Numbered Notes

  1. It's obviously the greatest food product ever invented, but deep-fried macaroni and cheese on a stick isn't as tasty as you might expect. The texture compares unfavorably to traditional deep-fried mozarella cheese sticks as well.
  2. Neil Stephenson wants to nucleate a "Metaweb" around his new novel, so he's started a wiki. It's either ambitious or pretentious, but it's probably more pretentious than ambitious (though I haven't read the book yet - Peter is still hogging it):
    ...I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. [...] The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.

    We have been looking for a way to get an explanation system seeded for a long time, and it occurred to us that a set of annotations to my book might be one way to get it started.
    The idea of organizing general knowledge around a novel - any novel - seems rather like my way of arranging bookshelves: it promotes serendipity at best, and disorientation at worst. So as a huge fan of serendipity, I must suppress my dislike of bullshit internet pseudo-librarians and support the effort. Reluctantly.

    But if I had to pick a novel (make that "work of literature") upon which to crystallize the accumulated wisdom of mankind, it almost certainly would not be Quicksilver (but then, I haven't read it yet). It might be Sophie's World. Like any proper nerd I'd be tempted to use The Hitchhiker's Guide, and like any proper Anglophone, Shakespeare. Then I'd come to my senses and pick out something by Borges... what about all y'all?

    [link via BoingBoing]

yami · 21:41 · 28 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature, Food

Someone’s Expense Account

The Company sent me up to the mountains on Thursday, to learn how to properly classify and catalogue mud. I'll be up there all next week, too, learning how to drill holes to China (or bedrock, whichever comes first); this weekend there will be a fabulous house guest to play with. So even less nonsense than usual for a while.

That said, let's get on with the fan mail.

?

Yes, fan mail. You are my fan. Stop asking questions.

Your search box doesn't work! Fix it!

Oh. Erm, try it now - the default template is still there, which is a bit embarrassing, but not quite as embarrassing as the interior of my car and house, which I should really get to cleaning. Anyway it seems to work again.

dear liza

Is there a hole in your bucket? Why not just buy a new one? If you're really extravagant you could buy a bucket full of ice cream, and have the bucket when you're done with the ice cream. Mm.

Monkeys can spot a raw deal when they see one.

Not if they're pirate monkeys wearing an eye patch! (you need stereo vision to spot raw deals)

test

See? The monkey didn't spot the raw deal. Instead, it is eating the raw banana.

Monkey over and out.

yami · 8:49 · 20 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

Shitfaced in Des Moines

It would seem that clever old Jesuit Jacques Marquette, as well as the people of Iowa, have been had: Des Moines is actually a Frenchification of a Miami-Illinois word meaning "The Shitfaces", and not "A Great Place to Live and Do Business In, Really!" as we've been told all these years.

The Shitfaces, Iowa is not as appropriate as some other nasty city-names: Chicago means either "skunk" or "nasty-smelling wild leek" which is true in some sectors today and must have been especially true in the city's slaughterhouse meatpacking heydey. Des Moines is a rotten place to be shitfaced in. The authorities are not tolerant of public urination, and the weather is usually much too crappy to lift your shirt and go "WHOOO!" while running down the street. Des Moines has many fewer strip clubs per capita than Portland, Oregon. Beer in Des Moines is more expensive than beer in Prague. And no matter how drunk you get, you're still in the middle of Iowa, and if you're me, you're probably also at your aunt's house.

Some jokes just aren't funny.

yami · 18:37 · 15 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Language

Epic Immuno-Suppressing Battles

Someone stuck my voodoo doll into a bottle of Benadryl, probably about forty-five minutes ago. I am all woozy and vapid.

Last night I set about arranging our two bookshelves to reflect two epic battles: Monkey vs. Robot, and Hipster vs. Nerd.

Monkey vs. Robot (available as a live-action or animated short film, compact disc, or comic book in addition to the representation on my shelves) was a relatively straightforward task: you've got the automotive maintenance, electronics, computer programming (robot), the paleontology, neurobiology, anthropology, tree-identification (monkey), and the computational neuro-stuffs (like Buddha, hybrid monkey robots transcend eternal struggle).

Hipster vs. Nerd was much trickier. While monkeys and robots duke it out in art and culture, in full view of society, the battle between Hipster and Nerd takes place deep within individual souls. Some have clearly been won to one side or the other - Kerouac is a hipster, Carl Sagan is a nerd - but others have taken up wildly waffled positions: technophilic hipster-nerds (Neil Stephenson, BoingBoing), double-crossing triple agents (Philip K. Dick), etc. Some authors appear to be casualties of the war, reduced to completely non-ironic pieces about life's simple pleasures. I was unable to classify several items:

  • A scholarly biography of Galileo - the exact title escapes me at the moment; it conveys the subject matter while simultaneously being bland. Galileo himself was probably more Nerd than Hipster, and we can see this by comparing his career to that of Copernicus, who averted theological problems by accepting a foreword to his heliocentric masterwork asserting that nothing he wrote actually had anything to do with reality. It's not quite the multiple levels of ironic self-detachment attained by modern hipsters, but the spirit is the same. Anyway.
  • Douglas Coupland - though I firmly maintain that Generation X is easily hipster, Peter kept stubbornly bringing up Microserfs just when I thought the conversation was over.
  • The Iliad - I met a classics major once, at Stanford. He was a nerdy guy, but humanities nerds are really a separate breed if you don't count philosophers. Most philosophers are well aligned with the Nerds on pure wanking.

Thoughts?

I have Internet at home now (yay!) though I still need to purchase a longer ethernet cable. Perhaps I will go back to starting, finishing and posting entries in one day rather than three.

yami · 13:06 · 10 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature

Known Data Problems

All y'all Euro-Cannucks can rest easy - your "milli-problem" has been solved by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

Precipitation is known to actually be in units of millimeters (rather than hundredths of inches) for several stations outside the U.S. mainland. We believe that this problem is confined to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands during the early 2020s.

This, from the same genius organization that presents the method of hanging cod gill-nets in Norway. Hurrah!

yami · 17:12 · 4 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Crap

More Maps!

A Smell Map of Minneapolis and other quirky cartographies are coming out from the University of Minnesota's Design Institute. I harken back to a guy who made maps of jack-o-lanterns. And so the question becomes, how can maps and communities reinforce one another? Or perhaps "reinforce one another" is the wrong expression, if you consider maps to be means and not ends (I'm not sure I do; I like maps).

This morning, I've had fleeting fantasies of small groups getting together to produce oddball shapefiles, datasets of particularly nice roses or how often people smile as you walk by, for use with standard GIS software, in combination with respectable data from the Census Bureau or USGS. After all, people seem to crave excuses to use their shiny new handheld GPS units (coughcoughgeocaching). But GIS software is rather tricksy and expensive (okay, maybe not expensive, but GRASS looks tricksy) for casual use, and the really clever community GIS projects won't happen until the appropriate tools reach a small army of part-time activists and hobbyists.*

I've put it to stew in the back of my head; meanwhile, that IKEA is still plaintively calling me.
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yami · 17:04 · 3 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Uncategorized, Crap

Jellyfish Ward

Initially, being a firm believer in hardwood floors, I had some misgivings about the blue wall-to-wall carpet in my new house. I'm still a firm believer in hardwood floors, but it's amazing how much a shelf full of books can warm up a room. I'm slowly coming to terms with the carpet; three or four more bookcases in the living room should do it. The unpacking is now limited by lack of furniture, some of which needs to be painted so as not to offend the carpet, some of which needs to be conjured up from thin air. There's an IKEA in Burbank and it's calling my name.

For the health of the cement front porch I have bought a sprightly miniature pine tree, not at all related to any normal pine tree. In its native land, the miniature pine tree is used to ease jellyfish stings, and so it will be a useful medicinal addition to my nascent garden. Giant stinging jellyfish are a scourge upon the San Gabriel foothills.

yami · 14:58 · 2 Sep 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary