a count, to be a Colonel in various armies and to be a member of almost every major political faction in the world. While doing this, however, he is unable to recognize when anyone else is ever lying, taking everything said to him at face value. Even though the books are written in his voice and we see his world through his own warped vision, it is entirely clear to the reader when people are tricking him and he never, ever catches on.
Anyways, I'll stop there. Here's my stats:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 114
Pages: 34994
I know I said when I started this that I wouldn't be reading a bunch of short books at the end in order to meet my quota, and this has turned out to not be true. However, I'm not reading short books for the end of this month in order to meet my book count quote, but rather to bring down my average number of pages, which is at roughly 307 pages per book. I have figured out a set of short books I can read over the next couple of weeks which should allow me to bring that down much closer to 300.
I'm now reading a book on art theory by Wassily Kandinsky. It's something else; I'll probably end up doing a post on it soon.
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| Then how are all things neat? |
[Nov. 24th, 2008|10:21 pm] |
While driving around yesterday, looking at houses, we came across a neighborhood where, in at least two different places, multiple streets came together all at once. Five or six at a time, they didn't meet in simple geometrical patterns, but instead would all flow into great oceans of cracked asphalt, like dendrites entering the body of a neuron. There were no lane markings, no signs, no islands. I left me flabbergasted in a way that I don't commonly experience.
As a gamer and a computer programmer, I generally find that I'm good at puzzle solving and at imposing order on disorderly situations. But this wasn't a puzzle to me; it was a complete breakdown of my expectations for how roads fundamentally work. It was like as if the road suddenly went straight up the side of a building; I had no idea what to do. I knew which road I wanted to leave on, but I simply couldn't figure out how to get there; did I drive straight across? Did I go around the edge? Was there some serpentine path that would be best? I felt like if I did the wrong thing, some SUV would come barrelling in from another street and t-bone me into next Tuesday.
I think the essential thing here is that driving is dangerous, and to protect ourselves, we regiment it as much as possible. There are very few places that I drive where lanes aren't clearly demarcated, turning orders aren't well-defined and all you have to worry about it not rear-ending the guy in front of you and taking your turns at the right time. Once all of that was taken away from me, even though I was the only moving car in sight, I was paralyzed. I think it's similar to the confusion people feel when moving from a right-side-of-the-road country to a left-side-of-the-road country, or vice versa.
I understand there are people who drive around in fields and other unmarked area all the time and they don't have any problems, but that's not me. Those folks are probably the ones who are always burning through a light just after it turns red anyways. I hate those guys.
In other news of yesterday, I accidentally bought two christian rock CDs in uncorrelated events. |
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| A heart, how shall I say? too soon made glad, |
[Oct. 30th, 2008|09:56 pm] |
It's been a long time since I posted anything. I've been writing a short story and somehow the urge to write also blogs hasn't really been coming into me. For now, here's a book update:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 106
Pages: 31866
My goal for the end of the month was 100 books, so I'm 6 books ahead of the curve right now, which is quite good I think. I'm at an average of 300.62 pages per book as well, which is about as close to that average as I could hope to be. I think the average number is going to be rising slightly over the next month, as I have some whoppers to work through, but that's ok. I have a plan in place that should let me hit very close to 300 by year's end.
I'm not sure if I'll do this experiment again next year. Partially it is fun just keeping track, but I'm not sure anybody actually cares. Of course, that's not why I'm doing it. We'll see.
Hopefully more interesting later. |
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| Nor any day for food or play |
[Sep. 7th, 2008|12:54 pm] |
I got email today from one Enid Vasostomy. The subject line was "Prescribed for psychoactive use" and the message body was "mixed worry able only, marry tooth lower its plate.", along with a link to a website. The website was not for prescription medication but actually some kind of weird porn thing, so I won't provide the link. I just enjoy sometimes having some truly absurd spam slip through my filters.
For those curious, "vasostomy" is a medical procedure. Like the similarly-named vasectomy, it involves the vas deferens, but instead of cutting it, a hole is made into it. I don't know under what circumstances this would be advisable, but I don't think I want one any time soon. I hope Enid's is doing well. |
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| Written upon the summit of a gate |
[Aug. 31st, 2008|07:42 pm] |
I just finished reading Adding a Dimension by Isaac Asimov. I know I haven't been doing these miniature book reviews, but I enjoyed this book so much, I felt like I had to share it with you all (both).
The book contains 17 essays on various topics in science: math, physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy. They're all aimed at a very much non-scientist audience, and in fact the only negative thing I could say about the book is that the sections on the sciences in which I am educated (math, physics and astronomy for those keeping score at home) were a little bit of a re-hash to me, although I did learn something from each essay. I especially enjoyed the chemistry essay in which he dissects the chemical name para-dimethylaminobenzaldehyde, giving both the details of the chemical meaning along with the etymology of each segment. For example, the "benz" part means that it's a benzene ring, having 6 carbon molecules arranged in a hexagon, and the name comes originally from a Javanese phrase, "luban javi", meaning a certain kind of tree from which could be harvested a resin from which benzoic acid was first isolated. I learned more about the underlying concepts behind organic chemistry naming from this essay than I ever did from my college courses.
In another essay he mentions that one would be able to fit more television stations in the broadcast range if you were to transmit them using visible light instead of radio waves. He suggests using lasers for this, and admits that a flaw in his plan is the difficulty is directing said light inside of buildings. He suggests long plastic tubes with mirrors, but I think he was mostly joking by that point. What's amazing is that he actually predicted the optical data networks of today, for the same reasons that we use them today. He just didn't know about fiber optics or digital coding back then. Which leads to the only other bad thing about the book; and that is that it was written in 1969, and so much of the science is dated to some degree. I imagine that's why these non-fiction books of his are so rare these days.
I'll leave you with a passage from the book:
( Asimov says... ) |
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| Distinguish all those floods that are |
[Aug. 27th, 2008|04:57 pm] |
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People often say that computers are "all ones and zeroes". While factually correct, I've never been sure what kind of impression that leaves in the mind of those who are not too familiar with the technical details of computer internals. I'm going to try here to explain in a little bit more detail what exactly we mean when we say "ones and zeroes". To begin with, let me simplify my language a little bit and from here on in I will use the term "digital" to mean "containing ones and zeroes". Very nearly everything in and around your computer is digital. That is to say, they represent information as sequences of things that can be either on or off, with no other possible states. Imagine bits like pieces from Reversi, with the black side being "on" (think of it as being filled in) and the white side being "off". If you arrange those pieces in a row, then you would have a reasonable facsimile of the storage system of your computer. Of course, in order to equal the data in, say, your iPod shuffle, you would need 125 million Reversi sets which would cost you over a billion dollars, so it's good that real computers use a more efficient storage mechanism. So, what does your computer do with all of these bits? At a very basic level, it uses them to represent different numbers using the base-2 or binary numbering system. A lot of people get confused by the idea of binary numbers, so let's go over that quickly. We're all familiar with base-10 numbers, so let's start there. When you see the number "2183", you know that the "1" represents the number of 100s, the "8" represents the number of tens and the "3" represents the number of ones, meaning that "2183" represents a number equal to the sum of: (2 * 1000) + (1 * 100) + (8 * 10) + (3 * 1). What you will see here is that the numbers we're multiplying by are increasing powers of 10. 1000 is 10 cubed, 100 is 10 squared, 10 is ten to the first power and any number raised to the 0th power is always one. The same pattern applies to binary numbers; for example, the number 10101 in binary is equal to: (1 * (2^4)) + (0 * (2^3)) + (1 * (2^2)) + (0 * (2^1)) + (1 * (2^0)). If we remove anything multiplied by zero and calculate the powers of two, we get: (1 * 16) + (1 * 4) + (1 * 1). Which is just equal to 21. This is the system that allows your computer to represent any number using only "ones and zeroes". And just like a 3 digit decimal number allows us to represent any number between 0 and 9999 (which is 10^4 - 1), a 3 bit binary number allows us to represent any number between 0 and 2^4 - 1, or 15. So the difference between a "32 bit" computer and a "64 bit" computer is that the 32 bit computer can only handle numbers as big as roughly 4 million at one time, whereas a 64 bit computer can handle numbers as big as roughly 10 septillion (that's a 1 with 19 zeroes after it). I'll talk more later on about how this kind of representation is used by various parts of your computer to store data and perform calculations. |
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| When darkened groves their softest shadows wear, |
[Aug. 24th, 2008|04:41 pm] |
It's about time for another book status post. I'm only 200 pages shy of my goal for August, which is a lot closer than I've been at this time of the month for a while. I might actually make my goal of 120 books this year! Crazy. Here's the stats:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 77
Pages: 23800
Sorry I haven't been posting much recently. I have about a half dozen almost-done entries. All I need to do now is actually finish them. |
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| A Britain would the law of honor give; |
[Aug. 1st, 2008|09:02 am] |
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I finished Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series a while ago, and I've been meaning to write about it since then. As I may have mentioned before, this series was originally planned to be 20 books long and to be followed by 2 other series, each of 20 more books. As I also may have mentioned before, the interesting thing about the series is that it doesn't follow the same group of characters through their adventures over time, but rather each book covers a similar time line, following different characters through vastly different stories and geographies. The characters from different books meet one another from time to time, and it's these interactions that really make the series incredible to me. See, in your standard epic tale, the heroes travel around a landscape, encountering enemies and allies, discovering wonderful new cities and cultures and having, as my father always puts it, Many Exciting Adventures. The thing is, the enemies, allies, cities and cultures that they interact with are generally pretty one-dimensional. You have the idyllic elven wood-city (or two), you have the dashing adventurer, you have the evil monks, the haunted dwarven mine, the desert planet, the jolly but politically clever king and the corrupt vizier. Now I'm not saying that it's bad to use these archetypes, as they're important storytelling tools, but they are very common tropes in the genre and what Hugh Cook has done with them here is really brilliant. Let's take an example. There's a warlord who shows up in a number of the books named "Watashi" which we are told is the word for blood and death in his native language. He's generally referred to as a fearsome warrior, and not much else is said about him, but the reader (and the main characters) tend to fill in his backstory with what it is that they know of the genre, and the books never disabuse you (or them) or their preconceptions. However, one of the later books has this Watashi guy as the main character, and through his story we learn that he's actually kind of a wimp, having "earned" his fearful name in a bet. He aspires to be a great warlord but by and large he fails. This kind of secondary backstory isn't just limited to the people in the story. There's an important city on the main continent, and it's visited numerous times in the various books. Each group that visits this city sees an entirely different aspect of it, but in each individual book, this disparity is never pointed out or even mentioned. Each group sees the city as they expect to see it, and we as the reader go along with them. One book, however, is largely set in this city, and in that book we get the true view of the city: a large metropolis, made up of many varied neighborhoods and districts. So what we have here is a collection of books that explores the backstories and histories of basically every important player in the world, all while telling 10 different exciting adventure stories, full of fighting, intrigue, sex and slug-eating. The body of work represents a staggering detailed and varied world of enormous scope, and after reading all 10 books, it really feels like a real place to me. To think that there were originally to be 60 of these books, and twice as many just to cover the time period I do know about, is breathtaking, and it's a little bit sad to think that the series will never be finished. |
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| Gleams up the pinnacles far and free |
[Jul. 29th, 2008|07:36 am] |
I haven't done a book update for a while. I haven't done any kind of update for a while actually. Anyways, here's where I'm at:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 66
Pages: 20219
I'm still a little bit behind on the month, but not as much behind as I was last month, so I'm confident that my 120 book yearly goal is reachable, but I don't think that I'll go much past that. I've now started Susan R. Matthews' "Jurisdiction" series, which is interesting so far, but I worry that the quality will decline as I work my way through the 6 books. We'll see. |
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| And darkness ends in everlasting day, |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|01:32 pm] |
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One measure of the impact of a scientist is how many numbers, theorems and other concepts have been named after them. In the field of mathematics, Euler is a leader in this. In computer science, we have Alan Turing. He didn't invent computers, nor did he pioneer the use of computers in science and industry, but contributions to the field cannot be overstated and his work is absolutely fundamental to all work down in computer science today.
I'm not going to go into depth on his contributions to the endeavor of computer science, as it would take too long and be even more dull than we're already dealing with here. I will say that he was instrumental in the success of Bletchley Park, the center in the UK that broke much of the Nazi's encrypted messages and gave the allies a decided advantage in the later days of WW2. Of course, it was this work that led to his groundbreaking theories on computing.
Turing was also a homosexual, which was illegal in the UK until 1967. He was discovered in 1952 and sentenced to a program of chemical castration which caused a variety of unpleasant side effects including gynecomastia. His military clearances were also repealed and he was rendered unable to continue his work. In 1954 he committed suicide by taking a bite from an apple into which he had injected poison. Thus we have: 
I draw no morals from this story.
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| Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,Grew lean while he assailed the seasons |
[Jun. 17th, 2008|10:52 pm] |
I picked up a new phone the other day, using my new company discount. I'm pretty happy with it; it can go online and do email and instant messaging, play music and movies and even do GPS and mapping. I think it might also work as a phone, but I haven't actually done that with it yet.
In the past I've pooh-poohed these kinds of devices, but now that I actually have one, I really like it. I might even start putting some movies on there to watch on the bus. Earlier today I was reading over lunch and came across a word I didn't know. The book described some people's amazement at discovering that their friend had two omphalos instead of the usual one. If I hadn't been able to look that word up online with my phone, I would have accepted only the face value of that joke and not gotten the real humor.
Verdict: well worth the money. Also I can play solitaire on it. |
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| Said: Master, what is this which now I hear? |
[Jun. 16th, 2008|08:35 pm] |
I had an idea on the drive home today.
I listen to audiobooks during my commute (when I drive, anyways. I usually don't drive, but I missed my bus this morning and so was forced to take to the car (some people were blocking in my parking space, making me late for my short drive to the bus station (so I do actually drive every day but usually only for 7 minutes, not for the 45+ it takes me to get all the way to work) and I missed my bus by only like 30 seconds)), usually I try to listen to crappy genre fiction, as it's sufficient to stop be getting horribly bored, but it's not good enough that I wish I'd read the book for real. Sometimes I err too far on the side of crappiness, a recent piece of spy-thriller garbage by Jack Higgins being an example. Other times I listen to something really good, like the Bill Bryson book I listened to last year.
Anyways, now I'm listening to a non-fiction book that's about amateur astronomy, and it's falling nicely into the zone between good and bad. It keeps me occupied, but if my mind wanders for a while and I stop paying attention to what's being said, then it's no big deal. He talks a lot about how amateur astronomers help the progress of professional astronomers, largely by their willingness to do regular observations of things that the big telescopes simply don't have the time to handle. They also do more all-sky surveying, which is why amateurs usually find new comets and things like that.
The problem is that the goals of the amateur astronomer, which are to have a good time looking at the stars, or to get interesting pictures, or to find something new, are rarely coincident with the goals of the professional scientist astronomical community, which values regular observation of either specific objects over a certain time frame, or systematic surveys of the whole sky over a relatively short time span. Sometimes the professionals manage to convince the amateurs to help them out, but that's often more difficult that it's worth.
So, my idea was this: we develop an installable telescope system that's cheap to produce (most important), remotely-controlled, rugged and sufficiently precise for scientific measurement. We then install these small scopes on roofs all over the world. They would be bolted down relatively permanently, wired to the power systems of the buildings they're installed on, and controlled from a central system that could coordinate their efforts to maximize value for all users.
Just like any major telescope, people could sign up for time to observe any object they choose at any time they choose. Unlike major telescopes (once there were a reasonable number of these things around the world,) you wouldn't have to wait forever to get your observations made, and the costs would be much lower. Of course the light-gathering power of any individual system would be relatively low and they wouldn't have all the fancy anti-turbulence correction facilities of the major observatories, but for a lot of kinds of research, that kind of thing isn't particularly important. Weather would cease to be a major concern; a given heavenly body should always be visible from somewhere (in the right part of the globe at any rate) at any given time and so if one telescope is obscured by clouds, another can take its work. Even more excitingly, this kind of system could be put to work doing a variety of VLBI-type tasks that could really revolutionize some aspects of modern astronomical observation.
Of course there are tons of potentials problems: is it even possible to make something affordable that's sufficiently rugged and self-maintaining? The cost of keeping up a worldwide maintenance/calibration team would surely swamp the project. Even installation would be a major problem, although that kind of thing might be able to be contracted out to, say, cable television companies. The system for controlling these things would be a real beast to develop, although once the hardware is in place, solving the control problem is something that can be accomplished iteratively, and a very simple initial system I think would be an entirely tractable problem for a relatively small development team.
I think this is a good idea. I haven't looked very hard, but I find it entirely reasonable to assume that someone out there is already working on something of this nature. What do y'all think? Is this just a pie-in-the-sky idea, or is this something that might really happen someday? Also, I can't think of a good name for this. Any ideas? This being astronomy, a clever acronym would be appropriate. |
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| And though the last lights off the black West went |
[Jun. 1st, 2008|12:03 pm] |
It's June, so I thought I'd do a little end-of month book update. I have three "goals" going right now. The original 50 book goal would have me at 6,250 pages right now. My updated 100 book goal would have me at twice that, 12,500 pages. I'm thinking now that maybe I want to do 120 books, or 10 books per month, which would have me at 15,000 pages now. So here's the data:
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 42
Pages: 14694
So, you can see that I'm only a little bit shy of the third goal, so I think that's going to be what I'm aiming for now. I think my reading rate will be increasing in the upcoming months, as my new commute involves a lot more bussing that it has in previous months, which gives me a lot more time to read. However, I've also been reading more technical books (which you can see from the list) and those books really take a long time to get through. So, we'll see. Note also that I'm well behind on my actual book count as opposed to my page count, and that's because I've been reading a LOT of books recently that are well above my 300 page-per-book average. I'm going to try to read more smaller books in the months to come to bring that average back down, which should cause the book count to come into nice parity with the page count.
Once I finish the Hugh Cook books, I think I'm going to write up a whole post about the series. It's really fascinating. |
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| To their first elements their souls retire: |
[May. 17th, 2008|08:26 pm] |
I haven't done a book update in a while. I'm reading a lot faster than I thought I would; even if I don't read one single page more this month, I'm projecting that I'll be over 31,000 pages by the end of the year, which is 16,000 pages more than my 50 book goal and 1,000 pages more than my 100 book goal. The number of books I've read so far is kind of low, but that's because I've been working through this Hugh Cook series and all of those books are well more than the 300 page average I've set for myself. I'm planning on reading a bunch of really short books after I'm done with this series, to bring my page average back down. I'm massively over thinking this.
( Details )
Totals:
Books: 39
Pages: 13069 |
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| And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer |
[May. 17th, 2008|10:27 am] |
I got some really high-quality spam today. Check this out:
From: "adam jamil" <adam@peru.com>
Subject: Mr SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.
I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to end like this if you don't comply. I was paid to eliminate you and I have to do it within 10 days.
Someone you call your friend wants you dead by all means, and the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also came to us and told us that he wants you dead and he provided us your names, photograph and other necessary information we needed about you. If you are in doubt with this I will send you your name and where you are residing in my next mail.
Meanwhile, I have sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation, but I ordered them to stop for a while and not to strike immediately because I just felt something good and sympathetic about
Now do you want to LIVE OR DIE? It is up to you. Get back to me now if you are ready to enter deal with me, I mean life trade, who knows, and I might just spear your life, $8,000 is all you need to spend. You will first of all pay $3,500 then I will send the tape of the person that want you dead to you and when the tape gets to you, you will pay the remaining $4,500. If you are not ready for my help, then I will have no choice but to carry on the assignment after all I have already being paid before now.
Warning: do not think of contacting the police or even tell anyone because I will extend it to any member of your family since you are aware that somebody want you dead, and the person knows some members of your family as well.
For your own good I will advise you not to go out on. |
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