Programming jokes

I've been saving up a few random programming jokes. Since I no longer care about post lengths, I shall post them now! Warning: they are all horrible, vile puns.

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1. “... and, since the language was essentially a combination of Perl and Haskell, we of course decided to call it Blaise.”

2. The following four (?) lines of code are potentially legal (if probably useless) C++, even in the absence of preprocessor defines. (Writing a prologue to actually make it compilable and executable is left as an exercise for the reader.)

o.o ^_^x <_< n_n >_> z_z ;_; ~_~ -_- *_*
‍ ‍ ‍ <(o_o)>~~~ o_O; x.x <3 +_+ 9.9 >_<!!!
‍ ‍ ‍ (T.T )( T.T) ._. H_H ^o^ '_' %_% x_X;

3. Loosely related to the above: one of the things I love about working with computer graphics is the fact that I'm working specifically with 3D graphics. This means I get far too many opportunities to write the following:

for (size_t i = 0; i<3u; i++) { ... }

4. “So this guy walks into a pipe...”

Okay, that's enough.

No, really. The towel is thrown in, and I am done, thank you.

It's not that I absolutely can't continue. If nothing else, I think, I've shown that I can consistently keep writing; the second half-year woludn't be any more difficult than the first in that regard. It may seem like I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel recently, but if I'm honest about it, it never was all that much better.

The fact that it doesn't seem to be any better now, though, that bothers me.

The biggest problem was that the original goal I set myself — to write more quickly — has been a complete failure: the time it takes me to compose a post is, frankly, absurd. I doubt a single one has taken me less than a full hour, and far more often they take two to three. (This post was no exception.) I've never had more than a day's buffer of scheduled posts, and I've never had that even that much buffer for more than a day.

Doing this (and, worse, avoiding doing this) basically eats up all of my time, and gives nothing back. (Most people do it for the joy of feedback; but if I had a million followers, it wouldn't matter — that was never the point.)

I bought a copy of Soul Calibur IV just before I started this nonsense. I've played it all of twice. I haven't seen a single episode of Fushigi no Umi no Nadia since November. I haven't gotten any farther in Eternal Sonata. (I was in the bonus dungeon — I still have the GameFAQs page for it open in Firefox!) The last time I studied music theory was at SIGGRAPH, when I brought along a book for the plane trip and airport wait. Never mind kanji practice or type-theory papers or looking into vocal lessons.

So yeah. No more daily posts, no more post restrictions, no more anything else but random whimsy. If I come up with something to post, I'll post it; but it'll be as long or as short as it needs to be, and not measured.

But tomorrow — tomorrow, there will be no post, and no explanation nor apology for it.

De lupis

(I am so, so sorry.)

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Werewolves, of course, can't generally support themselves in the Muggle world. Finding steady employment that allows for full moons off isn't easy in the best of times; finding a job that pays enough for a sturdy cage and repairs to it — let alone for Wolfsbane! — is essentially impossible. The few werewolves that are forced out into the Muggle world typically turn to a life of crime almost immediately, and rarely last a full month: either circumstances are mysterious, and the Ministry of Magic intervenes; or circumstances are not mysterious, in which case the Muggle police typically have no problem catching someone who doesn't know what fingerprints are, much less closed-circuit television.

Remus Lupin considered himself very lucky in this regard. Unpleasant as it was, he hadn't actually been forced out of the magical world after James and Lily's death. He was quite able to support himself well enough to afford a cage, and even the occasional dose of quietly-purchased Wolfsbane. In the unlikely event that the Ministry cared enough to know where he was and what he was doing, they couldn't legally do a thing to him as long as he didn't use magic —

— click —
— and, he thought to himself as the safe swung open, the Yard were unlikely to have the resources to catch him. Assuming they even realize, he thought as he cheerfully removed stacks of fifty-pound notes from the safe; that I'm not cousin Arsène.

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Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

So let me talk about cell phones for a moment.

The Motorola [motorola.com] company was founded in 1928 by Paul and Joseph Galvin, as the Galvin Manufacturing Company. It was renamed to Motorola, a portmanteau of motor and Victrola, when the company began to manufacture radios for automobiles in 1930. Later, it —

Wait, roll back. Let me talk about cell phones in movies.

The thing that sticks out most in my mind about Journey to the Center of the Earth — I make no apologies for spoilers; the movie was awful, 3D or no 3D — was the scene where the kid's cell phone rings while he's in the middle of the sea in bad weather and uncounted miles below the surface of the earth.

Conversely, Hoshi no Koe — or by its English name, the equally poetic* Voices from a Distant Star — revolves around a not-technically-impossible text-message "conversation", but a decidedly implausible one. (I suppose the Lysithea could have acted as a relay.) Since this really is the central plot device of the movie, it and its associated concepts get a free pass as the one unicorn in the garden.

The cell-phone bit in Battle of the Smithsonian, on the other hand, was completely arbitrary, utterly gratuitous, and yet managed not to worry me in the least. (The movie is about figures in a museum coming to life due to ancient Egyptian magic. The premise easily subsumes a multitude of lesser sins.)

The rest of the movie was also largely hilarious, especially the sequence where the three monkeys essentially acted out a Three Stooges skit. I have spoiled nothing.

Downside: the reference to π grated on my historical and mathematical sensibilities, for multiple reasons — here, have a link. (Sure, I'd have used π, but I'd have gone a lot farther than a lousy eight digits; you can go 32 before you hit a zero. Oh, and it's terribly convenient that the numbers happened to be in telephone arrangement, rather than (say) boustrophedonically... I should really just relax, shouldn't I.)

Other downside: the romantic subplot. It was fine for most of the movie (the putti notwithstanding), usually adding directly to the comedy, but the last bit was kind of depressing, really. No, after that; the bit that the movie closed on.

Still, it didn't exactly pretend to be high art, nor educational; and unlike your average so-called "romantic comedy" or the abomination they've made out of Land of the Lost, it was genuinely funny. It gets a 1/1, and a lack of impassioned rant.

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* I mean this quite literally: "Hoshi no Koe" is potentially the first line of a haiku, while "Voices from a Distant Star" fits nicely into either iambic or trochaic pentameter. (And no, I don't care that the official translation uses of in the title rather than from.)

Random things on the Internet (Issue 2)

An Essay on Criticism II, by Alexander Pope er, Geoff Nunberg; being a lamentation on the state of the language.

Inaugural Embedding, some notes on the language of the state. (And similar.)

Neon Genesis Evangelion: Gakuen Datenroku. Apparently Gainax has been reduced to selling alternate-universe doujinshi. (I just might get the first volume anyway; it sounds at least vaguely interesting, and I could use the practice.)

...of course, they do sell stranger things.

An advertisement-video for a Twitter application on the iPhone. It should be noted that I care nothing for the iPhone, and indeed have nothing but antipathy towards Twitter: I just want to know what that music in the background is. It sounds familiar — I could swear I'd heard it in a PC game of ages past, or possibly as a .MOD file, but I can't place it.

One of the worst puns ever to grace RPG.net (and I can assure you that that's saying something.)

A music video for a popular-ish song. Not even a fan-creation — the author's original. I mention it only because it (the video) is clever, and because the melody has been running through my head off and on for the past week.

Negative quarters

Negative quarters are relatively large coins, each worth -25¢.

A negative quarter appears to the eye to be the as a mirror image of an ordinary quarter, made out of some obsidian-like substance. It has a date (usually in the future) and sometimes a reversed mint-mark. It may have scratches and dents, although it never acquires new ones, and on rare occasion may lose the ones it has — the fact has been confirmed, but the process has never been observed directly. To the touch it feels much like an ordinary quarter, in both texture and heat-capacity.

When a negative quarter is allowed to come into contact with a positive quarter, the two quietly mutually annihilate. (Unlike the case of a matter-antimatter reaction, there is no release of radiation involved.) Similarly, negative quarters can be produced (along with a corresponding normal, "positive" quarter) out of nothing.

Spontaneous paired production/destruction events happen all the time: every monetary transaction involves the creation of a number of 'virtual currency pairs', although under normal circumstances these pairs are too short-lived to be observed directly. However, an existing negative quarter can easily be used to disrupt the destruction event, reifying the virtual pair.

`(-25¢) stackrel(delta)(->) 2(-25¢) + (25¢)`
(Note that, by symmetry, the mirror operation `(25¢) stackrel(-delta)(->) (-25¢) + 2(25¢)` is also possible; however, physical negative transactions are rather rarer, and usually of lower absolute value.)

Without an existing negative quarter it is more difficult to disrupt the virtual pair destruction event, but it is still possible. The usual process is to perform perform many thousands of long-distance, high-speed transactions near small objects of high value. The first negative coinage was produced by researchers in Switzerland, using Faberge eggs; since then negative quarters have also been independently produced using antimatter, common sense, and the kidnapped daughter of Bill Gates (later returned unharmed, with the demanded ransom unpaid).

In order to remove negative currency from their declared assets, banks have been known to surreptitiously hire construction companies to dispose of stacks of negative coins within the concrete of a building's foundation.

Review: Kikan (2/2)

(continued from last time)

So Kikan is, in fact, a complete and completed game (rather than a demo, a prologue, an introduction, or a “Part 1 of `n`” [for `n >= 2`]). This is an astonishing rarity amongst indie RPGs: most are only ever partially released, as many authors or groups never complete a game; and many of those who do release only the first portion for free, as teaserware. (And then there are those all-too-common individuals and works that fall into both categories. But I digress.)

Considered specifically as a console-style RPG, it is also a complete narrative; each part flows into the next sensibly. (With some bits of Fridge Logic, granted, but Fridge Logic rather than Wallbangers.) Though it is short, it does not appear particularly rushed; I would actually go so far as to prefer the adjective 'polished': I encountered exactly zero bugs. (This is rare enough in a professionally published game — much less an independent one made with a freeware game creation system!) There are also very few typos and misspellings.

There is also a sense of game balance; the game is neither awkwardly difficult nor absurdly easy. The level cap is 25, which is reasonable for the duration; it would perhaps have been nice to have it a few levels higher for the last sequence, but this was not actually necessary. (I cede that I have a tendency to overlevel in JRPGs.) The bosses are perhaps better described as ‘tedious’ than as ‘difficult’ — the bonus boss took an hour and two Megalixirs to defeat (although I could probably have gotten by with only one).

(As a negative: The Judgement Line — part of the combat system, requiring the spacebar to be pressed at certain times — is annoying in ways similar to Legend of Dragoon's system. I was mostly able to tolerate it (DDR is good for something, at least), but I did finally get fed up with it at the end, during the several-hours'-worth of boss battles.)

The puzzles are well-designed. One particularly fiendish Sokoban-style puzzle is optional, allowing you to bypass a boss if solved. There are also three optional minigames, all of relatively high quality. (One of them, being as it was a derivative of Tapper, sucked me in for an hour or two despite yielding at most very modest in-game rewards.)

The graphics are exactly as they should be, up to the limits of the system; they are notable as much for what isn't there (easily-added distracting frippery) as what is (individual enemy attack animations; just enough random variation in floor and wall texture to look believable).

Bonus points: the Blarney Stone is an equippable item. (And then minus half, for incorrectly referring to it as limestone.)

There are a number of in-jokey references made to other media (console JRPGs, ZZT/MegaZeux games, anime, etc.) — enough that I would find them grating in most media, but far, far fewer than would be expected in a MegaZeux game. (After the first section, fortunately, they almost vanish.)

The ending... the ending was basically what it should have been, given the game, and given the main character. I understand that. As an atheist, though, I don't really appreciate being expected to implicitly affirm the existence of God or positive qualities of faith-in-the-divine in order to complete the game. (I do give it credit that, unlike most such messages of this flavor, it was not a heavy-handed, sola-fide-based Christian-specific message. The protagonist was mentioned to have been a habitual churchgoer, but in this AU he could just as plausibly have been Discordian.)

So, eh. It cost me nothing but a bit of time — this has to factor into any review — but would I recommend this over the many other games available at the same price? Rrf. I would, if you're designing an RPG yourself, or interested in game design in general; it provides a number of positive examples. To anyone else... well, you have enough information by now to know what you would think. In the end, I'll have to simply rate it a 1/1, and move on.

The Oracle

She smiles serenely.

Her hundred perfect likenesses follow her, passing through one another though each is solid to the eye. Some try to cling to her robes; some cringe at her feet in fear; some pull away, though remain as though held by chains. Some whisper hatefully in her ears; some plead tearfully; some scream in wordless rage or terror. The sound is no more than a faint sussurus, though their hoarse words may be made out by any who choose to listen.

Her hair and her robes remain unruffled, except by the occasional draft.

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Her Servants

The Oracle is often petitioned by people who have suffered some loss, or who desire an unattainable redemption, or who simply have no direction in life. Sometimes they will ask her, — What shall I do? — and to this she will sometimes respond, — You shall serve me.

She chooses her servants as she does all else: wisely.

She is served by a small group of people, of various ages. In times of prosperity, she may have as few as five servants, and those generally older; in times of ill fortune, she may have as many as twenty. All wear the same style of white robe that she (and her images) wear; they can and do speak freely, though they tend towards silence. They do not accompany her during an audience; those are kept private.

To each visitor, she herself voices only one phrase: a greeting, in the listener's native language, in what they consider to be an educated but familiar accent. (This has included sign languages.) All other conversation is carried out by telepathy (when words are required) or telempathy (where not); she seems to prefer the latter.

She has never exhibited anger, or even displeasure.

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Edit 2009-05-19: Inserted horizontal rule. Everything below it is useless — or everything above it is box text.

Review: Kikan (1/2)

Kikan, by Luke Drelick, is a 2008 remake of a 2006 JRPG-style game for MegaZeux; it is available from the author's website, here.

I am of violently mixed opinion about this game.

For a MegaZeux game, it is uniformly excellent, and probably among the top in the medium. What problems I do have with it are largely problems endemic thereto — which is understandable considering that a) the culture surrounding MegaZeux is largely derived from the culture that surrounded ZZT, and b) the culture that surrounded ZZT was largely derived from America Online in its heyday. (I should know; I was there.)

But this review is supposed to be about Kikan, not MegaZeux.

Let me provide context. Kikan is set, at least for the most part, in a curious alternate-universe New York City. The boroughs are renamed with acronyms: BX, BK, QNS, MHT, SI, and the unseen but named LI (context: an alcoholic drink, "LI Iced Tea"). Only the term "Bronx" is ever actually used, and then only to refer to to the Bronx Zoo.

There is also gratuituous use of fanboy Japanese, except there is some implication that it's perfectly normal in-universe. The Twin Towers are called the Towers of Dub, rendered 「塔のダブ」. "Shoshinkai" (the historical name of a Nintendo trade show now called Nintendo Space World, even in Japanese) is shown as being held in NYC, and features banners for the XBox, Playstation, Square-Enix, Sega and Konami. The phrase 「デュキＴＶ」 appears on almost every television set, and most of those have Sega Dreamcasts.

(As the title, Kikan, is not an in-world entity, it has no such excuse. Unfortunately it's not a single Japanese word, but about twenty different homophonic ones. The kanji provided (造機) are actually read zouki; the probable intended meaning of kikan is "Engine," as the author has also released another MegaZeux work by that name. Likewise unexcused is the use of Ougi (rather than, say, Tech) to denote special techniques and/or magic, and the セーブ on save-points.)

There is running political commentary, which may or may not be in-universe — but probably isn't entirely so, even though the political situation appears to be somewhat different than in OTL. The Nintendo Revolution's controller has just been introduced at the aforementioned Shoshinkai, presumably placing the time at around late 2005, but the economy is currently in a recession. The FARC is a threat to US national security and operates partially on U.S. soil (albeit only as drug-runners). The name Al-Qaeda isn't mentioned. (Fundamentalist Islam is mentioned in one of two strange conspiracy-theory diatribes, offered by random NPCs, which are "left-wing" only in the sense that the people whom they vilify are right-wing, or at least right-of-center.)

... and that last paragraph implies most of why I don't like Kikan. So, on to the parts I did like!

(Actually, since this post is getting a bit long, that's been postponed until tomorrow later.)

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Edit 2009-05-19: "Tomorrow". Ha.

On Hubris

So I may have recently mentioned something about my uptime.

Should've kept my mouth shut, shouldn't I?

So I'm invoking the computer failure clause while I get this system patched and cleaned and updated and virus-scanned and so forth. There's no way to tell for sure, of course, but I suspect that the crash was due to a faulty video driver; apparently the system couldn't handle the loads that MegaZeux was putting on it. (Ha.) Among the patches is a new driver, though, so that should help; I may even be able to play some of the games I've been putting off playing.

A World, Inverted*

So, here we are in the world inside the world. Beneath your feet is rough terrain: to your left is a wormy, brainlike structure which, after a moment, you realize is the inverse of an ant mound.

Overhead, there is the sky, which is the center of the earth. As one proceeds farther up (which is in), the 'air' pressure increases to unsurvivable levels. People don't generally do that. There's a little bit of heat radiating from it, but not much. Somewhere within there is a distant twinkling, as of moving water; perhaps within sight is a tremendous, slow-pouring waterfall.

There is a day/night cycle of sorts. Co-photons pass through the Earth, striking the far side from the sun, which is thereby illuminated. On the far side, the sky is dark, but the ground glows brightly; on the near side, the ground is dark, but the far side (seen dimly through three or four thousand miles of intervening worldspace) generally provides enough light to see by, weather permitting. The undersides of particularly dense objects on the near side sometimes glimmer. (Their historical analogue to geocentrism was that the world floated in a sea of hot liquid, and spun. They did eventually figure out where the sun actually was, based on light-angles and parallax; this came as quite a shock.)

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* (With apologies to Christopher Priest... wait a minute. I've used this title before, haven't I?)

Topological inversion (continued)

(continued from last post)

Note that large quantities of goods must often be transported to specific locations in A-side or B-side — to select a relevant example, shopping malls. Since A-side shopping malls must receive many goods, they can reduce the cost of transportation by installing a cross-boundary transport facility to receive them directly from B-side.

A B-side shopping mall, however, also has to receive many goods. Since B-side transportation is cheaper, it's going to act much like an ordinary real-world mall, receiving many large shipments.

(I seem to have kind of wandered away from the original point — all of this actually applies to a world-behind-the-mirror, too, assuming it's coherent enough to have an economy rather than running entirely on whimsy and/or madness.)

This sole bit of commonality between the two — receipt of many B-side deliveries — is probably sufficient to justify building an A-side and B-side mall in the same location. Not to mention that if they're owned and managed by the same company you get savings in administrative costs; construction is probably cheaper (only one structure to build); and individual stores can possibly be transboundary if they sell things that both worlds want to buy. (There almost certainly must be some such things; otherwise, in what worthwhile currency can A-side pay its transportation fees?)

So a shopping mall can, and probably will, exist in two worlds at once. (Whether this is 'any arbitrary shopping mall' or 'some specific shopping mall' is likely to depend on how long crossboundary travel has been available.) Consider the architecture of a mall that is intended to provide service to more than one world. For mirrors this is probably simple, since you would just have the same architecture duplicated and reflected, but a people-in-the-walls scenario is more interesting. One or the other of the two malls would probably be "underground" (likely the B-side mall, to make deliveries simpler).

(TBC: never mind day-to-day life, what does the world look like?)

Topological inversion

So despite the relative recency of the world-behind-the-mirror concept, it's already overused. Let's twist it a bit instead.

Consider a world which, effectively, has usable space where we have impermeable material, and impermeable material where we have usable space. The exact mechanism is not important: perhaps there is a race of xornlike creatures to whom air is toxic and corrosive; perhaps the beings-in-the-walls actually exist ‘above’ the world, ‘phased out’ slightly in a manner that isn't possible in a region of space with such low energy density as open air. All that's necessary is that the boundary be impermeable both ways.

Now if the boundary really is completely impermeable, there would be no way of knowing of the other side's existence. (Well, modulo the fact that, a. the boundary isn't immutable because objects aren't, and b. oh hey, physics doesn't work like that. But we shall handwave both of these away.) However, if the bounadry is only mostly impermeable, we have interesting consequences.

Transportation of goods will almost certainly be cheaper on one side or the other. Which is which depends on fiddly irrelevant details of the technobabble, each side's social development, and plot requirements; but we'll call the one where transportation is more expensive A-side, and where it is cheaper B-side. Given the ability to transport goods across the A-B boundary at reasonably available locations and relatively low amortized prices (possibly ‘anywhere, anytime’; possibly only at fixed but constructible portals), one can save money on the transportation of A-side goods between points in A-side by transporting them through B-side.

(TBC)

Excerpted from the 2077 State of the Union Address

(Excerpted from the 2077 State of the Union Address, the first such by President Joseph Franklin.)

... Almost seventy years ago, in the time of President Barack Obama, this nation undertook a collection of research and engineering projects which — it must be admitted — were successful in their endeavor: to free us from our dependence on importation of fossil fuels from foreign powers. The old infrastructure of coal-burning energy centers and internal-combustion engines has now been almost completely dismantled, replaced by heliothermal plants and cheap, replaceable transkews*.

Ironically, this goal was once known as “energy independence”. Instead, it has had the exact contrary effect: to tie us far more strongly to a power more foreign, and more intrinsically and fundamentally hostile, than any nation of this Earth.

It is therefore imperative, and vital to the security of our country, that this Congress act immediately to fund alternative energy sources, and thereby break our current crippling dependence on foreign energy. America is not safe unless she is independent; and she is not independent while she relies on the Sun.

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* transkew /ˌtʃɹæns.kjuː/ n. common term for any photovoltaic cell with efficiency exceeding the Shockley-Queisser limit [< contraction of trans-SQ < trans`{::}^{1}` + Shockley-Queisser; fpc. 2021]

Through the looking-glass

The concept of an other-world on the other side of the mirror is firmly embedded in our cultural consciousness, or akashic memory, or whatever the currently-in-vogue name for yeah, everybody knows about that is.

Mirrors (quoth the Font of All Knowledge) themselves are thousands of years old: eight thousand for the oldest incarnations in obsidian; various polished substances around six; but the concept of mirror-as-gateway is much more recent — I can't find a single citation verifiably earlier than Lewis Carroll! A large part of this is possibly that mirrors, up until very recently, weren't very large: they were mostly hand-held objects, too small to even consider stepping through, and rarely affixed to walls, and it was only around the late ninteenth century that full-length mirrors became feasible.

It's actually difficult to find any mythological references to mirrors, since myth, literature, and art are all themselves so often metaphorically described as mirrors. There is, of course, Yata no Kagami, said to be the mirror hung by Ama-no-Uzume to lure Amaterasu from her hiding-place; of probably loosely the same vintage, but half a world away, is Tezcatlipōca, the malefic deity known as [the] Smoking Mirror. Allegedly there is also a Jewish myth (which, if it is a real myth and not a modern invention, is quite possibly older than the previous two put together) involving a mirror possessed by a demon. None of these feature mirrors as portals or gateways.

(possibly TBC)

The Flaxen Femme Fatale

The Flaxen Femme Fatale is a 2008 gonzo comedy science-fiction detective novel by John Zakour, sixth in a series of such starring the last freelance P.I. on earth, Zachary Nixon "Zach" Johnson. (If you noticed the similarities between the author's and protagonists' names, you win a no-prize.)

Hitherto I've only read the first novel in the series, The Plutonium Blonde, and that many years ago. I was initially worried about missing out on the intervening novels, but it turns out that that's actually not all that important, for two reasons: a) the author is kind enough to fill people like me in on the relevant bits of the backstory as they come up, and b) it's two-fisted action and madcap antics set in a world with comic-book physics; continuity isn't the point.

“Don't spin him around too much. Believe me, you don't want an Elvis to barf on you.” Yes, I was speaking from experience.

— Zach Johnson, The Flaxen Femme Fatale

It reminds me most of Sam and Max. Yes, there's a plot, with recognizable (if four-color) characters, but they're not the point either; the psychics and aliens and mad scientists and superpowered politicians and loons and freaks and goons and geeks (our tenacious protagonist arguably being included in all four of those last) are really all just a medium by which may be delivered hilarity.

All in all, it is exactly what it tries to be: an entertaining read. (Which is more than many books manage.) I have no reservations at all in rating it a cheerful 1 out of 1, and cheerfully recommend it. Even without reading any of the first five books.

Cheese Primer

Cheese Primer, by Steven Jenkins, is a nonfiction work, about (can you guess?) cheese.

For reasons I'll explain later, I'm taking the unprecedented step of reviewing a book I have not read in full. This is perhaps a lesser crime for nonfiction than for fiction, but it nonetheless deserves disclaimer.

The book (pardon the pun) grates, in places. Mr. Jenkins takes something of an anti-scientific stance, unable to apprehend the distinction between science and business decisions — or, in at least one case, the distinction between science and bureaucracy.

He does seem to know his cheeses, cheesemaking, politics (where concerning cheese), and history (ditto), though; his descriptions and chosen illustrations constantly induce salivation. (This is the reason I had to stop reading: if I didn't, I was going to head out to try to get some cheese.) The descriptions of the tastes of individual cheeses are certainly accurate as far as I know them, and very likely farther.

Scattered throughout the book is advice on serving cheese, sometimes with simple recipes; some of it is reasonable, some brilliant, and some questionable — his advice on pairing cheeses with wines is ... amusing: to serve a cheese with a wine from the same region, and nothing more. (At this point, admittedly, I disdain cheese/wine pairing as astrology.)

Considered strictly as a book, the writing needs some cleanup; he repeats himself in places.

Overall, I'm not sure I can recommend it; it's a bit old (things do happen, you know). Still, it's informative, and I'm hungry. (I shan't rate it, though, until I try a couple of his suggestions.)

Downtime, or the lack thereof

So far this system (which, I should note, is running an older version of Windows) has been up for a confirmed 4224 hours (176 days).

That's a lower bound: it's based on the sum of the CPU times of the longest-running processes, as provided by Task Manager. (Multiprocessor or multicore systems will need to divide that figure by the number of processors they have; this is a single-processor system, though.) Since I know I've had to restart Firefox (46+ hours) on a number of occasions — every time a new version has been released in the last six months, for instance — I know it's actually been up longer than that. (Possibly much longer: Firefox tends to consistently take up 10-20% of my total CPU time, so I might be justified in multiplying that figure by 1.1-1.25.)

Half of a year is 182.5 days.

This blog, the Edit Posts interface tells me, has had 166 posts made to it since it was started (not counting this one). A post has been made every single day. Since two of those 166 posts were made on the same day (March 15), it's only been around for 165 days.

— and I have just thought to check the event log, and it reads as having been started on the morning of October 11, 2008. So apparently I am on a three-year-old Windows PC, running a version of Windows that is significantly older than that, that has been up for 209 days despite daily active use. If you had asked me this time last year if such a thing were possible, especially with me as the user, I would probably have bet significant amounts of money that it couldn't ever have happened.

Also, I have been rereading old posts, and suddenly desperately want a very good sandwich.

Not technically a dream, even if I am tired enough

So I pulled my leg up to the workbench and started taking it apart.

The insides, of course, didn't make any sense. There were three large gears that weren't connected to anything (including each other) but when they were turned, they turned in sync. A strand of muscle coiled through the holes of one gear, being stretched ever more tightly as the gear spun, never releasing. It wasn't really supposed to do that, I didn't think.

I was able to figure out the immediate problem, anyway: two of the gears weren't touching. I pulled them together and pushed for a bit; they seemed to hold.

I tried to put the leg back together, but the latches wouldn't stick. Apparently some of the tiniest gear-chains (long strands of turning gears that somehow held together, despite not having fixed axles, usually running taut between two parts of the system) had come free and gotten into the latch mechanism itself, which was needlessly complicated.

Eventually what I ended up doing was disassembling the electric motor from my ceiling fan, and using the magnet inside to tease the gear-chains back into place. I never finished; I was still occupied with that when I stepped away for a moment (somehow now having two legs) to deal with the UPS delivery guy dropping off a replacement ceiling fan which was a) the wrong color, and b) stolen merchandise (according to the package description on the pad I had to sign).

Son of a Witch (continued)

So, no, it's not (as I said) an inherently bad thing that Son of a Witch is no longer particularly based on Baum's Oz; but it does mean that the book has to be judged on its own merits. Unfortunately, on those, it doesn't seem to stand up, and the way in which it fails to do so leads us back where we started.

Son of a Witch is very striking where it can hold itself up to Baum's Oz (and Fleming's), where the contrast between those shows the novelty and brilliance of Maguire's reimagining of Oz: the conversation with Dorothy, or the interaction of Animals with human(oid) society — scattered twinkling points from a twisted lattice.

And then Maguire fills in the spaces between those points of light with all the grace and curvature of a turtle doing connect-the-dots puzzles, inked in the tarry black of current-day headline news and the much-trodden-carpet brown of Generic Fantasy Land #3b; the result is something that reads, outside those few compelling passages, very much like a McDonald's hamburger tastes.

(Yes, the metaphor-mixer is stuck on frappé. Shut up.)

Since the next book in the series, A Lion Among Men, necessarily primarily concerns at least one of the Baumian characters, it has every chance of avoiding the above; but even though I'm not yet personally going to drop The Wicked Years entirely, I can't justify recommending anything past Wicked to the casual reader.

Unlike the last sequel I read, I can justify giving Son of a Witch a numerical rating; what I can't justify is making that rating any better than a (somewhat disappointing) 1 out of 1.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled book review to bring you random things I found on the Internet today.

First, the so-called "Disappearing Car Door." This is the second automotive anything I've ever actually wanted, and the first was (and still is) the Prius' bidirectional electromechanical conversion system. Alas, it's only tenuously real, as the comments here indicate — and there is corroboration to be had; one of the prototypes that Joalto Design made was even auctioned on eBay in 2007. (The Jatech LLC advertising this technology is the reincarnation of Joalto Design, the CEO being one John A. Townsend.) Unlike some of the commenters, I do think it's feasible to retrofit an existing car to use these, but it would involve monkeying with the suspension to raise the ride height.

(I'd also have given it a more engineerish name for marketing purposes than "Disappearing Car Door," but as the Wii has demonstrated how little this matters, I will set that aside and move on.)



Also, go here for a detailed explanation of what is, strangely, called the Droste effect (the original Droste picture was much simpler, being merely recursive, with no deformation). Then go here for what people do with (mostly) conformal mappings.


Also, second best anagram ever.

Son of a Witch

Son of a Witch, first published in 2005, is the sequel to the novel Wicked, and therefore the second novel in Gregory Maguire's series now entitled The Wicked Years. It follows the trials, travails, and travels of the eponymous Liir, who is technically only very plausibly the son of the erstwhile and so-called "Wicked Witch of the West," Elphaba Thropp.

When Wicked came out, it had a certain freshness: a newness of concept that even other Oz fiction had not trod. (I consider here only the professionally-written and published Oz fanfiction.) Son of a Witch has lost that freshness. Moreover (or, perhaps, instead), where The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and perhaps even Wicked) had a certain timelessness to them, Son of a Witch feels very much like what it is: a novel of the early 21st century.

Its last strong connection to the Oz of the novels is Dorothy Gale herself, who is probably the only character in the entire series about whom it can honestly be said, at all times, that she means well; she features only briefly, in a few flashbacks. As most fanfics become over time, The Wicked Years' second installment is a thing in and of of itself more than it is an work based on Oz — a continuation of Maguire's work, rather than of Baum's.

This is not an inherently bad thing, but it should be recognized.

(possibly continued tomorrow)

A World Too Near

A World Too Near, by Kay Kenyon, is the second novel in her series The Entire and the Rose.

It features, among many other things, militarized nanotechnology, exotic matter, quantum computation, artificial sapience, quasidystopia, black holes as (part of) a method for interstellar travel, a separate method of interuniversal travel, and an oblique and innominate reference to the Kardashev scale. Intuitively I nonetheless classify it as fantasy, rather than science fiction.

(The first one I would actually slightly classify as SFnal almost entirely due to the opening bit, where a machine sapient goes off track not because of some unknowable fundamental quality of AI but because an intern did something very stupid while logged in with administrator privileges.)

One of the things that strikes me is the curious submissiveness and tendency towards obedience of the native species of the Entire. (Their likely-true creation myth, that they were once automata of the Tarig, goes a fair way towards explaining this tendency, if not the tendency of those that spend time around our trifecta of protagonists to ... well, go off track, developing willfulness, as Ji Anzi does. Perhaps the Quinns have somehow obtained administrator privileges? I may have to reconsider my classification.)

My favorite bit of the series so far is the vicious subversion of the "psychic animal companion" trope: there are, essentially, psychic horses which form bonds with their riders, and Sydney Quinn is among those riders — but this is really a form of slavery. And no, the horses aren't the ones enslaved. (Although this actually showed up, and was made quite clear, in the last book: the notable bit in this one is that Inyx-to-Inyx telepathic transmission does not, unlike most of the rest of the Entire, respect speed-of-light limitations.)

The Tarig, lords and masters of the Entire — gods, in all but name, though one of their few surprising and redeeming qualities is that they don't claim that name — anyway, the Tarig are all creepy gits. They are described as inhuman in thought and emotion, but they certainly seem as human in motive, if not more so, than many of the Chalin (human? human-analogue?) residents of the Entire. Perhaps this is why the Chalin (and Gond, and Hirrin, and other races of the Entire) don't understand the Tarig, seeing them as incomprehensible? (Although it's usually easier to empathize with the latter than the former, as the former are, largely, Quite Mad.)

All in all I can't honestly rate it. This is a bridge between the opening and the conclusion, and its rating is dependent on how well it serves that function — and that is dependent on what the conclusion is. (A journey may be enjoyable for itself, but it is a quality of at least this journey that it leads to a particular place. We'll see where that is, shall we?)

What qualifies as "illness"?

I should really have clarified that when I set out the initial conditions.

I'm pretty sure anything that involves going to the emergency room qualifies, though.

I've merely been given analgesics and abjurations against ambulation; I'll be fine, I'm sure, but this hasn't been a great week.

Today, I have

Today, I have purchased a copy of A World Too Near. I have in fact already finished reading it: just under two hours' work, completed just under two minutes from midnight.

This is not important.

Today, I have purchased also a box of blueberry chocolates, by Harry & David.

This is.

Moreover, it is important — and desperately so — that they are delicious. They closely resemble extra-large almond M&Ms, except with dried blueberries instead of almonds at the center, and made with much, much better chocolate.

They are also the sort of purple to inspire a certain color of prose.

Alternately, they resemble in size and coloration nothing so much as Kalamata olives; and, having also just had some of the latter, I assert that they resemble in taste precisely the opposition thereof — sweet and rich and melting where the olive is tart and spiky, two delicious contrasting extremes.

Not at the same time, obviously. I shouldn't at all like to combine them in an uncontrolled environment; there might be a sudden and catastrophic release of energy equivalent to the detonation of approximately 5.5 megatons of TNT, releasing high-energy edysmons and geusmons across the Houston area. Cloudy with a chance of mushrooms.