A few of my posts seem to have gone awol since being posted on Friday. I can't stand the idea of you missing out on my deep and searing insights into 80s girly rap or google's apologism, so I'm linking to them again.
I did wonder if I was being victimized, but a quick scan indicates that many other blogger hosted sites seemed to lose out on posts from Friday also.
20060219
From the mouths of sprogs
Since an early age, I've been acutely aware of the way in which we are lied to by the media. In particular, how special effects are achieved by the method of CSO, Colour Separation Overlay, Chromakey, more commonly known as "green screen" (or occasionally 'blue screen'). Possibly aided by editions of "Tomorrow's World", my child eagle eyes watched special effects sequences intently, and I would often be able to identify unreal images thanks to awkward outlines or lighting mismatches between foreground and background.
Being a small child, and thus still developing a suitably capacious vocabulary, I didn't know that this was CSO. Instead, I would squeak out excitedly "That's not real -- it's put on." Thus, 'put on' was the way me and my siblings would describe instances of chromakey when we saw them.
Now, here's my question: did anyone else say "put on" for this very specific meaning? Or was it something that we invented a name for, not knowing any better?
Your message for the day: whenever someone makes a bald assertion, and then follows it up with "and that's a fact", you can know for sure that it's compelte garbage. And that's a fact!
Being a small child, and thus still developing a suitably capacious vocabulary, I didn't know that this was CSO. Instead, I would squeak out excitedly "That's not real -- it's put on." Thus, 'put on' was the way me and my siblings would describe instances of chromakey when we saw them.
Now, here's my question: did anyone else say "put on" for this very specific meaning? Or was it something that we invented a name for, not knowing any better?
Your message for the day: whenever someone makes a bald assertion, and then follows it up with "and that's a fact", you can know for sure that it's compelte garbage. And that's a fact!
20060212
Travel Plans
Take note folks: I'm hitting up the UK for some righteous indignation in April. I've booked the tickets, and am working out an outline itinerary to get me where I need to be. Let me know if you are interested in fitting yourself into this schedule via the usual media:
April 11 -- Land at London's fantastic Gatwick Airport. Scuttle over to Maidstone.
Sleep.
April 14 -- Head up to Britain's trandy Manchester District (possible via London). Hang around there for a couple of days.
April 16 -- Move further north to the Lake District to see the extended family.
April 19/20 -- Head back south. Possibly stop over in London.
April 21 -- Smack down in South Central UK (comin' straight outta Surrey).
April 22 -- Fly back to the glorious US of Eh?
Further details as they emerge, because I'm dope like that.
April 11 -- Land at London's fantastic Gatwick Airport. Scuttle over to Maidstone.
Sleep.
April 14 -- Head up to Britain's trandy Manchester District (possible via London). Hang around there for a couple of days.
April 16 -- Move further north to the Lake District to see the extended family.
April 19/20 -- Head back south. Possibly stop over in London.
April 21 -- Smack down in South Central UK (comin' straight outta Surrey).
April 22 -- Fly back to the glorious US of Eh?
Further details as they emerge, because I'm dope like that.
20060211
US Drivers
One problem with many Americans is that they are really bad at driving. Take these images, captured from CCTV recordings.
First, note the scene: a small child rushes out in front of traffic. Note that the policeman is standing in front of a stop sign.
Now here comes a typical bad driver, failing to indicate or slow down while making a
left turn...
...and now she fails to stop or even slow down for the stop sign! And the policeman makes no attempt to stop her or warn her of her dangerous driving. Something should be done, what kind of example is this mother setting for her children?
First, note the scene: a small child rushes out in front of traffic. Note that the policeman is standing in front of a stop sign.
Now here comes a typical bad driver, failing to indicate or slow down while making a left turn...
...and now she fails to stop or even slow down for the stop sign! And the policeman makes no attempt to stop her or warn her of her dangerous driving. Something should be done, what kind of example is this mother setting for her children?
20060210
Warrantless
A lot of media coverage of GWB's annoying habit of listening in to people when they phone their family has started referring to it as the "warrantless wiretapping program". This is somewhat ambiguous, surely? Doesn't warrantless usually mean "without any good reason or purpose"?
It's well known that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, then they will surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare, provided they can stop hurling their excrement at each other for long enough. But what do you get if you take a solo monkey and give him a typewriter for six months? The answer is apparently the next Dan Brown novel. And a smaller but still considerable amount of monkey do-do (as in, "Monkey see monkey do-do").
It's well known that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, then they will surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare, provided they can stop hurling their excrement at each other for long enough. But what do you get if you take a solo monkey and give him a typewriter for six months? The answer is apparently the next Dan Brown novel. And a smaller but still considerable amount of monkey do-do (as in, "Monkey see monkey do-do").
20060203
1729
Exciting news for Numb3rs fans -- in a recent episode, perennial grad student Amita won the Milton prize, and it is revealed that her surname is Ramanujan. This is of course a nod to the famous mathematician and collaborator of Hardy, who died young after suffering in England.
I remember a favourite anecdote about Ramanujan. Hardy came over to visit him in his sick bed, and commented that the taxi that had brought him over had the number 1729, which didn't seem like a very interesting number.
To which Ramanujan, quick as a flash replied, "What the f*** are you talking about, you utter c***-muncher? I'm f***ing dying here in this godforesaken p***ant country, and you march in here like a f***ing elf, giving it all this about c***flapping taxi numbers? Why don't you just p*** off back to Cambridge you f***ing apology for a mathematician?"
Other accounts of this encounter may vary slightly in minor details, but I am convinced that my version is the most accurate retelling.
I remember a favourite anecdote about Ramanujan. Hardy came over to visit him in his sick bed, and commented that the taxi that had brought him over had the number 1729, which didn't seem like a very interesting number.
To which Ramanujan, quick as a flash replied, "What the f*** are you talking about, you utter c***-muncher? I'm f***ing dying here in this godforesaken p***ant country, and you march in here like a f***ing elf, giving it all this about c***flapping taxi numbers? Why don't you just p*** off back to Cambridge you f***ing apology for a mathematician?"
Other accounts of this encounter may vary slightly in minor details, but I am convinced that my version is the most accurate retelling.
20060130
When are the Oscars?
Is there something wrong with my machine, or are the Academy Award-givers unable to count? When I visited oscar.com, the countdown clock tells me that there are 31 days and and 21 hours until oscar night. It's currently sunday. The oscars are held on a sunday. Shouldn't this be (one less than) a multiple of seven -- in particular shouldn't it be about 34 days? And what are they doing, starting at 4 in the afternoon?
I'm sure they will fix this as soon as they read it, so check it out now before it's too late. WARNING: Oscar site contains some truly horrible flash, including a video that starts playing with sound on, whether you want it to or not.
I'm sure they will fix this as soon as they read it, so check it out now before it's too late. WARNING: Oscar site contains some truly horrible flash, including a video that starts playing with sound on, whether you want it to or not.
20060129
Spooner!
Your spoonerism for the day:
Chai Tea
Should be good for any crossword compilers out there.
Talking of which, the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly warns me that "the puzzler" (Cox and Rathvon's decennial(?) cryptic crossword) will no longer be available in the magazine, and you'll have to go to their website to get it. Except that everything on the website is locked down behind an impenetrable barrier, requiring a subscription to access [OK then, not strictly impenetrable, but you gather my meaning]. Thus my carefully constructed plan to get the crossword, (see this old post that details the method in full) will no longer work. What am I to do? I don't really want to subscribe just to get access to the puzzle (since I can never be bothered reading the rest of the magazine) -- that would set me back about $2.50 per puzzle. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind paying a nominal fee just for the puzzle---$0.50 to $1 say--- since I probably get that much value from it. But TheAtlantic has no facility for micropayments for a single article as yet (EDIT: this is of course total garbage as even a tiny amount of research would demonstrate. In fact they do allow complete access to their archives for a fee schedule; unfortunately, this is no help at all. Either I have to pay $2.95 for each puzzle as it comes out, or else time my accesses carefully and buy them in blocks of five for $1.19 each, which is not ideal since it severly affects the regular stream of new puzzles). So what am I to do? I might just have to wait till march and see if things improve at all by then.
Still, it could be worse: at least Private Eye still has the full crossword online, even as the rest of the magazine sinks deeper behind a subscriber only barrier.
Chai Tea
Should be good for any crossword compilers out there.
Talking of which, the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly warns me that "the puzzler" (Cox and Rathvon's decennial(?) cryptic crossword) will no longer be available in the magazine, and you'll have to go to their website to get it. Except that everything on the website is locked down behind an impenetrable barrier, requiring a subscription to access [OK then, not strictly impenetrable, but you gather my meaning]. Thus my carefully constructed plan to get the crossword, (see this old post that details the method in full) will no longer work. What am I to do? I don't really want to subscribe just to get access to the puzzle (since I can never be bothered reading the rest of the magazine) -- that would set me back about $2.50 per puzzle. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind paying a nominal fee just for the puzzle---$0.50 to $1 say--- since I probably get that much value from it. But TheAtlantic has no facility for micropayments for a single article as yet (EDIT: this is of course total garbage as even a tiny amount of research would demonstrate. In fact they do allow complete access to their archives for a fee schedule; unfortunately, this is no help at all. Either I have to pay $2.95 for each puzzle as it comes out, or else time my accesses carefully and buy them in blocks of five for $1.19 each, which is not ideal since it severly affects the regular stream of new puzzles). So what am I to do? I might just have to wait till march and see if things improve at all by then.
Still, it could be worse: at least Private Eye still has the full crossword online, even as the rest of the magazine sinks deeper behind a subscriber only barrier.
20060127
Today's special
I give you "I predict a fry-up" by the Kaiser Chefs (which jumped into my head unbidden this morning). Now all I need is a wannabe morning show DJ to fill in the rest.
20060125
A new kind of spam...
I received a message today with the following title
"Subject: Request for an opprtunity to work with you"
and the first line
"I, the undersigned, am furnishing my resume along with this letter."
Spam, surely? No, actually an entirely serious and reasonable request to work with me over summer. Of course, I have no resources with which to support such a request, and so the most I can do was politely decline, and file the message somewhere deep within my hierarchy of folders. But given the antiquated state of my anti-spam system (which is me reading the messages and deciding which ones to delete, after processing through some very crude procmail filters), it could so easily have been deleted without reading it. Which would have been unfortunate, since the net effect is the same, I still like to give every genuine message to me its proper attention. Paf.
"Subject: Request for an opprtunity to work with you"
and the first line
"I, the undersigned, am furnishing my resume along with this letter."
Spam, surely? No, actually an entirely serious and reasonable request to work with me over summer. Of course, I have no resources with which to support such a request, and so the most I can do was politely decline, and file the message somewhere deep within my hierarchy of folders. But given the antiquated state of my anti-spam system (which is me reading the messages and deciding which ones to delete, after processing through some very crude procmail filters), it could so easily have been deleted without reading it. Which would have been unfortunate, since the net effect is the same, I still like to give every genuine message to me its proper attention. Paf.
20060124
Stoopid Monkey
I've recently noticed that the "...for Dummies" range has experienced a fairly significant amount of brand extension. Remember when it was just computer software, like "Excel for Dummies" and so on? Then they branched out into all manner of things, such as "Buying a home for Dummies", and "Cat care for dummies". But lately it seems to have gone a bit far... I was in a bookstore this weekend and saw "Breast Cancer for Dummies". Really?
Of course, nothing compares to the ambiguously titled "Building a website for Dummies".
Of course, nothing compares to the ambiguously titled "Building a website for Dummies".
20060122
Suckage
Why does IE suck so much at rendering animated GIFs? I was browsing that latest of the twisted mr sheep's efforts through Avant, which is a relatively sensible wrapper around the IE rendering engine, and it almost choked. I loaded the same page in Firefox, and it worked fine. Of course, I use Opera for my serious browsing, but now I'm wondering if I should remove all traces of I.E. from my system (and also wondering why I didn't do this years ago).
20060119
Damned by faint criticism
Possibly the lamest indictment of MSWord I've yet seen:
"What I hate about this WYSIWYG word processor is that it doesn't display other people's documents the way *I* want them to be displayed."
By the way, here is how I deal with word documents:
cat wasteoftime.doc | strings | less
rm wasteoftime.doc
Easy, huh?
"What I hate about this WYSIWYG word processor is that it doesn't display other people's documents the way *I* want them to be displayed."
By the way, here is how I deal with word documents:
cat wasteoftime.doc | strings | less
rm wasteoftime.doc
Easy, huh?
20060117
pdflatex and letter paper
One of the slight irritations in my life was getting pdflatex to output on US letter paper. For some reason, whatever I did, setting [letterpaper] options in the documentclass settings, trying to edit the pdf configuration files and so on, I didn't seem to have much luck. Eventually I found a fix: putting the lines
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
in the preamble seemed to work, but seemed a bit clunky.
Then today, I found a new fix: putting
\usepackage{graphicx}
in the preamble seems to fix the paper size. I have no idea why. In the event, I seem to have this line in a lot of tex files I write since it's used to include graphics. That explains why it's only in a few cases that I've struggled with this problem. It's funny, in all the searching I've done for this problem, I've never seen anyone suggest this solution, so I'll post this here on the offchance that it helps someone else. Or rather, for next time I have the same problem and can't rememeber what I did last time to fix it...
Edit June 06: It seems to have broken again on my system, and the graphicx trick doesn't seem to work anymore. I tried something called 'texconfig', but this didn't seem to make any difference. So, back to the tried and tested pdfpagelength technique. (This seems to partly be a problem with the ACM's sig-alternate style, I think, since it was working fine till I switched class files.
Edit November 06: Here's a slightly cleaner way that means that people still living in the past and using latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf can still compile the same file: include
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\ifpdf
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
\else
\fi
Of course, then you need ifpdf, but it's part of most modern tex distributions (as indeed is pdflatex, which rather renders the whole effort redundant, but means that I can just send people the ifpdf file to get it to compile if they don't have it).
Edit April 2008:
Another thing to remember: when compiling with the ACM style files, remove all use of the 'fullpage' package (and probably other packages that play around with the page size, such as geometry). Otherwise, for some reason, LaTeX creates a never-ending stream of blank pages.
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
in the preamble seemed to work, but seemed a bit clunky.
Then today, I found a new fix: putting
\usepackage{graphicx}
in the preamble seems to fix the paper size. I have no idea why. In the event, I seem to have this line in a lot of tex files I write since it's used to include graphics. That explains why it's only in a few cases that I've struggled with this problem. It's funny, in all the searching I've done for this problem, I've never seen anyone suggest this solution, so I'll post this here on the offchance that it helps someone else. Or rather, for next time I have the same problem and can't rememeber what I did last time to fix it...
Edit June 06: It seems to have broken again on my system, and the graphicx trick doesn't seem to work anymore. I tried something called 'texconfig', but this didn't seem to make any difference. So, back to the tried and tested pdfpagelength technique. (This seems to partly be a problem with the ACM's sig-alternate style, I think, since it was working fine till I switched class files.
Edit November 06: Here's a slightly cleaner way that means that people still living in the past and using latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf can still compile the same file: include
\usepackage{ifpdf}
\ifpdf
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
\else
\fi
Of course, then you need ifpdf, but it's part of most modern tex distributions (as indeed is pdflatex, which rather renders the whole effort redundant, but means that I can just send people the ifpdf file to get it to compile if they don't have it).
Edit April 2008:
Another thing to remember: when compiling with the ACM style files, remove all use of the 'fullpage' package (and probably other packages that play around with the page size, such as geometry). Otherwise, for some reason, LaTeX creates a never-ending stream of blank pages.
20060116
House Call
I saw a very odd recent episode of House recently. House was in Baltimore to sort out some Medicare billing issues. I thought that this would be an interesting subplot, but it was dealt with in about 30 seconds. He then had to get back from Baltimore to the Princeton-Plainsboro Teachning Hospital to fix another patient. So far, so good. But how was he getting back? He was flying.
Thus a major feature of the episode was that he was stuck in the airport as snow delayed the flight, and had to offer sage advice over the telephone. Here's the problem: Baltimore is only 150 miles from Princeton. It makes very little sense to fly from Baltimore -- he'd have to go to Newark, I suppose, and then get down from there. Heck, he might just as well go from Philadelphia, it's about as close, and that's saving only 100 miles. Given that snow was a likelihood, and that there's all that hassle of checking in, why on earth would you fly? You can fly from BWI to EWR or PHL, on Continental Express for a sky-high fee, and it'll take about an hour.
But here's a thought: why not take the convenient rail option: for a significantly lower ticket price, you can take the train either from BWI or Baltimore Penn Station direct to Princeton Junction on Amtrak, and the total travel time is about an hour and half to an hour and three quarters. That's a heck of a lot faster, cheaper, and less prone to delay from snow than the flying option. And it gets him pretty much to the front door of his hospital.
I know that the show is actually made on the West Coast. I know that, for some bizarre reason they chose to set the airport scenes in the fictional "Baltimore Libery International Airport" instead of the more standard BWI. But you have to wonder, if they make the transport so convoluted, how many liberties are they taking with the medicine? It's probably a good thing I'm not a medic.
Thus a major feature of the episode was that he was stuck in the airport as snow delayed the flight, and had to offer sage advice over the telephone. Here's the problem: Baltimore is only 150 miles from Princeton. It makes very little sense to fly from Baltimore -- he'd have to go to Newark, I suppose, and then get down from there. Heck, he might just as well go from Philadelphia, it's about as close, and that's saving only 100 miles. Given that snow was a likelihood, and that there's all that hassle of checking in, why on earth would you fly? You can fly from BWI to EWR or PHL, on Continental Express for a sky-high fee, and it'll take about an hour.
But here's a thought: why not take the convenient rail option: for a significantly lower ticket price, you can take the train either from BWI or Baltimore Penn Station direct to Princeton Junction on Amtrak, and the total travel time is about an hour and half to an hour and three quarters. That's a heck of a lot faster, cheaper, and less prone to delay from snow than the flying option. And it gets him pretty much to the front door of his hospital.
I know that the show is actually made on the West Coast. I know that, for some bizarre reason they chose to set the airport scenes in the fictional "Baltimore Libery International Airport" instead of the more standard BWI. But you have to wonder, if they make the transport so convoluted, how many liberties are they taking with the medicine? It's probably a good thing I'm not a medic.
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