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Friday, December 4th, 2009
9:37 pm - Writer's Block: Tinsel town

Do you put up decorations for the holidays? If so, when do the decorations go up and when do you take them down?

Submitted By [info]carterbecks99


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Generic "winter holiday" decorations I'm happy to put up any time after Halloween, preferably after the first snowfall if feasible. Christmas-specific things - wreaths, trees, etc. - I put up for Christmas, that is, the twelve-day period stretching from the evening of December 24th until Twelfth Night, the eve of Epiphany on January 5th. Before that, it's just Advent.

Now, my parents generally did put up the Christmas tree on the 23rd, partly as a concession to our impatience and also to avoid doing absolutely everything on Christmas Eve, but it was very clear that this was a bit of a dodge.

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Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
9:51 pm - Oddly shaped things
Google Street View now includes London, Ont., allowing me to take virtual walks through my old home town. So very, very weird!

The Green Owl vegetarian restaurant, at long last opening in my neighbourhood! I was a bit worried it'd be just Soup, plus More Soup, but no: menu.

We're getting our signed copy of Christopher Moore's copy of Fluke back.

That's about it.

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12:28 pm - Can't think of anything clever and relevant to say, but..
Happy birthday to [info]commodorified!

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Monday, November 30th, 2009
3:00 pm - The imitation game
Recently I was at the Museum of Science and Industry, where they have a captured German U-boat in the basement. Like you do. Among the items retrieved from it were 2 military-grade Enigma encryption machines; the text evades what was actually done with them, but unless I miss my guess, they probably wound up in Bletchley Park, England, where they helped Alan Turing and his team figure out how to crack the latest military version of the Enigma - the civilian one, and previous iterations used by the German military, already having been solved.

A pickup truck on my street has one of those "If you can read this in English, thank a soldier" stickers. It might, with equal justice, read "If you can read this in English, thank a gay nerd with a speech impediment." I've posted about Turing before, but to me, at least, his story never grows old: the shy, retiring genius, first publishing ideas which, come to fruition, will yield a technology that changes the world beyond recognition; then, from a shed in the country, delivering a mortal blow to looming tyranny; and finally, rather than the Star Wars ending of decoration and gratitude, being treated by his country as a subhuman deviant and hounded to suicide.

Recently I read a recent re-telling of this story, David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much. There's nothing original there: the reconstruction of Turing's inner life comes largely by way of Andrew Hodges' classic Alan Turing: The Enigma, and the correct attribution of key design decisions in the first electronic stored-program computers to Turing rather than to John von Neumann is drawn from Martin Davis. I have a clear recollection of Davis giving, at a conference, an after-dinner talk on Turing's life, and the utter silence that prevailed after he recounted the grim details of Turing's death and then flipped off the overhead.

The first place that I heard the whole story still sticks with me most of all, though: Douglas Hofstadter's review of The Enigma, reprinted in Metamagical Themas. The last sentence:

Although today all evidence strongly suggests that the machine known as Alan Mathison Turing halted itself of its own free will, the ultimate reason remains an enigma to us, an undecidable question.

still seems to me one of the saddest ever committed to print. Leavitt doesn't come anywhere near these heights, but this is a decent and sympathetic short biography and I can't really fault him.

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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
8:42 am - And the two into ten thousand things, and old things into new
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
-Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st ed., November 24th, 1859

Happy Origin Day!

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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
7:56 am - Where Don, the dirty river, ran / Past taverns numberless to Man / Down to the TTC
Yeah, I'm always secretly a bit disappointed that "Rocket Ride" isn't actually about Toronto public transit.

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Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
6:12 am - Lord Kitchener's mustache
Ypres 1915
Alden Nowlan

The age of trumpets is passed, the banners hang
like dead crows, battered and black,
rotting into nothingness on cathedral walls.
In the crypt of St. Paul’s I had all the wrong thoughts,
wondered if there was anything left of Nelson
or Wellington, and even wished
I could pry open their tombs and look,
then was ashamed
of such morbid childishness, and almost afraid.

I know the picture is as much a forgery
as the Protocols of Zion, yet it outdistances
more plausible fictions: newsreels, regimental histories,
biographies of Earl Haig.

It is always morning... )

Oh, I know they were mercenaries
in a war that hardly concerned us.
I know all that.

Sometimes I’m not even sure that I have a country.

But I know that they stood there at Ypres
the first time the Germans used gas,
that they were almost the only troops
in that section of the front
who did not break and run,
who held the line.

Perhaps they were too scared to run.
Perhaps they didn’t know any better
– that is possible, they were so innocent,
those farmboys and mechanics, you only have to look
at old pictures and see how they smiled.

Perhaps they were too shy
to walk out on anybody, even Death.
Perhaps their only motivation
was a stubborn disinclination.

Private McNally thinking:
You squareheaded sons of bitches,
you want this God damn trench
you’re going to have to take it away
from Billy McNally
of the South End of Saint John, New Brunswick.

And that’s ridiculous, too, and nothing on which to found a country.
Still
It makes me feel good, knowing
that in some obscure, conclusive way
they were connected with me
and me with them.

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Sunday, October 25th, 2009
9:09 am - The people's sure foundation
In German there's a clear distinction between traditional music - Volksmusik - and new music consciously written in a traditional style - volkstümliche Musik. It's long been a low-level frustration to me that English lacks the terminology. I hate to get all Sapir-Whorf, but I think the lack of common terms does result in this distinction being frequently lost on people, to the degree that I once heard someone describe a James Taylor song as "folk".

Not that the whole category of "folk music" isn't kind of problematic to begin with. I worry, betimes, that it's frequently just a mental lobster-fork with which to make a false separation between Good popular song (arising from a ground-up process of largely anonymous creation and improvement through transmission) and Evil (written in the Brill Building or the offices of Stock Aitken Waterman by soulless, salaried drones aiming at the lowest common denominator, and forced into everyone's ear by corporate radio).

And yet to my ear and brain there nonetheless seems to be a vast world of difference between, say, "Fire and Rain", and "The Two Butchers". On the other hand, it's probably more a matter of style, rather than any kind of mark of the potter's hand - for years I thought that Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song" was traditional. (Although, to be fair - it is kind of by way of a remix of traditional themes and turns of phrase, so it's kind of an edge case.)

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Friday, October 23rd, 2009
10:23 am - Madison peeps!
Anybody interested in taking in the Phil Ochs Song Night at the Wil-Mar Centre?

Anyone going to GeekKon at all? My current plan is to check it out for a chunk of Saturday afternoon/evening, but that may vary depending on who all else is there, what I find, etc. etc. Also on wireless access, since I plan to spend a fair chunk of time this weekend on my personal Web/coding projects.

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Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
4:33 pm - A happy 80th birthday to Ursula Le Guin
"They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument. They were awed, adoring. She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! That's not anarchism, that's mere obscurantism. You don't think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you? They accepted their tongue-lashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb. She! She who had mined the shipyards at Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte to his face in front of a crowd of seven thousand, telling him he would have cut off his own balls and had them bronzed and sold as souvenirs, if he thought there was any profit in it - she who had screeched, and sworn and kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF A-IO ETC ETC, pssssssssss to all that! And now she was everybody's grandmama, the dear old lady, the sweet old monument, come worship at the womb."
- from "The Day Before the Revolution"

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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
8:35 am - National Poetry Day meme
Meme via [info]oursin; name ten women poets.

My ten )

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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
9:22 am - Conference on john or something like that
For some reason this morning I thought about the movie Running Scared, which is a bit odd because it really wasn't that memorable a movie. It was one of those movies from the 80s that was marketed as an action/comedy (Spies Like Us is another I can think of, although that was a bit closer to the pure comedy side of things) despite.. not really being that funny. You know, the kind of thing where there's a solid half hour of gritty police procedural, and then a wacky encounter in a warehouse with a gay crime-lord with a droopy mustache! Ahh, it's comedy gold.

And I realized that it's not really a selling point anymore that an action movie has shtick in it - we really just sort of expect that! Summer blockbusters are supposed to have wisecracks and comical sidekicks and absurd set-pieces and that's that; not having them would be like a burger at a diner not coming with fries. If Cellular had come out in the 80s, the marketing probably would've played up the whole sub-plot with William H. Macy's day spa and made it sound WACKY! When in fact it's some tense shit. (NB: actually, it's a pretty good movie, and I don't just say this because we love both Macy and Jason Statham and seeing them in a sexy, Dostoevskian war of nerves is totally awesome. I think it suffered from the belief that arose, early on, that it was "Phone Booth, but with a cell phone!" because, well, Phone Booth really blew chunks, with all due respect to the voice of Kiefer "Raistlin" Sutherland.)

Maybe this was partly due to how insanely humourless pure actioners were in those days - I have clear memories of lots of posters from which Arnie or Stallone or Chuck Norris would stare grimly, daring you to cross that line, punk.

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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
10:30 pm - Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Long day. Both bad and good: work crazy, a pleasant time at the Web608 Geek Dinner, then the nasty shock of not finding my cellphone charger, with the deep suspicion that, because it looks exactly the same as [info]commodorified's, everyone was tired, and our apartment is a bit cluttered, it's on its merry way to Ottawa. Still figuring out its whereabouts and ordered a new one, with [info]ladymondegreen's help, but it was strangely very upsetting, especially with [info]sweetmusic_27 in transit.

Since it's getting chilly of nights, unwinding seemed to call for cocoa. I'm fairly happy with my cocoa algorithm, though it's not wildly groundbreaking:

3 cups milk or milk substitute (have tested with soy milk and like the results; almond milk probably even better)
6 tbsp each of cocoa and either sugar or honey (I prefer honey)
1/2 tsp (roughly) cinnamon and nutmeg
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
pinch chili powder

Mix all together over medium heat, whisking constantly until smooth and hot.

The end result:
Cocoa

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Friday, September 25th, 2009
6:41 am
"Much love, much trial; but what an utter desert is life without love. God bless you. C.D."
-Charles Darwin to Joseph Hooker, November 1863

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Thursday, September 24th, 2009
9:03 pm - A Good Thing or Two
Betimes I sit down and try to make a post which is a whole list of interesting things I'd like to pimp. I'll keep this one small:

1. Gene Stratton-Porter's book Moths of the Limberlost; [free text] [free audiobook]. I had never heard of Geneva Stratton-Porter before stumbling across this book on Librivox; she funded her nature-writing through writing popular fiction, and her semi-autobiographical novel A Girl of the Limberlost has been adapted for the screen 4 times, first in 1924 and most recently in 1990. Moths is a completely winning book, full of the author's fascination with living things ("A perforated box," she confesses in one chapter, "is a passport to my good graces"), sharp analytical mind, and knack for story-telling: such as the narrative of her efforts, as a child, to convince her parents that Deilephila lineata is a moth and not a bird:
I ran into the house crying that at last I had caught a Lady Bird. Holding carefully, the trumpet was cut open with a pin, and although the moth must have been slightly pinched, and lacking in down when released, I clung to it until my mother and every doubting member of my family was convinced that this was no bird at all, for it lacked beak, tail, and feathers, while it had six legs and four wings. Father was delighted that I had learned something new, all by myself; but I really think it slightly provoked my mother when thereafter I always refused to call it a bird. This certainly was reprehensible. She should have known all the time that it was a moth.

2. The Terra: The Nature of Our World video podcast, especially "Ten Days to Paint the Forest", "Les Vers de Darwin", "Papiroflexia".

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8:46 pm - Belated report
So a few weeks ago I asked what I should do on the long weekend, and there were several votes for a bike adventure. I never reported back on that, but I did have one! I took the Military Ridge State Trail all the way to the Pluto marker (edit: I originally said 'market', which I'll preserve because I think "The Pluto Market" is a very evocative phrase) in Mount Horeb:
The Wumpus at Pluto, Mt. Horeb
and a little farther (after lunch at the Grumpy Troll) to Blue Mounds, and then back home. There were sandhill cranes, and innumerable grasshoppers; espresso at the Tuvalu Coffee-house on the way up, and Gatorade from the vending machine nearby on the way back - unbelievably delicious in the afternoon heat. Mount Horeb was still mostly dozing at 20 to 10 on a Saturday morning, but the Prairie Bookstore was open (I had Neal Asher's Cowl and a wide selection of science podcasts with me, but it's always reassuring to find a bookstore wherever you may go); as was the Mustard Museum.

By the trailside was this alien-looking plant:
Red white and green
which turns out to be Actaea pachypoda, doll's-eyes or white baneberry. Which is extremely toxic by all accounts, so not succumbing to my momentary temptation to try one was probably wise.

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Monday, September 21st, 2009
6:15 am - The grain and stuff of eternity
Saturday was a good day for finding interesting sights about the neighbourhood. Down by the water, at Clarke Beach, was this plant growing out of a crack in a rock:
Persistence
and also a couple of great insects, cut for non-fans )

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Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
2:00 pm - This is the best quiz

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be W.B.R. Lickorish's An Introduction to Knot Theory.

I am an introduction to mathematical Knot Theory; the theory of knots and links of simple closed curves in three-dimensional space. I consist of a selection of topics which graduate students have found to be a successful introduction to the field. Three distinct techniques are employed; Geometric Topology Manoeuvres, Combinatorics, and Algebraic Topology.

Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

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Sunday, September 13th, 2009
7:08 pm - Medium pimpin'
I discovered recently that some people haven't come across "Shatner Of The Mount" yet. Or [info]moon_custafer's excellent webcomic, Does Not Equal, which recently included a quote from me - it's the one in Copperplate Gothic.

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Friday, September 11th, 2009
8:35 am - Things I have never quite understood, pop culture edition
- What it means for a thing to be 'honky-tonk' (man, woman, girls, freeway, etc.)
- What it means for a thing to be 'à go go'
- What the literal meaning of tripping the light either fantastic or fandango is. Yes I get that metaphorically it means dancing, but what is the actual image supposed to be?

ETA. I mean, I get the general sense of "honky-tonk" - it's got a clear down-home, C&W, sort of Southern feel to it, but I don't have an effective decision procedure, you know: "This girl here: honky-tonk! That girl over there: not honky-tonk!" Maybe Mick Jagger needs to write a column or something.

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