Plutor

In 2006, I hardly did any better than the year before. I’ve hardly seen any of the Oscar-nominated movies.

The Departed, The Queen, and Children of Men are all still very high on my “to-see” list. Those three alone would push my combined total up to 9. The AP contrasts this year’s Best Picture nominee field with last years – they claim that there’s no immediate widely-accepted favorite. (Of course, last year’s favorite didn’t win..)

Update 26 Feb: For the first time since 2003, I saw the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture (The Departed) in a first-run theater before the night of the awards. That was the only additional top-award nominee I saw, but it brought my total up to six. The only other award winner I've seen is An Inconvenient Truth, which I coincidentally saw just this weekend.

Gedanken game time: What is the largest (in volume) gift you could buy or make for under $20? Some ground rules:

1. You can't get anything for free. i.e. "ask family and friends for all of their packing peanuts."
2. On the other hand, anything you can make or do yourself is okay. Inflating balloons with your own breath, for instance.
3. No one else can help you. This is an individual project.
4. Machines and devices to help you are okay, but buying anything you don't already own will go towards the $20.
5. On the other hand, things you already own can't be used as a part of the end-result.
6. You have to be able to bring the gift itself to a party.
7. The party is in one week.

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (22 July 2006 - 7 August 2006) This book, along with Freakonomics and Blink, are the three books that took the blogging world by storm in 2005. The latter and the former are clearly applicable in social-network and website design. Somehow, I missed this one last year.

The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick (10 August 2006 - 23 August 2006) I’d never actually read a single Philip K. Dick story. I came across this while I was wandering through the library, so I grabbed it. Reading Science Fiction from the 1960’s is unlike reading anything else. The state of instability in real-life scientific progress during the Cold War makes everything seem so out-of-place. Dick’s drug use, schizophrenia, and escalating psychosis definitely show through, but it never affected his ability to write a great story.

Sundiver by David Brin (29 August 2006 - 11 September 2006) Science Fiction, at it’s best, is not about science. It’s about society. I had read something about David Brin’s “Uplift Saga” at some point, and it sounded interesting. The social dynamics in a universe where entire species are voluntarily subservient to others for millennia are fascinating and complicated. This is a great detective story. (I started to read the second book, Startide Rising, but my heart wasn’t in the story.)

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs by Ken Jennings (14 October 2006 - 21 October 2006) I follow Ken’s blog and subscribe to his weekly trivia mailing list. I knew he was funny, intelligent, and a great writer, so reading this book was a no-brainer. It alternates between a memoir of his Jeopardy rise-to-fame and an investigation into the history and spread of the trivia phenomenon. He even goes to a Boston-area trivia night!

Einstein: A Life in Science by Michael White and John Gribbin (24 October 2006 - 27 October 2006) I finished Brainiac on the plane on the way to Spain, so I had to keep an eye out for English-language bookstores. When I finally found one, it was in Gibraltar. Einstein’s an interesting figure. It’s somewhat jarring to realize how young he was when he made his primary contributions (he was only 26 in his “Annus Mirabilis”) and how quickly physics ran, yes, beyond his comprehension.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (15 November 2006 - 12 December 2006) This is the second of the two books I would pick to recommend strongly. The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an in-depth look at how the food we buy at the grocery store gets there, and the role that historical happenstance has played in the development of the current American’s diet. Supermarket “Organic” isn’t as different from non-organic as you think.

Like last year, I kept track of what I read this year. And like last year, I’m going to tell you what I thought, whether you’re interested or not. Here’s the first half of the year. The second half will come later.

The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout (30 Nov 2005 - 18 Dec 2005) To be perfectly honest, I no longer recall any of the details of this book. I apparently enjoyed it enough to finish it, but not enough to give it any more than an average score. I vaguely remember that it was an interesting read, but was about 100 pages longer than necessary. Note to self: Write book reviews in vivo next year.

Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter (22 Dec 2005 - 21 Jan 2006) This book was one of the most enlightening I’ve read in a long time. Although I was alive for a little more than a year of his administration, I have no recollection of it. In fact, in the political atmosphere I’ve been aware of (essentially the past five years), the idea of a deeply religious southerner who is intensely liberal and libertarian has seemed like a fairy tale.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (5 Jan 2006 - 9 Jan 2006) My sister-in-law, Shaun, gave me the comic book just a few months before the movie came out. And I’m glad she did, because the book’s plot is deeper and its philosophy is far more Anarchist. I might be willing to go so far to say that it’s a totally different message with a fairly similar story.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (28 Jan 2006 - 4 Mar 2006) If I had to suggest one book to read based on my list from this year, I wouldn’t be able to. But if I was allowed to suggest two, this would be one of them. It’s somewhat amazing to hear that there were likely more people in the Americas than there were in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the 15th century. Corn was mankind’s first GMO. Oh, and learn the dirty politics behind Squanto aiding the pilgrims.

Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos (12 Jan 2006 - 28 Jan 2006) This is another book I can’t remember. I was waiting for an interlibrary loan, and had to kill some time.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington (10 Mar 2006 - 28 Mar 2006) As I said in January, Mil Millington’s humor is canonical English. Dry and sarcastic, but also silly and exagerrated. This book gets wilder as the main character’s life spins beyond his control, but I smiled through every single page. Absolutely strongly recommended.

Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (3 Apr 2006 - 22 July 2006, holy cow) This book took me forever. To be perfectly honest, I skipped a couple chapters in the middle and at the very end. His discussions about mathematical language systems and especially Gödel’s incompleteness theorem are invaluable. They reminded me a lot about one big part of school I miss: true theory.

Would I be embarrassing myself if I admitted I didn’t get the notorious xkcd make me a sandwich comic? (Now being made into a t-shirt, due to its popularity.) As I read it, there are a number of possible explanations for the punchline, but the ambiguity is (I think) what’s contributing to my lack-of-getting-it.

1. The seated character (lets call her Alice) uses sudo to make the request as root. Bob follows the request, since, well, you always listen to root. So does this mean that Bob is an executable? In that case, his first response of "make it yourself" seems out of place; something simpler, like "no" would have been more accurate. I think that this is the most likely explanation, but the first line is what throws me off.
2. The comic leaves off a "-u bob" argument from Alice's sudo command. In this case, at the end, Bob thinks he's making a sandwich for himself. Alice plans some sort of future sandwich-stealing action. Maybe she hopes chown will be as effective.
3. Alice is telling Bob to use the sudo command to make her a sandwich. (In this case, "sudo" is an adverb that modifies "make". Replace it with the word "quickly", and you'll get what I mean.) Bob realizes that with different permissions, he'll be able to make any number of sandwiches and escape responsibility for purchasing more jelly. Bob's wily, and Alice's laziness backfires.

Like I said, it’s probably #1, but Bob’s first response is poorly composed. Part of the allure of xkcd is the off-the-cuff style, evident in the stick figures, but in this case, I think spending a few more minutes considering the dialogue would have been worth it.

I know that Brian got a Wii after camping out overnight. I know that Chris and Nomad were planning on showing up at their local Target at midnight. A co-worker of mine says he’s sore today from playing Wii Sports (bowling and tennis) with his wife for 4 hours yesterday. (He’s going to bring it into work tomorrow, and we’re hooking it up to the projector.) I’m interested in your reviews.

Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with baseball knows that there’s at least one important rule difference between the American League and the National League: in the AL, the pitcher never bats, and is instead represented by the Designated Hitter, a player who never takes the field. Interestingly, the rule that governs this is 6.10, which begins by stating “Any League may elect to use the Designated Hitter Rule.” Apparently the NL has simply elected not to use it. More interestingly, there are a few minor official rules that specifically apply to only NL or AL teams:

• 1.16(b) - All NL players have to wear a double ear-flap helmet while at bat. According to 1.16(c), almost all other players are simply required to wear one with at least one ear flap. (Aside: Rule 1.16(c) actually grandfathers in players who chose in 1982 to not wear a helmet with ear flaps. Tim Raines was the last player to wear a helmet without ear flaps. He retired after the 2002 season. Julio Franco is the only still-active player who would qualify under this rule. Unfortunately, he chose to wear one-flap helmets, even before they were required.)
• 4.10(a) - The National League can adopt a rule changing one or both double-header games to be seven innings long. The AL does not have that right. As far as I know, such a rule has never been adopted.
• 4.12(a)(7), 4.12(a)(8), and 4.12(a)(9) - The NL can adopt a rule making games that have been stopped before regulation (for instance, because of rain) a "suspended game" instead of "no game".
• 6.02(d) - The NL had to follow this experimental rule in 2006, essentially saying that the batter could not leave the batter's box unless either team was making a substitution or calling a conference. I have no idea if they're planning to make it permanent.
• 10.23(b) - In the AL, the league pitching champion must have pitched at least as many innings as the number of games each team played that season (162 this year). In the NL, the champion only needed to have pitched 80% that many innings (129.6). As far as I can tell, this rule rarely, if ever, actually matters. The top pitchers in both leagues usually pitch at least 190 innings a year.

For those following the same strategy as me this fall – “If I can’t walk into a store and find a Wii, I wasn’t meant to have one.” – there’s some good news. Target’s allocation information was leaked to the Internet the other day, and since then, several Google Maps mashups have sprung up. For instance, this Wii Locator.

I decided I’m not going to regret not doing National Novel Writing Month this year. There’s no telling whether I’ll regret not winning (that’s what they call getting to 50k words). I’ll know that on November 30.

Update: I now realize that they way I said it above is more likely interpreted as "I'm not doing it", and the image just made it more confusing. I meant that I'm not going to regret not doing it because I am going to do it. I'm in.

On the side of a non-descript road in sleepy Cumberland, Rhode Island is a little bar with a tiny parking lot. From the outside, it looks like the kind of bar you’ve driven by a hundred times: dark, walls grey with pre-ban cigarette smoke, exactly three taps of American rice-heavy beer, NLCS playing on the fuzzy television in the corner. The name — Pitcher’s Pub — is even a beer/baseball pun. But despite its unassuming outward appearance, this bar is different. You sit down, yes, next to the Golden Tee game. You shout your order to the waitress over, it’s true, the Tom Petty cover band that non-traditionally includes a banjoist. But when you start scanning the twenty-some taps and realize you only recognize half of them, you’re willing to admit that your first impression might have been hasty. And the orange bottled-beer menu packed with microbrews, barley wines, and bocks makes you glad you didn’t judge this book by its cover. In fact, you realize dizzily, you can only think of one bar in Boston with such a broad offering.

I felt the need to opine this morning because there’s not a lot out there about this hidden gem. There are some moderately positive reviews on Beer Advocate that convinced us to give it a try.

I am in need of a product that I am virtually sure exists.  I can’t, for the life of me, seem to find a place that sells this product — although I suspect that’s just a difficulty with putting my thoughts into search terms.  I also am even having a difficulty envisioning what it might look like.  So I ask for your help.  I need some way to easily keep all of my different USB cables (iPod, Palm, phone, camera, video camera, et al) as easily accessible and not-ugly as possible.  Requirements:

• A hub, or at least some way to not have to reach around my tower to get the right cable plugged in.  I only have six USB ports, and including my keyboard, mouse, and printer, I have far more devices, so there currently ends up being a lot of juggling.
• Some sort of cable hiding solution.  Cable ugliness is the number one cause of premature death, followed closely by the goddamn Nihilanth.
• The cables should be easy to remove, so that I don't have to spend fifteen minutes pulling one out just to bring it to a friend's house.

We’re trying to find a new location for trivia night that’s a little more central than the current destination in way-north Somerville. So I whipped together my very first Google Maps mashup. It includes all of the Stump trivia locations as well as the T subway lines and stops.

Today’s almost certainly the day. With events planned for today in Japan and the US, and tomorrow in Europe, and pretty much all of the rumored launch dates mere weeks away, it looks like today’s the day to finally hear details from Nintendo on the Wii’s pricing and the list of launch titles. And the true date. I’ll be updating this post as the day goes on.

Right now, Wii.com is live, but only the Japanese section. From the Japanese event we know the price and date for Japan: 25000 yen on December 2. Nintendo has previously said that they can’t manage a simultaneous worldwide launch, but that all the major markets would be within a couple weeks. That seems to indicate a late-November date for the US.

Unsurprisingly, there will be only one Wii box at launch, but sadly it will have only one remote. We also have Japan Virtual Console pricing deets (NES 500 yen, SNES 800 yen, N64 1000 yen; the equivalent of about 4, 7, and 9 dollars).

Perhaps the biggest news I’ve seen thus far is the list of launch titles. WarioWare, Monkey Ball, and Trauma Center should make this a killer investment in my house, but it’s also very nice to know that Twilight Princess is going to be available at launch, despite some recent rumors to the contrary.

Update 7:45: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an article today that it claims came from the New York Times wire citing November 19 and $250. If anyone got advance information, it's the NYT. And I could totally see them "accidentally" putting it on their wire. On the other hand, it claims that Wii Sports will be included with "every Wii", and we already know that that's not true for Japan.

Update 9:40: USA Today confirms the NYT's info, plus includes a photo of the all-important box. And the box proclaims "Wii Sports Included!" pretty prominently.

Update 12:30: It's all over, and it's pretty much all true. $249.99, November 19. Only one remote but including Wii Sports. Remotes for $40. Plus some other interesting features, like the Miis (personal avatars that you can copy to the remote to bring to a friend's house), Wii channels, and free Internet play. Guess it's time to start saving up and counting down the minutes.

Update 14:31: This is the last update, I swear. There are 52 Wii games, including both first- and third-party, scheduled for release before the end of March. That's quite a lineup. Compare it to the Gamecube launch: a dismal three launch titles, and only 12 within the first month. Most were simple ports, and only one was even close to a first-party franchise (Luigi's Mansion).

My brother and I may have moved to Boston, but my parents have lived in the same house in Danbury for twenty years. This photo was taken the summer after we moved from Boulder, CO:

And this photo was taken last weekend:

How time flies.

It’s hard to argue with the fact that Google has grown to the point where it can be a real challenge to compete with it. The first public demonstration (in my memory) came this week when web calendar Kiko went up for auction on eBay, and the obvious reaction was to think that it was killed by Google Calendar. Paul Graham went so far to say that the big lesson here is “to stay out of Google’s way”. The Kiko team itself came away with some rather different lessons.

But I think that David Heinemeier over at 37signals said it best. Google isn’t the be-all end-all. In fact, no one product or application or website will ever be the best thing for everyone. There are plenty of Google applications (among them the Calendar), that while neat, don’t suit my needs. When people balked at this idea, claiming “Google is big. Backpack calendar is small. They win, you just haven’t realized it yet,” Jason Fried piped up with defining your own success. Success is not a zero-sum game. Two competitors can both succeed.

And that’s probably the most important lesson.

Supposedly, there’s going to be a new planet definition proposal made the IAU today. Everyone thinks “Pluto is a planet. It just is, so whatever we propose needs to keep it a planet”. So the new proposal also adds three new planets to the solar system: Xena (that’s 2003 UB₃₁₃ to you), Ceres (the first discovered and largest known asteroid-belt object), and even Pluto’s moon Charon. Under the proposed definition, “A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.” What’s that you ask? Why does that make Charon a planet? Well, it’s because the barycenter for its orbit lies above the surface of Pluto. It would now be considered a double-planet system.

The rule also introduces the likelihood of even more planets (like Quaoar and Orcus) once we have a better idea of their size and mass. I definitely like some of the new terminology: a “Pluton” is any planet beyond Neptune. We need to start working on a new mnemonic for MVEMCJSUNPCX. Go.

Update 10:15: The IAU press release

Wait, what? That’s an outrage. I hope it was a sale. Update: Ah, jeez. It was a photoshop. I’ve been hoodwinked.

Some behind-the-scenes stuff: I’ve finally upgraded this blog from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0.4. While I was at it, I decided to install the coComment plugin, so that you can follow your comments with coComment. They have a new Firefox extension that makes it even easier than before. Almost trivial, in fact.

Update, 13 Aug - I've created a small plugin to add the slash:comments element to my RSS feed. That should fix the discussion counts on my home page, and it's a cleaner solution than hacking the WP code directly.

Is anyone else unimpressed with Apple’s WWDC announcements today? They’re cool, I guess, but there was no real bang. Certainly no surprise. I suppose if I had a Mac, I might be excited about some of the Leopard details, but none of them seem especially groundbreaking to me. The Mac Pro was not only rumored for weeks, but doesn’t seem especially spectacular or surprising. (Let’s see, Macbook, Macbook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini.. Hmm.. What else could they transition to Intel?)

Okay, 16GB of RAM and 2TB of disk in a desktop is pretty impressive. But.. I dunno. What am I missing?

Here’s a random Saturday link-dump:

1. Don't believe BusinessWeek's bubble-math - Web 2.0 plus shoddy journalism equals a firm foundation for another bubble. BusinessWeek takes a made up number, multiplies it by a rumored percentage, contradicts itself several times, and most readers are probably just thinking "Wow, what a smart kid!" Related: A hilarious parody.
2. Saved locations on Google Maps - This is a great thing. I've been waiting for some sort of smart auto-complete on Google Maps since day one. The interface is a little crusty (I wish I could click on a bubble anywhere and say "save this location" instead of having to have all locations saved), but I'm certain this is just release number one.
3. No Space World and Mario Galaxy could be available at launch. Or rather, no one has yet verified that Mario Galaxy won't be available at launch. Related: The early October release rumors still seem to have some air in them.
4. Two Cool Bash Tricks - Holy cow. Both are total life savers, but the second more than the first. Redirecting output to two files before you can diff them is a big pain in the neck. (via)

Back in June, I came across a question on Ask MetaFilter about getting back into Magic: The Gathering and deck recommendations. I had honestly thought about it from time to time. I remembered the game being an interesting challenge, since you’re never sure what the other guy’s deck is going to do, and there’s no way to be prepared for all of it. I didn’t want to fall head-first back into spending hundreds of dollars on the game, but if there was some way I could enjoy it on a limited basis, I was interested. I noticed the poster was in Somerville, so although he wasn’t soliciting players, I posted a comment indicating that I thought it was an excellent idea. A couple of weeks later, he emailed me and invited me. Yesterday, I went.

It was a just as much fun as I remember. The pre-made “theme decks” they have nowadays make it really easy to spend $15 and have a great time. I got Code of the Orzhov from the Guildpact expansion, a black and white weenie/whittle deck. Some of the cards — like Agent of Masks — have effects that are really powerful in games that are larger than one-on-one. I also got two boosters for a booster draft and made a few tweaks to the deck after a couple of games, and I was really pleased. I went 3-2 with my deck, a couple of which were very close games. Not bad for it being seven years since I played the game.

Not many people know that there is very little copper in modern pennies. In 1982, they were changed from 95% copper to simply copper-plated zinc. If you cut open a penny made after that date, you’d see the grey-colored metal on the inside. In fact, in 1981, pennies of both recipes were made, and collectors have to listen to the sound they make when they bounce to tell the difference. Do it yourself with a penny from the 70s and one from the 90s; the difference will be obvious.

The price of copper closed last night at $3.48 a pound. That means that a 3.1 gram penny has about 2.26 cents of copper in it. Melt down a big wad of those, and you can make yourself a tidy profit. The price of zinc has been escalating in the last few months, too, so it might not be long until it’s worthwhile to melt down new pennies, too.

How would you design a database of the names of Starfleet employees? At the very least, you’d have to handle standard European Human-style names (given name, family name); Bajoran-style names (family name, given name); and Klingon-style names (given name, son/daughter-of father’s name. And you’d probably need to have House name in there, too). I’m certain there are others that I’m leaving out and that we’re unaware of. How would you do this?

Corollary: How would you alphabetize a list of Starfleet employees names? Would Ro Laren come before or after Jean-Luc Picard?

Last night around 9, our water cut out. I spoke to a couple neighbors and they had no water, either. There was nothing about it on TV, and the Boston Water hotline was completely busy. We went to bed, and when we got up this morning, it was working again. We thought it was nothing big. We were wrong.

M says that Mass Ave near BMC was still closed when she got in this morning, and their ER was evacuated and closed overnight. And I think she said it still is. Bad for patients, but good for her: it means she probably won’t have to admit any patients today.

I got a new bike, and it’s an adventure story.

Sometime last summer, on two separate occasions, we found two bicycles on the side of the road in Naugatuck with a free signs. Neither was in great condition: they were dirty, rusty, and had flat tires. For some reason, despite M’s insistence that we start biking, they were put in our garage and ignored. During her long period without school-work, however, she got them out and started cleaning and rebuilding one. The other was discarded. Before she could complete her work on it — or even put it all back together — we moved to Boston. We brought the bike, in pieces, with us.

She dropped the pieces off at Federico’s Bike Shop on Emerson St about half a mile away. She had called ahead, but they still were surprised and amused by (what they called) the “bike destroyer”. Our neighbor had warned us that they were slow there, and they were clearly quite busy, but it was okay; I had waited a year, so I wasn’t really in any rush.

They called a few weeks later to let us know that it was done and ready to be picked up. For something like fourty dollars, they put it all back together, degreased and regreased the parts that needed it, and even replaced a couple damaged pieces. I consider it a huge bargain. M was working on a beautiful Sunday, so I decided to go pick it up and maybe bike to City Point. With only a blank check and my phone in my pockets, I left home. Immediately I realized that I was locked out. After trying to break in through my own windows (I was unwilling to cut the screens) and thinking whether our upstairs neighbors could help (no, we haven’t given them a spare key), I realized my only option was two miles away saving lives.

It’s a really great thing that I had what I had, because I was able to pay for the bike and ride it to the hospital. It was a surprisingly smoooth experience, considering the fact that the bike wasn’t really sized for me (the seat was too high and the handlebars too low), and I hadn’t ridden a bike probably since high school. I had no bike lock, so I had to wait outside, hot, thirsty, and feeling stupid while M did vastly more important things. She eventually came out, deservedly berated me for my idiocy, and made me wear her helmet in punishment. I have a massive noggin, and she does not, so it looked sort of like a strapped-on fez.

Unsurprisingly, I suffered a flat tire on my way home.